Re: And don't forget when a remake happens to be a remaster! || Re: Remakes, remakes, remakes

On Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:51:20 +0100, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
Oh, yippee. Yay.

>
I don't care a lot about remakes, since they are supposed to be a new
game built from scratch. Case of Dead Space of Final Fantasy VII remake,
for example. They usually are optional and technically unrelated to the
original game. Even though the Paper mario: The Thousand Year Door
remake was a disaster that lowered the framerate of the original from 60
to 30, It's not like the Gamecube version was affect.

While I get your point with "Final Fantasy 7", the "Dead Space" game
was more a remaster than remake. Okay, sure, it used a new engine and
all, but it was otherwise 90% identical to the original. "System Shock
remaster" was similar (maybe only 80% the same in that case). It's
still mostly a case of lipstick on a pig (even if, in the case of
"Dead Space" and "System Shock", they were very *pretty* pigs ;-)

"Final Fantasy 7" made  significant changes to the game; not just in
visuals but the entire story and gameplay structure. I'm a lot more
forgiving of something like that; at least there is some creativity
involved!

The problem I have is with the remasters. They tend to be completely
unnecessary in PC, and exist mostly to relaunch a game on a different
console generation. With the bioshock remasters, the benefits for PC
were minimal, and in some aspects, worse than the original. A similar
case with the Batman Arkham games. Still not a big deal since these were
released as games independent from the original versions.

Too often a lot of this sort of remasters merely exist to bring games
released on older consoles up to parity with the original PC version
(and, as you mentioned, sometimes that actually results in a downgrade
to the 'remastered' PC version. "Doom 3 BFG Edition" suffered somewhat
from this). And even when there is distinct visual change, it's still
too often just a lot of AI upscaling and hacks rather than a 'proper'
remaster ("GTA3 Definitive Edition", stand up; we're talking about
you).

What gets on my nerves is when because of a console remake / remaster,
the PC version I purchased suddenly gets replaced with the new version
that was remastered for consoles. Case of Fallout 4. After the series,
it was updated for PS5 and Xbox Series X... And the new codebase
replaced the PC version after years without updates. The game is broken,
specially mods, a settings menus is missing in Steam Deck, and it's
impossible to go back to the previous version in Steam. To add insult to
injury, the patch notes in PC only talk about playstation fixes.

As bad is when they release a 'remastered' version to a game they are
/still/ selling (or keep selling right up to the point the remastered
version comes out). "Horizon Zero Dawn" and "Skyrim Special Edition"
are both examples of this. Neither game at the time really needed a
remastered version. They just exist to make gamers buy the same tripe
they already own with minimal effort on the part of the publishers.
It's greedy, and its lazy.