Face-Off: Mass Effect on PS3

The editors over at Eurogamer have taken a closer look at the PS3 version of the Mass Effect trilogy, comparing the series of titles to that of their Xbox 360 counterparts across a variety of elements that include graphical fidelity, available options, downloadable content, and more. Here are a few paragraphs to start you off:

Texture pop-in has always scuppered the look of Mass Effect when played on 360, even once it became possible to install the game to the hard drive. It mainly affects scenes where the camera switches view during dialogue sequences or when first loading a new area, and this stays true during our tests with the game fully installed. To the PS3’s benefit, the issue is made practically impossible to pick out in similar scenarios, showing a streaming process that has been optimised based on the advances made in later games.

Having the PS3’s dedicated HDD to hand helps hugely here, where Mass Effect takes up just over 3.5GB via a mandatory install. Sadly, this doesn’t put to rights the ‘Loading’ prompt that interrupts play while walking around the citadel – just as it does on 360 – or the lengthy bouts of loading disguised by elevator rides. The PS3 seems to also suffer for rapid transits around the Citadel in particular, where warping to Chora’s Den for the first time (from the Citadel Tower) takes the 360 just 10.5 seconds, compared to double the time on PS3 at 21.5 seconds. This increase is consistent for many locations, and stands at odds with the PSN release, which is streaming entirely from the HDD.

On the topic of data differences, the PS3’s larger disc size is taken up with DLC content, plus alternative language packs for German, Italian and French audio (weighing in at 1.62GB each). By contrast, the 360 only has the audio language specific to your game’s region, and comes complete with 468MB of filler files, used to cover the remaining space on the DVD-9’s first layer.