If you have already played Mass Effect: Andromeda, chances are you both like and dislike the game. From graphics to combat to story, it is a mixed bag of video game issues.
Critics liked the gameplay but found the story line disappointing. Others found the microtransactions too pricey. The wonky animations and distorted faces became a stuff of memes and angered many players, with some even taking it as far as harassing the woman who worked on the facial animations.
Thankfully, there were others who took a more positive and proactive approach toward the game's graphics, such as a modder who created a mod that made the game look more cinematic.
Modder Fixes The Game's Graphics
Enter TheMercsAssassin, a modder who posted a series of videos showcasing the game modded using the game's native Frostbite engine. Modding is the process of changing a game's content and design — such as graphics — by creating new skins, introducing elements found outside the game, or in TheMercsAssassin's case, improving the game's lighting and colors.
The modder did not tinker with the skins or changed the models of the in-game characters and locations. Instead, he just maximized Mass Effect: Andromeda's Frostbite engine's full capabilities by using a post-processing tool called ReShade to create a preset or filter called "Cinematic Realism Lighting Overhaul."
There's one video where a player can see the significant changes in the game's original graphics by simply toggling ReShade using the END button. Hitting the F1 button brings up the ReShade menu. The enhanced ambient light, occlusion, contrast, highlights, shadows, lights, and sharpness made the game look more cinematic and realistic and, in turn, more engaging and play-worthy.
Unfortunately for console owners, the game mod is only available for PC owners. To use the ReShade cinematic-realism mod, simply go to the NexusMods site and read the instructions for download and installation. The modder suggests turning off the game's film grain filter and use the ReShade instead.
'Mass Efffect: Andromeda' And The (Ugly) Face Of Animation
Mass Effect: Andromeda came under fire for its characters' awkward facial animations, which are so awkward they immediately and collectively became a meme.
Jonathan Cooper, a former BioWare animator who worked on Mass Effect and is now part of Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4, explained via Twitter the debacle regarding the game's facial animations. According to him, producing an RPG is a matter of "quantity vs. quality tradeoff," in which the priority shifts to an RPG's naturally high volume of content.
In other words, given the number of NPCs in an RPG, animating all of them (via motion capture) is a logistical problem. Also, given the thousands of pages of dialogues that are present in a choice-driven narrative like that of Mass Effect: Andromeda, the designers needed to pre-create facial animations for every combination of dialogues. And even if animators wanted to perfect and animate all NPCs, there simply isn't enough time.
