Just finished the game with this mod and holy s#*! was it incredible. Expanding the squad as you went was awesome, meeting up with Grunt, finally getting to fight alongside Kirrahe and hold...the...line. So great. Zaeed and Jacob, also very cool even though Jacob is kinda meh. I only have the tiniest of quibbles with one of the radio lines at the hub that felt like obviously modded content but it's so minor it's barely worth discussing. Nearly everything you've done here feels like completely authentic, vanilla content that could have and should have been in the game from the start.
Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team have put into this. I can't imagine I'll ever play this game without your mod going forward. Truly amazing!
Really loved this mod (& most other stuff you've done, Unofficial Patch, DLC integration, Thessia, Final Conf) And the temporary squadmates felt super fitting for an epic conclusion, seeing all the allies you've made over the game & trilogy come to your aid is just 100% the way to do such a final climax. One suggestion though: Maybe replace Jacob with Samara? I think about the conversation Shepard has with Jacob in the N7 mission & hospital, where Jacob seems invested to stay close to his love interest, away from the worst of frontlines when he wants to have a family, Hackett keeps him busy but still he seems more interested to hang back. Whereas Samara if you meet her after the monastery in the embassy, really gives the impression that she'll throw herself onto the frontlines to fight to the end as her code dictates, and she's expressed multiple times that she will follow Shepard to the end, in ME2 & in 3 her admiration of Shep, so I feel she would naturally gravitate to be there on the ground facing a destroyer with you to charge the tower.
Hopefully the Orikon Collection will be available again in the near future.
BTW, off-topic, but do you know if it's possible to implement cascading shadowmaps into ME3(or 1-2)? Some later unreal engine 3 games had cascading shadowmaps, I think Xcom Bureau Declassified was one, of course there are "shadow volumes" which is a remnant from when Epic still was developing dynamic shadows to rival idtech4 stencil shadows before they scrapped it because they wanted to squeeze more polygons onto the xbox360 instead of better lighting/shadowing when developing GoW-- Maybe that would require too much effort or be impossible without fullblown SDK tools.
Starting a new playthrough of ME3 in the next couple days - once I'm done with ME2 - and I'm trying to decide between this and Take Earth Back...
Right now, for this playthrough, I'm thinking I'll grab this mod though! It'll be my first time playing modded ME3, the last time I played was on my PS3. I'm excited to dive head-first into it again with my current Paragon mShep!
Hey there, I use your Orikon Collection with the OG ME3, along with a bunch of other mods. I love them, so much.
I have a little issue with the prologue: since I also use Project Variety I get a strange cutscene mixing both Variety and the restored content from the Orikon collection, and I was wondering if there was a way to disable the restored prologue content but keep the rest of the Orikon collection active?
[Edit] NVM after a bit of experimenting, disabling the Ambient Audio mod seem to have fixed everything, they work together perfectly now.
Commenting prematurely because I haven't gotten the chance to play with the mod yet, but I picked up a copy of the OT versions of the trilogy today because I was so excited by some of the mods I saw for OT, particularly this one. I'm a late-comer to ME, beginning with LE and I could not believe I waited so long to enjoy this series. I played with your Immersive Thessia Mod and was just absolutely blown away by it. Now I'm excited to play the original versions of the game and do some comparing/contrasting of my own, but really what I'm looking forward to is experiencing some of the amazing mods only available for the original releases, particularly with this one. I cannot wait to play PEOM, and give my full experience afterwards! Thanks for all your hard work.
I mean yeah there's nothing wrong with the original games -- just as functional and accessible as the LE, only less buggy and broken. When it comes to OG-exclusive mods, don't forget to grab ArkMod and Bonus Powers Pack. Both are incredible.
And please come back after you played PEOM, I'd love to hear your opinions as a first-timer.
