I dont understand this argument. When a game is considered very good, particularly by people that are already invested in a series, those people want remakes and remasters to more or less be exactly the same game, with only technical improvements such as graphics and framerate. The game is beloved and changing it more often negatively effects the experience. This way new players and old players can have discussion about the game and their experience is more or less the same. Changing the game means new players will have a totally different experience from old players, and ruins discussion between the two.
Why can they not make their new version a separate mode, like New Game Plus?
A remaster is what you describe - technical improvements such as graphics and framerate.
Remakes are (supposed to be) additive - improving the story, changing un-fun mechanics, implementing new stuff that still fits the themes of the game (or that they originally wanted to include, but couldn’t due to budget or time or publishing constraints).
If you’re looking through nostalgia lens, yea, a remaster is all you need. But, when it’s not a studio just looking for a cash grab, devs can have plenty of reasons for wanting a second crack at their game.
FF7 Remake is a great example. Sure, there’s been a lot of controversy around the changes. But I’ve really enjoyed a lot of them because it’s different from the original. It didn’t ruin the discussion - it added to the conversation.
A remaster is generally a re-release of an already existing game. It is a new build of the same game, on the same engine, with the same assets. The only difference being compatibility with new hardware, etc. In my opinion, a lazy cash grab that realistically shouldn’t even exist. Often times these new builds aren’t even the same and have many bugs not originally present in the original game that the remaster developers never even fix.
A remake should always try to stay as close as possible to the original for its initial presentation. The intention of a remake is to become the current market replacement of an old product, for various reasons. Maybe it doesn’t run on new hardware or the original code was deleted/lost. Maybe the original game was poorly received and the developers want to try again with some QoL adjustments. Maybe the graphics haven’t aged well but the story is timeless. This is why a studio would opt for a remake instead of a lazy remaster.
The issue comes from something like Silent Hill 2 Remake. It did not include a “Classic Mode.” The remake alters some pretty important themes in the game, changes multiple story elements, and entirely changes the focus of the gameplay, putting a greater emphasis on action and combat than the original ever did. The remake shifted the tone away from a melancholic exploration of a character into a Hollywood action movie with an over-reliance on jump scares (basically every Bloober game, honestly).
This has problems when fans attempt to talk about the game. Which version is each talking about? People do not always specify. If one person talks about the Coin Puzzles in the apartments for example, the clues, hints, and solutions are completely different between versions. Players of the original game needed to get a crate of rotten juice cans and drop it down a trash chute in order to receieve a coin for that puzzle, but that entire sequence was removed in the remake. This is only a minor example that doesnt impact the story, but the problem of discussion disconnect is apparent. You can imagine how confusing it would get when there are other major changes that do impact the story later on in the game.
These differences are fine if the developers add them as an “Arrange Mode” or “Remake Mode,” but not as the only way to experience the game. That effectively says “our new version is the only good version, because we won’t allow the players to directly compare the two with the same engine and graphics. If you want the old version, you can’t, because we definitely aren’t selling the original and pirating the original that we refuse to sell you is copyright infringement.”
A remake should always try to stay as close as possible to the original for its initial presentation. The intention of a remake is to become the current market replacement of an old product, for various reasons.
Reading your comment, it seems like you’re locked onto the idea that all remasters are lazy, low quality cash grabs and that remakes should actually just be high quality remasters.
Remasters don't change the content of the game. Remakes do. And there's a spectrum of quality for both.Life is Strange had a bad remaster. They updated the graphics, but there’s original aesthetic looked better than the uncanny “upgrade”. Skyrim - Special Edition had a better visual upgrade and fixed bugs.
Twin Snakes was a bad remake of Metal Gear Solid. They added unnecessary cutscenes and tried to bork in mechanics from MGS2 just because it was newer. RE4 was a good one.
It sounds like you wanted a high quality remaster of Silent Hill 2, and instead they gave you a remake and never released a digital version of the original. So now everyone’s playing the remake and calling it Silent Hill 2, instead of properly differentiating it as Silent Hill 2 Remake/Silent Hill 2 (2025).
And I agree that the situation is ass for navigating online conversations.
But a remake should not “stay as close as possible to the original”. That’s what remasters are for.
