Report to the ship on May 14th.
After months of rumours, EA has finally confirmed the release date for 'Mass Effect: Legendary Edition', as well as posting a number of updates on what the remastering entails.
First up, the date that was previously touted as March 12th turned out to be incorrect, with EA announcing May 14th as the release date. Three months away, unfortunately. After that, however, it's all good news.
Polygon managed to get their hands on a presentation of some of the remastering process, and it looks like it's a top-to-bottom refresh of the graphics. Much work has been done to update and improve everything visual and cosmetic in the game, but the core gameplay remains the same. "We really stayed true to everything that you would remember in your mind’s eye, like your nostalgia of the game had to be consistent," project director Marc Walters told Polygon, with nearly every character in the game being "hand-touched" to perfection.
Interestingly, much of the heavy lifting - their words, not ours - went into bringing the first 'Mass Effect' game up to scratch with the other two, and moving the action more to the front and smoothing out the role-playing elements. The idea is to make it more seamless, meaning that you pick up and start playing the first one, carry the story right through to the second one, and then top the whole thing off with the third.
'Mass Effect' was one of the first games to really embrace importing characters from the first game and keeping it going right through to the final game, so the idea here is the same - you make your version of Shepherd, and then carry him / her / them through to the finale.
Another point to mention is that 'Mass Effect: Legendary Edition' will have every scrap of DLC made for the franchise loaded in, but is leaving out the game's very so-so multiplayer. No bad thing, to be honest.
All in all, it's looking pretty damn impressive. Here's the trailer.