Why Do We Keep Remaking Games?

in the past couple years it seems like popular media has been getting re-released and remade more than ever especially video games there are an insane amount of titles out now that are just upgrades of previously existing works not new games just old games wearing a funny hat and these new versions of old games have been coming out more and more frequently Spider-Man remastered for the PS5 came out two years after the original game nobody was playing the original Spider-Man two years after release and going yeah this looks terrible I mean can you even tell the difference between the different versions because the only thing that gives it away to me is how the new Peter Parker looks like he makes thirst traps on Tick Tock so with remakes and remasters becoming more and more common I really just have one question why uh because they make a lot of money next question other than that is there a reason for them to exist does remaking or remastering a game have a point that's what I want to talk about today when talking about kinds of re-releases is there can be a bit of confusion some of it coming from the overlap of the terms as I'll get into but most of it coming from the video game industry just throwing nonsense words out to try and sell more copies to get it out of the way most of the terms that re-released games add to their title mean absolutely nothing and sometimes just aren't true games will add things like Redux or Resurrection or reloaded to the end of their name which don't actually tell you anything about what makes it different from the original it could be a visual upgrade it could be a completely new game it could be the same game but on a new console and even when a title uses a more defined term like remastered it still might not help Ducktales Remastered is not a remaster it is a remake the title of the game is a lie and that doesn't even get me started on the billions of different editions which all mean nothing and are seemingly made up on the spot Ultimate Edition enhanced Edition Darksiders 2 death native Edition what the [ __ ] does that even mean you see every single one of these title add-ons is is nothing but a meaningless buzzword they exist purely to make the new version of the game sound cool so you'll buy it they don't care in the slightest about being informative which makes them all pointless which makes me hate them all of them except for Bionic Commando a game about a man with a bionic arm which cut a remake called Bionic Commando re-armed that one's okay that's the one exception so let's just throw out all the buzzwords for this discussion and try to Define re-releases by the terms that actually describe them not the terms that Publishers use to sell them since those are about as truthful as ads in a porn site are there hot moms in my neighborhood probably is this website gonna do anything about that definitely not now the first kind of re-release and the most common is a port games are typically developed initially for a single platform and then just adapted to work on all the others they're released on sometimes these versions are released at the same time but sometimes a game gets ported to another system later down the line to be honest most ports are just PC versions of console games because a ton of developers really hate the PC for some reason even something like Dark Souls Prepare To Die edition is just a PC re-release of the original Dark Souls that also included all the DLC and it ran horribly because from software just did not care but sometimes more work is put into upgrading or changing the game for a new platform especially if a game gets ported to a later console generation keeping in tradition of game titles lying to you Spider-Man remastered is just a port they ported the game from PS4 to PS5 you can argue it's technically a remaster too because they added Ray tracing and twinkified the protagonist but it is undeniably a port first and many remasters of older games are like this those kind of ports aren't interesting to talk about though what I want to touch on are the ports that just got weird with it like die Katana a failed FPS on the N64 got ported to the Game Boy Color and turned into an old school Zelda game Half-Life 2 had a version of the game released exclusively for Japanese arcade machines that turned it into whatever this is and last but not least Resident Evil 4 got ported to the Zebo well you haven't heard about the Zebo oh wow that's crazy it was a big hit it was a Brazil and Mexico exclusive console from 2009 that only sold 30 000 units because it didn't have a disk drive you had to download all the games via something they called the Zebo net and it was so underpowered that the re4 port was actually just the mobile phone version of the game which you might not have even known existed so unfortunately Zebo and zebonet were discontinued in 2011. the re4 port wasn't even that special this whole segment is just an excuse for me to say Zebo a bunch so circling back around to versions of games that are nothing like the original remakes are another kind of video game re-release and they're very simple to explain you take a game and You remake it or more specifically you build a new game from the ground up to try and replicate or reimagine an older one they can be nearly identical to the original version like in the case of dead space or they can be different in almost every way like Final Fantasy