Oiya. Odd to see mwah here is it not lmao. Anyway, this is probably an IDIOTIC question but is there ANY chance I could brute force PEOM to work with Take Earth Back. Not asking for any work on your part other than a text explanation of some kind. Ive read all the backstory you have with it and know its basically a lot of your scrapped ideas, and while PEOM is basically a perfect mod that has ZERO faults, there is one thing that mess things up... The FOB is *too* vanilla. That would be good in most cases, but the main part of the hub is much better in TEB and i mean absolutely no offense. Seeing your war assets in the hub is great, but PEOM does it better by seeing them in the field so of course your masterpiece is better but still. Seeing the same 4 marines hanging around the hub like dummies can get boring lol. Now dont get me wrong, you have some AMAZING additions that TEB doesn't do or doesn't do as well, for instance your debriefing scene is just... mwah. But i digress; I am quite aware that you cant use both, but as the mastermind modder you are, do you know of any way i could mish mash my game to where i CAN have both? Like by disabling and enabling once i get to the hub or would that just destroy everything and everyone i love and cause Harbinger to destroy my entire family in a fit of anger over my ignorance, naiviety, and overall dumbassery lmao. Once more, i absolutely mean ZERO disrespect i cannot stress that enough, PEOM is f*#@ing gorgeous and i would marry it faster than I'd marry Liara or Tali, but TEB's hub is just too beautiful... I gotta go asshole Shepard and cheat on ya XD. In a way, this situation isnt too far off from ME lol. Romance Liara or Ashley/Kaidan in ME1 (use PEOM), realize you can romance Tali/Garrus now and begin to regret everything and end up cheating in ME2 (using TEB), then when you get to ME3 you rlly wanna marry Liara after LotSB and you rekindle the relationship (Back to using PEOM). Just something i realized while writing this lol. Anyway, would that be possible? Or, again, am i just smoking that Harbinger pack and grasping for straws
Look, I appreciate your impeccable rizz, but what you want is just not possible without a patch. I suppose you could delete some files to try and have your preferred mod take over, but you're risking creating bugs. You would need to tell me exactly what parts of the FOB you want to swap. I don't know about TEB, but in PEOM the FOB and Hammer Assault are interconnected, so if you delete some sections it will cause issues later on. That's why it's important for me to know which parts of the FOB you want to swap.
Also bro what do you mean the PEOM FOB is too vanilla? xD You've got Jondum Bau and his freaking Spectres, the Asari platoon, the Asari holding the barrier with multiple races helping her, some N7 soldiers(e.g. the Engineer in the Comm Room), Salarians with Kirrahe's speech, Turians... plus, all the Alliance soldiers are very diverse in their appearance, from their arsenal to the head gear such as hats, caps, microphones and so on. Some have dirty armor, some are clean, etc.
The FOB does become more and more vanilla-like both in the number and appearance of soldiers as your EMS goes down (that's intended), so I gotta ask my dude does your Shepard have high EMS?
Listen, listen... I am not gonna lie. I have yet to play OT modded yet, I will definitely get to it, but I have yet to do so, the Dreams Remade mod is just too good not to look at over and over again. So my only experience of your amazing mod is through video. And yeh, dont get me wrong I knew you would have a lot, its you your content is amazing but from what I've seen TEB DOES have the better FOB, but I'll admit you got some good shit... Not only does it have Kirrahe and the Asari, the Asari have their own speech and a lot of the convos are now their own and no longer ambient convos.
So, I suppose you could say my Shepard has 0 EMS... Bro really got executed by the Batarians for War Crimes
On a side note, for some reason my shitty computer can't handle anything but ME3/LE3 apparently. LE1 & 2 refuse to launch and my pc cant handle mods for the first 2, idky tbh lmao. But yeh, I have yet to play it yet. but trust me, I will. And thx for the answer Ill see what I can with my impeccable tenacious tism powers and figure this stuff out lol
Most PEOM videos you can find online are widely outdated.
The most updated one is this series from Ninemil:
This is with the Special Edition and you can see how the FOB looks like with High EMS. The comment section also features extensive developer commentary from me so you can get insight into a lot of interesting tidbits.
But yeah if you want to swap some parts of the FOB with TEB that's fine just tell me which ones exactly. I think HubStreet1 and HubStreet 2 should both me fine (that's everything from James up until Garrus), except for the Comm Room because that includes a fix that ties into the temporary squadmates later on, but anything beyond that and you're potentially playing with your life. For instance, you can't swap the Command Room because that includes a change to the Speech so that Shepard can say "You two, with me. The rest of you... good luck." after you select squadmates, and if you swap that, your game would crash as soon as you tried to leave the FOB.
The process would also require some effort on your part. You'd need to delete everything from TEB except the files you want to apply to PEOM, and then rename those files so that they match the name of the equivalent file within PEOM. So for instance if it's called HubA in PEOM but HubAZ in TEB, you'd rename that to HubA.
