If you’d been planning to replay the first two games in preparation for the big finish with Mass Effect 3’s launch in March, HOLD UP JUST A MOMENT THERE. Those games are a couple of years old already, which means they’re too hideous to look at without protective eye-gear OR this super high resolution texture pack.
“My goal was to massively improve character detail while keeping Bioware‘s fantastic design as intact as possible,” writes mod creator JeanLuc761 over on the BioWare forums. “Character textures now range from 2048×2048 to 4096×4096, which is 4x more detailed than the default textures.”
The pack comes in two editions – “optimized” and “ultra”.
“All characters in the optimized pack use a balance of 1024×1024 and 2048×2048 textures in order to achieve the best balance between quality and performance that I could achieve for this mod. The ultra pack is composed primarily of 4096×4096 textures for armor/body models and a mix of 2048×2048 and 1024×1024 for faces,” he explains, adding that the “ultra” pack comes with 15-20 minute load times, so yeah.
You can read more about the mod, including installation instructions, and download it at the link below.



It’s awesome that there are people putting the effort in to make these.
Pity about the loading times, would be nice if the link had system-to-loading-time comparisons, so as to determine what kind of PC one needs to avoid dying while waiting for the game to start. I’ll suggest it in the thread.
Hopefully Bioware won’t limit graphics for ME3. Would like to end the series off with a truly shiny game.
What’s really nice is that the Mass Effect series isn’t coming to an end, just the chapter with Commander Shepard. Awesome, more ME for the future.