Game developers are not lazy. It’s not exactly brain surgery, but it is a complex, demanding job – from QA testing right up to game directing – that has little room for off-days or rest. No, the right word is cheap. Game development studios as a whole, their bosses who make the decisions, and their publishers or owners who provide some or all of the money are as cheap as possible. They want more for less, they overscope projects (accidentally or otherwise) to fit in more features that almost certainly won’t be ready in time, they force crunch on employees to get things done.
The lazy developer is a myth, but the cheap executive is as blatant in this industry as it is everywhere else. Nowhere is it more obvious than the murky world of re-releases, remasters, remakes, and reimaginings. After playing a few new takes on some of my favorite games I have a message for everyone: we have to stop accepting the cheap remaster.
It started with Grim Fandango, the first remaster I was properly excited for. Generally I skew new rather than old and heavy remake or sequel over remaster – the originals exist, they’re usually perfectly playable through emulation if nothing else, and I’d rather something flawed but intriguing than the exact same ground re-trod. That said, a few games mean enough to me that I’m happy to see them up-rezzed, bug-fixed, and otherwise improved without necessarily including complete reinvention.
Which is fine when they actually are a significant improvement over digging out the original disks and installing fan patches. Grim Fandango was not. Bugs went unfixed, the visual upgrade was minimal, and the most significant new features such as a control scheme update and 16:9 resolution were taken from fanworks from over the years. I enjoyed replaying the game, I didn’t like the missed potential.
There are a couple of asterisks that left me disappointed rather than enraged. Grim Fandango Remastered was, at the very least, working with a very old game, for which source code and assets were either difficult/impossible to obtain or not in a format that was easy to update. It’s bringing a previously PC-only game to modern consoles, and done by the relatively small – especially at the time – team at Double Fine with some support from PlayStation to get the rights.
Which is where we come to the crux. However much those rights cost to license from LucasArts-cum-Disney, they had to be factored into the game budget. Take whatever you assume the game is going to make over its release period, remove ancillary costs like store cuts, production of physical copies, and so on, and that’s your maximum budget. Eventually you need to make a profit, of course, which is where the problems come in.
It is basically possible to make a video game do anything you want it to, it just takes time. Need a vast open world filled with characters, quests, voiced dialogue, secrets, enemies, and so on? Okay, that will take ten level designers working for 24 months, supported by three writers, just to do the basics. Those people cost $20,000 a month combined, so that will be $480,000 please. Do the same for gameplay design, cutscenes, character models, sound, animation, general art etc. and you have a game budget. The numbers are pulled out of thin air, but that’s the simple truth of how these things are laid out in scoping documents when pitching to publishers.
It becomes more complicated when plans change. Features are harder to design and implement than expected, bugs are more prevalent than they’re meant to be, there is a global pandemic. The game needs to be delayed – that’s another $20,000 for the level designers to refine their work and the writers to bridge the gaps created by cut content, please. Nothing is released when it’s done, it’s released when the return on investment for more development isn’t going to be positive.
This is a truth that is often ignored because we view games – rightly – as an artform. Only the most brutal of the businessmen of the industry are viewing things in this light, while the actual artists, programmers, testers, and everyone else are (usually) trying to make something good. It particularly muddies the waters in the land of remasters because it can be extremely hard to move the needle on that return on investment, and the creative drive of redoing what came before is lesser.
Imagine, if you will, a game from your childhood, one you love with all your heart. It went under-sequeled for whatever reason – the developer went in a different direction, a later iteration damaged the franchise, they basically made the same game only with waifus in it, pick your poison. They’re doing a remaster! Oh, joyous day, you’re going to buy that, just to relive those summer days free of COVID and capitalism.
So why would the developer, or publisher, or anyone involved, need to put in the significant increase in money (10s or 100s of times as much) for a Final Fantasy 7 style giga-upgrade Remake with ground-up rebuilds of all your favorite scenes in a brand-new way when they could just take the original code, up-rez the textures, and put it out Spyro-style? They have your buy, and the buys of everyone like you, and a pretty decent portion of folks who missed it the first time round but can be convinced by borrowed nostalgia and decent reviews.
