Catachrism has released a must-have mod for the PC version of the first Mass Effect game. Mass Effect Restored Light & Illumination Natively (MERLIN) is a mod that aims to restore dynamic lights and post-processing effects from the X360 version.
In case you weren’t aware of, the PC version of Mass Effect lacked a number of effects that were present in the X360 version. Thus, this mod aims to restores as much of those effects as possible. Moreover, it corrects other things that were broken in the PC port (as well as some things that were broken in all releases of Mass Effect).
It’s also worth noting that MERLIN fixes some mesh LOD issues like the Marines on the Normandy, Dr. Chakwas in conversation, and Lorik Qui’ins eyes. Not only that, but it provides options for more optional mods like high poly romance bodies, Tali visor distortion removal, and Ash armor consistency project.
In order to showcase the graphical improvements, the modder released the following comparison video.
You can download Mass Effect Restored Light & Illumination Natively from here.
Speaking of Mass Effect, we also suggest downloading A Lot Of Textures (ALOT). ALOT is one of the best visual upgrades of the Mass Effect trilogy. This mod comes with over 20,000 high-resolution textures and 40GB across all 3 ME games.
Kudos to our reader s_fnx for bringing this to our attention.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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And apparently all (most?) these lighting issues missing from the original PC release will also be missing in the ME:LE.
It is ironic how they scr#w over PC gamers with the lack of effects but then use the source code of the PC version for the remaster. Same thing happened with Halo 1.
And many other games. But thankfully the PC modding community is a blessing so nothing is ever truly lost thanks to these legends who spend their time and their effort to restore/preserve such stuff.
The PC versions usually have superior scalability well and above the consoles at the time of release, hardly surprising the chose the most suitable version for a remaster. Shame they did a quite lazy job of the original this time around
I don’t doubt but the Xbox detail sure would be nice to have on day one.
Is that confirmed ?
Quite subtle differences, for the better. Bioware, scr#wing PC gamers since 2008…
Quite subtle differences, for the better. Bioware, screwing PC gamers since 2008…