Mass Effect: Legendary Edition Addresses One the Series’ Bigger Controversies

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition updates a lot of elements from the trilogy, some big, some small – and one little change addresses one of the series’ biggest controversies.
Spoilers follow for Mass Effect 3 – proceed at your peril!

One of the ever-present characters throughout the original Mass Effect trilogy was Tali’Zorah, a quarian party member who – like the rest of her race – cannot remove her suit and helmet due to an acute risk of disease. That means, throughout the three games, players are never shown what a quarian looks like – that is unless players choose to romance Tali.

In Mass Effect 3, romancing Tali leads to a scene in which Commander Shephard looks at a photograph of an unmasked Tali. In the original version of the game, fans were disappointed to find that, after all three games, the image was a Photoshopped version of a stock image depicting Miss England ’05 winner Hammasa Kohistani. The reaction was strong enough for Tali’s photo to make it onto IGN’s list of Mass Effect 3 controversies.

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As part of its many updates, however, the new Legendary Edition has quietly altered the image, now depicting an actual unmasked Tali using in-engine visuals. As pointed out by MaxGoods on Reddit and confirmed by many others, the image shows a very human-looking face (albeit for almost all-white eyes) underneath the quarian helmet.

Fans have reacted mostly positively to the change. Superspicycurry37 wrote: “This is the ONE thing I wanted them to change if they were going to change nothing else. I’m glad it was this.” Like many, Max_Crultak26 thought the image was perhaps a little too human, but approved of the change: “In my headcanon some quarians are purple or pale red with lines, and others like Tali are purple with freckles (and tree-like lines) But still the image is cool”.

It’s one of many changes – many of them formally unannounced – made in Legendary Edition, which bundles all three original games together into one huge package. It’s so huge that you’ll need to wait a little longer for our review. If you’re already playing, we have a Mass Effect walkthrough, a Mass Effect 2 walkthrough, and, you guessed it, a Mass Effect 3 walkthrough. If you specifically want to find out how to see the new image of Tali yourself, here’s our Mass Effect 3 romance guide.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.