

Many " old school" gamers that have tweaked the Unreal Engine to its limits will be left disappointed. As such, much of the Unreal Engine was left unused.

When the game was ported to the PC by Demiurge Studios, there were a few changes made to the game to make it easier for keyboard and mouse users but very little of the work was actual optimization for the PC. Since Mass Effect was built upon Unreal Engine 3, there is a lot of customization which can be done via INI files however, Mass Effect does not use a good majority of the parameters available in the Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, dynamic shadows are simply going to remain comparably bad when put up against more modern games even with the tweaks included. Dynamic Shadows are addressed in the INI Tweaks section of this guide, but do not expect gold. Yes, they may have looked okay on consoles however, when the game was ported over to the PC, like many titles before it, Mass Effect had no real upgrades done specifically for PC users. BioWare's implementation of dynamic shadows in Mass Effect is horrible. Mass Effect was built upon Unreal Engine 3, which provides users some customization however, certain things can not be easily fixed.