When do you NOT have exstensive developer commentary lol. I could find a 30 second video with 726 views that was uploaded on July 15th, 2019 with 18 comments and you'd be half of em.
But hey, thats good to hear. Soon my ME3 OT playthrough will be unstoppable... I have most high quality deleted mods, such as ThaneMOD and the impeccable Virmire Casuality, and there's a plethora of amazing mods that LE doesnt have. HOWEVER, and im not kidding when I say this, Dreams Remade rlly makes me finish LE first lol. Its just such an amazing mod
So basically, PV and LE3DP. I heavily prefer DP and agree PV is kinda ass, but the heavy changes it makes are amazing: I.E the clothing, new dialogue, and scenes, but one of the major things i noticed was Cortez. Cortez uses a unique armor in DP, a rendition of ME1 Medium armor and its honestly pretty damn sexy. Would it be possible to do something like you described here and switch out Cortez's armor? I assume id have to switch out entire cutscenes for that... Maybe even change out some levels? The Coup is much better in DP
When do you NOT have exstensive developer commentary lol. I could find a 30 second video with 726 views that was uploaded on July 15th, 2019 with 18 comments and you'd be half of em.
Lmaoooooo true
So basically, PV and LE3DP. I heavily prefer DP and agree PV is kinda ass, but the heavy changes it makes are amazing: I.E the clothing, new dialogue, and scenes, but one of the major things i noticed was Cortez. Cortez uses a unique armor in DP, a rendition of ME1 Medium armor and its honestly pretty damn sexy. Would it be possible to do something like you described here and switch out Cortez's armor? I assume id have to switch out entire cutscenes for that... Maybe even change out some levels? The Coup is much better in DP
You actually wouldn't have to switch the cutscene since cutscenes are always in their own file, separate from the main file where actors (aka. NPCs) are located. In PEOM, this file is called BioD_PEOM_105_Intro. Take the DP file (it probably has the vanilla name: BioD_End001_110LoadInterior), rename it to the PEOM name and place it into the PEOM folder.
You will lose the fake loading screen I put between the Sword cinematic and the shuttle conversation, but that's a minor thing anyway.
There was some miscommunication here lol, srry that was completely my fault. That 2nd one was for LE. Project Variety and LE3 Diversification Project, but Id assume itd something of the same caliber
Hello. I was curious to replay Mass Effect trilogy after finishing it for the first time when the OT came out. I wanted to do the modded playthrough (I never installed mods on it before), and the question wether I should go with LE or OT came up. So far yours is the only mod that still make me consider installing OT instead of LE (Because most of the other mods I found that I want in my playthrough, are alread ported to it). And also from what I've been hearing so far, LE should be better in overall experience. I haven't played LE myself yet in any form, so I don't have any personal opinion on the matter, but I was curious to ask your opinion on it, since you not being interested in porting this mod to LE probably has some more legitimate reasons than just "I don't like the new lighting" or whatever. Like would you recommend to still play the original trilogy or at least ME3 as OT instead of LE, and if so, why?
Hey, thanks for reaching out. I'll be honest with you, I've spoken on the topic of LE so many times before that I just don't have the energy to write an essay yet again. So I'll keep this short.
In essence, the problem with the LE is that it introduces a myriad of bugs that have never existed in the original games. Objectively they're far inferior to the originals, and you need to do some heavy modding just to bring the LE games remotely close to the quality of the OT... or you can just play the originals which are perfectly fine out of the box.
In LE3 I think some core issues like enemies falling through the floor (and locking progress), head explosions not working and so on have been fixed by the Community Patch - but unfortunately that patch is so poorly made that it introduces a ton of new bugs all on its own. Some game breaking. However, even with mods, there's a bunch of issues particularly in LE3 and LE2 which have not been resolved to this day.
For instance, enemy AI is completely broken in LE1. Not that it was ever great to begin with, but in its bugged remastered state, it's brain dead. Insanity difficulty is a joke. This will never get fixed by mods because its outside of what our tools can do.
So to me, it's total insanity to port PEOM (which means remaking it from scratch, it's not like with Skyrim where we do a few clicks) to a version of the game that is not only buggier but also lacking in features. Especially since the OT version is just as available and functional today as it was 10 years ago. I am just not remaking my mods for a port of the Wii U version, which is by the way what LE3 is.
If other authors want to do that for clout or download numbers - that's their thing.