VII really the changes made to the game are up to the studio and remake have the most leeway to make changes of any kind of re-release the only type of new version more different would be something like a reboot where a new game is built from the ground up to be a new game you know Tomb Raider 2013 is just a new game with a new main character who also happens to be named Laura Croft You Can Tell She's different because uh uh she's got more polygons now I think the best example of a remake that is different from the original is Resident Evil 2. the original game was fantastic but had horribly dated tank controls and obviously looks kind of gross nowadays so the Remake turned it into a modern third-person shooter with modern Graphics which not only fits the tone better with the claustrophobic camera angle and realistic environments but plays better in basically every way if you prefer tank controls don't even bother leaving a comment I'm not gonna read it the Remake is an entirely different game with only the same general story and characters but the feeling of playing it is pretty much the same feeling as first playing the original which is the intent that to me is what makes it the perfect execution of a remade game and that brings me to the final kind of video game re-release the remaster the origins of the term remaster actually came from music production where the master was the final recording of the track that had all the individual recordings and edits layered together and so say if that Master was created in the 70s with janky 70s technology its quality would be limited to the era it was made in so sometimes the band would go back years later take all those individual recordings and re-edit them into a new master with better technology and usually better editing skills thus remastering the song just meant changing everything but the original recordings and getting a new result from it however I should say that remastering is not synonymous with upgrading because you're still limited to the whims of whoever is editing the new track it could EQ a song in a different way or change some of the effects to get a different result that can actually sound worse and famously in the late 90s a lot of tracks were remastered in something called the loudness War where they would just compress the entire song to make it way louder and if you're wondering how that affects the quality of the song Here's my voice with a ton of compression on it now if you were to take that original definition of remastering and apply it to video games it would mean a remaster is just a version that enhances the surrounding quality without changing the core of the game which is basically the case that is the definition most people agree with the vast majority of remasters are just visual upgrades sometimes as little as a change in resolution to HD sometimes as much as completely retexturing every asset sometimes if the original was made in 4x3 the remaster just made it wider but again just like music what changes are made are up to whoever is doing the remaster and don't necessarily make it better like with Silent Hill HD Collection which removed the fog from Silent Hill 2. you know the horror game about running around in the fog and GTA's Trilogy Definitive Edition famously used an AI upscaler to improve the asset quality meaning everything in the remaster looks weirdly smooth and both of these new versions had performance issues bugs and other questionable chain changes that made many people prefer the old ones but if you can make a remaster of a game that is faithful to the original and just upgrades what it needs to to modernize the game then the remaster is pretty much just a better version objectively with Metroid Prime remastered which just came out recently being a prime example so a remake is a new game built from scratch a remaster is an older game with some upgrades and from those definitions you should be able to tell the difference between them in theory in theory those two words should mean different things and be easily differentiated is that always the case well 2023's Dead Space would you consider that a remake or a remaster the game was built from the ground up on a new engine by a new team so I think the definitions would point to it being a remake which is interesting because it's basically the exact same game with a couple new ideas and in Isaac Clark who looks like he wants to sell me Insurance okay what about Metroid Prime that started with the original code and assets was worked on by the original team and uses the same engine so it seems pretty clearly a remaster though they obviously worked on it a lot because it has entirely new assets animations different lighting and even quality of life changes to core gameplay and people made fun of me on Twitter for it but Samus kind of looks like Hillary Clinton now actually now that I think about it they'd make a great couple anyway what about Demon Souls like dead space that was actually built on a new engine by a new team and is almost solely referred to as the Demon Souls remake but the way Blue Point develops games is they import all the code and assets from the original into their engine and then replace parts of it from there which means it's technically a remaster even though it's on a new engine and they did replace basically everything uh moving on Last of Us Part One it's certainly called a remake by the developers but I think I've