In Legendary Edition, Mass Effect’s infamous elevator rides are over three times faster

If there’s one negative thing people remember about the first Mass Effect game, it has to be those elevator rides. In the remaster, they’re no longer a problem.

There’s a varied spread of changes and improvements to the games in the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, but the first game in the series received a disproportionate amount of the attention - and that’s because it is by far the game that has aged the most. Among improvements like an updated heads-up display, native PC controller port, weapon rebalancing, improved AI and more, it also includes one major addition fans have long been waiting for: shorter elevator rides.

Back in the first Mass Effect, elevators were used regularly, most noticeably on the Citadel, to divide up areas into manageable chunks for the gaming hardware of the time. The only problem was that’d often mean you’d get stuck in an elevator, staring at a wall and listening to space muzak while the next area loaded in.

That’s still the case in the Legendary Edition of the first Mass Effect - but it’s way faster. In PC version footage BioWare presented, we saw the original and remastered versions of the game side-by-side. The original took 52 seconds to load the elevator from the Wards up to the Presidium - while the same elevator takes only 14 seconds in the remaster.

That’s over three times faster, pushing four. It’s an impressive improvement - but that’s not all that’s new here.

In addition, once the load is complete, an optional Skip button will appear on screen, allowing you to skip to the end of the elevator ride if you prefer. This is handy when ambient conversations between squad mates trigger in elevators - some players might want to soak up these interactions, while others might want to get back into the game proper. Either way, there’s now no need for unnecessary waiting around.