Let me also debunk some common pro-LE arguments that you might get told by Bioware worshipers: 1) "The 4K makeover makes it look nice." - this doesn't mean anything. The OT games can be played in 4K resolution and 4K textures have been available via ALOT for over a decade now. Furthermore, because texture upscaling in the LE was done primarily via AI software and with little quality control, the result is that a good number of textures was messed up or forgotten about. That's why ALOT for LE exists. 2) "It's more accessible. All DLC in one bundle." - It's no more accessible than the OT games. The DLC bundles for each original game is free via EA Play and install automatically. Find some cheap game keys and you end up paying less for a better version of the trilogy. 3) "LE is a better in overall experience." - How? Where? What does that even mean? I've heard this argument come up time and time again yet nobody has been able to provide a single concrete example. I guess in LE1 the Mako handles a little better and some weapons have been tweaked? But then what about all the new bugs? Is not being able to target enemies or them falling under the ground and locking your progress part of this "better experience"?
4) "More and better mods. Also no memory restriction." - I've been opening the LE nexus every day since it came out. It's dead and creatively bankrupt. The most popular and widely-downloaded mods are either ports of the original mods, or unofficial patches that attempt to fix mountain piles of new bugs introduced with the LE. Memory restriction was also rarely a problem in OT, and if it was it just meant that the mod author failed to optimize their mod.
To be fair, there are some awesome mods like Hot Labs Restored, Immersive Emails, and the Diversification Project. If you're into those, by all means go play the LE. Those are excellent mods and valid reasons to skip the OT.
Hey, thanks a lot for the detailed, even if a "short" reply ; ). I'm sorry for rilying up the subject I guess you're incredibly tired of, I can understand it coz I mod for New Vegas myself from time to time when I'm not busy with the war in my country (though not on this website anymore after Nexus usurped the rights of modders on their mods, on MODDB ), and one of the things that always got asked on my mods is if it's compatible with TTW and if I'll make a patch for it. Trying to explain to people that I don't know if it is and no I won't, coz I'm simply not interested in TTW since my GoG Fallout 3 works without any problems of Steam version, no extra steps and myriads TTW patches needed, plus access to lots of great mods that will never going to be ported to TTW --- often leads to someone trying to prove to me why I MUST use TTW x ). So yeah. And that's actually why I was wary about all those saying I should "go with LE", I liked on paper supposed graphical and gameplay improvements LE was bringing in the game, but the videos didn't give any confidence, especiall the way Mass Effect 1 and 2 looked, just seemed like some of the atmosphere was castrated for some alleged new effects.
Actually the mods you've mentioned are those that were on my mind if playing LE, but if you have like a personal modlist for OT of mods everyone must have a play with (Especially those that are story/ immersion and atmosphere-enhancement related) and wouldn't have a hustle sharing it, I'd appreciate it.
I also wanted to say that I saw your comments about having your final updates and some projects stuck in a burnout, totally can relate. I have this very big mod for NV https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-spook-and-mojaves-trails-of-bizarre and I have a stockpile of assets I've made like about a dozen of new super mutants, some other creature-features and outfits and a couple of gameplay additions and places that were supposed to be in my "dot update" for it, but at some point I just didn't have a time for that. Ironically, sometimes I spent time procastinating creating even more new things for it, without actually working on implementing them in the mod besides just testing xD. Probably at some point I'll just drop all of that as modders resources and be done with it, unless I really feel like there's a point in that "dot update" after all this while.
In any case, hopefully, both you and me will find the right moment to wrap our modding things without that being an "unfinished business" in the back of our heads, and I wish you the best in all of those goals you have (Though I would say, if I understood you correctly, don't try to do something just so that wouldn't go along with the cliches someone created about you in their heads. If you like game design and it's a thing you'd at least would like to try to do professionally besides your other aspirations, then to bloody hell with everyone, go for it. We're not in this world to prove anything to anyone. We're here to take the best from it that would make us happy).
Hey. Tbf. Dreams Remade is a mod I cant play without. You know my ass would play the OT (Im new to pc, but ive played ME since i was like 10.) Id Dreams Remade was on OT, that s#*! is fire and i love it. Honestly. Dude, I'd recommend playing a bit of LE to at least see the dream after Tuchanka,(if you havent seen the dreams) all i gotta say ab it is you're literally following Mordin as he shows you your choices. Personally, as a writer, it would've been AMAZING thematically if Nihlus showed you around the first dream and then maybe the last, i haven't seen the last yet so idk what happens but its such a good effing mod man
I know it's not necessary to have PEOM installed from the very beginning of the game for it to work, but what is the latest point during a playthrough (an event horizon, if you will) when I can no longer postpone installing PEOM or at which point I must have the Mod installed for it to take effect for the current playthrough ? The reason behind the question is that a couple months ago you said that you might release a new version of PEOM, so I had decided to put on hold installing the currently available Special Edition of PEOM and began my playthrough without it.
