Pulling from the past

 Burn the past.

We've touched on this before, but given the increasing success of remakes over the brand newly conceptualised titles of the current year, I can't help but ponder the idea of remakes and their place within the world of modern gaming more and more. I mean just look at the past few AAA titles to come out: Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, Redfall- all terribly broken and buggy at launch, a few broken far beyond repair. (But still those developers want to try and stick with it, because people don't know when to put down a lame horse anymore I guess.) And then look at the AAA titles that were remakes which launched around about the same time. Resident Evil 4, Dead Space- fantastically reviewed, beloved titles that few people have anything substantively bad to report about. And yes, The Last of Us Part 1 has it's place in there, shill cash grab of a remake that was, but right now it's the exception rather than the rule.

Given recent empirical data it would seem we've rubbed up against that wall of compounding development teams and costs- where the vast ambition of the final products simply can't be met within development windows. Of course, Redfall had something else clearly going on that we've yet to uncover as a community, but for the most part the issues are bare and obvious; games can only feasibly get so big without it reflecting badly against the typical time to develop. Just as how big high-CGI Marvel movies simply can't be pushed out in such close proximity as they have been over the past two years without crimes against visual design coming out the pipe-line, giant games can't be cobbled together to working order in that old 2-3 year cycle that our industry loves to tout. Especially not in the present when every other game and it's mother wants to be the new 'biggest game ever'.

Whatever happened to nailing a simple premise for all to love in some small degree? Picking a niche, taking an idea, and expanding on that to it's core-most ideal- providing some small experience unlike anything else available to the masses? No, now we have to make everything a grand open world sweeping adventure that shoots it's players giant fully-developed narratives, side games, meta games and an online competitive scene. Every new game has to be the 'next generation of open world games', so giant it will swallow up your entire life and leave you a gasping husk of an empty human, totally devoid of any personal thought and drive. Which is... I mean is that a good thing? Yeah... yeah I'm sure that's the natural endgame everyone yearns for. We all want that GTA Online money, right? The money to literally buy our own Cayman island and live away from society for the rest of our natural lives. Not that the developers would ever that kind of money even if they could make those sorts of games.

So instead of focusing on the big new releases and their unrestrained ambition, we can instead look inwards to the influences of those games. The incredible confined yet polished stories that inspired the developers of today back when they had free time and hopes for the future, to pursue game design themselves that they one day might create something as special with their own hands to inspire a new generation some day. Resident Evil 4 revolutionised it's franchise and third person action games, so let's get back to that. Dead Space refreshed the horror scene with a new almost lovecraftian-meets-body-horror take. (Lovecraft actually is a bit body horror on it's own, now I think about it.) And if we're to take the rumours and 'leaks' of the past few weeks, this trend is only going to extend in the years to come as what was old is destined to become new again.

The most obvious example to pull from would be Persona 3 and it's long rumoured and recently leaked remake which is being worked on at ATLUS. (Allegedly.) Using the meteoric momentum built up by the explosion of the Persona franchise in popularity and funnelling it towards a game that many of the die hard fans still consider to be an unsung masterpiece. Using a story framework that exists, developing within that constraint and punching up everything around it to a mouth watering degree- the winning formula of all these recent remakes. Of course, I would personally also push for some narrative rewrites and reworks to incorporate some of the elements that weren't so well explored in the original, as well as a total restructuring of all Social Links to not be quite so... limiting. But it's a product with a pre-existing fanbase and a perceived quality attributed to it- you won't see remakes of failed games to try and fix what was broken, but retreads to capture that post glory and share it out for the crowd. 

Just as what would be the case with Knights of the Old Republic, if that remake ever ends up actually being made. A game that already had a smaller audience than your typical Star Wars fare simply by warrant of it being an RPG in the vein of DnD; but which has a place of honour for how it retold and remixed a familiar Star Wars narrative formula and played on audience expectation in a way they didn't anticipate. To this day fans yearn for a day when KOTOR could be reintroduced back into the canon, with all of it's fan favourite characters and lore tidbits largely intact; and that's the promise that this remake would have provided. More than a proposed adaptation either in film or movie; a remake would have been the perfect way to bring back what fans loved whilst heralding the modern world of Star Wars who had only heard of this apex of creation into picking up the, presumably decently more accessible this time around, port.

And now, I can say this with a bit of excitement once again, there's the Metal Gear Solid 3 Remake. Yes, apparently it's actually happening this time around, no take-backsies, for real-reals. After Konami demonstrated how pathetically incapable they are at carrying on the Metal Gear franchise by themselves, and to even hold their own in  a market that roundly hates them, remaking MGS3 is kind of like a last ditch attempt to score nostalgia points. Using the masterful work of Kojima for their advantage and almost certainly without his involvement overseeing it all. But by god is it a good choice. Even as a cynical ploy I can't help it- MGS 3 is literally my favourite game of all- I have to get excited about this. Even knowing I'm being manipulated, there's not a damn thing I can do about and that irks me to absolutely no end.

We can see the strings of what a Remake does to us, but what I find just fascinating is the way it lays the bodywork for the best games of this generation. As if the sheer over-ambition of modern games is what scuppers them, and by following a simpler framework from a more sensible time, new games can be created to that impeccable standard the AAA market has established for itself. What was starting to become a begrudging reality of the industry is steadily becoming it's sole saviour, and I for one welcome our new remake overlords as long as they don't start getting lazy with it- oh wait, the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters just dropped with their boring unified UI design and ugly text proportions- well there goes the new standard!