Game remasters have been coming out more and more since the PlayStation 4/Xbox One era of gaming, some of them may be too soon, but do people really care about them? Why don’t we take a look at Why Game Remasters Matter?
Updated for new audiences
A game that comes to mind for me that was really unplayable for me was Grand Theft Auto San Andreas/Vice City/III, the controls just felt so dated and it really made it unplayable, but that’s where the fun thing of a remaster comes into play. With GTA V, they had a completely different control scheme compared to them, so when they “remastered” those old Playstation 2 era games, they gave them the updated controls and actually made them a lot more playable for people that didn’t like the classic controls.
Availability and mindset
When games are 10 years old, do you really wanna play them, or are they even still available to get? At times you see some random gameplay of an old game and think “that looks fun” only to find out its an old Playstation 1/2 or Gameboy game, most of these games are harder and harder to get these days and when you look at the visuals you might just pass on it. For reasons like this, remasters come in greatly. SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated came out in 2020 with a lot of praise from both fans of the original and a ton of new people who never played it before.
Packaging
sometimes older games span multiple generations of consoles with some of them being kinda dated. Just look at the Halo series, the 1st game back in the day was an absolute masterpiece, all the way up to the 4th game, but now? it is still good with its gameplay and aged pretty well, but the visuals? they did not stand the test of time. With the game still getting sequels, updating the visuals with the modern ones is a lot easier, and if you package them together with all the ones from the previous generation you got a damn good pack of games on your hands, all for the console that is at that moment the “current-gen”.
Games like the Spyro trilogy and Crash trilogy are also perfect examples of this and made them so popular again that they even got new games and introduced the game to brand new audiences.
Reimagining
Sometimes hardware or time holds back what game developers actually wanted to make, just look at games that got remastered and don’t look like anything like what they originally looked like. The perfect example here is the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Nothing is like what it used to be back on the PlayStation 1, from visuals to gameplay, the only thing that remained is the base of its story.
Another game that did this in a less big way is Ratchet and Clank (2016). The game updated its visuals and made its story more modern and added characters that got introduced later in the series while still holding that charm the 1st game had all the way during the Playstation 2 era.
If you enjoyed this article then please check out some of our other Editorials where every week we jump into a different topic about anything gaming. Please let us know what you think about game remasters in the comments or on Twitter/Discord!