Technically, if you want to get the full experience, it should be installed at the start of your playthrough, otherwise the mod cannot track which War Assets you have or do not have and will revert to the default choice when it comes to the notifications.
But it's a very small, cosmetic thing that has no real impact on gameplay. Other than that, you can install the mod as late as before Cronos Station. Not after Cronos, though. But right before is good.
Ouch. I'm just a bit confused, there are various links to it, but instead there's "just" Priority: Earth and other components are separate. Ambience mod states that it's an obsolete version and I should get the collection, but it's nowhere to be found.
I know, it's a bit of a mess right now. I apologize. But, to be totally honest, considering how few people use Mass Effect mods, I didn't feel much pressure to set things right.
But you can always message me here or write a comment and I will respond very quickly.
Ambience mod (AAOM) is being totally reworked at the moment so in the future you won't be stuck with the old crappy version. I'll hide the mod page for the time being.
The problem with The Orikon Collection is that it has to include the Unofficial Patch and Enhanced DLC Integration. Unofficial Patch is stuck in development hell, as I've got a list of things I have to do but zero motivation to finish it. Enhanced DLC Integration cannot be worked on until the Unofficial Patch is done, as both mods are strongly tied.
It might get finished, but as per my tweet, I just can't promise when. I am hoping to release a Mass Effect 2 mod for N7 Day and maybe AAOM too.
The problem with The Orikon Collection is that it has to include the Unofficial Patch and Enhanced DLC Integration. Unofficial Patch is stuck in development hell, as I've got a list of things I have to do but zero motivation to finish it. Enhanced DLC Integration cannot be worked on until the Unofficial Patch is done, as both mods are strongly tied.
I've been waiting for these mods since the early days of PEOM, pretty sure there are still a few of us (including myself) who really want to see these mods completed at some point as they are ESSENTIAL for the true, Ultimate Mass Effect experience. Your motivation can come from us, instead of the unreliable masses who completely abandoned the OT for LE.
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Thank you for all the time and effort you and your team have put into this. I can't imagine I'll ever play this game without your mod going forward. Truly amazing!
One suggestion though:
Maybe replace Jacob with Samara?
I think about the conversation Shepard has with Jacob in the N7 mission & hospital, where Jacob seems invested to stay close to his love interest, away from the worst of frontlines when he wants to have a family, Hackett keeps him busy but still he seems more interested to hang back.
Whereas Samara if you meet her after the monastery in the embassy, really gives the impression that she'll throw herself onto the frontlines to fight to the end as her code dictates, and she's expressed multiple times that she will follow Shepard to the end, in ME2 & in 3 her admiration of Shep, so I feel she would naturally gravitate to be there on the ground facing a destroyer with you to charge the tower.
Hopefully the Orikon Collection will be available again in the near future.
BTW, off-topic, but do you know if it's possible to implement cascading shadowmaps into ME3(or 1-2)? Some later unreal engine 3 games had cascading shadowmaps, I think Xcom Bureau Declassified was one, of course there are "shadow volumes" which is a remnant from when Epic still was developing dynamic shadows to rival idtech4 stencil shadows before they scrapped it because they wanted to squeeze more polygons onto the xbox360 instead of better lighting/shadowing when developing GoW-- Maybe that would require too much effort or be impossible without fullblown SDK tools.
Right now, for this playthrough, I'm thinking I'll grab this mod though! It'll be my first time playing modded ME3, the last time I played was on my PS3. I'm excited to dive head-first into it again with my current Paragon mShep!
I have a little issue with the prologue: since I also use Project Variety I get a strange cutscene mixing both Variety and the restored content from the Orikon collection, and I was wondering if there was a way to disable the restored prologue content but keep the rest of the Orikon collection active?
[Edit] NVM after a bit of experimenting, disabling the Ambient Audio mod seem to have fixed everything, they work together perfectly now.
I mean yeah there's nothing wrong with the original games -- just as functional and accessible as the LE, only less buggy and broken.