Isn’t this discussion already murky by the fact that persona games re-release with upgraded versions even without ramakes? As far as I know, they are actually remaking the Golden version, which is already notably different from the original (many touches rather than a full on overhaul)
It’s weird to me that game devs don’t experiment with alternative organizational structures more often, kind of like Motion Twin; or how they’re only just beginning to unionize in some places. The “capital” in game development is a little bit computer hardware, but otherwise the vast majority of value in a game design studio is the human beings and their talent and skills.
I cannot think of any other industry where the workers are more essential, and management more superfluous and replaceable.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with what they’re saying. I just feel like it only sounds like deep wisdom because the industry is so fucking broken.”
How many times do the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 need to explain the basics of how to make a popular game and we all treat it like deep wisdom?
I mean, I grew up basically raised by PBS and even saturday morning cartoons and thought that it would be basic, fundamental knowledge in the world today that reason and knowledge are power, that con-men will tell you what you want to hear, and not to believe people who say they’re “the best” and instead look at empirical evidence of all claims.
I thought “wow the future is going to be amazing, we have all these programs that are telling us kids how to live, how to navigate a complex world, we will have a future of starships and science and wonders!”
Now I’m here every day talking to the team I manage when they share obviously AI-generated “news articles” about scientists discovering mermaid cities and trying to get permission to spread their essential oil pyramid scheme through the company.
As a species, we are far, far stupider than we want to admit. As individuals, sure we each have great potential, but when you get more than one person in any kind of situation, the intelligence levels drop to the lowest common-denominator, and the more people, the lower that level drops.
Gonna have to do it forever until businesses figure out that half of what makes a game good is that it needs to be a literal passion/art project, and not just a checklist of shit that needs to get done.
Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.
For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.
I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.
But Larian themselves released a buggy mess even with early access for 3 years? Why did they rush it out?
Fuck EA and AAA in general, but like practice what you preach Swen. You aren't the small studio you think you are anymore, you have nearly 500 employees.
I mean, all due respect, to the guy, but this doesn't go down until 2027. At least give them a minute to get in the position where they could feasibly fuck up before you berate them for it.
If you look at the Internet they are apparently definitely dismantling the company to sell the pieces but also definitely continuing to make what they make but with MAGA politics but also as a muslim theocracy and trimming down and speeding up but also doubling down on live service at the same time somehow.
And man, one or multiple of those may happen, but almost certainly not all of them and none have happened yet. Given how much of a public-ass public company chasing short term gains they've been historically I can't help but think there's a fair amount of projection going on.
Here's my stance: I have no idea what this means and I have no idea what they're going to do. This is all weird and I have zero frame of reference for how the new owners are going to gel with that organization or what their new objectives are going to be when compared to the old "make more money this quarter than last quarter" thing.
Yeah, but have you considered the fact that this gives Saudi Arabia &/or Jared Kushner “anti-cheat” level access to millions & millions of PCs in the USA?
That is reason enough to never buy another EA game.
Mentioned it in one of the other threads about this but it bears repeating:
BG3 did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a case of Wizards of the Coast giving money to a random studio and getting a masterpiece out.
Baldurs Gate 3, as a product, was officially in development since approximately 2019. It released into early access on Steam in 2020 and 1.0 in 2023. It received repeated injections of cash through things like fricking google stadia over that period.
But also? Baldurs Gate 3 didn’t begin development in 2019. Larian had been pestering/pitching the Wizards since freaking 2014 when they were still working on the kickstarted Divinity Original Sin 1. And Larian, as a studio, had been making CRPGs since 2002’s Divine Divinity.
BG3 was agame with 3 years of active development and 21 years of experience and expertise.
When studios get shuttered because they aren’t immediately profitable? You inherently have people who decide “I am done with this shit” and either were successful enough to enter early retirement or transition to related industries. You lose the experience that makes a “three year game” possible. Sometimes that is a high profile creative lead. But more often that is the people who don’t get to go on stage at the keighleys but who are interpreting said creative leads and actually making the mechanics and story beats we all love.
Fuck EA. They are a horrible company that has mismanaged so many IPs and engaged in decades of worker abuse. But understand that we are also likely losing hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced game developers which will make future games from other studios worse.