After all, it’s still a good game! It will have some oddities thanks to age, but will receive praise for being faithful and true to its roots. Things like writing and art direction don’t age, and there’s always the massive groups of gamers who vastly prefer games from the SNES-to-PS2 era for their simplicity and originality. Hell, if Square hadn’t already spent the early to mid ‘10s re-releasing FF7 on every platform under the sun anyway, they’d probably still be doing those minor-tweak relaunches.
How do we know? That’s exactly what they’ve been doing with the pixel remasters for Final Fantasy 4-6, not to be confused with the iOS re-releases, or the initial 3D versions of FF3 and FF4, all of which had their own problems. Re-done sprites that didn’t seem to have been looked over by a human with eyes, new text boxes without any soul or appropriate for English text, gameplay tweaks that didn’t make much sense. All very odd.
But it is in those Final Fantasy re-releases that we see another, big problem. The second time those games were remade, for the Game Boy Advance, a fair amount of extra content was added. For FF6 this included new summons, new areas, and new superbosses. For the Pixel Remasters? Gone. Square Enix cannot even manage to give a ‘definitive’ version of its own games, making it difficult to recommend a version.
There’s also times when additional elements are half-developed or done for only specific areas of the game. Again in the latest version of FF6, the HD-2D graphical style made famous by Octopath Traveler and its ilk is used for just one scene – they didn’t remake the entire game in this style because they knew the game would be successful enough without it, that the investment wasn’t worth it.
WarCraft III: Reforged is an example of an occasion where that assumption was wrong, with the corners cut and changes made – even ones that stretched back to impact the original game – being too much. I can’t tell you if it actually made its development budget back, but the damage it dealt to Blizzard’s reputation (along with everything else the company was going through at the time) was costly. Let’s not even start to discuss the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition, I don’t have the words in me.
Then there’s the example that inspired this rant in the first place, which is Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. I, as I’ve re-learned about myself while playing this, adore Mass Effect. It is my favorite game series, including my favorite game (Mass Effect 3, we’ll fight about it some other time though), and I would rate it as some of the best science fiction ever created. The first game in the series has some flaws, some pretty big ones, and Legendary Edition put a lot of effort into fixing those. New leveling mechanisms, better weapon handling and driving, vastly improved graphics – the list goes on.
It also didn’t fix a laundry list of problems with game logic, graphical glitches, and even removed some features. These are, in-turn, fixed or available through the community patch initiative, an evolution of a similar patch for the original games. To fix all three, it adds up to seven gigabytes of changes the community has put out, none of which are adding new content.
Not only was the Legendary Edition released with these problems in place, it has not been fixed to include these in the time since – patch budgets are, unsurprisingly, even harder to argue for than delays or games in the first place. If you aren’t playing on PC, or don’t want to go to the effort of downloading a mod manager and setting it up, you’re out of luck. Enemies will look out of place, textures will be wrong, game logic won’t fire properly, minor features like glowing points of interest on system maps will be missing.
Is that not ridiculous? Legendary Edition was $60 on release, and still is unless you wrangle a sale or opt for EA’s subscription option. Is my $60 not worth the extra paid hours of developer time to implement these community patches into the games? Is the $18 for FF6 not worth the money it would cost to pay a developer to go in and grab the GBA files and implement them in the Pixel Remaster, making it definitive?
It should never be up for debate which version of a game is best – and if it’s really going to be controversial, make new content, graphical modes, and so on toggleable. Ship me the lot and I’ll choose what I want. You can even charge me more for it, because it’s a better product – but I’d rather you worried less about the profit margin and more about the love you’re giving to an old game.
We adore these games. We should expect the same level of respect for them from the executives who decide how much time their developers put in.
