I'm sure we used to have a topic about this subject, but I can't find it so maybe it was back in the old place.
Anyway, this gen's enthusiasm for re-releasing all the stuff you played years ago continues unabated. We're getting a Knights of the Old Republic remake:
In a dick move by Sony, it's a PS5 timed exclusive, great stuff.
Then there is of course Skyrim Remastered Remastered, sorry Anniversary Edition, for anyone who hasn't bought this game three times in the past decade. Out this November and should make enough money to prevent Bethesda having to make a new Elder Scrolls game for the next few years.
There's a Monkey Ball remake on its way that apparently gives you infinite lives/retries, which kind of breaks the whole point of the game but oh well. You can swap out the monkeys for Kiryu Kazuma, apparently.
Sonic Colours Ultimate Edition if that's your thing. It probably isn't.
That's not even counting the games that are getting Director's Cuts, i.e. last-gen re-releases with just enough new content for them to get away with charging you to buy it all over again. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has done this, so you can now buy your re-release of your remake and be proud of your life decisions.
Dead Space is the one I'm looking forward to now. Well, and KotoR now, I guess. There's a also a shitload of things just getting the bump from PS4/Bone to PS5/Series S/X (with varying levels of free upgrade to 'gimme more money'), of course.
I'm torn on the whole thing. The free (or reasonably priced) upgrades to the latest hardware are obviously lovely, and if it's a game that either gets the proper treatment, or I can't currently play (more of an issue for me over on the Sony side), then I have quite a lot of time for some of them. But then we're all at around that age now where half the time we'd rather just replay/just end up replaying stuff we played years ago anyway, so if people want to make said things look as good as we remember, rather than as bad as they actually looked, then that is likely to appeal to us (or the people that missed them first time around) anyway I guess.
There area few eye-rollers in there now as well though - GTAV coming to it's third generation of consoles feels inevitable but also wildly uninspiring, and then Skyrim I only heard about reading the OP, but am utterly unsurprised by. I also love the Uncharted games, and Ghost of Tsushima, but updating some of the best-looking recent PS4 games to run a bit faster/shinier on the PS5 does seem maybe a little redundant.
But then, that's where I become sort of part of "the issue", I suppose - I already got the GoT update for the DLC, and put 90-something hours into Skyrim, but never finished it, and occasionally do fancy another go, so if a PS5 version looked good…
I can't get too mad about something as old as Knights of the Old Republic - there's a lot of people who'll have missed out on its original release, and playing it today through GamePass there's a lot of it that has not aged well; a ground-up rebuild with modern sensibilities will be substantially different enough to warrant the exercise.
I don't know that we really need another version of Skyrim, though. Is there anyone interested in that (or GTAV) that hasn't already got it?
It's all a bit inevitable with the lack of back-compatibility, though. I guess you can ask which came first, the dollar sign eyeballs at the prospect for resales or the decision to scale back previous-generation support. But nostlagia's a warm fuzzy for consumers and a quick (relatively) easy buck for publishers, especially with cross-platform engines making multi-console releases more straightforward than ever before.
Sonic Colours Ultimate Edition if that's your thing. It probably isn't.
Is this the one that's completely technically fucked on Switch?
But nostlagia's a warm fuzzy for consumers and a quick (relatively) easy buck for publishers, especially with cross-platform engines making multi-console releases more straightforward than ever before.
Not sure I agree on how easy it is to port these things across. Looking at something like Unreal Engine, for instance, I've seen huge issues from version to version because of things like lighting, shadows, other effects that can totally break a game through how they're changed. Hell, I've seen in-development titles get totally fucked through engine changes, and that's when they're still being made, rather than being based on years-old code.
The older a game is, the more fucked you are. And given how quickly the platform holders pull up the ladder on which versions of an engine you are/aren't allowed to use, there's a lot more work required to make older games work properly than people think.
It's all a bit inevitable with the lack of back-compatibility, though.
It's all a bit different this gen because both major platforms do have backward-compatibility this time round. PS5 plays the PS4 library, Xbox Series plays the Xbox One library plus probably about half the 360's games as well as a smattering of OG Xbox titles. And - despite Sony's valiant efforts to charge for minor technical upgrades - these games generally look and play better on the newer consoles too, either with a patch or just because of the new consoles' additional horsepower.
