Jason Moyer on 28/6/2022 at 02:24
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
FFS, why do so many people keep mindlessly throwing around the word "remastered" when talking about the Night Dive projects that are clearly labeled "enhanced"? This obviously isn't a remaster, it's just the same old assets shoved through a filter and dragged into a new engine.
Quake is labelled as enhanced, but it uses new assets? I appreciate pedantry, but I dunno.
ZylonBane on 28/6/2022 at 16:29
When a game has the "Remastered" suffix slapped on, it implies that ALL (or at least most) of the assets have been remastered. Quake Enhanced only remasters the weapon and AI models. The world textures, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the game's graphics, are untouched.
But of course you already know all this and are just making a weak attempt at being contrarian.
Aja on 28/6/2022 at 20:29
When used in the original musical sense, remastering means applying new final processing to the existing finished tracks. Unless the project is being remixed as well, the actual content of the music doesn't change at all. So if we're being truly pedantic, we should acknowledge that there are no true remasters in gaming; only varying degrees of remake (remixes?).
Jason Moyer on 29/6/2022 at 02:49
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
When a game has the "Remastered" suffix slapped on, it implies that ALL (or at least most) of the assets have been remastered. Quake Enhanced only remasters the weapon and AI models. The world textures, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the game's graphics, are untouched.
But of course you already know all this and are just making a weak attempt at being contrarian.
I actually wasn't sure and appreciate the explanation.
Thirith on 29/6/2022 at 07:30
A quick Google search doesn't reveal any hard-and-fast definitions like the ones ZylonBane describes above, even if they might be handy. I am pretty certain they picked the title because of the film's Esper machine and its enhance function, and they would've used that title too if the game had better fit ZB's definition of a remaster.
demagogue on 29/6/2022 at 10:38
The thing is, we're talking about marketing, and marketing doesn't have to care about the technical meaning of words anyway. Their job is to succinctly communicate to the market why their product is worth spending money on, when "other versions" of "more or less the same game" are out there. Or even more basically, their job is to construct in the player's mind what this is vis-a-vis the original. "Remaster" implies a game is basically the same as an original release except the assets are updated, and "enhanced" carries the implication of new features, so between those two options, it's pretty evident why they'd go for the latter.
I suppose that does overlap with the technical meaning, but the important point is that it should be doing so for marketing reasons, not because they're doing any kind of public service for players per se.
ZylonBane on 29/6/2022 at 15:23
Quote Posted by Aja
When used in the original musical sense, remastering means applying new final processing to the existing finished tracks. Unless the project is being remixed as well, the actual content of the music doesn't change at all. So if we're being truly pedantic, we should acknowledge that there are no true remasters in gaming; only varying degrees of remake (remixes?).
The most pure analogy to remastering a video game would be to go to the original, presumably higher-quality source files, and re-export them at higher resolution, bit depth, frame rate, etc. This seems to be rare though, probably due to source files from old games commonly being lost, insufficiently high-res, etc.
The more common approach is to draw all-new, but similar, textures from scratch. Faithfulness to the originals may vary.
Then there's AI upscaling of the original assets. Ugh.
Aja on 29/6/2022 at 21:21
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
The most pure analogy to remastering a video game would be to go to the original, presumably higher-quality source files, and re-export them at higher resolution, bit depth, frame rate, etc. This seems to be rare though, probably due to source files from old games commonly being lost, insufficiently high-res, etc.
Agreed. I can't think of any actual example of it, though. Dema's right that "remaster" means whatever the marketers want it to mean.
