[Broshep High Quality Textures
Ainoha Sistek
The anniversary edition of MEUITM comes with improved performance and mipmap function (no glitches), a new installer, 2K texture option at the installer level for performance and lots of new textures.
Normandy lettering inside ship
Most Normandy floor panels
Normandy doorways
Normandy entry platform in the docking area
Normandy HD Galaxy map on deck
HD galaxy map while in map.
Citadel clouds-mior-just minimizes artifacting
Citadel-reworked lightmaps dxt but higher res to compensate for loss (still not as nice as the original) but more memory friendly and format change is not supported with MEM currently.
Citadel Embassy flags
Avina citadel console-minor fixes artifacting
Citadel transports-minor fixes/minimizes artifacting on reflection.
Feros many concrete textures, floors walls, craters
Feros lightmaps on main area for much smoother cast lighting.
Virmire-retextured beaches many types
Virmire-retextured cliffside vegetation
The original ME3Explorer Wiki contained a spotlight page dedicated to featuring a few of the mods being developed with the new toolset. With the exception of MEHEM, they were mostly smaller, simpler mods, as the toolset was in its infancy. This article seeks to re-create that page in the context of the toolset's maturity, showcasing some of the more extensive, high-quality mods available for Mass Effect 3.
Disclaimer: This list is obviously not exhaustive and isn't meant to be. It's purpose is to feature a small variety of especially high-quality content and texture mods created with ME3Explorer. Additional mods can be viewed on a variety of mod hosting sites.
The Citadel Epilogue Mod places the Citadel DLC at the end of the story. Ideally it is used with MEHEM, JAM, or LIME so that it makes sense although there is a way to get from the original endings to CEM as well. You can also opt to play most of the Citadel DLC during the game and then throw the party at the end of the story.
EDI Default Outfit is an excellent example of a squadmate overhaul that incorporates both mesh and texture modifications, while staying faithful to the original. Most textures have been redone from scratch in HD and some of the more unnecessary... "sexbot" characteristics of our favorite AI have been removed. Tasteful lights have been added and her visor is now optional.
JAM comes in two versions, A and B. Version A modifies the Catalyst conversation and retains Shepard's choice between Destroy, Control, and Synthesis. Version B skips the Catalyst conversation entirely (like original MEHEM) and the Crucible destroys the Reapers. Both versions also adjust other portions of the epilogue.
The mod removes Shepard's conversation with the Catalyst and instead routes the player into a heavily modified Destroy ending. However, in the MEHEM version, the Normandy stays in the fight long enough to rescue Shepard, so that s/he can survive the firing of the Crucible and reunite with their crew in a memorial scene for Admiral Anderson. In order to tell this revised storyline, MEHEM features custom dialogues, sound, music, pre-rendered and in-game cutscenes, epilogue slides, emails, models and more.
MEHEM is currently at version 0.5, which means that while fully playable, it is not quite finished yet. Future plans include a better implementation of the new dialogue, translations into other languages, improvements to the quality of the pre-rendered videos and maybe one or two other surprises. ;)
ME3 Character Texture Overhaul is a fantastic texture mod that replaces numerous human textures with versions that are higher resolution and more life-like. Textures are all associated with the head and include faces, scalps, hair, eyes, eyelashes, and eyebrows. Both BroShep and FemShep are affected, in addition to all human NPCs. This mod should be ran as a TPF and used with either Texmod or TPF Tools.
ThaneMOD is a large content mod that focuses on changing and enhancing Thane Krios's story in Mass Effect 3. Ultimately, ThaneMOD removes Thane from the Coup, but what the player experiences in game varies with both ME2 and ME3 decisions. It also varies with what "modules" the player chooses to install. ThaneMOD is a highly-customizable mod allowing the player to experience as many or few changes as they want (relatively speaking).
In playthroughs with minimal changes, Thane will avoid the Coup and return in an epilogue "slide." In playthroughs with the most extensive changes and Thane as the LI, he will send a modified email from Huerta, have modified Huerta dialogue & music, convey the Paramour achievement, convey a codex entry and cabin photo, avoid the coup, send FemShep a series of 7 emails throughout the game, influence the amount of flirting FemShep experiences from other potential LIs (and James), convey 2 new war assets and boost the base Hanar and Drell Forces asset, have a new LI-specific ending flashback, have an epilogue slide, and be present in the Memorial Scene.
