Remasters

[benji]

There's a video I keep getting recommended about how each new version of the first Gears of War looks worse than the previous that I'm waiting for a couple remasters of before I click on it. I used this one just because uh, it was recent, he's verbose and can kick off the thread where we whine because we can but not asking if we should.

[Eric Cartman]

Not gonna watch but just gonna bring up how fucking funny it is that the one thing even the most die hard Deus Ex fan can admit is that its graphics are kinda shit, even for when it was released, and the remaster somehow makes it look even fucking worse

[DavidCroquet]

I'm gonna buy this stupid ass Deus Ex remaster. 

I've just never played it!

[benji]

Not gonna watch but just gonna bring up how fucking funny it is that the one thing even the most die hard Deus Ex fan can admit is that its graphics are kinda shit, even for when it was released, and the remaster somehow makes it look even fucking worse 

I just posted the video so there'd be more of something in the OP but this is actually the main theme of it, that a lot of these remasters are upping the details of textures plus adding better lighting and not realizing how it fucks with the entire scene. That they ignore that there was a reason things were done other than they didn't have the power and storage space. Shows a number of examples of this.

Some of the remasters remind me of those old mods people would do that would give real textures to games like Mario 64 and Zelda 64. Okay, yeah, when you're staring at a rope somewhere it looks great but did you ever stop to see it in motion and with that ancient geometry everywhere?

I think both the guy in the video and company executives underestimate how many people would buy ports that touch up the settings, allow proper resolutions and legit gamepad support. Like the original GTA trilogy runs pretty fucking great by default except it doesn't have any gamepad support beyond basic 1990's Windows APIs, so you literally cannot by default use any of the Xbox pads because of the analog triggers which takes away two buttons you need which those APIs had no support for.

A lot of the NightDive "remasters" are really just ports with the old textures upscaled. Some of GOG's fixes are really fixing bad ports from consoles. Ubi and EA and so on could be spending the same amount of money just making sure their PC versions are like this, then porting those to every console, packing games together as "trilogies" or whatever and putting them for $20 and probably be doing better than what they're doing with some of these remasters. Rockstar's deal with the GTA trilogy is just inexplicable considering they originally tried porting the mobile versions and then whatever the Definitive Edition is supposed to represent. Meanwhile, look at what they did with Red Dead Redemption.

[HardcoreRetro]

Me, some retard mouthpiece from gaming company X.

"This is what the game was always meant to look like."

The game:

[who is ted danson?]

Not gonna watch but just gonna bring up how fucking funny it is that the one thing even the most die hard Deus Ex fan can admit is that its graphics are kinda shit, even for when it was released, and the remaster somehow makes it look even fucking worse 

I just posted the video so there'd be more of something in the OP but this is actually the main theme of it, that a lot of these remasters are upping the details of textures plus adding better lighting and not realizing how it fucks with the entire scene. That they ignore that there was a reason things were done other than they didn't have the power and storage space. Shows a number of examples of this.

Some of the remasters remind me of those old mods people would do that would give real textures to games like Mario 64 and Zelda 64. Okay, yeah, when you're staring at a rope somewhere it looks great but did you ever stop to see it in motion and with that ancient geometry everywhere?

I think both the guy in the video and company executives underestimate how many people would buy ports that touch up the settings, allow proper resolutions and legit gamepad support. Like the original GTA trilogy runs pretty fucking great by default except it doesn't have any gamepad support beyond basic 1990's Windows APIs, so you literally cannot by default use any of the Xbox pads because of the analog triggers which takes away two buttons you need which those APIs had no support for.

A lot of the NightDive "remasters" are really just ports with the old textures upscaled. Some of GOG's fixes are really fixing bad ports from consoles. Ubi and EA and so on could be spending the same amount of money just making sure their PC versions are like this, then porting those to every console, packing games together as "trilogies" or whatever and putting them for $20 and probably be doing better than what they're doing with some of these remasters. Rockstar's deal with the GTA trilogy is just inexplicable considering they originally tried porting the mobile versions and then whatever the Definitive Edition is supposed to represent. Meanwhile, look at what they did with Red Dead Redemption.

