Remastering Recent Games Is A Pointless, Sisyphean Task
Leaks yesterday revealed screenshots from the still unannounced but imminently releasing remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Today, other leakers say Bethesda is also working on a remake of Fallout 3. This happens the same month the PC received The Last of Us Part II Remastered, meaning we can only be minutes away from the announcement of The Last of Us Part I getting a re-re-remaster for PS5 Pro. Meanwhile, gaming history is being lost to the grim swamps of forgotten copyrights, anti-piracy measures and advancing technology, while fresh new ideas are so vanishingly rare as to be considered wildcard maverick moves.
I obviously understand why companies want to remaster their games. It's a lot of hard work, but it's a lot less hard work than making a whole new game, and only one of them is certain to make lots of money. New games, and especially new IPs, now come with enormous risk, where hundreds of millions of dollars can evaporate in a single disastrous launch week. The teams creating Concord and Suicide Squadworked incredibly hard, exhaustingly so, and the results were massive financial black holes. If their time had instead been dedicated to making a proven success look prettier, profits would have been practically guaranteed. Remastering games is a pragmatic decision based on prudent economics. It's just that it also sucks.
Here's a secret fact about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: It works just fine. Great, in fact. Released in 2006, you can buy it from Steam right now for $15 (and frequently far, far less), and it works perfectly right away. It runs in 2560x1440, requires no hacks or mods, and within minutes of booting it up just now I wasn't noticing that the graphics are dated. Heck, Bethesda games' graphics are dated at launch, invariably improved by modders in the months that follow—no one was buying Oblivion for its looks in 2006, not least the hilariously terrible character models. And given Starfield's are just as embarrassing, it's not like that's going to suddenly improve either.
The point is, Oblivion already exists in a very playable form that's just as entertaining and flawed as it was 20 years ago. Also, there are 20 years' worth of mods to improve all the aspects that Bethesda is pathologically incapable of doing well—UI, facial animations, inventory arrangement, voice acting, textures—to have the game look and run exactly as you want. So what, precisely, is an officially remastered Oblivion for?
Yes, like I said, it's for making money, especially from long-term fans of the game who do want to see it look prettier, returning to a Cyrodiil whose graphics look like their two-decade-old invented memories of the original. There's also the potential to draw in a new audience who's perhaps only ever played Skyrim, so they can be disappointed to learn the predecessor wasn't nearly as good. But even Skyrim's original audience is noticing a little more grey in their hair, given that was nearly 14 years ago.
This is then made more frustrating given the extraordinary efforts of the Skyblivion modders, who have spent over a decade remaking Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, hoping to finally finish their herculean project in 2025. They say they aren't too upset by the clash with this official remaster, but come on—how incredibly galling for them. Yet it's worth noting that Skyblivion has a far more distinct aesthetic than the wishy-washy meh-ness of what we've seen of Bethesda's version in the leaks.
Releasing remasters is now incredibly commonplace, for all the reasons given above, but there's also a sad irony to this focus on remastering big-name titles from the past few decades. While GOG has recently launched some significant efforts to preserve PC gaming, it's barely scratching the surface of a vast history of video games that are being lost to time and technology, because those who own the rights either don't care or are actively hostile to anyone attempting to preserve their games for them. Games that cannot just be bought from Steam and run with a click are certainly not receiving elaborate remakes, and can now only be played via illegal methods.
Now, I'm not daft, and I'm not advocating for publishers to spend millions of dollars remastering forgotten, obscure games from their 1980s and '90s catalogues; I know they're far more likely to plunder them for titles to attach to wildly different new games (cough-Marathon-cough). Still, I do really believe that dedicating a fraction of the resources that go into remasters to preserving a company's back-catalogue would be beneficial to humanity. Or, you know, just releasing them into the public domain like they obviously should.
However, I think this should also be recognized as part of the existential malaise in which video games now find themselves, where the AA game is all but non-existent and new ideas are kryptonite to publishers.
Yes, the ballooning costs of game development would be the subject of a whole other article, and the industry's obsessive focus on live-service is yet another, but these and other crippling aspects of game creation under late-stage capitalism all contribute toward the reasons why remastering has become so endemic. As I've said, it's safe. And right now, publishers are retreating toward perceived safety like terrified kittens. But doing this can only make the problems worse—they can only solidify the notion that the only sure way to make a profitable game is to have it be one you've made already.
What we need are bold new ideas made at sensible prices. And it's agonizing to watch the indie world produce original hit after original hit, and publishers unable to recognize how they could be funding and profiting from this phenomenon at a AA level. The reason there are so many great games to plunder and remaster is because for decades previously, this is how game development worked! There was no need for a game to make half a billion dollars for it to have been worth releasing, when doing so gave the developers the opportunity to create fresh conceits that could gain widening popularity that fueled ever-more sequels and spin-offs.
Because while it's grimly amusing to joke about Naughty Dog remaking the same three games for the rest of eternity, the company also demonstrates that it's a Sisyphean task. Endlessly updating a game to reflect the latest gimmicks in graphics is folly, that boulder always rolling back down as fast as it can be pushed up, withe the miserable irony that it's just as good of a boulder when left at the bottom of the hill.
Bethesda, for crying out loud, get on with making TheElder Scrolls VI and leave the perfectly good and perfectly enjoyable Oblivion and Fallout 3 to the modders. And, for goodness sakes, release Morrowind's source code. And the same goes for everyone else.
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