What makes a remaster different from a remake?
With all these old games finding new life these terms are getting confused
WACO, Texas (KWTX) -
If you think about it Video games are in a unique way a fairly impermanent thing because as technology has improved, preservation of older games has become more and more of an issue. 1000′s of games are still relegated to older hardware making access to older titles difficult and at times impossible. So what’s the solution? Well publishers have a few options. Remake the title with an all new team, all new assets for a modern audience, remaster the original, updating the visuals and controls or rerelease the original making it available through emulated software for current technology. The problem is the industry can’t seem to decide what words mean what. So, I figure, with all the recent remakes, remasters and releases we’ve seen in the last decade I’d take you through what the differences are why some are soulless cash grabs and others just make sense. I’m Andrew Hamilton and this is another edition of THINGS NOBODY ASKED TO KNOW.
We’ll start with the most common of the bunch, the sparkly 4K paint covered remaster. These are sometimes under sneaky names, like definitive edition or special edition but typically the idea is to take an older title like Halo, update the visuals, controls and improve the frame rate to deliver a better version of the original. Sometimes the simple act of jumping to HD or even 4K is enough to make an old title feel new. A great example of this is the Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection on the PS4. The original games are excellent, but they have long since been made antiquated by modern standards. The cover system was broken causing shoot outs to be annoying and unfun, issues with movement resulted in a lot of irritating climbing deaths. Blue Point took all that and refreshed it opening a pandoras box of possibilities for the combat encounters. On the other end of that scale is the Master Chief Collection, a remaster of the original set of games. The updated visuals ended up destroying a lot of the visual clarity the original games had, the cut scenes were impressive, but it was plagued with bugs and glaring technical oversites. I mean look at this mess, it may be shinier but it is not better! The industry loves to remaster titles and up until the last few years they mostly focused on remastering things we still had access to. Luckily teams like Aspyr, Blue Point and Night Dive studios are bringing back games we actually don’t have a way to play yet. When done correctly remasters can be the definitive way to play an older title, better fulfilling what the developers were originally going for.
Remakes are a different beast all together. These are a lot less common and a lot more controversial. Just this year we’ve had 2 major remakes in Final Fantasy VII Rrebirth and Silent Hill 2 Remake both incredibly well received and both aiming for complete different definitions of a remake. Usually a remake is when you redesign a game from the ground up in a new game engine, with new assets, entirely redone everything, with modern audiences in mind, while retaining the key characters and identity of the original. From there it gets a little...branchy? You see Silent Hill 2 Remake is a nearly one to one copy of the original game but made in a new engine with altered combat mechanics and new more cinematic camera angles. So a remake is supposed to just recreate the original but with newer graphics and controls right? Fans don’t always seem to think so. The Last of Us part One is a full from the ground up remake of the original, but it plays exactly the same, no changes to the story or the gameplay at all. Gamers seemed annoyed it was being called a remake and not a remaster. Final Fantasy VII Remake is a complete overhaul of that game, recreating the world from a new perspective, with no turn based combat turning the game into a 3rd person action RPG. So what counts and what doesn’t. Truth is regardless of what gamers think, Remakes are any older title being recreated from the ground up with modern technology to bring in current players to experience the game.
But you can see why there is some confusion. Sometimes it seems like even the industry doesn’t know what qualifies as a remake or remaster! Dead Rising “Remastered” just released this month and despite being called a remaster, they recreated the original in an all new engine and added in new costumes! THATS A REMAKE! So let me help make it clear for everyone going forward: A remake is a game recreating an older title from the ground up but not necessarily always shot for shot, for a modern audience. A REMASTER is the updating of graphics, resolution, and controls of an existing game for current hardware. Think of this one as a splash of new paint on an old building. Rereleases are when a game currently available on one system is ported and brought to another system. Thus rereleasing the game. I hope this helps make these terms less confusing. Now everyone tell Sony to Remaster Bloodborne, tell Nintendo to remake Star Fox and tell Microsoft to make a new Banjo Kazooie. Be sure to subscribe to us over on YouTube so you never miss an exciting video like this.
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