Exploring strange things on Solcrum (Mass Effect 1 LE, PS4)
Hey, here’s a cool video (I’m biased; it’s mine)!
I’m in the process of streaming Mass Effect Legendary Edition for a friend of mine (no voiceover on the stream because she and I communicate via Discord while I stream for her, so I have my game mic off), and one of the recent play sessions involved two different things that I realized I wanted to show off online, so I actually bothered to download the stream before Twitch cleared it from my channel.
This is the first thing I wanted to show off: a few bug shenanigans on Solcrum, involving its star, Grissom.
First, on the PS3 and PS4 versions of ME1, the star is actually in front of the mountains that are part of the distant terrain, instead of behind it like on the PC (and I presume the Xbox, but haven’t had verification on that) version of the game. Apparently there’s something about the Playstation hardware that either moves the star closer or makes the distant terrain part of the actual skybox. When I shared this on the Mass Effect subreddit, someone else showed their own screenshots (with flycam mod) from the PC version:
The second bit is that there’s a spot near a mineral deposit in the lower-right corner of the map where, if you angle the camera just right, the star disappears. I didn’t show it in the video, but I seem to recall that it also works if you’re not inside the Mako. I don’t even know why that particular spot and camera angle causes the star to not render, but talk about pop-in.