So there really isn't much demand for "remasters" of last-gen titles this time around. What we're getting instead is PS3/360 games again - Mass Effect, Alan Wake, Dead Space, Skyrim - or even older titles - Monkey Ball, KOTOR etc. Stuff that's now dated just enough that even if it does technically still work on your current console, you might be tempted into a shinier version.
It does seem like this stuff is cannibalising the AAA market though. How many man-hours will go into making Final Fantasy VII Remake over the period of time it takes to reach its conclusion? How many new RPGs will we not get as a result? The older the game gets, the more a remaster becomes an actual remake, and the more time it takes. Will we eventually just be replaying the same 50-odd games on a revolving cycle every couple of console generations?
Yeah, I'm not too sure on it. I love both last of us games, but it doesn't feel needed. I'm sure once I see the game I'll be hyped. Kinda think this is how they are gonna sell you the new last of us multiplayer that wasn't in the second game.
I'm hearing Marcus Fenix collection is coming this year too. As a massive Gears fan I'm hoping for reworked graphics from the ground up, more modern controls from the Coalition Gears games and a fun multiplayer like the Master Chief Collection. I'm asking for a lot but I feel they have to right? All the gears games have been FPS boosted and look great right now.
I'd heard that too, I was toying with the idea of giving one of the FPS-boosted Gears games a go but I might hang on and see what happens. MS have got to have some sort of big release for Game Pass this Christmas and Gears would definitely fit the bill.
Mind you it took them something like six years to get the Master Chief Collection into a decent state so maybe don't get too excited…
I feel awful saying this about a team of developers, but 343 have been underachieving for years. The Coalition are one of the strongest workhorses at Microsoft studios. Could you imagine if one of the studios like Playgrounds, Coalition or Obsidian had the same budget as Halo Infinite. It's crazy to think about.
I did/do and I actually like both TLOU games but they've completely disappeared up their own arse over it now, TV series? Remake? No one gives a fuck, not to mention Neil Druckman being super face punchable for a while.
As with a lot of triple-A "story" games, the mechanics of The Last of Us were something you just kind of have to put up with. It had some great choices built into the design – molotovs and health kits both used the same crafting recipe, so you had to balance offence and recovery with limited resources – but by and large it was a by-the-numbers third-person shooter.
I liked it, but by the time I finished it I definitely didn't want more of it, especially as by all accounts the sequel is even more grim than the first one. It seems a very odd title to turn into a blockbuster cross-media franchise.
I finished it multiple times, and at least once on every difficulty level except the hardest (DLC?) one.
Its combat and traversal are functional, but I got sucked into the world and the characters.
I was extremely disappointed that they went back to Joel and Ellie for the sequel, though; it felt like there was a ton of room for other stories in that world, and their arc was complete. That had put me off buying TLoU2 even before the unnecessary brutality of the game became apparent.
Just saw this blog linked on twitter, it's a great article about how and why gaming is eating itself through lack of innovation. Well worth a read. Also relevant to Gar's post about fantasy book series earlier (which I also agree with)
Just saw this blog linked on twitter, it's a great article about how and why gaming is eating itself through lack of innovation. Well worth a read. Also relevant to Gar's post about fantasy book series earlier (which I also agree with)
“I’m not really playing games. I’m using these grinds to give me the sense of playing games”
Well I feel seen.
On the fantasy novel point, I recently re-read Lord of the Rings for the first time in over a decade, and it’s crazy how modern it still feels. The vast majority of fantasy hasn’t moved on since 1954.
Yeah the stuff about games being more about games than games themselves is perfect. I'm not a massive online gamer, but I first noticed it in Hearthstone years ago, and it put me off the game at that point (even before they started retiring stuff you'd paid for…). There's a line somewhere between community and "meta" that, as the author suggests, probably starts with the word "monetisation"…
Depressing though it is, at least that article is entirely focused on mobile grindathons and Games As A Service bollocks. I do think there's also a very healthy undercurrent of experimental indie stuff going on that simply wasn't there ten years ago. And a lot of this experimental stuff is now making it to consoles and even mass audiences through things like Game Pass. So it's not all doom and gloom. Whether any of it is actually making any money for its creators is another issue…
Depressing though it is, at least that article is entirely focused on mobile grindathons and Games As A Service bollocks. I do think there's also a very healthy undercurrent of experimental indie stuff going on that simply wasn't there ten years ago. And a lot of this experimental stuff is now making it to consoles and even mass audiences through things like Game Pass. So it's not all doom and gloom. Whether any of it is actually making any money for its creators is another issue…
Agree completely, there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful even if the mainstream money is largely in cookie-cutter bollocks. Twas ever thus to a degree, but I'd never thought through the mechanics of how and why as clearly as that post did.
