Curious about y’alls opinions on this. I like the idea of getting new people to experience an older game by aligning it to modern graphics and accessibility standards. But capitalizing on nostalgia with quick updates to that make it look modern rather than making new games seems like just more of studios trying to squeeze money out of us.
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.
Unfortunately it depends on who’s doing it. Who’s creatively in charge and what freedom they get.
At the moment, it’s reliably bad. Even when the vision is good, it’s dominated by invested poo poo.
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.