There is a trend in the gaming industry to re-release old games – this is easy money out of thin air. There are several ways to implement your plan – a port, a remaster or a remake. They differ in development cost, volume, approach to changes, and price. We decided to look into the classification and create a “golden rule” for reissues – you no longer have to argue which is which.
We will divide the types of reissues into levels of complexity. They reflect how expensive this approach to creating a product is for developers and publishers, as well as their perception by players – what is expected of them, whether they will be easily impressed by the result, what complaints there may be.
Ports – level “Easy”
A game port is the easiest way to revive an old project. The game is re-released on modern systems without changes – the game code is almost not rewritten, but only optimized for new equipment. On average, ports cost 10-20 dollars, their development is cheap and is usually given to other teams, and the payback is insane.
You can recall the recent re-release of the first Red Dead Redemption from Double Eleven Studios. This is both a good example, because it has no problems with the technical side, and a bad one – the price tag of $50 for a 2010 game without changes, even with DLC, spoils everything. Although this did not stop Rockstar from being on top – the port of Red Dead Redemption, after its release on PlayStation 4, became the most popular release on the PS Store.
Remasters – Normal level
Remasters come next. Their feature: complete or partial update of the graphics and perception of the product – resolution, textures, frame rate, controls. Often they make minor adjustments, fix bugs and add convenience to players without changing the main game design – for example, adding autosaves at key points in missions. The gold price for remasters is $30-40. If we are talking about a collection of several games, then a price of 50-60 dollars is acceptable. Development is more expensive than ports, but still not too expensive.
When developing remasters, developers not only work with the game code, but also improve the project technically – replacing models and videos, rewriting configuration files.
The standard can be called Diablo 2: Resurrected. The developers modernized the appearance of the game, made the network components more convenient (although at the start they worked so-so), added the transfer of progress between platforms, the mechanics of automatic gold selection and console control. This magnificence cost reasonable money – 40 dollars.
Another success was the re-release of Dark Souls – they raised the resolution and frame rate, worked on the network element and added amenities – there were more bonfires to which you can quickly move. This remaster was even released on Nintendo Switch, where it plays comfortably – I can confirm from personal experience!
The goal of a competent remaster is to make an old game enjoyable and convenient for the modern player. It’s not enough to update all the components; you need to make the old game work according to new rules and with new small mechanics, if any were introduced. Otherwise, the product may be damaged.
This is what happened with the updated version of Assassin’s Creed III. The graphics became worse than the original – the lighting changed, there were fewer details, the faces of the characters worsened and the drawing distance decreased – it was hidden behind the fog. There are more errors, but the old ones have not gone away. Innovations in the form of whistles from bushes, free aiming mode, updated markers on the mini-map and highlighted location boundaries tried to compensate for this, which did not suit everyone.
But if we talk about a bad remaster in the full sense, then we can’t do without Warcraft III: Reforged. Everything about it was bad – bugs, crashes and terrible optimization. Creative decisions also raised many questions – the design of the characters and their dubbing changed. But Blizzard’s worst decision was to take away the beautiful original from players – it cannot be downloaded from Battle.net, even if it was purchased! As a result, we received a re-release of the classic that failed on all fronts, judging by player ratings on Metacritic – 0.6 points out of 10. Only Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy The Definitive Edition, which has similar problems, can compete with it.
Remakes – Hard level
Remakes are essentially creating a new game. When working on them, the developers use the original project only as a basis. Every aspect is being rethought and developed from the ground up – game design, storytelling, graphical level design and world building. Changes can be both minor and large-scale – the final project can be radically different from the original. An adequate price for such work is from 40 to 70 dollars. Depends on the vision of the developers and their pricing policy. Remake budgets are usually equal to the development of a full-fledged game.
Capcom is good at re-releasing its own classics – they’ve found the perfect formula. In the remake of Resident Evil 2, they recreated the game from scratch without changing the essence of the project – the heroes make their way through a police station clogged with infected people. But the key elements have changed – the over-the-shoulder camera and the aiming mode from the original Resident Evil 4 have changed the perception of what is happening on the screen. And new mechanics – the ability to independently create ammunition, barricade windows and counterattack – deepened and modernized the gameplay.