Also agree about T:O - the psp version was lovely, got nearly as much play as FF:Tactics up here.
Is multi platform confirmed? I haven't seen anything apart from a listing on PlayStation and a leak of a possible PC release.
It's looking really nice:
And it sounds like they've added full voice acting, and changed the levelling system to unit-by-unit rather than class-based (which was one of the flaws of the original game as it discouraged you from trying new classes later in the game).
Have you not played it before, Brian? It's brilliant. Final Fantasy Tactics but taken to the nth degree, with loads of classes and configurations to play around with and a really clever branching plot.
The writing is interesting because the actual plot is fairly generic and a bit overcooked but the translation is absolute genius. The lines in the game are incredibly evocative, and it generates so much atmosphere through words alone. It could have had a much more workmanlike translation and been a much poorer game as a result.
After Let Us Cling Together and March of the Black Queen, though, I'm disappointed they didn't continue with the Queen references. I'd have been well up for Tactics Ogre: Fat Bottomed Girls.
After Let Us Cling Together and March of the Black Queen, though, I'm disappointed they didn't continue with the Queen references. I'd have been well up for Tactics Ogre: Fat Bottomed Girls.
Huh, I'd never noticed that before. That can't be a coincidence, can it?
I've been playing Resident Evil 3, which somewhere along the line has received a next-gen update, so it's a current-gen refresh of a last-gen remake of a PS1 game. I think that qualifies for this thread.
I'm not the biggest fan of these remakes - as an old-school Resi fan I feel that something's been lost in the transition from claustrophobic fixed camera angles to the slick over-the-shoulder viewpoint - but this one works a bit better than RE2 I think. It's more action-focused, which suits the new style better, and it's less in thrall to its source material, happy to hit the same story beats while reinventing pretty much everything in between.
Nemesis in this though doesn't seem as intimidating as Mr X in RE2, mostly due to his habit of teleporting right in front of you and/or grabbing you with tentacles from miles away. It's hard to feel tension running away from something when it can basically cheat at any time.
In terms of the next-gen-ness of the whole thing, there are several options now ranging from full-on ray tracing right up to a 120fps mode. Digital Foundry was very sniffy about the framerate in the ray tracing mode but I think VRR must be doing a lot of heavy lifting on my TV because it looks pretty damn smooth to me. I have to admit it doesn't make a huge amount of difference in terms of picture quality but given that all the modes seem pretty smooth then I might as well have the one that gives me all the shinies, right?
A bit of all three I think - the PC version was always some way ahead of the consoles and it's had some minor tarting up as part of the remaster but essentially that's just Skyrim. Like a lot of games of this type, the environments still hold up really well but the character models and animations date the game.
The real magic comes with all the mods you can apply, but that's a rabbit hole all of its own.
See that's what I love about it. I don't care that it's not got Soulsborne combat, or an enthralling story, or moving characters, or that its a bit shonky in places (a lot of places). I love just wandering the world and seeing what happens, finding the weirdness and the hidden things, doing a bit of sneaking, brewing some potions, building a house… I've never finished the main quest, can't even remember what the story is all about, but I remember the experiences I had in specific dungeons, discovering a whole underground realm, and the quests where I met the different lunatic Gods.
There's no real humanity or human feeling to any of it really - it's a great, big beautiful clockwork snowscape that just keeps on giving you more vistas, more quests, more caves. And that's fine. Better than fine really, it's pretty much exactly what I want when I think of games as escapism. I remember someone here saying many years ago that they loved Fallout 3 because it was the game they always fantasised about playing as a kid (might have been JDub?) - Skyrim is that for me. I feel at home there, I feel comfortable - everything seems built to let me play how I want to play, in a place I want to play in.
