Remakes are Good for the Industry

At the end of last week it was announced that there’s a new Halo remake coming out next year and it’ll be on PC and PS5 too! Because of that I figured I should write about my opinion on Remakes and how I actually really like them and think they’re good for the industry. At least, sort of.

So today, I’m gonna go over the main benefit of having remakes of older games and then I’m going to go over the couple of caveats I have about doing a remake. How sometimes it’s just a waste or simply just to charge more money. I’ll likely touch on many of my favorite remakes and such, but overall this isn’t about that, it’s just about how I view remakes as a whole. With that, let’s get into it.

More people can play amazing games

A fuck lot of older games are hard, or next to impossible, to play. This is both because of software and hardware. The sad fact is that, as tech advances, more and more games become obsolete. It becomes incredibly frustrating to go back to it.

For instance, one of my favorite ever games is Knights of the Old Republic. It came out in 2003, 22 years ago (fuck dude that’s way too long ago). Back then games weren’t really HD. I could play it on the low quality monitor that came with my mom’s dell desktop and be fine. Everything looked great, everything fit the screen. It just worked.

But to play that now is a massive fucking pain in the ass. You have to mod it to allow for HD resolutions, then again for HD textures so it doesn’t look all muddy, then a HUD update separate from the HD resolution issue that allows it to actually fit your screen instead of looking super fucking tiny. It sucks and it all requires figuring out how to mod a 22 year old game which can be difficult for many people. Then add on that, for some reason, sometimes the mods don’t work and you just have a recipe for throwing up your hands, giving up, and going to play something else. It sucks because it’s genuinely an amazing game with a hell of a twist and just an almost all around amazing experience (that combat is ass and was ass back then too). But because of these issues plenty of people who have come of age since the game has released just haven’t played it.

Which means that the only real solution is a remake. One does seem to be happening but it’s been a little bit of a hectic development and we know it’s being worked on but that’s kinda it. This will allow new people to play it for the first time ever. What’s more it will allow new players to be able to play the game with updated graphics and gameplay allowing them to, hopefully, get the same feeling that those of us that played it back in the day got.

This is the benefit of a remake. I’ve been among the people who were never able to play a game before and were only able to play it because of a remake allowing a better experience overall (Final Fantasy 7 Remake review here). It’s amazing to experience the game for the first time and I will actually cherish the feeling I got playing FF7 Remake and even the RE2 and RE4 remakes. Remakes bring new fans and allow older fans to experience that which they loved in a new light. For better...and for worse. Which is what we are now gonna get into.

Losing the soul

Every game that exists has its own personality. This personality is derived from a mix of art, gameplay, story, and often voice acting. That is the soul of a game. Sometimes those things are driven by tech limitations of the time and sometimes they’re driven by purposeful vision. Here’s where the problem arises.

When you bring an older game into modern context you have to make adjustments. This is normal and expected. Things like taking out some of the perviness of Leon in Resident Evil 4 with a literal teenager is fine, changing the sexy photos in the MGS 3 Remake with modern pictures of the same models, some with their families, that came out a couple months ago is a really cool update! These are things that aren’t integral to the experience of playing the game and can be changed because why not? The 2000s was a more pervy time with a lot more...bad jokes (to put it nicely). It’s not a bad thing to replace them.

But then there are moments like Ratchet & Clank from 2016. This game was a movie tie-in which immediately ruined the entire experience. It’s a “retelling” of the original game but with randomly shoved in movie scenes and a slightly different story than the original. It’s an annoying experience because the gameplay is great, the graphics are great. It could have been a wonderful experience. But the idea of releasing a remake of the game as a movie tie-in completely sapped the soul of the game. All of a sudden all that mattered in the game was making it a more in depth experience of watching the movie as opposed to actually being a faithful remake of the original. It was bleh and I, a massive fan of Ratchet & Clank, didn’t even fucking finish it.

And of course, there’s Halo Anniversary which, to put it bluntly, seems to have missed the point on what made the original so memorable and how the game as a whole was designed. This is a point that is made brilliantly by Noodle over on YouTube so instead of doing a long in depth talk on it here, I’m just going to link the video (which is apparently fucking age-restricted).

