ME1 - Director's Cut ReShade - A Cinematic Overhaul with Balanced Optional Cinematic FX

*If you like this, please feel free to come back and hit that endorse button (top right) if you get a chance. Means a lot to me, thank you so much! Cheers.

Mass Effect 1 LE Director's Cut ReShade

directed by TheMercsAssassin

WHAT IS THIS?

ME1 Director's Cut ReShade offers something near a complete visual overhaul for ME1LE providing color options from 'enhanced vanilla' to 'extra vivid' with myriad balanced cinematic effects that are toggleable on hotkeys including lens flares, letterbox, depth-of-field, chromatic aberration, and camera lens emulation. While texture improvements are pretty good in ME1LE, I was quite disappointed that the lighting still feels flat in many scenes and it was especially bothersome that MANY objects and light sources seem to distinctively lack any noticeable glow or fail to feel like they were actually emitting anything more than a brighter texture around them as oppose to being an actual light source. This is my attempt to address those complaints while adding a great bit of cinematic flare and bolder but rebalanced colors to the game.

With lens flares in particular, I tried to make them match the color of the existing lens flares in the game but also add them to other light sources that make sense. Various new bloom and lens flares have been added to enhance certain light sources and weapons fire while not interfering with the rest of the image too much. Depth-of-field has been tested under a number of circumstances to ensure maximum compatibility with the variety of gameplay scenarios and tons of conversations and cut scenes in the game.

Obviously testing every conversation or cut scene in the game would take forever, months for me probably, so all effects are play-tested within reason for the game only launching mere days ago. But rest assured, significant development time was spent in QA and playtesting the various effects on offer under a wide range of scenarios that made sense. Will I play test even more? Yes, of course, but this was the compromise to either have people wait months when most will be done playing by then or release now -- now makes the most sense.

The plans are to add new, drastically different, more realistic and also grim/gritty color grading options very shortly (next several days or so).

Hope you like it. I'll port to this to ME2 and ME3 asap. Feel free to test it with those and