Last time I played some of the OG GTA trilogy there was some kind of "all in one" modpack that fixed missing visual effects, soundtrack, controller support (might even have added button icons).

The only benefit to the remasters is they have achievements I guess, but not sure that counterats all the stuff they broke.

[who is ted danson?]

Not gonna watch but just gonna bring up how fucking funny it is that the one thing even the most die hard Deus Ex fan can admit is that its graphics are kinda shit, even for when it was released, and the remaster somehow makes it look even fucking worse 



         

Yes its a kjoke but I might have to get it because it's Deus ex lmao (on PC)

[Eric Cartman]

I think both the guy in the video and company executives underestimate how many people would buy ports that touch up the settings, allow proper resolutions and legit gamepad support. Like the original GTA trilogy runs pretty fucking great by default except it doesn't have any gamepad support beyond basic 1990's Windows APIs, so you literally cannot by default use any of the Xbox pads because of the analog triggers which takes away two buttons you need which those APIs had no support for.

A lot of the NightDive "remasters" are really just ports with the old textures upscaled. Some of GOG's fixes are really fixing bad ports from consoles. Ubi and EA and so on could be spending the same amount of money just making sure their PC versions are like this, then porting those to every console, packing games together as "trilogies" or whatever and putting them for $20 and probably be doing better than what they're doing with some of these remasters. Rockstar's deal with the GTA trilogy is just inexplicable considering they originally tried porting the mobile versions and then whatever the Definitive Edition is supposed to represent. Meanwhile, look at what they did with Red Dead Redemption.

Its a number of factors;

• MS actively fucking up the PC dev space trying to push Xbox - like, bare fucking minimum they could easily do would be have a dummy server just to allow GFWL titles to fucking install, let alone create a deshittifier .dll that anyone who got suckered back in the day and wants to resell that shit can just run to replace GFWL calls with void functions for bare minimum resale opportunity or - god fucking forbid - have a DX update to enable directinput calls to recognise 360 controllers and just grab the existing 360 input params for analogue triggers / second thumbstick support.
  
• Steam stepping the fuck up and enabling universal controller support in literally every game ever made, with crowd sourced configs. Sure, never going to be as good as native support, but community post launch support is free. Same deal with community bugfix packs, texture replacers, ENB mods, widescreen fixes, etc.
  
• The big publishers literally could not give less of a fuck about the PC, which they only see as piracy and lack of control. Its like a reverse gamblers fallacy, they refuse to put anything more than the bare minimum effort in because they literally never have. Sure, they pretend to when they create their own launcher app to harvest userdata or whatever, but even then they do bare fucking minimum and then act disapointed when people actively dislike it.
  

A lot of the stuff steam have added that makes it a genuine platform and not just a storefront is stuff MS could and should have added literally more than a decade ago. It is very much in their interest to effectively give developers the option to rebuild old DirectX source code straight into a modern platform executable, but they haven't hit panic stations enough to do that yet.

Its kind of an inevitable future, as Windows 11 has been a big turd and PC gaming was one of the only consistent drivers of new hardware and new windows licences.
Corporate use is fucked, because the future of productivity apps are thin client whatever devices connecting to a cloud service.
Hardware sales are fucked because RISC chips like ARM outperform wintel/AMD for average joe PC use at way lower cost + power draw.
Does anyone outside of MS think MS Copilot is the future of AI?
Does anyone outside of the beige box manufacturers think AI is going to be a big hardware seller for average joe customers?

If MS were smart, they'd be going all in on getting Windows ARM being as backwards compatibile as possible, creating a new DirectX people would want to use that can recompile old DX code for modern systems as painlessly as possible for easy IP flips, and looking to make basically Windows Chromebooks.

MS aren't though so they're doubling down on fights they can't win by maintaining XBAWKS as their 'gaming brand' and trying to compete with steamdecks and switch by building a modern day Atari Lynx.

Yes its a kjoke but I might have to get it because it's Deus ex lmao (on PC)

Laputan Machine