TL;DR: Basically the atmosphere of the game is lost by making it so much more polished. It takes away the feeling of grunge that existed in the original, it took away the color differences for the enemies so that they were obvious to see. It sapped the soul of the game and made it so much worse off.

Game Remakes don’t need to be completely faithful, sometimes something new is good, like where the Final Fantasy 7 Remake decided to make some changes to the game to keep it interesting while still retaining the soul of the original, just adding in more complexity and differences. But faithful to the idea of the original is what matters. If you stick to that you’ll likely make a great remake. If you don’t then you will make a soulless game that pales in comparison to the original.

This just isn’t needed

Then there are the remakes that just....aren’t needed. Specifically this often happens with games that just aren’t that old, or at least are much easier to play than many many older games. Like the recently released The Last of Us 1, or rather The Last of Us Part 1. Put simply, there just wasn’t much of a reason to do this. Remakes are something that are supposed to take an older game, make it more modern and allow new people to play it. Last of Us 1 was available to be played on modern consoles with the PS4 version that came out early into that consoles life cycle. But because Part 2 was so successful and, particularly, because the TV Show was coming back, they had to make a new release because it was just super necessary for an increase in sales. One could argue that was a remaster but I’d argue it was more of a Remake with some changes here and there in the way the game played that really made the experience different.

Sony has a ton of games that came out forever ago now that they could be doing a real Remake of. Like what they did with Demon Souls. There should be a Bloodborne Remake, an inFamous Remake, a Sly Cooper Remake, an original God of War Remake, a Resistance Remake. There are loads of games from the 2000s and early ‘10s that are in desperate need of a modern Remake and the market is there. But instead we get The Last of Us Part 1.

Remakes are not a bad thing to do to increase attention to a series. They’re often great to release not long before a new series installment comes out. Yet, they’re also just great to release to see if there is interest in the series in modern day audiences. I want more Remakes, I want more games that actually deserve to be Remade brought back into the limelight. I want games that are stuck behind difficult installing and modding to be brought up to snuff. Not The Last of Us to get another release. Some remakes are sorely needed, some just. fucking. aren’t.

A touch on Remaster vs Remake

An important note about all of this is that there are also frequent games that have been coming out recently that are a “Remastered” instead of a “Remake”. This means it’s basically just a collection of all the DLC and upping the resolution and textures and frame rate and then, sometimes, bringing in some consistency between sequels (like Mass Effect 1 in the Legendary Edition having its combat made more like the next 2 in the series).

These are not the same thing as Remakes and, because of the annoying common use of the term, obfuscate the differences between full on Remakes. These are often from games that just aren’t that old (like Horizon: Zero Dawn getting a remastered version for...no real reason).

I personally often hate Remasters, not because they’re inherently a problem but because they’re often just absolutely pointless. They’re usually done for games that aren’t old enough to justify a remake but the company still wants to make some kind of update, maybe bring it to a new console or something. Maybe just want to re-release it to make some easy money.

Remakes are what I like. Not Remasters.

The Conclusion

I think I’m a little nervous about the Halo remake. I’m still going to end up replacing it because, well, it’s hard to find a lot of good 4 player co-op games to play with the 3 friends I play games with. But it still makes me nervous the game will fall into the pitfall of losing its soul. Noodle really summed up my issues very effectively with the Halo Anniversary video he put out that I linked above and he just put out something touching on the coming Remake as well and it really highlights the reasons I’m nervous about the game even if I’m still excited to play the game.

Side note: As I continue to make my game in Unreal I’ve started to notice some things in Unreal games that are consistent and recognize how they could be fixed with some tweaking. It’s cool being able to do that but it’s also frustrating being able to recognize that the Unreal Engine is just leading to games being pretty similar graphics wise all because of some frustrating settings in the engine that are so damn annoying to deal with. Unreal sucks in a lot of ways even if it also rocks in a lot of ways.

So those are my thoughts about Remakes, I can imagine a lot of people disagree and some will agree. Are you interested in Halo: Campaign Evolved? Do you have a favorite Remake? Is there a game you desperately wish would get an official Remake? Or is there a Remake you wish had been done better? Sound off in the comments and let me know! I’m always curious to hear people’s opinions!

Meow,

Cat