covered why that doesn't mean a whole lot it had a new engine and had the studio go back and rebuild everything to look like part two but why didn't Metroid Prime rebuild all of its assets too and Demon Souls was on a new engine so it's a remaster or a remake or a third thing I think the truth is that the definition of remaster as it came from music production is a horribly inaccurate term when talking about video games who would have guessed you're trying to differentiate something by discreet attributes when games don't really have any they don't have original recordings like songs do you can take out every part of the original and put in a new one like it's the ship of Theseus and at no point does it become a new game so many remasters end up being more different from the original than a remake would be and then the other common difference between the terms is put on the development process was the new version built from scratch or did it work off the original well like I pointed out with blue points even that doesn't matter anymore remasters can and do build many parts from scratch remakes often take huge chunks of the original and even if everything is 100 Handmade by a new team if it's meant to look identical to the old version who cares there's no tangible difference so all of this just blurs the lines beyond all recognition I've seen so many people use remake and remaster completely interchangeably because there seem to be more exceptions than rules at this point so to try and remedy this I've come up with my own terms and definitions that I want to use for at least the rest of this video because I think they work a bit better I would like to put forward the term rebuild to describe any game that attempts to recreate or upgrade the original into a faithful modernization regardless of things like engines or code bases or if it's made from scratch or not this is any and all remasters and remakes that aren't trying to be different Metroid Prime is a rebuild Dead Space is a rebuild Demon Souls is a rebuild Last of Us Part One is a rebuild they all are because they're trying to be the old game and they're just rebuilding parts of it to make it newer hey look at that the term even makes sense in the context of game development following that I'd like to redefine remakes as just the new versions of games that fundamentally differ from the original they are not just trying to be a newer shinier version they are not just trying to add a couple new features or levels they are trying to be their own thing usually by reinterpreting The Originals concept so that's Final Fantasy VII that's Resident Evil 2 and 3 that's the weird Game Boy dicaton I showed earlier I still don't know what that was they can still be very faithful to the experience of the original but you can clearly see that they're not the same game also ports still the same if an old game is moved to another console it's a port regardless of what else you do to it many ports or rebuilds many rebuilds or ports it's a Venn diagram but I think these new terms work better at least for me because it separates re-releases by intent instead of stuff like development style or what engine it's on all you gotta ask is what is the re-release trying to do is it trying to be the same that's a rebuild is it trying to be different that's a remake and by splitting up games this way it makes it so much easier to talk about them which in turn makes it easier for me to finally answer the title of this video what is the point of rebuilding or remaking a game why would you ever do it aside from the fact that they make a ton of money and are easier to develop and can use name recognition and Nostalgia to sell more copies as aside from all that I think when talking about re-releases and in particular how many are coming out now and how low effort some of them seem to be the immediate first thing that comes to mind for people is movies where Hollywood seems to have been dominated by the idea that they need to remake every old film and reboot every franchise to squeeze the last few drops of money out of their fan base and with that comparison you could very easily say that most video game re-releases are pointless because most remade movies are pointless take something like 1998's Gus fans and psycho remake for example that movie sucks it is a shot for shot remake of the original 1960 psycho by Alfred Hitchcock that replicates everything about the movie so closely you can play them side by side and they line up perfectly aside from the fact that one's in color and stars events fall also two fun facts first the original draft of the script I was going to end that last sentence with a joke but then I realized that Vince Vaughn is a serial killer is way funnier than anything I could ever come up with second fact the original Psycho cost only eight hundred thousand dollars to make and was financed by Hitchcock personally as a studio thought it was too big a risk the 1998 remake on the other hand cost 60 million dollars however while I can make fun of bad movie remakes all day and several YouTubers have done so with things like RoboCop Total Recall or The Lion King there is an important difference between films and video games that changes the arguments the difference being that you can still see old movies very easily and most of them hold up really well yet with video games that isn't always the case in fact older games being readily playable on Modern