Mass Effect 3: Special Edition Performance Analysis

Going by Digital Foundry’s performance analysis of Mass Effect 3: Special Edition, the Wii U port of the title doesn’t stand up to the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game, becoming an attractive proposition only to those people that own only Nintendo’s console.

Here’s a snippet from their conclusions:

Aside from some cute but non-essential gamepad features, it’s safe to say that Mass Effect 3 on Wii U is a solid enough conversion but offers nothing of substance to elevate it over the existing Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game – it’s clearly an improvement over the lacklustre PlayStation 3 release with a higher performance level, but across the overall run of play it’s somewhat disappointing to see a vintage 2005 console with slower GPU and less RAM match and indeed exceed the quality of the experience found on the brand new Nintendo hardware.

Regardless of the fact that the game has been farmed out to another developer, and irrespective of the state of the current Wii U toolchain and the overall lack of experience the studio would have had with the console, the fact is that a true generational leap in power – even the 2x to 4x jump represented by the Digital Foundry PC – would be reflected in a much higher level of performance than we see here. That said, we must remember that this is a first gen Wii U title, a conversion of a game that was never designed with the platform in mind. Assuming publishers put the resources in, there’s no reason to believe that we shouldn’t see superior results into these multi-platform titles in the future.

In the here and now, none of this detracts from the fact that Mass Effect 3 was – and is – an exceptional video game. The Wii U version isn’t the best edition of the game available and in truth it’s not even the preferred console buy. Indeed, once the DLC situation is factored into the equation, there’s a sense that it’s being treated almost like the poor relation. But if Wii U is your only console the reality is that this is still a decent rendition of Mass Effect 3 – and through default it is one of the best games you can buy for your new machine.