On the Necessity of HD Re-releases

HD re-releases are a lucrative business for developers, and a good way to experience older games in a series if you want to experience the history of gaming franchises. However, more and more so recently, there has been so many HD re-releases that I feel aren't justified in the effort and costs involved in creating them, nor the cost of purchase.  I try to analyse just what makes a HD Remaster 'worth it' for myself.

Resident Evil REmake HD, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Final Fantasy X/X2 Remaster, and more recently, Tomb Raider Xbox One Edition, The Last of Us Remastered, and Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection. HD remakes of older games are becoming prolific. A question that is commonly put to me by my fiancée when I consider buying a remake is “is this really necessary?”

Upon considering the state of the remasters that currently exist, my answer is a resounding “maybe”. However, I think that the question of necessity regarding a HD Remake is something that does need to be asked more often by developers. I hardly think that games from the generation immediately prior are in desperate need of the development time and effort needed to touch up their graphics by a few imperceptible pixels, or a very tiny improvement in performance, nor are such games usually worth the full retail price of most modern titles; essentially, when we buy a remake like this, we are buying a game that is a few years old and paying a premium for the luxury of a few, barely-noticeable tweaks.

There are some counter-examples where the games involved represent good value for money, and that is with game collections; Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, Gears of War Ultimate Edition, and for all its problems the Halo Master Chief Collection, in my opinion, represent good value for money due to their nature as packages; putting all the games in a single, easily-accessible boxset is a practice not unlike DVD boxsets, and in my own opinion I’m happy paying a premium for convenient access to a back library should I feel like experiencing a game’s story through all its instalments in order.

However, what I don’t think represents good value for money is when there are remakes of a game that came out in the prior generation. I think that the Xbox 360/PS3 generation was unique in that graphically I don’t feel that the Xbox One or PS4 are massive step ups in graphical terms. Games have stepped forward in how they look, certainly, and there are some absolutely beautiful games out there for the current generation of consoles that wouldn’t have been possible at the same scale on the previous generation. However, that step-up is more of just that; a step and not a leap. Where the jump from the PS2 generation of blurry standard-definition to sharp, crisp HD is like night and day (now you don’t have to squint to imagine that mass of polygons as a person), and before that the jump from the PS1 generation was like travelling in time.

In the case of generational gaps, I feel there needs to be benefit graphically for a HD remaster to be justified. If the graphics alterations that can be achieved thanks to larger production values show a real improvement then I certainly believe that remakes are justified; look at how excellent the original Resident Evil REmake was on the GameCube, which transformed the PS1 game into something absolutely terrifying and atmospheric, that still stands up today graphically. Furthermore, porting something from the PS2 era into modern-day HD is worth it because on modern HDTVs the blurriness of low-res gaming really shows how badly some of the older games have aged.

However, in the current generation, in particular The Last of Us Remastered, and Skyrim Special Edition, I simply don’t feel that the graphical improvements on show made the games at all necessary. Thanks to the law of diminishing returns, the graphical leaps and bounds of previous generations are getting harder and harder to notice as technology reaches that point where we get as photo-realistic as graphics can get, power-be-damned. The HD Remaster of Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection, for example, actually looks worse in places than the games off of which it is based.

Importantly, however, one has to also consider the difference between a Remake and a Remaster. In the case of the former, there is certainly more justification as there is a design philosophy behind the game where there are very large changes to the story and gameplay of the game to bring it up to a modern standard, not just the graphics themselves. Again, I quote the excellent Resident Evil REmake.

In the same case however, the further remastering of the remake (which sounds very meta as I write it), is less impressive, where a simple graphical touch up made the game appear better on HD screens. In this case, the fact of the technology itself behind how games are played, the fact that HDTVs are now far more widespread, made the game somewhat more justified, though with how well the original remake looks even on a HDTV, I do question whether such development was truly necessary (in this case, I believe other factors existing outside of technology were at play here, as the game could have been taken as a statement of intent by Capcom to return to horror-based gameplay, as the excellent Resident Evil 7 shows).

A final consideration, one which I think is the most important, is for compatibility. As older technology continues to age, it’s only going to break down and get harder to play classic games that are important to gaming’s history. For posterity’s sake as well as education for a younger generations, I believe HD Re-releases form a great generational bridge, where new gamers can play and enjoy previous instalments of modern series done to a standard that they can enjoy. Imagine trying to get a gamer whose only experience of videogames are from the Xbox 360 generation onwards to play something like the original Metal Gear Solid. The graphics of the PS1 simply haven’t aged well and this could hamper the gamer’s appreciation of the classics. I also think that remakes and remasters play an important role in bringing the code of such games up to a more modern standard that allows them to be bought and played even on machines far in the future, despite being released in bygone eras.

While many have questioned, rightfully so, the justification behind an endless torrent of HD Remasters and Remakes, I believe that there are perfectly good reasons that can justify the creation of such games. In particular, I think that posterity and compatibility of previous games are most important as I want to be able to replay old classics many years down the line. While there are some really bad examples of simply repackaging old titles for a quick buck, I think that HD re-releases can be justified, if technology has moved on so much that such games would truly benefit from the practice, or if there is significant effort to bring the gameplay and story up to a modern standard. Hopefully, the consideration of “is it worth it?” will be brought up more when developers consider whether rereleasing a game is a good investment.

(Sorry for the lack of updates yesterday, I had written this post up but not uploaded it. I may not get the time to write up the blog post today either due to work commitments. I will try to catch up on missed posts as soon as I can. I'm aiming for a post a day.)