systems is kind of a rarity it only tends to happen with the most popular of franchises I can go back and watch the original Psycho right now through a variety of methods so there is no point to the remake or any reason to seek it out unless I'm a huge Vince Vaughn fan but even a gaming franchise as popular as Metal Gear Solid isn't so easy to find to play through the entire series my methods are limited to emulation which can be unreliable or just buying a PS3 and physical copies of the games which sucks not only that MGS is massively popular but try to play any game that's a little obscure and it'll be prohibitively expensive or downright impossible for that reason ports and rebuilds have an important role to play in the preservation of older games re-releasing something on a newer system even if it's unchanged is a net positive because it might be the only way to play that game and even though I am typically a bigger fan of emulation and preserving games that way I do have to admit having a team of developers adapt the original is much more efficient than relying on faint communities to do it provided that the developers do a good job obviously though even further than that games get outdated infinitely faster than movies do there are tons of franchises from older Generations that have completely unintuitive gameplay by modern standards especially in the weird early 3D era where every game had wildly different ideas for their control schemes so unlike with movies just porting a game a lot of the time can still leave it inaccessible to a lot of people which is why I am personally okay with the rebuilds Taking Liberties and changing elements of the game so long as it's for the purpose of modernizing it the bulk of the game should be faithful to the original because again this is often the only way to conveniently play it but getting rid of dated elements is certainly appreciated so that someone who didn't grow up with the game can still enjoy it like I'm sorry I know the new armored Core game is coming out but I really don't feel like going back and playing The Originals when the optimal way to play them is to literally turn your controller inside out I'm not doing that and then of course you have obvious graphical up grades that should continue to happen with re-releases as are standards of what looks good in a game get higher and higher which isn't actually that different from movies there are tons of companies like the Criterion Collection that exists solely to rescan old film prints to a higher resolution because even something like psycho 1960 used 35 millimeter film which can be scanned at 4K they just never did it for home releases because nobody but the movie theaters were capable of displaying something that high quality but now you can go and buy a 4K HDR re-release of psycho that looks basically brand new just the same as an upscaled or retextured game so rebuilds to me have a functional purpose and reason to exist that I think is worth the effort spent making them that is so long as the rebuild is actually good again developers are ultimately free to put in as much or as little effort as they want which can result in something like Shadow of the Colossus being amazing or Warcraft 3 reforged being the worst game blizzard ever made besides the very next game that they made and remakes I'm honestly all for if a studio goes ahead and actually makes something new out of an old title I find that fantastic because cashing in on Nostalgia is gonna happen regardless of what I do so I'd much prefer to be a modern reinterpretation that can deliver a new experience or new gameplay even if you're still treading the same story and using the same characters hell a rebuild can be worth it if the game is improved enough to be considered a new experience the third party Black Mesa rebuild of Half-Life 1 reworked a ton of the game including all the Zen chapters and is considered so good that some of the half-life devs prefer it to the original but while remakes and rebuilds do have a purpose to me and I like most of them that come out I think it's time we finally talk about the money now I don't know if you knew this because I don't think anyone mentioned it or made a big thing out of it the last of us part one was 70 goddamn dollars and that is an absurd amount of money to charge for a game that came out 10 years ago a game that many people already played twice who would now have to pay full price to play again but a little prettier now don't get me wrong the game does look really pretty The Last of Us is a great game hell Dead Space demon souls in most of the games I covered are great but to charge full price for them again feels like a slap in the face I can go play Dead Space 1 right now for like twenty dollars but you're telling me the version with a new coat of paint and a couple changes warrants more than triple that I don't think so it's my opinion that rebuilds of games should not be full price something like Metroid Prime remastered costing forty dollars is already quite a bit the entire crash insane Trilogy is packaged together for that amount Hell Black Mesa costs 20 dollars The Last of Us costing 70 is a joke but that is ultimately my opinion different people have different ideas about how much a game is worth and I can guarantee I'll have a bunch of people joining the tank control crowd in my comments defending why their favorite remake was worth every penny it's your opinion