The first Mass Effect was a game that sometimes struggled to perform well on Microsoft’s last home console. But, it looks like BioWare’s sci-fi creation is a much better experience on the Xbox One.
Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that backwards compatibility will be coming to their latest home gaming machine and Mass Effect is among the first crop of games that will be available to play that way. Xbox One owners who are in the company’s features beta program are getting the early chance to try it out. One such player is YouTuber Mecha-Potato-Alex, who put up a side-by-side comparison of the Xbox 360 and Xbox One versions of the game.
Mecha-Potato-Alex lists a few observations on the performance upgrade:
-Some frequent stuttering points in the 360 version run perfectly smooth on X1, but not all
-Texture pop-in is vastly improved. While not perfect, there are many instances where it no longer happens at all
-Load times are shorter. In this video it was 4 seconds, but when replaying the same scene later, it was as low as 2
-Character lighting appears to be darker, except on their skin
-ME1’s somewhat clunky controls are less of an issue with the X1’s controller
-Some cutscenes appear to end slightly quicker, as a result of no momentary slowdowns when changing camera angles/animations/etc.
It’s still not clear exactly how the Xbox One backwards compatibility works from a technical standpoint, but it’s nice to see it improving at least one games that was finished being made years ago.