LE1 Potent Weapons

Why?

Every game I play, I do my best to mod out bullet sponges and artificial difficulty by making the weapons in the game more potent. By taking the bullet spread for weapons and reducing them, they all do significantly more damage and feel more like weapons of the future. It hardly feels like a sci-fi gun if it functions worse than a modern firearm.

Installation

You could simply drop the file into your game's directory under, "Mass Effect Legendary Edtion > Game > ME1 > BioGame > CookedPCConsole".

Or, you could try using ME3Tweaks Website to make your own modifications. Then it would be compatible using ME3 Tweaks Mod Manager. I did not use this method because I found it more time-consuming than unpacking and editing the .ini files.

I used MECoal. It works for all three games. You can download it from Github and use it to make modifications yourself directly to the file. You can use notepad to edit them like ordinary .txt files, but I prefer Visual Studio Code. I use it for basic programming and software editing. Don't be alarmed by the techy-sounding name. It's the most simple to use right alongside Notepad++ and typically automatically detects the file format.

Modifications

Assault Rifles and Pistols: Divided aim error by 3. 15 and rounded down to nearest tenth.

Shotguns: Divided aim error by 1. 5 and rounded down to the nearest tenth. Shotguns can be potent, this just gives them more effective range.

Snipers: Aim error for zoom is always 0, so I divided the non-zoom aim error by 2, which is the same for every sniper rifle.

Author’s Notes

Because the aim error in Mass Effect 1 is done through 'x' and 'y' axis values in a rectangular area if your overall aim error 16 that is an area of 4x4; x = 4, y = 4.  If I reduce those values each by 1/2 (divide by 2), then your aim error goes down to 4, which is 1/4 of 16. You will be 4x as accurate. So by dividing a rifle or pistol's accuracy by 3. 15, you can expect the weapon to be roughly 9. 9225 times as accurate as before (3. 15 squared). After playing through just under half Mass Effect 1's content for 16 hours, it does appear that this also affects NPCs.

With an assault rifle, and a spread of 1/4 the normal, damage can be excessive.

For that reason, this is by no means "a balanced mod". Is it a fun mod tho? I think so.