aaa_game_design_starter_pack.png

Notices where this attachment appears

1. Embed this notice
   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Monday, 26-May-2025 01:33:05 JST pistolero

   in reply to
   @dagda @SuperDicq @coolboymew @romin @takao
   
   > what about remasters?
   
   Also those.
   
   There's a thing, a work. A game is a work. It is, unlike a song, usually not owned by its authors, so within the lifetimes of the people that worked on the game, they get to see their own "posthumous best-of remaster" cash-grab produced by the employer that fired them when it was done. So it's already kind of soulless and crappy in most cases, and it's more gutless than doing a sequel, which is already goddamn gutless.
   
   But even if not, you know, if I've read a book and a new version of the book comes out and the pages are made of a slightly nicer material and maybe the typesetting is cleaner and the typeface is slightly easier to read, I don't need to go read the book again just because "NEW!" I could read a different book.
   
   There's also the fact that nobody cared about video games or took them seriously before, and people do now: if a studio is big enough to issue remakes, then they are also big enough to worry about politics. The game's going to get some things stripped out of it. And there are some things that remakes fuck up because when faced with a decision about a AAA title, the bias is towards doing the safe thing that everyone else is doing. I have heard that FF7:R is now an open-world sandbox action game with RPG elements and a lot of dialog.
   
   You can't really separate a thing from its place and time and then call it the same thing: part of FF7's charm came from its rough edges, from the game kind of being a shock--not just the sword through the girl, but there were a lot of things that it did differently, it had some guts: making those same choices *after* the game sold well is gutless, and doing whatever sells now is even more gutless. Why remake/remaster the same game? Why do you have to call it "FF7" instead of "Generic Bullshit AAA Title #302"?
   
   That having been said, I have heard good things about Mario RPG's remake but I can't manage to care about it. It was a really weird game and is now a retread of a game that was popular. I'd rather just replay the original. Nintendo may have been gutless in some ways in the 80s/90s ("turn those crosses into ankhs if you want licensed for North America!") but there wasn't a massive context defined: people didn't have expectations except to be entertained. Everything was original. So those games tend to be interesting; the new games that are interesting are all indie games. Hotline Miami was goddamn delightful, Stray was amazing, you know? I am unable to forgive Twitter for killing The Last Night. Big studios operate very conservatively nowadays (all entertainment is like that now, they're so worried something won't sell a million copies/tickets/whatever in its first month that they neglect things that sell a hundred thousand copies in the first month and then inexplicably keep selling a hundred thousand a month for five years), so all the cool shit comes from indie devs.
   
   Something like Quake, it's a competitive multiplayer game, I can see QOL improvements mattering there, sure.
   aaa_game_design_starter_pack.png