Mass Effect remaster patch stops Shepard becoming an accidental millionaire
Plus the Mass Relay sounds will no longer burst your ears
Last night, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition got a new patch, nerfing Commander Shepard's bank account and reducing the noise from those deafening Mass Relays. Sure, it got some performance tweaks here and there, but more importantly, you'll now find an imported Shepard from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 might have considerably fewer credits than before. Perhaps it's all linked to the Mass Relays, I wouldn't be surprised if Shep splashed out for some sound proofing on the Normandy.
In the old version of ME1, you could carry over a max of 100,000 credits (depending on how much you had) to ME2 by importing your save. But the remaster changed that, allowing players to keep 10% of the credits they collected instead. Seems fair at first, right? Well, if you complete almost every mission and sidequest in ME1, it's surprisingly easy to max out your credits at 9,999,999.
This left completionists (like me) with a cool million credits at the start of the second game, (I'm loaded). Which is great! But yeah, admittedly far too much. I'm nearly at the end of ME2 and still have about 300,000 credits left thanks to that import, and that's with me buying literally every item from every single vendor I come across. Last night's patch has reduced the maximum amount of credits that can be carried over to just 100,000 now (the same as it was in the original release), so you actually have to work to buy stuff.
Which, I mean, doesn't make total sense because Cerberus spared no expense to bring Shepard back. Now I have to earn credits to buy my own gear?? Baffling.
The other notable change is that BioWare have lowered the volume of the Mass Relays in the first game's loading screens. The Relays are what launch the Normandy to different solar systems, and the sound they make is cool, but absolutely needed toning down. They've been bursting eardrums since the original game released in 2007 - I'm surprised it wasn't an initial change for the remaster release.
More tweaks and improvements include: a fix for the occasional problem where players couldn't click on anything in ME1 (when I had this I needed to save a reload to sort it, so this is a very welcome fix), removing the unintentional bright red eye colour of a character at the end of the Overlord DLC (this mission was disturbing enough without that, trust me), and a fix for an issue that stopped some characters from appearing in ME3's Citadel DLC (I'd be heartbroken if any of my pals couldn't make it to that excellent party).
The patch is available now on PC and consoles, and comes in at around 9GB. If you'd like to have a gander at all the changes, here are the full patch notes:
General
- English spoken dialogue can now be selected separately from subtitle language
- Resolved issues with unlocking some achievements/trophies, such as the Paramours or kill count trackers
- Corrected pre-rendered cutscenes that were darker than intended after the previous update
- Wireless headsets/devices no longer cause issues with the Xbox launcher
- Improved PC performance across various hardware configurations, including on Virmire
- Fixed an issue on PC where non-standard characters in the operating system’s username would prevent the game from launching
- Removed the dependency on the AVX instruction set in the launcher
- Other minor calibrations and fixes, including some instances of crashing
Mass Effect
- Fixed an issue that prevented players from reaching the max level
- Fixed an issue where tier VII Spectre - Master Gear was inaccessible
- Various collision improvements
- Fixed an issue that would prevent the ability to interact with objects
- Lowered audio volume on Mass Relay load screens
- Improved eye animations for male characters in some scenes
Mass Effect 2
- Toned down the intensity of fog on Illium
- Fixed an issue where a character’s eyes at the end of the Overlord DLC were unintentionally red
- Reduced the max credits that can be carried from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 down to 100k for more balanced early-game progression
- Credit carryover maximum now matches carryover from the original release
- Posthumous banking fees are a lot! It’s a great way to dodge taxes.
Mass Effect 3
- Resolved an issue where English dialogue no longer played during the Citadel DLC for German and Italian localizations
- Fixed an issue where some key characters weren’t appearing as intended during the Citadel DLC
I'm still reeling about the money thing. Going to every shop and mindlessly buying everything was kinda my routine for ME2, and having so much dosh at the start made it so much easier in the Legendary Edition. I can't believe BioWare are making me change, right after I established that I do not want to do that.