Mass Effect PC: WTF?

[Nieroshai]

I have a gaming pc that can more than handle anything Mass Effect can throw at it(according to the manual), but it still FREQUENTLY forgets to load textures, especially on characters' costumes, and glitches a lot but rarely in a game-breaking way. Is this a hardware insufficiency I don't know about, or is this just how the game is?


Also: my roommate says the Xbox360 version is even glitchier, but he doesn't have the game to show me. Is this so?

 

[Irridium]

Its a known problem with the engine.

Mass Effect runs on the Unreal engine, which is notorious for this problem. For some reason nobody has seemed to be able to solve it.

Its not a problem with your PC, or the actual game, just the engine the game is built on.

 

[DustyDrB]

Yeah, happens pretty much every time Saren shows up.

 

[lacktheknack]

I didn't have it happen once... but I tend to get lucky with these types of things.

 

[Eumersian]

Is that the glitch where you would be in a cinematic or a conversation, and the textures would be really dull and smoothed over in the beginning, and only later would the more detailed versions appear over them? I noticed that all the time. It never really bothered me though. In fact, being oblivious as I am, I thought it was something that BioWare incorporated into the game to make cutscenes and such run smoother.

 

[Paksenarrion]

Yeah, happens pretty much every time Saren shows up.

Does it happen specifically when he makes air quotes about Reapers?

 

[Anarchemitis]

A pretty universal fix-all to game problems is to check if your video card driver is the latest version, and update as necessary.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

hmm...well i never really noticed it. i dont notice those kinds of things, as i dont really hold those kinds of high standards in that category of stuff, but i played it 3 times on the 360 and played it 3 times on the pc so far and i have yet to have it glitch or anything in any possible way on either system..so idk what to tell you on that one.

 

[s0m3th1ng]

Only problem I had was with the character/facial shadows....bloody awful.

 

[CAPTCHA]

Thankfully I believe that Unreal Engine 4 is due to be released with Bulletstorm, so the texture problem might be solved soonish.

 

[Super Toast]

The Unreal Engine 3 is incredibly sluggish.

 

[De-Moti]

Unreal Engine, you such a busta.

 

[Liquid Ocelot]

I've had the problem with the textures taking a bit to load, but I've never had them NEVER load. x.x

 

[Aesir23]

I've never had this problem on the 360 or the PC, and when it comes to the Unreal engine I always found the PC to be much better with it or at least, in the way that the game didn't randomly break (like what happened to my Xbox versions of Lost Odyssey and Last Remnant, both of which had the Unreal engine).

The only problem I experienced with Mass Effect was lag in the Citadel on the 360 version and a bit of texture popping in Mass Effect 2.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

The problem is that in order to speed the load times, a temporary set of very low resolution textures are loaded while the rest is streamed to memory. When that is finished, the engine simply swaps the low res textures with the higher res textures leading to the infamous texture pop.

It isn't a bug since it is in fact working as designed. Trying to hide loading screens is also the reason why ME1 had excruciatingly long elevator rides.

The "problem" of texture pop can be mitigated by using a better set of low res textures that are not so glaringly different from the high res versions. Given that this is done by increasing the resolution of the textures, it really isn't a solution. It can be resolved by simply having longer load periods more often.