I totally appreciate it isn't what everyone wants to play, but it's perfect for me. I've no idea how many hours I've spent there across many platforms but it must be 100s, I'd guess second only to (Championship)/Football Manager in my time-spent rankings. And I've no doubt I'll go back and do more again and again and again…
Yeah mod wise I'm a bit scared to touch it visually since imo they seem like the main culprits of conflicts between other mods and breaking the game, like maybe the 'anime graphic' mod will conflict with the 'realistic water' mode or something less obvious. I will say that combat is quite a bit worse than I remember if you're doing anything that isn't shooting arrows from the dark so I think this might be the thing I mod. At the very least it's satisfying when my guy gets a kill animation and just buries his dagger in their neck as opposed to just swiping it across them in a weak manner…and less said about the Destruction magic the better. >_>
I sort of wish I could find the game in Skyrim that everyone else does.
I enjoy making my own stories, not like the main quest is that great anyway. I do regret losing all my 'Nord Nationalist' posts from the last Society actually, that was a lot of fun. This time, assuming I play this a lot again, I rolled a Dunmer with the idea of using their innate Fire Resist to make me an overpowered Vampire, I'll be a bit of a bastard who becomes even worse after being bitten and turned into a Vampire. Looking forward to trying to integrate myself into society while hiding the fact that I'm a Vamp by sparingly moving around town in the Day but by night sneaking into people's homes and drinking their blood, I wonder if it's possible to eventually murder an entire town, like Riverrun and really drive home that feel of being a parasite wherever you go? Like one day someone comes to Whiterun and finds a bunch of corpses shrivelled like prunes :thinking:
Screw the Dragon threat, imagine fighting Dragons as a Vampire when they breathe pure anti-vampire spray like a person killing a wasp with some aerosol spray ha ha ha…
I love how in Skyrim you can find at least ten (if not a lot more) games' worth of content completely separate from the main quest, which you can completely ignore after the first bit of running away from the city
Spoiler - click to showand a small bit after if you want to gain access to some FUS RO DA!!! etc shout action
by just wandering around the entire map. And some of it is some strange, what-the-heck-am-I-getting-into stuff that could be in its own game padded out a bit.
Yeah, I'll admit it. I like Skyrim. Unmodded(gasps of horror). And it even plays well on old, janky, crap computers, especially if you still own the original release they made ages ago before the 500 or so PC re-re-re-releases.
One aspect of the whole remasters craze that's often overlooked is just how stupid the naming conventions are getting.
I mean it was bad enough when the sequel to DOOM was called DOOM and the sequel to God of War was called God of War.
Now I defy you to find anyone who isn't following this closely to know which out of The Last of Us, The Last of Us Remastered, The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2 is the newest release, or which they should play.
And I read an article the other day which said something along the lines of "Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's release has been the series' most successful launch since the release of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 in 2012" and I'm still confused by that.
The Witcher 3 next-gen update is finally coming out on the 14th, and impressions and videos are out.
Honestly I can't tell that much of a difference. On console there's a 30fps ray-tracing mode and a 60fps performance mode, but outside of the frame-rate it's hard to spot much of a difference between the two, it's hardly transformative. The game overall has had some lighting and texture improvements but it still looks exactly like The Witcher 3 always did.
It's free, so it seems churlish to complain. PC owners will probably get more out of this. But I was expecting more somehow, after such a long wait. I'm sounding entitled, aren't I?
The latest DF video has an especially embarrassing bit with a tankard where they claim it's a transformative change and it looks like a spot the difference designed for hyper attentive adults with 20/20 vision.
The 60fps and quality of life upgrades are welcome. The rest is a touch of fluff and nonsense.
Has anyone here actually finished W3? Is it actually good? I've tried a couple of times but found the combat to be a slow, janky no fun zone, and it put me off. Appreciate the quests were well done in a "no good outcomes" kind of way, but never found it to be compelling or fun. Maybe it'd feel better in 60fps. Or with shinier tankards.
I can see why others would describe the combat it as slow, but I'd rather describe it as methodical. It also really rewards preparation - having the right Signs or oil can make all the difference. I once killed a wyvern twice my level, through liberal application of Quen and a lot of patience - it took about 15 minutes, but I still have the whole thing saved on my PS4.