With v3.0, new systems for Kahje and Rakhana will be added to the galaxy map, additional war assets will be added, Huerta dialogue will be re-tweaked, a LI-Thane will have an endgame romance scene, and more.
Gonna bump this and add my own take on it:
It feels like custom character unification was dropped in ME2 only to get picked back up in ME3. Characters imported from ME1 DO NOT seem to translate well into ME2 at all. Skin is a discolored, pale color (if your Shepard is white), eyebrows are discolored and lighter (and seemingly chewed-off), and beards are almost non-existent. This goes for both male and female Shepards. It also doesn't feel like the textures were as significantly updated as they were for custom Shepards in ME1.
I really hope EA addresses this, because a lot of us put a lot of work into our custom Shepards and it's disheartening that, after so many years, our custom Shepards still look like they don't belong with the other, more polished characters in Mass Effect 2 (especially coming out of ME1:LE where I could barely tell the difference in quality between my custom Shepard and the other main characters in the game).
I'm kind of surprised that Bioware and EA haven't given a patch yet to fix this, I'm glad there is a mod for it now but still, this should have been something they would try to fix as soon as possible
Since managing Wine manually can be a bit difficult, there is a wonderful program called Lutris, which makes managing different Wine environments and applications a lot more convenient and provides many community contributed installers to install Windows applications and games automatically. Such an installer also exists for the Mass Effect games, however we are on our own when it comes to modding, so my guide will explain that in detail. Luckily, Lutris makes this easier for us too.
I recommend that you install Lutris from the package manager/software center of whichever Linux Distribution you are using. As I am using Pop!_OS as a game system, I simply installed it from the built in software center.
Once we have Lutris, we can open it, press on the plus button in the top left and search for Mass Effect 2. Click on the game, then select the Origin version and press Install. As the note says, this will only install Origin and some dependencies, not yet the game itself. Once Origin is done installing, you can launch it and install Mass Effect 2 (and any DLC you want/have) from inside it.
Modding in Mass Effect today happens mainly through two tools. Firstly, there is ME3Tweaks Mod Manager, also called M3, which handles content mods such as Project Variety. Only rarely are mods installed manually today and M3 is the suggested method. Secondly, there is the ALOT installer (using MassEffectModder in the background), which handles all the texture mods, such as ALOT, MEUITM and any custom textures you may want to install.
For Mass Effect, we always need to install content mods first and texture mods last, otherwise it might create conflicts between different mods. Accordingly, in this guide, I am installing the following mods in the following order:
There is a lot to think about in terms of order and compatibility here, so I have done the hard work for you and will be going through these step by step. But before we can start installing mods, we need to install our tools.
Now, you can save and launch the mod manager from within Lutris and it should open up its main window. It will probably display a message that your operating system is not supported, this can safely be ignored.
The mod manager will prompt you to create backups for the game, which I also highly recommend as it can speed things up massively if something goes wrong and you have to revert the game to its initial state. Select a backup location and give it some time to do the backup. It will then recognize the application as backed up and restorable.
There are two options for installing the ALOT installer, depending on how much storage space you have available. Ideally you want the game to be running from an SSD drive for the best loading speeds, but SSDs can be quite small compared to HDDs, so you may not want to keep the tens of gigabytes of texture mod files on the same drive. If you have a small SSD like me, you want to keep the ALOT installer somewhere outside of the Wine prefix on a different drive, which I will explain soon. If you do have enough space, you can do the following:
With all of this done, you can launch Mass Effect 2 again (from Lutris, not from M3) to make sure that it still works before we apply the texture mods. Optionally, you can do another backup by simply copying the Wine prefix to a different location.
We already downloaded and installed ALOT in the last step (if you chose the method of installing ALOT through M3, you have to download the ALOT files still). Also download any updates for ALOT if there are some, as well as the Improved Static Lighting, also linked on the ALOT page. Again, I highly recommend using torrents as much as possible to speed up the process for yourself and others.
795a8134c1