There’s a myriad of problems with Mass Effect: Andromeda. From the distorted faces to the janky animations, and everything else in between, a lot of people who are used to the standards set by other games running on the Frostbite or released by skilled development studios like CD Projekt Red are thoroughly displeased with the output of the finished product that is Mass Effect: Andromeda. Well, some modders are already at work on attempting to fix BioWare’s mistakes.

Modder TheMercsAssassin posted up the ReShade mod over on Nexusmods.com.

The mod makes a huge difference in how it takes advantage of the Frostbite’s native lighting capabilities. There’s a video that shows a toggle between the ReShade being on and when it’s off. Ambient occlusion, dynamic highlights and contrast, and darker dynamic shadows all help give Mass Effect: Andromeda a much more cinematic look. With the ReShade mod on there’s also a film grain effect, along with increased sharpness. You can check out the video below.

As you can see, with the ReShade mod Mass Effect: Andromeda literally looks like it could be a close relative to Battlefield 1. Everything is highlighted and sharpened in a way that really accentuates the capabilities of the Frostbite 3.

Many people had mentioned that modders would likely have to fix the game in order to bring it up to par, and it looks as if that’s the case.

EA should have been running damage control a lot tighter than they did because now there’s a large contingent of gamers out there who believe that the Frostbite engine is “trash”.

If I were publisher I would never let a high-end piece of software technology like that develop a negative reputation based on the poor quality of work from an incompetent design studio. It’ll tarnish the name of the tools for a long time to come… unless they get out ahead of it and remind people what the Frostbite is capable of, especially when combined with middleware companion tools like Enlighten’s Geomerics lighting solution.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the ReShade also highlights the engine’s natural propensity for diffuse lighting and physical based rendering, allowing the environment and surrounding light sources to illuminate based on the nearby fire. A competent lighting engineer definitely would have taken natural advantage of that to really make the game pop.

You can literally see the difference between what the game looks like with the cinematic filter on and with it off. The top one is how the game looks normally, and the bottom image is how the game looks with the filter on.

If you’re playing Mass Effect: Andromeda on PC and you want to make use of the ReShade cinematic mod, you can download from NexusMods, install it by extracting the files into the main folder where the MassEffectAndromeda.exe is located. Proceed to run the game in borderless-windowed mode for the best effect, assuming you’re running on Windows 10.

It’s also suggested to disable the game’s native in-game film grain filter and use the ReShade filter instead.

The only thing suggested on the mod site is that you may need to modify the dxgi.ini file and ensure that the “General” directory paths are setup. Otherwise you shouldn’t have too many problems running the mod with the game.

Sadly, even with the fix to the lighting and shaders, it’s still not enough to repair the fugly faces in Mass Effect: Andromeda.