As of late, I've been in this ranting mood and this one has been built up for literally several months. At this point it doesn't matter because whatever I say may cause disagreements, friendships to be ended, or let alone more enemies to be made. I feel like I have the right to express my opinion and thoughts. As of late I am starting to show a dislike towards video game remasters and I will explain why so in this rant article.
Remasters have been a thing for a long time, where developers take a older game that is either hard to conveniently play on modern hardware or has some certain features and what not that hasn't aged well. While some remasters are at times well done, honestly I liked the Xbox 360 port of Quake II and some refer to that as a remaster, there are some issues depending on a game and still is a recurring issue nowadays.
The most notable feature that is likely to not make it would be Multiplayer. Most remasters even today either lack any multiplayer functionality or even if it were added, it would have issues which I'll explain in a bit.
Many people have heard of Nightdive Studios once or twice. Mostly known for remastering classic first-person shooters. They may have made some original releases but most of the time they take some old game and give it the remaster treatment. Nightdive was founded by Stephen Kick in late 2012 with their first release being a remaster called Strife: Veteran Edition. I remember getting myself a copy of this when it was new.
I mean there were a few issues here and there but I remember completing the remaster once, meaning I completed Strife for the first-time on this very port. It even had multiplayer support that I remember playing deathmatch here and there. Another notable feature is the modern additions, like true 3D rendering, and the like.
I recall they also remastered other games like System Shock and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and even Forsaken.
To be fair, Nightdive remastering Turok did help enable custom content which wasn't entirely a thing in the original version for Nintendo 64 and the PC port for Microsoft Windows 95. I do recall one weird thing Nightdive tends to do with their remasters and that's notable in Forsaken and even their remaster for the console versions of Powerslave (aka Exhumed).
From my understanding, Forsaken recieved a port to the Playstation and Nintendo 64 with varying differences, almost the same can be said about Powerslave/Exhumed when it was released for the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn consoles. Nightdive tends to fuse what made each port different (especially with exclusive-content) which isn't necessarily a bad thing if I'm being honest.
I feel like what Nightdive does best at is remastering the id Software titles. Most of the time when a remaster of an id Software comes out, I was met with positive impressions aside from questionable changes. Only exception to my knowledge is Doom 64 (remastered in 2020). Just like Turok, it seems to have a dedicated modding community to this day.
In 2021 however, Quake got itself the Nightdive treatment and was released following Quakecon. While I was excited at first and enjoyed hours deathmatching in public lobbies alongside my friends, I started to notice some issues lingering.
When I said questionable changes, I meant that as the Nightmare difficulty was changed up based on Copper, a quality-of-life modification. This meant that the health was handicapped to 50 and most of the enemies behave more similar to the Hard difficulty, which has been a debate because some people didn't like stationary ogres as they felt cheap. My problem with that is that players (especially those who have played the original prior) are going to deal with muscle memory issues. Not only that, but raises concern with compatibility with other things, especially demo playback.
Two year later, Nightdive overhauled Quake II and it launched following Quakecon. It was met with high-praise, especially from those who thought the singleplayer experience felt mediocre and bland. That was one of the reasons why I preferred Unreal over Quake II mind you.
To be honest, I barely had many issues with the Quake II Remaster, but while there are some remasters that were decent (let alone great), there are some remasters that left a bad taste in my mouth.
Enter.. ugh.. Blood: Fresh Supply... Fucking christ! when this remaster came out in 2019, I was hyped. Not only the game was easy to pickup especially when you have easier online multiplayer and split-screen even, it made me interested in playing Blood again since 2016. I wanted to support this and hoped that the issues it had would be ironed out in the future, but...
Sad to say, we never saw a major patch since August 2019. The remaster became stale and not to mention that by that point we already had far more accurate and superior source ports like NBlood coming out. Blood: Fresh Supply was supposed to receive more patches but their contract with Warner/Atari had likely been expired. *this is before Atari accquired Nightdive*
I was very disappointed at the aftermath of this remaster, so much so that even agreed when Kaiser (who reverse engineer games for Nightdive) told people to just get a source port like NBlood. While Nightdive wasn't entirely at fault for Fresh Supply's demise, I wouldn't say the same for this next one.
Rise of the Triad is an acquired taste, I will admit it. But this game hasn't seen polished source ports at all given the tiny cult-following it got. Not only that but the source code from what I've heard is a nightmare to work with.