When it comes to OG-exclusive mods, don't forget to grab ArkMod and Bonus Powers Pack. Both are incredible.
And please come back after you played PEOM, I'd love to hear your opinions as a first-timer.
Look, I appreciate your impeccable rizz, but what you want is just not possible without a patch. I suppose you could delete some files to try and have your preferred mod take over, but you're risking creating bugs. You would need to tell me exactly what parts of the FOB you want to swap. I don't know about TEB, but in PEOM the FOB and Hammer Assault are interconnected, so if you delete some sections it will cause issues later on. That's why it's important for me to know which parts of the FOB you want to swap.
Also bro what do you mean the PEOM FOB is too vanilla? xD
You've got Jondum Bau and his freaking Spectres, the Asari platoon, the Asari holding the barrier with multiple races helping her, some N7 soldiers(e.g. the Engineer in the Comm Room), Salarians with Kirrahe's speech, Turians... plus, all the Alliance soldiers are very diverse in their appearance, from their arsenal to the head gear such as hats, caps, microphones and so on. Some have dirty armor, some are clean, etc.
The FOB does become more and more vanilla-like both in the number and appearance of soldiers as your EMS goes down (that's intended), so I gotta ask my dude does your Shepard have high EMS?
So, I suppose you could say my Shepard has 0 EMS... Bro really got executed by the Batarians for War Crimes
On a side note, for some reason my shitty computer can't handle anything but ME3/LE3 apparently. LE1 & 2 refuse to launch and my pc cant handle mods for the first 2, idky tbh lmao. But yeh, I have yet to play it yet. but trust me, I will. And thx for the answer Ill see what I can with my impeccable tenacious tism powers and figure this stuff out lol
The most updated one is this series from Ninemil:
This is with the Special Edition and you can see how the FOB looks like with High EMS. The comment section also features extensive developer commentary from me so you can get insight into a lot of interesting tidbits.
But yeah if you want to swap some parts of the FOB with TEB that's fine just tell me which ones exactly. I think HubStreet1 and HubStreet 2 should both me fine (that's everything from James up until Garrus), except for the Comm Room because that includes a fix that ties into the temporary squadmates later on, but anything beyond that and you're potentially playing with your life. For instance, you can't swap the Command Room because that includes a change to the Speech so that Shepard can say "You two, with me. The rest of you... good luck." after you select squadmates, and if you swap that, your game would crash as soon as you tried to leave the FOB.
The process would also require some effort on your part. You'd need to delete everything from TEB except the files you want to apply to PEOM, and then rename those files so that they match the name of the equivalent file within PEOM. So for instance if it's called HubA in PEOM but HubAZ in TEB, you'd rename that to HubA.
But hey, thats good to hear. Soon my ME3 OT playthrough will be unstoppable... I have most high quality deleted mods, such as ThaneMOD and the impeccable Virmire Casuality, and there's a plethora of amazing mods that LE doesnt have. HOWEVER, and im not kidding when I say this, Dreams Remade rlly makes me finish LE first lol. Its just such an amazing mod
So basically, PV and LE3DP. I heavily prefer DP and agree PV is kinda ass, but the heavy changes it makes are amazing: I.E the clothing, new dialogue, and scenes, but one of the major things i noticed was Cortez. Cortez uses a unique armor in DP, a rendition of ME1 Medium armor and its honestly pretty damn sexy. Would it be possible to do something like you described here and switch out Cortez's armor? I assume id have to switch out entire cutscenes for that... Maybe even change out some levels? The Coup is much better in DP
You will lose the fake loading screen I put between the Sword cinematic and the shuttle conversation, but that's a minor thing anyway.
In essence, the problem with the LE is that it introduces a myriad of bugs that have never existed in the original games. Objectively they're far inferior to the originals, and you need to do some heavy modding just to bring the LE games remotely close to the quality of the OT... or you can just play the originals which are perfectly fine out of the box.
In LE3 I think some core issues like enemies falling through the floor (and locking progress), head explosions not working and so on have been fixed by the Community Patch - but unfortunately that patch is so poorly made that it introduces a ton of new bugs all on its own. Some game breaking. However, even with mods, there's a bunch of issues particularly in LE3 and LE2 which have not been resolved to this day.
For instance, enemy AI is completely broken in LE1. Not that it was ever great to begin with, but in its bugged remastered state, it's brain dead. Insanity difficulty is a joke. This will never get fixed by mods because its outside of what our tools can do.
