A particular quote often comes to mind when I consider the video game industry, and it’s from Ben Starr. I’m a big fan of Mr. Starr and have nothing but good things to say about him, but at the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards, he declared: ‘It is absolutely criminal that we do not have an official 60 frames per second version of Bloodborne.’
Criminal? Seriously, Ben? There are murderers walking the streets. The sitting U.S. President is named more often in Epstein filings than God or Jesus in the Bible. I get it, we all have our own definition of ‘criminal.’ I’d personally love to round up people with no spatial awareness, those who abandon their shopping carts, and the bozos who can’t find their turn signal while driving, and cannon them in the midday sun. I also understand the frustration of not being able to play your favorite old game as well as it ran all those years ago when you first experienced it. However, when the community clamors for remakes, I believe what we truly need for the vast majority of these titles are good ports. The same graphics, the same gameplay, and even the same performance in some cases—just playable on more than one aging console. As we saw with the 3DS and Wii U, it’s far too easy for games locked to a single platform to vanish forever.
This isn’t to disavow remakes entirely. No, I think some fantastic remakes exist. Capcom, for instance, does a brilliant job of adapting the scares of the Resident Evil franchise to modern standards. I also think a remaster can be a good compromise, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But the waters between a remaster and a remake have become so muddied these days that it’s hard to truly define what separates them. Ports and optimization work, however, are often overlooked. It’s less exciting to be offered the same old game, but it might be a better option for many developers and titles. Sometimes it feels like GOG is the only major player keeping old PC games available without completely retooling the experience for a remake.
Remakes are fun, they’re flashy, but they also cost a lot of money and time. The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is a prime example. It’s not just about taking old code and making it shiny and new; it’s essentially creating a new game at that scale, even if you have a solid foundation to build upon. In an era where AAA development budgets are exploding, it feels like it’s better to save money where possible and invest potential remake funds into something else. As for time savings, while porting isn’t something you can do with a snap of your fingers, it’s far easier to bring old games as-is to new platforms with minor updates than to create a brand new AAA experience with all the bells and whistles people expect from their games today.
Returning to the Bloodborne example, we know that if it were to be remade, FromSoftware would be the studio to do it. However, FromSoftware, like I imagine many other studios, prefers to work on something new. Remakes can be absolute certainties, just like any game, because you already have a fanbase, and you don’t need to pitch them a new intellectual property. It’s easy to see why many studios make them. However, we might be missing out on dream projects and exciting new universes if developers simply spent their time working on a remake. Imagine if Baldur’s Gate III hadn’t come out because Larian worked on Baldur’s Gate II Remake instead, for example. This is hypothetical, so it’s not the strongest anti-remake argument, but given how consumer release schedules can be remake-focused, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve missed out on some truly interesting original works over the years.
I also think there’s something to be said for the fact that players can still play a great number of the games for which they want remakes. As mentioned, GOG is a place where you can find games like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Dragon Age: Origins, Dino Crisis, and tons of other titles. Sure, they have their quirks, and they show their age more than a five- or ten-year-old game, but as games broaden every year, it seems like things like graphics and a universally accepted visual standard are being thrown out the window. You expect a certain level of quality from a AAA experience, but when games like Slay the Spire 2 reach hundreds of thousands of players, I start to think we could probably all stomach early 2000s visuals and performance again if we needed to. Not wanting to waste years of my life waiting for the Knights of the Old Republic remake, I simply grabbed the mobile version and played it on a tablet. It was great. I recently picked up Dragon Age for the first time again. It shows its age, but it also absolutely slaps. Immediately dismissing an old game because of its graphics or performance feels like an outdated attitude, and an opinion truly only championed by the most dedicated ragebait accounts on Twitter who look at anything 2D or with a non-realistic visual style and call it idiocy.
Even if, for whatever reason, the idea of playing an old game as it was, with full functionality via a new port, turns your stomach, there are still plenty of games available that look much better and don’t truly need a remake. You can play Bloodborne as long as you own a PS4 or PS5. Sure, the framerate isn’t 60fps, which might make a blood vessel burst for Ben Starr, but it’s still a fantastic game that doesn’t need a remake. Seeing remakes of titles that are only ten years old, or even younger in some cases, showcases some of the worst trends in modern gaming. It’s corporate greed and consumer entitlement when you boil down the demand for constant remakes to its core. More ports could still encompass both of those things, but at a fraction of the cost in money and time.
Remakes look better, they perform better. You can make a game the dream it was meant to be twenty-odd years ago. However, a port can still introduce a new fanbase to a beloved old title, while also giving it a little TLC to ensure it runs well on a modern machine. The problem with remakes is that they sell the idea that we constantly need new things. This is understandable, of course. If you think about it, you probably have enough games to play and replay to fill ten lifetimes already, so the industry needs to sell us this idea to keep existing.
When I think of the best games from my youth, I don’t think they’re going to benefit from a glossy DLSS 5 overhaul; I simply wish they were playable on a modern machine without praying for a heroic modder to make them compatible with today’s systems. If we were a little more honest with ourselves, and not jumping on the remake demands as soon as we see clips of an old game that still holds up in many ways, I think we would end up with far more ports, and greater long-term preservation of old games.