Mass Effect’s Legendary Edition remaster just got its release date set for May 14th, and the community is hard at work pulling every detail out of EA that the studio will let out into the wild. Among those uncovered details are the trilogy’s system requirements, and suffice it to say, it’s the much-needed break our systems need.
EA published the following system requirements:
Mass Effect Legendary Edition Minimum PC Requirements:
- Operating System: 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-8350
- Memory: 8 GB System Memory
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9280X
- GPU Memory: 2 GB Video Memory
- Storage: At least 120 GB of free space
Mass Effect Legendary Edition Recommended PC Requirements:
- Operating System: 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- Memory: 16 GB System Memory
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1070, AMD Radeon Vega 56.
- GPU Memory: 4 GB Video Memory
- Storage: At least 120 GB of free space
These requirements aren’t steep, which is much appreciated in a day and age where games are becoming increasingly taxing on our systems — in a time when it’s nearly impossible to get your hands on a powerful graphics card for any reasonable amount of money.
Although nobody gets away with less than 120GB of free space, a good experience can be had with modest graphics cards and old CPUs. Better hardware will, of course, help you make the most out of the unlocked framerate, though. EA is upping the textures to be 4K ready, and 21:9 support is also being added for fans of ultrawide displays.
Of course, none of this is all too surprising. The studio decided that Mass Effect Legendary Edition was best remastered on the Unreal Engine 3 the original games were built on. Using UE4 would have required a full remake instead of a polishing up become far too big a task. As a result, it’s Mass Effect 1 that will benefit most from the remastering process.
Meanwhile, although the intention was for all DLC to be included with the Legendary Edition trilogy, Mass Effect 1’s Pinnacle Station DLC won’t make the cut. The reason here is simple: the original source code wasn’t backed up properly and is now corrupted, and remaking the DLC isn’t within the scope of work EA was able to put into the project.