And before people say “fuck that, I like indie games”: Clair Obscur is the poster child of that and for very good reason. Maybe do some research as to who those core 30 people are (hint: They mostly were head hunted from Ubi et al) and where their money came from. And then think about what happens when there aren’t major studios to head hunt from.
One of the biggest parts of the problem is that corporate management types can’t quantify experience and skill. This leads to them thinking of projects purely in terms of man-hours, and they cannot comprehend that not all man-hours are equal. It’s an issue that plagues a lot of industries.
I mean… if we want to talk about mismanagement, budgeting and delivery dates are barely a factor in game dev. With even a halfway decent publisher/stakeholder, the system of deliverables means that you tend to get into a case where the game is “done” by the time it was supposed to be and you are “just” focused on bugfixing and polishing. So you crunch until your staff are suicidal and then ship it and people criticize the “unfinished” area while loving the rest of it.
The bigger issue is that the entire industry is more or less run in a start-up mindset. The competent project managers are mostly ignored in favor of the rockstar devs. MBA who spent hundreds of hours firming up jira tasks and translating between gitlab issues and said tasks? Get bent you stupid stooge, you are trying to ruin games. In a quick video blurb because you worked on the foliage in one of the boss arenas? How would you like a dump truck of money to run your own studio?
And that is why we constantly see shit like Blizzard (when we actually look) where “locker room culture” is so prevalent and people just want to hire other people like them. They have no idea how to lead a project or deal with any kind of friction. But they are a genius Auteur until they crash and burn.
Corporate management types are not organically recruited from experienced labour, they are from the “brahmin” echelons of society. Not only do they not understand that not all man hours are different, they have no clue of what is going on since they are recruited because of their pedigree and not competence.
For a prime example of this, look no further than EA’s former CEO John Riccitiello, who keeps getting executive positions despite being objectively bad at his job.
He was hired as EA’s COO (and later CEO) despite having zero experience in the video game industry (his prior work was at places like Pepsi and Clorox). EA under Riccitiello tried to squeeze every cent possible out of customers through aggressive microtransactions (he infamously stated in a stockholder meeting that he’d like to charge Battlefield players a dollar per reload), pushed to make every game always-online to prevent piracy (a decision that lead to the disastrous SimCity reboot, and the Sims 4 only escaped the same fate due to SimCity’s dire reception [though it’s theorized its vastly simplified gameplay compared to earlier Sims titles is a remnant of this time]), was a major proponent of the worst sorts of anti-consumer DRM such as SecuROM, and treated employees like trash leading to an exodus of talent. EA was voted the worst company in America twice during his tenure, and people online celebrated when the stock price plummeted and he was finally pushed out.
His post-EA career was also a disaster. After leaving EA (with a golden parachute, naturally), he was hired as the CEO of Unity Technologies - the company behind the Unity game engine - due to his “industry expertise”. Over the next few years he ran the company into the ground with awful monetization strategies (he’s the one behind the “runtime fee” fiasco, where Unity wanted to charge game developers by how many times their games were installed), wasted billions of dollars acquiring middleware vendors (mainly ad and analytics companies), and set engine development priorities that chased mobile game fads over what the actual users of their product wanted. He “resigned” when the stock price dropped by over 60% in a year due to his mistakes, and the engine’s reputation hasn’t come close to recovering from the damage his leadership caused.
One thing I love about the original rogue legacy is that it has shoutouts to the dev’s previous games. None of them look great but it makes it clear that even this game that feels like their first isn’t, it’s the product of years of smaller games. RL1 is a great game, and it gave them the skills and money to do RL2 which was a masterpiece.
I love indie games, but they aren’t popping up with noobs designing a masterpiece on a shoestring budget except in very rare instances and that involves the budget not accounting for their time.
Also I miss the era of flash games, especially as it proved a good way for everyday people to learn these skills as a hobby and the best could move to professionalize.
Larian also had to sell 30% of their company to Tencent to raise more money during development after they already raised money on Kickstarter. If it was a case of WotC just giving money they probably wouldn‘t have had to do that. Good games take time but also a lot of money. Let‘s hope they‘re not selling more of their company any time soon because they could end up being the one being pointed at.
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