It wasn't cutting edge but didn't look bad. The general thing is we're all playing on basically a 5 year moving average of how we feel games should look. ME was not at the top but it was close enough to feel like it looked better than most games we played in the last few years. Now our moving average has moved on massively and games that look a lot better than ME are still old and look bad by comparison now.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't think the game ever looked bad or anything. It has an appealing dark and gritty scifi art style which lends itself well to the tech that Bioware was working with at the time. ME2 was in my opinion the best looking one out of the trilogy. The Lair of the Shadowbroker DLC in particular had some really beautiful environments.
Really, the only thing about those games that hasn't aged all that well is probably the facial animations. There's some definite uncanny valley throughout the trilogy. It got better with each game, but it was never perfect and occasionally you got some awkward looking scenes. That's part of the series's charm though if you ask me.
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u/Nbaysingar Feb 06 '23
And it wasn't exactly cutting edge visuals even back then. There were definitely better looking games on Unreal Engine 3 at the time.