How do you feel about remakes?

[Jeff]

I was getting tired of all the remakes and remasters and reboots and rebraces at some point, but I've gone full 1080° Tony Hawk style. Now I feel that if I've played the original and it has enough sentimental / nostalgic value for me, and if it seems like the remake is shit in comparison, I don't need to play the remake I can just replay the original instead, easy. But if it's a game I've never played before and the reviews are decent enough, I'd probably rather give the remake a go because a) no nostalgia / point of comparison to the original so that side of things is irrelevant, b) the remake probably looks but also plays much nicer due to QoL improvements. Might get me to play a game that I never would have played otherwise, and I have enough of a backlog that even if they never made a genuinely new game again I don't know if I'd care much.

So that's like my 0.02 cents imho, ymmv, go play Resident Evil on PS1 and then tell me you disagree after you've spent two thirds of the playthrough watching door opening animations

[SenisterDenister]

Remasters can be good because that's a port to modern hardware and has potential bugfixes and such. The C&C Remaster was gold. Remakes can be for the better or worse depending on whomever is at the helm of it. The System Shock remake was surprisingly good, for instance. The REmake of Resident Evil 1 on the gamecube was vastly superior to the original game.

[TheKingofVault14]

NGL, I feel like too many remakes/remasters are being made these days, I wish it would be every now and then, instead of them spawning left and right. Because honestly, for me IMO, it shows two things about the entertainment industry overall:

1. People have ran out of ideas!

& 2. That's what they're currently relying on for them to be successful, instead of creating new worlds & stories.

So yeah, that's just my two cents on remakes/reboots/remasters.

[Jeff]

1. People have ran out of ideas!
& 2. That's what they're currently relying on for them to be successful, instead of creating new worlds & stories.

I mean when it comes to AAA games in particular then yeah, too many unnecessary cash-grab remakes (like said I just ignore that shit). And things certainly seem to have gotten complacent compared to say the 90s; I feel like this is at least in part due to the big publishing companies stepping in, video games have become an industry and that's caused a shift in the operating logic I think (read: $$$).

But it's pretty easy to forget about all the interesting (mostly indie) games that have come out in recent years when they get drowned out by the massive influx of all the rehashed slop; the signal to noise ratio is pretty wack. FTL, Into the Breach, Superhot, Papers Please, Hotline Miami, Disco Elysium, Inscryption, Neon White, Untitled Goose Game, those are some pretty damn good and dare I say novel games just off the top of my head (just to give you an idea; I admit that it's not a long list and some of them aren't that recent either but I don't play a lot of games anymore and I'm old so I don't remember anything and time has lost all meaning).

Sure the remakes outnumber the good stuff by a long margin, but then again Steam alone saw like 15k releases last year. If we go by Sturgeon's law (99% of everything is crap), and let's assume two thirds of the non-crap releases are remakes, that still leaves us with a good non-remake game every week. Yeah I'm pulling these estimations out of my ass, my point is that maybe the situation ain't that bad after all. Maybe it is I don't fucking know

Regarding running out of ideas, I think the issue is that whenever someone actually does innovate something and the game becomes popular, the concept gets copied to death like immediately (and why wouldn't it). Battle royale was a pretty novel concept until it wasn't. Crafting is in every game now. Zelda gliders. Open world this open world that. And so on. I believe this has always been the case however, good ideas are good so people utilize them in their projects. It's not like there weren't more than enough Doom clones back in the day as well, the market was just smaller. I dunno, the Doom clones were pretty good though, maybe I'm talking nonsense; yet perhaps one could argue that the gameplay loop was essentially the same and they mostly just swapped the assets and shit, yet it still felt novel back then because the whole genre was pretty new so you hadn't played a thousand first-person shooters at that point.

Anyway, looking forward to the Romancing SaGa 2 remake so I can enjoy it for the first time with all the mod-cons

[Hyacinth]

Sucking on the hollow tit of nostalgia trying to get full. I dont even rewatch movies lmao

[Jeff]

highly doubt some 13 year old coomer would be nostalgic for final fantasy 7 tho