Several months after Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out, modders released a community patch to fix a host of minor bugs and irritations in the remastered version of the first game. A similar community patch for the Legendary Edition's update of Mass Effect 3 followed. But the remastered Mass Effect 2 lacked a similar community patch—until now.
Although the Legendary version of Mass Effect 2 already dealt with the most egregious bugs in the best game in the series (don't @ me), there were still plenty of minor things left for the Unofficial LE2 patch to fix. The lengthy changelog notes a lot of lighting corrections, changes to make NPC uniforms match, fixes for inconsistent skin tones and misaligned props, as well as typos. There are a couple of more notable fixes, however.
If you played the previous game with the LE1 Community Patch installed, creepy Shephard superfan Conrad Verner will now correctly remember how you dealt with him rather than defaulting to the Renegade choice. Individual mods had fixed this oversight before, but it's nice to have it parceled up in the same patch that also ensures asari on the Citadel no longer have human hands.
The changelog description "Communications animation corrected" may not sound like much, but it gets rid of something that's bothered me for years. When characters held two fingers up to their ears in the universal "I'm talking over an earpiece" gesture, if they weren't wearing a helmet they'd still hold their hands a good 10 centimeters away from their heads as if they were. The same bug was present in third game until the LE3 community patch fixed it, and now it's gone here as well I can finally stop gritting my teeth about it.
Several of the minor changes amused me, so here they are for your edification:
- Jacob will not start typing in midair after Shepard breaks up with him.
- Male quarians can now blink.
- Hammerhead will no longer scream like an undead nightmare when mining nodes.
- Legion will correctly reference Shepard's meeting with Sovereign happening on Virmire (rather than on Ilos).
- Restored eyelashes on Normandy crew members, including Ashley and Joker as the most noticeable cases.
- Shiala's teeth are now visible.
As the Unofficial LE2 Patch's FAQ explains, though its team contains several modders who contributed to the other two games' community patches, they are a separate release group—hence the change in name compared to the LE1 and LE3 Community Patches. Since nobody else seemed to be working on an equivalent for Mass Effect 2, they stepped up.
They also note while this mod will continue being updated to "more comprehensively address smaller aesthetic and QoL issues", they believed it was worth releasing now, as in its current state it's still "a complete, functional bugfix mod."
Time to update our list of the best Mass Effect Legendary Edition mods, I guess.
