Bioware's Actually Going Out Of Their Way To Release A Good Port? Kudos To Them. Seriously.

Bioware's bringing Mass Effect 3 to the PlayStation 3 day-and-date with its XBOX 360 counterpart, but the franchise's previous title, Mass Effect 2, is finally coming to the PS3 in January. Makes sense that the port would run under Mass Effect 3's updated graphics engine, right? It sure seems obvious, but we never expected it. Thankfully, Bioware's pulled it off. This ain't no lousy port, folks.

"One of the first things you're going to see is improved graphics," said game producer Jesse Houston on the BioWare podcast.

"We actually created the engine for Mass Effect 3 and used that to make Mass Effect 2 PS3. So we took the content, the story and all of the other assets that made up Mass Effect 2 and we put it into the Mass Effect 3 engine.

"We've also gone ahead and made the experience much more solid on PS3," he added. " So for example the controls are geared towards the PS3 controller [although] you can switch it back to the old Xbox [layout] if you like. Other things like planet scanning have been improved; we've rolled up all of the patches; done a whole bunch of bug fixing."

R1 and L1 for shooting in a PlayStation 3 port? Good grief, Bioware really are the best. The PS3 port of Mass Effect 2 will include a heap of extra content, including recent add-on packs such as the Lair Of The Shadow Broker.

The game launches on January 21st in Europe. There's a demo planned for next week.

[source eurogamer.net]