In 2020, at 3D Realm's Realms Deep event, it was revealed that a remaster for ROTT would be in development by Slipgate Ironworks and Destructive Creations (the same people who made HATRED). Of course I was a bit skeptical at first but whenever a remaster is made and it's not be Nightdive, it increases the risk of a remaster flopping and flopping HARD! One example is that remaster for Star Wars: Battlefront that would release later on and it was horribly unoptimized and had AI upscaled nonsense from what I've heard.
Anyway, fast forward to 2022 and it turns out that the remaster was in the hands of Apogee Entertainment, New Blood Interactive (known for DUSK) and of course, Nightdive Studios. This would be the second time I got hyped for a KEX Remaster since Fresh Supply. I even bought the game day one mind you.
What was included in the remaster is an extra episode, restored beta content, a new level editor, Steam Workshop support, and more. I was heavily sold on the multiplayer since the network code for ROTT at least under DOSBox was abysmal. I will note that once the game launched, of course multiplayer sessions were active and it encouraged me to start a collab COMM-BAT mapset that would soon become 'Dakkijam'.
One major hurdle however is that when the game first came out, it did have Steam Workshop support. However it was only for singleplayer content and on top of that, there were only 10 COMM-BAT levels.. 10! In the original there were way more than that, but it was not featured for quality control reasons. Only eight original levels were kept along with two others made by Lexi Mayfield.
To make matters worse during development of Dakkijam, Dave Oshry of New Blood ran his mouth about a new patch being worked on and should be released along with a news article via Steam detailing what is to be addressed through future patches and multiplayer Steam Workshop support was in the list. I was optimistic about it at first, but as time progressed and with not convenient way of playtesting the maps made. That optimism soon turned into frustration, so much so that I ranted about this on a Doomworld thread not only to be lectured by a Nightdive employee but soon felt like I was being ganged up on for speaking up.
Of course, I didn't feel like arguing so I ended up with the "apologizing if I came off as harsh" response. Honestly that was when I started disliking remasters at this point because..
When one of the Nightdive employees confronted me about my rant, they noted on one thing :
"Meanwhile our games continue to get good reviews from both users and critics so these problems are apparently quite small in the relative scheme of things. Drumming them up as some kind of indictment of a slide in general quality is outside of any realistic sense of their scale."
What I really don't get, is what user/critics are we talking about? Those that are blinded by nostalgia like, "ey i remember this game, i played it when i was a 4 year old on my 286 pc ahh the memories" or are we talking about the people are actually know the fucking ins and outs of a game itself. If you have critics/reviewers like Gmanlives who believe that Fresh Supply is THE way to play Blood then you need to get your shit checked because those critics don't know what the fuck they are on about, it's likely that those 'critics' or 'reviewers' are just pushing this 'slop' for the views in the name of keeping the YouTube algorithm happy.
Like at this point, all this is, is just your typical corporate response. You leave out these 'small' problems and expect people like me who care alot of having a convenient but polished/accurate remaster to be happy?
I hear certain people claiming that a potential game crash is near, and I can see it because almost everybody is just remastering everything and there are way too many people in the games industry getting involved only for profit rather than making actual quality games. Look I am no expert programmer and I am not too involved in the games industry, if anything I am more fitting as a level designer than I am a programmer but atleast I can try to find out inaccuracies (Fresh Supply is an example of this)
In another note, I don't entirely blame Nightdive because at the end of the day, it's like what I've said in the post on Doomworld, "because publishers and deadlines are stupid at times".
And I meant that! Remember Blood II: The Chosen? A game that almost everybody hates while some people didn't even bother to atleast give it a try for like 15-30 minutes just because a certain YouTuber who lives in a dungeon made a video about it. The developers aren't the reason that the game came out the way it did, but more so on the publisher, "GT Interactive".
If anything the fact it felt like my rant didn't matter and it left a poor-taste in my mouth, Maybe what Nightdive should do is consider getting your source codes out so other people can fix the issues not even your employees couldn't fix because you bit off more than you can chew with "way too many planned remasters". or maybe just consider sticking to the only popular titles like the id Software lineup because that's all your basically decent at.
My rant-filled article might be harsh to some, but at this point. I rather express my frustrations than to sugar-coat shit to please everybody. If anyone wants to know why I rather play the original versions of games more than a $30 remaster (and yes games are going up in prices, better sail the seven seas or maybe go to some gray market for game keys) this is why. *unless I have to play some exclusive-content then maybe*
Anyway rant over.