So to me, it's total insanity to port PEOM (which means remaking it from scratch, it's not like with Skyrim where we do a few clicks) to a version of the game that is not only buggier but also lacking in features. Especially since the OT version is just as available and functional today as it was 10 years ago. I am just not remaking my mods for a port of the Wii U version, which is by the way what LE3 is.
If other authors want to do that for clout or download numbers - that's their thing.
Let me also debunk some common pro-LE arguments that you might get told by Bioware worshipers:
1) "The 4K makeover makes it look nice." - this doesn't mean anything. The OT games can be played in 4K resolution and 4K textures have been available via ALOT for over a decade now. Furthermore, because texture upscaling in the LE was done primarily via AI software and with little quality control, the result is that a good number of textures was messed up or forgotten about. That's why ALOT for LE exists.
2) "It's more accessible. All DLC in one bundle." - It's no more accessible than the OT games. The DLC bundles for each original game is free via EA Play and install automatically. Find some cheap game keys and you end up paying less for a better version of the trilogy.
3) "LE is a better in overall experience." - How? Where? What does that even mean? I've heard this argument come up time and time again yet nobody has been able to provide a single concrete example. I guess in LE1 the Mako handles a little better and some weapons have been tweaked? But then what about all the new bugs? Is not being able to target enemies or them falling under the ground and locking your progress part of this "better experience"?
4) "More and better mods. Also no memory restriction." - I've been opening the LE nexus every day since it came out. It's dead and creatively bankrupt. The most popular and widely-downloaded mods are either ports of the original mods, or unofficial patches that attempt to fix mountain piles of new bugs introduced with the LE. Memory restriction was also rarely a problem in OT, and if it was it just meant that the mod author failed to optimize their mod.
To be fair, there are some awesome mods like Hot Labs Restored, Immersive Emails, and the Diversification Project. If you're into those, by all means go play the LE. Those are excellent mods and valid reasons to skip the OT.
Actually the mods you've mentioned are those that were on my mind if playing LE, but if you have like a personal modlist for OT of mods everyone must have a play with (Especially those that are story/ immersion and atmosphere-enhancement related) and wouldn't have a hustle sharing it, I'd appreciate it.
I also wanted to say that I saw your comments about having your final updates and some projects stuck in a burnout, totally can relate. I have this very big mod for NV https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-spook-and-mojaves-trails-of-bizarre and I have a stockpile of assets I've made like about a dozen of new super mutants, some other creature-features and outfits and a couple of gameplay additions and places that were supposed to be in my "dot update" for it, but at some point I just didn't have a time for that. Ironically, sometimes I spent time procastinating creating even more new things for it, without actually working on implementing them in the mod besides just testing xD. Probably at some point I'll just drop all of that as modders resources and be done with it, unless I really feel like there's a point in that "dot update" after all this while.
In any case, hopefully, both you and me will find the right moment to wrap our modding things without that being an "unfinished business" in the back of our heads, and I wish you the best in all of those goals you have (Though I would say, if I understood you correctly, don't try to do something just so that wouldn't go along with the cliches someone created about you in their heads. If you like game design and it's a thing you'd at least would like to try to do professionally besides your other aspirations, then to bloody hell with everyone, go for it. We're not in this world to prove anything to anyone. We're here to take the best from it that would make us happy).
The reason behind the question is that a couple months ago you said that you might release a new version of PEOM, so I had decided to put on hold installing the currently available Special Edition of PEOM and began my playthrough without it.
But it's a very small, cosmetic thing that has no real impact on gameplay. Other than that, you can install the mod as late as before Cronos Station. Not after Cronos, though. But right before is good.
But you can always message me here or write a comment and I will respond very quickly.
Ambience mod (AAOM) is being totally reworked at the moment so in the future you won't be stuck with the old crappy version. I'll hide the mod page for the time being.
The problem with The Orikon Collection is that it has to include the Unofficial Patch and Enhanced DLC Integration. Unofficial Patch is stuck in development hell, as I've got a list of things I have to do but zero motivation to finish it. Enhanced DLC Integration cannot be worked on until the Unofficial Patch is done, as both mods are strongly tied.
It might get finished, but as per my tweet, I just can't promise when. I am hoping to release a Mass Effect 2 mod for N7 Day and maybe AAOM too.