Look a remaster should or could have obvious upgrades, sometimes it’s visuals, videos, style, controls etc. that to me is good.
But that quote specifically tells me “the game has been changed for current day sensibilities” and I hate that. I feel it takes away from what the original had in mind, for good or bad.
I understand that many media have been racist/misogynist/ageist and accept that it was a product of its time. But I don’t think it does it any good to essentially pretend that it didn’t happen and I feel we’re just pretending it isn’t what it truly is when it’s changed.
I do think remakes are different however. I feel they are taking the idea of the original but redesigning it in a way that the new designers for see.
BUT the fact is, that quote is only ever seen on media that hides the past, not remakes the future.
It does tell you that it’s been changed, though. You can typically still go and play the original game. And it enables the people affected by -isms to enjoy it when sometimes said -isms would pull them out of it for them otherwise.
And it’s not like the original intent was for people to be distracted by what would have, to the developers, have likely seemed a small or unquestioned detail. We can never truly approach a game the way its original audience did anyway because culture changes so much, and a large part the experience you have with art is what you bring to it. Thus why graphical updates can make the game look like you remember it, even though it now looks much prettier. I think these sorts of updates can be similar to that.
Granted, it’s harder to access the original game because of hardware. But even so, a lot of original intent is always lost in the process of making a remaster. I’d argue “for modern audience” updates tend to be less of a departure than changes in visual design (the different lighting in the various Myst remasters that changes the mood, the extra foliage in Shadow of the Colossus remasters) or mechanics updates (the ability to control Resident Evil like a regular game instead of via tank controls).
Edit: I think my ideal scenario would be if remasters include “modern audience” updates of all kinds, to make the game as enjoyable for new players as possible, but also that the originals be made more easily available such as by legalizing or sanctioning emulation for old games.
Interesting but I do think things are a little different:
A lot of people seem to be commenting about how a remaster is about changing atmosphere or visual changes. And I agree with you. But OP is asking specifically about games with the quote “for modern audiences” in the game and that quote is not added for the visual or control or minor game design changes, but instead specifically to tell you it’s removed the “isms” out.
I think your point about isms makes sense, it’s just that I’m of the opposing view. That I think the “isms” have been removed out is like censoring a painting or movie. Sure it’s easier to digest, but what made the media so poignant is sometimes the rawity of it.
I guess I don’t think you’re wrong, just that I think it takes away from the original media for the only reason that “it sells more if we can widen the audience”.
For me the ideal would be you could choose between the two. How the game was originally made but with the updated graphics/control/design. Or the new one that removes any isms to placate people’s sensibilities.
I don’t think however my preference would happen because it goes against the idea of “hay we can sell more if we tell everyone we removed everything controversial about the game”. So I guess your idea solution is probably the best middle ground :)
Zelda BotW and TotK. I just kind of get board cus the game is so wide but so shallow. I wish I could like it cus there is a ton to like.
Any souls like. They just seem very lazy and the combat is just silly to me.
Just about any competitive game honestly. Part of it is I suck at them but mainly the trash talking toxic communities. Plus honestly I’m not very competitive.
Pokemon. I can’t wrap my head around the complexity and “meta” and the story doesn’t real matter anymore. I did like my first Pokemon game but that’s it.
Most Mario except Mario RPG. I played the heck out of SMB 1-3 but when that was all that was available. When games expanded so did my tastes I guess.
Not the OP, but IMO it’s that difficulty is an actual feature. And that feels stupid. Difficulty should be a parameter, not a goal.
I’m a story guy myself, so if the game doesn’t have a really good story, it’s not for me. And souls-likes usually sacrifice everything to difficulty. And even if the story was good, dying 20 times with every new boss would break me out of it all the time.
I think with Souls games in particular, difficulty can be part of the atmosphere. Whether or not that is your sort of thing is another story. My husband completely bounced off of Dark Souls even after playing Elden Ring. To him, Elden Ring was the first Souls game that was more interested in being a fun game rather than a difficult experience.
Difficulty is not the goal of any of the Souls games (not talking about soulslikes). The challenge is a means to get you to think methodically and strategically, and is a vessel to bring you catharsis and release when you overcome it.
I started playing the last of us 2 remastered. I didn’t play the original (but did play 1 remastered). I don’t know if it was modified “for modern audiences”, but it would depend a lot.
Having more characters from Asian or African descent would please me. Making it look more like the (in my opinion) excellent tv series would be less great, but understandable. Removing the whole “military is bad” arc (like they did in the tv show), would suck.
After growing up with Star Wars games like X-Wing/TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, Shadows of the Empire… The whole choose your own adventure text game was a really lame step down.
So many people say it’s the pinnacle of SW games and I just see it as a game that could have been made for Commador 64 that has has some cut scenes added over it.
I want Disney to rethink removing Kyle Katarn from the canon because I hella wanna see a show or movie following him, if not another awesome FPS where I can be him. Kyle and Dash Rendar (another video game protagonist) are my favorite SW characters.
Great, unique, iconic, still fun to play. Its biggest achievement: I have brought a lot of people into the hobby by making them play this as their first video game and there wasn’t a single one not having fun. Tower defense is as a whole an underrated genre if we talk about the best games of all time. It also is a game that offers achievements that add a lot to the gameplay by challenging you to change your tactics.
They of course had to make the second one mobile only and on top ruin it with microtransactions. :( Greed is why we can’t have nice things.
Dark Souls 3 and only Dark Souls 3. I love Dark Souls 1 and 2, Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite game, and Sekiro. But Dark Souls 3 is just so boring and unfun. Even the ingame world feels uninterested in this game, (because it kinda is over the whole age of fire thing.) Everything is gross and brown it just makes exploring kind of icky. DS1 had a good balance of gross and majestic locations and enemies. DS2 suffered from too few monsters and too many generic armored knights, and locations felt too clean and empty.