There were more details, a cinematic production appeared. However, the level design, overall story, and characters remain the same. This has changed the atmosphere of the project, but it still feels like that second “Resident”. And just recently, Capcom successfully repeated this trick with the re-release of the fourth part of the same series – this is one of the best projects of 2023, judging by press ratings and player reviews!
Another example of a great remake is Mafia: Definitive Edition. Hangar 13 did a similar job to Capcom – the project received a modern combat system and cinematic presentation, patched up plot holes, revised the approach to the characters and was sold for $40, which pleased the players. No one expected that Mafia: City of Lost Heaven could become better than it was at the time of release.
A more ambitious remake was Final Fantasy VII Remake. The developers have reconsidered the approach to absolutely all components of the original – battles, exploration, storytelling, location design, world logic and main characters. This resulted in something more than a simple re-release. FFVII Remake feels like a completely different product, providing the player with a new perspective and experience.
But even at Capcom, not everything is so smooth. The re-release of the third part is not as successful as the second or fourth. The remake of Resident Evil 3 turned out to be shorter than the original – significant parts of the story and game mechanics were taken under the knife, and players had to pay as much as $60 for a game that only took 5-7 hours to complete – all because the game included the RE:sistance online mode. He “died” a week after launch, and attempts to revive him brought nothing to Capcom. Such changes upset the players, and the project received poor reviews.
The worst remake of recent years was the re-release of Project XIII. The mechanics on which the gameplay is based did not work in the game – broken artificial intelligence of opponents, lack of recoil when shooting, poor animations with low frame rates and bugs that prevented progression. The remake lost everything that players loved about the original – the game design of the re-release became worse than the original and the project did not receive any improvements. The game feels more like a bad remaster than a reimagining built from the ground up. If the re-release of the third “Resident” suffered from the controversial vision of the developers, then XIII violates the basic principle of creating remakes – there is no reassembly of the project and no innovations.
Graphic remake – level “Grabbed”
Graphic remakes have become the golden mean between remasters and remakes. In this case, the old game is taken and placed in a new wrapper. Graphics, frame rate, resolution, interface are completely modernized by transferring to a modern engine. All other components remain the same.
A positive example is the re-release of Demon’s Souls. It can be called the most beautiful game in the “Soulslike” genre, while the original “Souls of Demons” looks downright bad today. The remake added a couple of usability and balance improvements, but otherwise – with the exception of graphics – the game did not change at all. Even the previous bugs remained in place. Bluepoint Games previously also re-released Shadow of the Colossus – the remake transformed the project, making it convenient for the modern player.
A controversial graphical remake was System Shock in 2023 – the project received a modern appearance, but the gameplay remained the same – like the 1994 original, it turned out to be too clumsy, stuffy and overcomplicated. This is the main problem with such re-releases – sometimes games become outdated, and updated graphics alone are not enough for them.
But the re-release of The Last of Us Part 1 is easy to put on the list of the worst. The game was in terrible technical condition at the time of release. In the PC version, in addition to errors, long loading times and compilation of shaders, the graphics component was terrible – although this is the point of a graphical remake. At the same time, Sony asked for as much as $70 for a similar product – both on PS5 and on PC! No wonder it received a lot of negative reviews. Even on the native console, where there were no special problems with the technical part.
We derive the “golden rule”
- Ports bring the original game to modern systems without changes;
- Remasters modernize the technical component of the old project and add minor mechanics to it;
- Remakes recreate a product with a new vision using modern tools, sometimes fundamentally changing the story, mechanics and world of the old game;
- Graphic remakes are a symbiosis of remasters and remakes, because in such projects only the appearance is completely changed.
The list above is the standard we derived from the examples analyzed in the material. We can say that the secret to the success of each type of reissue is the balance of all elements and the minimization of errors. The project must bring something new, be in good technical condition and be sold at an adequate price – and then it will be loved by the players.