I'm not gonna say it's wrong and I can make arguments talking about why I support mine but ultimately if bloodborne got ported to the PC I dropped 70 bucks on that bad boy in a heartbeat I'm only human this does all bring up a discussion that's a little more important than price points though that being the actual reason re-releases are made as I've said I support rebuilds for game preservation and modernization and I support remakes because I like new takes on Old ideas but that's not why the industry pumps them out that's not the point money is the fact that they can charge seventy dollars for a game you've already played and net millions in sales with relatively little backlash is the reason they do this that's why we're seeing more remakes than ever and that reasoning starts to poke holes in my support for these re-releases for a couple reasons one it's still not uncommon to see rebuilds that are just flat out not trying at all or companies that make them their entire identity I don't even want to know how much money the Pokemon franchise has made on all their rebuilds which make up like one third of their entire catalog by the way all of them full price two because the incentive is profit the games that are getting re-released are not the ones that need it the most Last of Us did not need a rebuild neither did Dead Space those games hold up really well but any game that isn't a giant pop culture icon isn't popular enough to get a new version I'm sure many of you can think of Niche or underrated games from your childhood that need a rebuild way more than Resident Evil 4 does but they're not Resident Evil 4 so they don't get them which just makes them need a new version that much more and finally the time spent painstakingly rebuilding a game from scratch or even remaking them into something else could be better spent on a new idea this is something you'll hear a lot it's probably the most common argument against re-releases of any kind but it has a point we could have gotten a new sci-fi horror game instead of dead space but shinier we could have gotten a fun Naughty Dog game instead of last of us but sharper but neither of those new IPS would sell nearly as well as a repackaged classic so they'll never exist this last point is the one I'm the most on the fence about though as there are developers like bluepoint that solely focus on rebuilding old games and it's not like old games aren't worth playing again if the rebuild is good and if it's a remake then you get new ideas and gameplay anyway but I just thought I'd bring it up because it does get a little tiresome to see a bunch of new releases that are nothing but games I've already played before at the end of the day remakes and rebuilds are always going to exist we as a society love old things we may say we like new things but when a popular old thing gets a new version it makes 25 quintillion dollars so I think trying to fight that wave is perhaps a losing battle but we can certainly put a little more thought into what gets re-released and how hey maybe instead of slapping some new textures on a five-year-old game you do something new with the idea maybe instead of upping the resolution to 1080P and charging full price you actually upgrade the game and charge half that maybe instead of taking the fog out of Silent Hill 2 you do literally anything else with the amount of remakes and remasters and reduxes and rehydrations we're getting I just want them to be good and not cash craps that's all I ask that's all I want make the new version worth the price you're charging for it and stop just slapping on a new title and calling it a day that would be great uh anyway support me on patreon where you can watch the exclusive super ultra deluxe edition of this video that isn't any different from the YouTube version but costs money to watch and thank you to everyone who gives me money to watch the same video you've probably already seen before whose names you can see scrolling up the side of the screen now while the credits roll I think I speak for everyone when I say remakes are actually kind of lame and what we really need is more D makes where you take a game and remake it but in a purposefully downgraded way that looks like it's for an older console like I don't know if you knew this but you can play bloodborne PSX right now it is a PS1 dmake of bloodborne made by an indie Dev who is very normal on Twitter I promise and it goes hard it slaps it's great they're also currently developing bloodborne cart which is a spin-off of bloodborne PSX that's Mario Kart it's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life they make the bloodborne guy doing Akira slide in the trailer I love it also you've got stuff like disco Elysium on the Game Boy Halo for the Atari 2600 and left for dead on the any yes really I just want more games that look old it's so cool give me more dmix I want all of them and speaking of what I want Capcom Port Resident Evil 4 remake to the Zebo you know that's where the real money is do it you cowards

Channel: Lextorias

Views: 82,265

Keywords: lextorias, video game remakes, what's the point of video game remakes?, video game remaster, remake, remaster, rebuild, port, video game port, video game re-release, re-release, metroid prime remastered, dead space 2023, the last of us part 1, demon's souls remake, why do we keep remaking games

Id: 1Z--9StAdfo

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023