It feel like this game does not like you to diversify your build. Armor is basically cosmetic, and offers very slight damage protection. Poise sucks, and is basically removed, so making a tank build kind of sucks. Its so damn fast and doesn’t give you a ton of options like Elden Ring does. DS3 is certainly the most actiony of the action rpgs, and idk, I’d like more rpg. I remember watching a video about how playing these games at level 1 is the intended and best way to play. I can kind of see that, I think that discredits a lot of the rpg elements in these games. I always saw permadeath runs as the more fun way to play, especially in DS2, that game was like designed to be run as an arcade game.
The game also feels like it rides on nostalgia pretty hard. Anor Londo? Thats here. Andre? He’s here. Firelink Shrine? Thats here, too. Artorias? There’s a whole cult trying to cosplay as him. I actually think DS2 handled this sort of thing better, it being so far it the future from DS1 that most characters and places from 1 are only legend or ancient history. I think it gave 2 a sense of discovery, even if DS2 certainly has much less coherent lore lol.
There are good things in this game. The dlc is fantastic. Certain areas look downright stunning, often helped by the muted color palette. A lot of the bosses are fun when you use the correct play style for them. Pontiff Sullivan or Champion Gundyr is my favorite boss on my most recent playthrough, but I haven’t gotten to Gale, the Twin Princes or Midir yet.
**3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5)**Some video essay (I can’t recall which one) compared GTA’s attitude to that of the protagonist of “Catcher in the Rye”. Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying “they are phony”, “they suck, don’t they” and “we are too cool to even admit we’re cool”. The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind. Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying “this is not for me, I will pass”) to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.
No Man’s SkyWhen it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it’s basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.
Souls-likes and MetroidvaniasI have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that’s fulfilling and gratifying. I don’t seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don’t feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)
on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is ForspokenSure, the dialog is cringe and there’s way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.
Don’t get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.
HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know what’s cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know what’s not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go. I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that there’s no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.
Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.
Most Mario games in general. I can play Mario Kart or some of the sports games with friends if someone else chooses them, but the singleplayer Mario games just aren’t fun to me. The only exception is The Thousand Year Door. I tried the other Paper Mario games and none were as good.
I also agree on BotW. Nintendo was chasing the survival game trend and I guess it paid off for them, but I find the world empty and boring, made worse by the dull colours in the art style. The worst part is the durability system. If there was a way to repair items it might be okay, but everything is like tissue paper. Even higher end weapons are gone after a few enemies, so eventually I just started avoiding combat entirely. I’m certain they did that and kept it that way in TotK because they couldn’t think of anything else to reward players with for exploring their empty world.
There is still item durability BUT! it is “fixed” by the addition of a weapon creation system. Now monster parts that drop can be slapped onto whatever weapon you find on the ground, making every (still breakeable, disposable) weapon less important than the monster part. You can even (a bit later) save your badass monster parts from breakage and reuse them. Furthermore your can immediately see what monster part will drop (its on their heads) which saves unnecessary farming and serves to show the enemies strength at a glance.
Insert comic of the guy in a staff meeting suggesting they fix complaints about durability by adding a simple repair system like every other game and Miyamoto throwing him out the window.
I mean, TOTK is almost copy pasted BOTW. Yeah there are some new mechanics, but it still has all of the flaws of BOTW.
Crafting and the building mechanic add some fun, but the farming required for all of it is tedious (and I even used duplication glitches for items).
Itll be curious to see how people’s opinions of BOTW change over time because I think it took Zelda in a bad direction (unfocused gameplay with simpler puzzles).
Yes. I don’t mean it has a piss filter like Xbox 360 games. I mean the lighting washes everything out. Compare this screenshot to one from Wind Waker or Skyward Sword.
If your argument hinges on the colors being duller than The Wind Waker, perhaps you are setting the bar too high? TWW is more vibrant than 99% of modern games.
But I’m also not the only one who thinks the colours are washed out. Modders running the game on PC were able to increase the vibrance to something that actually looks appealing to me.
Galaxy is actually the one I was playing when I realized I don’t like Mario games. I got about halfway through it, decided I wasn’t having fun and turned it off.
Ohhh i just got one that will be really controversial.
I’m not a big fan of Morrowind.
Yeah the world has a very alien style, and the lore is cool. But the actual world feels empty and boring to me. Like IMO the map is way too big for it’s own good.
When wandering around, there’s always a cave or tomb around to explore. But yeah, there aren’t a lot of people out in the wilderness. Just the occasional naked nord or plantation.
With you on BotW. Love the dungeons, but in terms of the open world I never felt the oooh, the aaah, the escapism that everyone cooed about etc. Gliding was fun!
Maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?
Maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?
Don’t know about that, because I very much grew up with Zelda for the Gameboy, SNES and of course N64 and I loved them all. Maybe it’s just Breath of the Wild…
Yes but poorly. There are no real dungeons and the open world has maybe 5-6 enemies total, everything else is just a variation on color and strength. That’s a far cry from the original game.
So I was curious about this and looked it up and there are technically 8 regular enemy types (bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, chuchu, keese, octoroks, wizzrobes, pebblits, lynel). There are then also the different types of guardians, 2 overworld bosses (Talus and Hinox, I don’t count Molduga), and the yiga.
Depending on how you cut it there are then 8 up to 13 overworld enemy types. However, the real issue is you typically only encounter 3 maybe 5 (bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos / keese, chuchu) while running around.
I think the thing people forget when talking about variety is it matters how you use it. BOTW and TOTK basically have a few set grunt types that are what you predominantly fight, and it gets boring fast (in my opinion).
Edit/Note: I didn’t count stal/cursed enemies as they’re basically the same with slight modifications.
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