But several people also noted that the games industry goes through cycles of mass layoffs, because simply having a stable business isn’t enough for investors. Revenues must grow by a chunky margin: if they don’t, costs must be cut. Embracer’s mishandling of their business might be grotesque, but it’s business as usual nonetheless. “We make a shitload of money, but it doesn’t go back into the games,” one person commented. “It goes into a lot of now very wealthy peoples’ pockets, and the people who actually make the games kind of scrape by, most of the time.”
Remakes can be awesome – the recent System Shock remake is an excellent example of doing it right. The problem, as it always is, is capitalism and greed, which lead to lazy money-grabbing remakes of games that didn’t need it. Many games that get remakes should have just gotten patches – Dark Souls is a prime example of this. The remake barely looked better than the original and changed things about the gameplay, not necessarily for the better.
Don’t give me Final Fantasy 6 Pixel UHD 4K with the same old boring Battle System - give me a new game with the same story!
Or heck - let me play as the bad guy! Make it “The legend of Zelda - The Rise of Ganondorf“ where you’re doing the stuff that happens between kid-Link and grown-Link in Ocarina of Time
\1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.
\2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.
\3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.
Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators toe this line pretty well.
But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.
(I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)
I used Backlogery, but Backloggd seems to be more popular nowadays. That forum discussion mentions a few others, too.
If you play retro games, then you could also look into RetroAchievements, which will track more than when you simply beat a game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for all games though.
For more modern games, you could also use Achievements to track what you beat.
As for keeping track of what games you WANT to play… it’s called buying them! Don’t buy games you don’t want to play, haha
Seriously though, you could go through your Steam library and add games you want to play to a playlist, or sell physical games you wanted to support but don’t want to play.
But for multi-platform stuff, check out the linked forum post
IMHO, it depends on the game and the remake. The old Halo games are probably the best case study on what to do and what not to do.
Halo CE - Don’t do that. The game was old enough to warrant major texture, geometry, and animation upgrades, but the developer also completely changed the art style.
Halo 2 - Do this. It’s the old art style, but with more detail. The game looks like how you think it looked, until you toggle the old graphics on and see how it ACTUALLY looked.
Halo 3 - Do this. The game was in good enough shape to just need a few frame rate, texture, and resolution bumps. New animation and geometry wasn’t needed, and avoiding that was the right call.
Halo 2 Anniversary should have kept the old sounds. A lot of the art was done in the shitty Halo 4 style too instead of the original Halo style. Blur absolutely smashed the cutscenes though.
Yeah, I wonder why they never added the option to combo new visuals and old sounds. MCC will only allow old audio with the old graphics.
That said, it’s still one of those games where I get together with my middle aged friends, and no one thinks much about the game’s in-game presentation until someone toggles the graphics, then people suddenly realize a LOT more has been updated that they realize.
IMHO, they did a better job than most at recapturing how the game felt when you played it back in the day. Not all of the creative choices were perfect, but nailed a lot of it.
Commenting so I can come back to this later with the site, I can’t recall the name at the moment
Alrighty, it looks like the list has grown and I can’t remember what site I had used previously, so here are a couple options. It looks like they all roughly have the same format of: create account, fill out games from database, possibly account and app linking options.
In no particular order:
How long to beat: create an account, has a games library for your profile
Keep track of my games: create an account, “pay what you want”-ware (free), can import gaming accounts (Steam PSN etc) to fill out list.
Backloggd: Create an account, can fill out games to your library and has space for reviews and other user profiles
Grouvee: Create an accout - homepage is pretty minimal
Gametracker: Seems more “game team” oriented but it has a spot for filling out a games library
GameTrack: Has an IOS app as well, can link gaming accounts for achievements, can make lists to sort games
Playtracker: Create an account, looks like there is a software download for the computer
Stash: Has both Android and IOS apps,
Of all of these, the feature sets look basically the same, the main differences seem to be UI layouts and more niche options of sorting/filling out. All of them look to need an account (expected). Since I can’t recall which, if any of these, I had used in the past I will just say that the websites for Playtracker, Backloggd, and How Long To Beat looked the “best”.
Hopefully this helped and didn’t just give you more choice anxiety, lol.
To me, they are both winners. I loved Phantom Liberty and just started playing it again last week, only for it to be interrupted by Shadow of the Erdtree. Both DLC’s reminded me how much I loved the base game and both are proper and large content additions. And they both run perfectly on Linux on day 1 <3.
Both these games and their DLC’s are in my opinion what other game studios should aim for.
Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.
Blood and Wine was exceptional. Much like Shadow of the Erdtree, there was enough content added that they could have almost justified releasing it as a full game. There are full games released today with less content than Blood and Wine brought to TW3.
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