This week on Semi-Ramblomatic, Yahtzee ponders the separation between re-releases, remasters and remakes.
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So, at time of writing, it's a couple of days after the shadow drop of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion remaster, something that I and my colleagues had already known about thanks to whispers on the Insider Grapevine. But what we were still asking each other right up to its official announcement was whether this was a remake or a remaster. And it occurred to me that some people might not appreciate the difference. "Aren't they the same thing?" The lay person might ask. "Isn't a remaster just a pretentious word for a remake?" Implying that mastery was involved in the creation of the original product. And while Elder Scrolls: Oblivion could be called a lot of things, masterwork is a bit of a stretch. A reasonable stance, slay person. But there are many ways game publishers go for second bites of the apple when they have a successful game on their hands. And I find I can categorize them across three levels, which I will label remakes, remasters, and re-releases. And in this video, I will explain the subtle nuances that separate them.
Let's start with the first and most basic form of secondary apple mastication, the re-release. Re-releases, in contrast to the other two levels, aren't rooted in nostalgia and are more likely to happen in the first few years of a game's existence. The motivation being usually to reignite sales while the game's still in its prime earning period and or to regain some exposure if you feel the game missed out on some on the first attempt.
This sort of thing happens a lot at the start of a new console generation. Games that came out towards the end of a console's life will get a quick spruce up and re-released on the new hotness so as to not get left behind. If it helps, think of a re-release as closest in spirit to a port. Sometimes porting from one platform to another, sometimes from the past into the future. A subset of the re-release is the game of the year edition, when a game that has proved a hit gets a special spruced up version to bank off the positive buzz, often with some token polish and all the DLC thrown in, as with the Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, for one example.
This used to be something linked to physical media. If the first run of the game sells out and you need another printing, it makes sense to take the opportunity to give it a glittery coating now that you know it's a hit. Maybe quote some positive reviews on the box blurb. With digital delivery being prevalent, this is now purely a marketing exercise and we don't really call it "The Game of the Year Edition" anymore because technically you were supposed to wait for some media outlet to declare you game of the year before you did that. And these days gaming media is too thinly spread for that to mean anything to the average buyer. What characterizes the re-release or game of the year edition is that it's generally understood to be, broadly speaking, the same entity as the original, even if there have been changes, sometimes a lot of changes. In the case of Persona 5 Royal, which has so many enhancements, it can feel like a completely different game. But because it was only a few years later and was updated for the PS4, the newer, more relevant system, many consider it the definitive version.
We move on then to the next level of lucrative commercial copy-pasting, the remaster. And the fundamental difference between a re-release and a remaster may simply be how much time has passed because the remaster is generally what is done to a legacy hit to bank off nostalgia for it. This will almost inevitably involve a graphical upgrade. How can it not? Screen resolutions and graphical fidelity will have advanced in the intervening years. And part of the appeal for the game's fan base will be getting the chance to see the game they like looking how it was meant to look.
What exactly constitutes a graphical upgrade varies from remaster to remaster. You might have something like the remastered version of Zelda Wind Waker for Wii U where the basic models are the same but benefit from improved resolution and lighting effects. Or you might have the Oblivion remaster or Grand Theft Auto Trilogy where the textures and character models all got swapped out for high-res versions.
As someone with an investment in historical games preservation, I much prefer the first approach to the second. What fundamentally defines a remaster is that it still contains the architecture of the original game underneath it all. probably the same code, the same gameplay design, same level layouts, just with all the visual assets spruced up and some extras bolted on. And what we learned from things like the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy is that all atrocious bugs aside, the combination of up-to-date high-deaf character models with old animations and environments creates an off-putting visual clash that kills the original property's visual identity.
The holy grail for a remaster, in my view, is one that looks like how you remember it. Not like how it actually looked, how you remember it through the rose tinted haze of nostalgia. Sonic Mania isn't a remaster, but it illustrates what I'm talking about extremely well. When you play it, you're utterly convinced you're playing an extension of the classic 16-bit Sonic games you loved as a kid. You need a side-by-side comparison to notice that Sonic Mania actually has a lot more color and detail and adds about twice as many frames to all the standard animations.
So, having established that a re-release is the same game again, and a remaster is the skeleton of the same game with new wallpaper, we reach the final terminal stage of IP milking with the remake, which in contrast to the remaster contains not a crumb of the original game and has been completely reconstructed from the ground up. The engine, gameplay, design, and story scenes, all rebuilt to reflect modern sensibilities. My tolerance for such things has a very clearly defined stopping point. It will encompass games like Black Mesa and the Resident Evil 2 Remake because I believe in these cases the original games were from an older era of technology that imposed limitations upon the concept realizing their full potential, especially RE2 with its fixed cameras and its blocky 32-bit models.
This tolerance does not extend to the Resident Evil 4 remake or the Silent Hill 2 remake. The original games in these cases were not held back by the technology of their times, or if they were, that only became part of their identity. As discussed in my previous Semi-Ramblomatic on the Silent Hill 2 remake and how its occasional awkwardness inadvertently became part of its unique vibe, the remakes therefore felt less like transcending the material and more like sanding down its identity to meekly fit in alongside the blandly polished experiences of the current era of AAA. Motivated more by cashing out name recognition than in preservation.
And that in three nutshells is how I categorize incidents of video game repetition. I'm aware not everyone shares my definitions. The Steam version of Last of Us 2 calls itself "remastered", even though I'd classify it a re-release. I'm also aware there's plenty of rewords we haven't covered. Reboots, for example, those are a completely different thing. A reboot in either the hard or soft variety is something you do to a whole franchise rather than an individual game. The Tomb Raider reboot wasn't a re-thread of anything. Oh, yes. And then there's re-imaginings, which is in a world of its own. Frankly, I'm not sure I can define re-imagining. I don't have a formal distinction, but you know, when they remade The Lion King to look photorealistic, that's one thing I would classify as a re-imagining. You know, something best not dwelt upon.