It’s been years since the main Mass Effect trilogy ended, but people are still tinkering away on mods for the series. One aspect of older titles that tends to age poorly is texture resolution. Never fear, a fellow with the handle “CreeperLava” has come to the rescue with their “A Lot Of Textures” mods for the second and third games.
If you just want to see the difference in quality, here’s a video from UniqueActive that compares the vanilla and modded versions of Mass Effect 3.
I’ve captured a few stills from the clip above and added a line to make it clearer which is which. Left is modded, right is unmodded.
The mods themselves are really collections, as CreeperLava explains:
– We compiled hundreds of mods made by various mod authors into a single, exhaustive package. No need to scour the Internet for hours, we’ve done it for you :).
– We created a complete database of “portable” (ie identical) textures between the 3 Mass Effect games. This means comparing through various means about 44 000 textures.
– Bioware downscaled many textures and upscaled others throughout the development of the 3 games (eg a texture could be 1024px in ME1, 512px in ME2, 256px in ME3). We normalized these textures (same, highest resolution everywhere).
– Some of the original, not downscaled textures are still present in the game files (promo textures). We restored those we could find. Jack’s
face, some of Shepard’s armor, and more, benefit from this.
– We made plenty of new textures. More to come in the regular updates :). Texture makers are welcome to participate !
Being high-definition texture packs, they are not small downloads. The mod for Mass Effect 2 comes in at 2.8GB, while the Mass Effect 3 one is a hefty 4.9GB
Maybe not enough to justify a fresh play-through, but definitely mods to get if you’re yet to don your Shepard guise.
A Lot Of Textures (ME2) and A Lot Of Textures (ME3) [Nexus via RPS]
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