There are a lot of remakes and remasters right now, aren’t there? More than ever before, it feels like everything’s coming back, from Fatal Frame to Dead Space, and even Alone in the Dark. Here’s the thing though – like the Hollywood remake bonanza starting back in the 2000s, what seems like an endless goldmine does have its limits. There are things to bear in mind, each being foundational to one another.
Firstly, what should be the most obvious yet still bears mentioning: understand the essence of the thing you’re remaking. It doesn’t actually matter how you drastically change something so long as your game gets at the spirit of what came before. The perfect example of this is XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Despite what you may have heard, it’s infinitely gentler than its source material, not to mention an entirely different style of strategy game, that works more like you’re commanding someone to play a long game of Gears of War. Firaxis initially tried to make a straight 1:1 remake of the original game, only to find their attempts weren’t landing well, making them go back to the drawing board to produce the hit reboot.
While simplified, Enemy Unknown resonated with audiences by presenting that exact sort of feel they associated with XCOM. It was the foothold necessary for the far more ambitious XCOM 2, which had a bolder vision for the future of the series that might not have landed with players if it’d been the first entry out of the gate.
By contrast, DICE’s Battlefront in 2015 aimed to capture the spirit of the Star Wars movies instead of the original Battlefront, despite having a similar casual action gameplay focus and eventually receiving a dedicated instant action mode. Why? Because despite being an arguably fairly solid shooter by the end of its lifespan, the essence of Battlefront just wasn’t there. Battlefront is about reliving – and breaking – the most iconic battles in Star Wars history.
Consider then, how outside of the latter three DLC expansions, Battlefront 2015’s entire span of maps are just generic locations that kinda look like but aren’t quite the memorable areas you recall from the movies. You aren’t defending the main Hoth base, but a secondary one. You aren’t besieging the Endor shield bunker, but holding off an AT-AT from routing Rebel forces. You’re just in one of a dozen rocky canyons on Tatooine or Sullust. Players are eternally trapped in side stories that don’t matter.
This is why DICE’s Battlefront 2, whenever possible, maps are now the locations we remember from the movies, and involve the heroes and villains clashing in clear view. Even before they reincorporated Conquest mode under the rebranding of Supremacy, the shift is already there. You aren’t an extra in a Star Wars b-plot, but playing with a full toybox of Star Wars figures.
Of course, some remakes can be more granular, sticking to what came before while tweaking where deemed necessary. In this case, a crucial question a remake has to ask itself is simply: what actually warrants changing? What genuinely constitutes an improvement or purely an equal, yet different, creative flourish. Take the weapons of Dead Space Remake, for instance. Some are far better than they’ve ever been, yet the Linegun is fundamentally broken due to the desire to remix its old functionality – and I mean broken in both senses.
As it’s intended, the Linegun’s proximity laser mines are largely useless since Necromorphs don’t stand still that long. Meanwhile, the community has found dozens of ways to break scripted cutscenes and gameplay balancing with it by attaching the lasers to all kinds of things they were never supposed to be glued to. It’s not even like the Linegun was a weapon desperately asking for reworks. Now I’m sure you’re thinking “Okay, but it’s just a weapon. How big a deal is that when the Remake got so many things right?” Except for some folks, the Linegun was a primary part of their arsenal – as indispensible as the knife in Resident Evil.
Speaking of, if there’s a weapon that just can’t seem to catch a break anymore, it’s the Resident Evil knife. Ever since the decision to make them breakable in Resident Evil 2 Remake, Capcom can’t seem to decide what role the knife truly serves in their series of remakes. Is it a temporary tool? A reliable fallback? The weapon of a skilled player? Resident Evil 4 Remake really tries to tie all these possibilities together, but as a consequence, when you’ve maxed out your knife, it’s one of the most ludicrously overpowered things ever. You’ve got to understand why decisions were made in the past, and how altering even a single mechanical wrinkle can ripple across the entire experience.
That’s one of the most baffling things about Resident Evil 4 Remake – it doesn’t really capitalize all that much on Leon being able to move and shoot at the same time. What should be a game changer feels pointless because the aiming is so much less elegant and the still-cramped environments don’t really encourage harnessing mobility. Some boss fights will reward movement, but others feel more designed for stationary aiming than their original incarnations.
On the flipside, if you’re going to change things – and I mean really change things – you need to commit to it. Don’t drag in parts that don’t fit your new vision. This goes hand in hand with understanding the essence of what came before. If you’re going to update it, you’ve got to have a solid justification for why. When Resident Evil 3 Remake threw a ton of its predecessor’s ideas out, it did so to focus on what most players clearly remembered: the thrill of racing from Nemesis.
Is the remake as deep as the original Resident Evil 3? No, of course not – the original has branching narrative arcs and defeating Nemesis temporarily is what’s necessary to unlock exclusive, upgraded weapons. Yet despite this, Resident Evil 3 Remake is far from a failure.
Do you know what the average completion rate for Resident Evil 3 Remake is, according to Steam? 68.9% To put this into perspective, less than fifty percent of players typically finish any game they play, much less have so minimal a drop-off as Resident Evil 3 Remake accomplishes. It’s a smaller game, but not a humbler one. It narrows its focus into a tight, breathless experience while boasting new ideas (like the expanded Hospital level).
It’s by far one of the tightest paced Resident Evil games ever released, capturing the tone of what came before while updating it in ways that kept players hooked, myself included. It might not have been the epic scale remake Resident Evil 2 received, but even the original Resident Evil 3 was more of a spin-off expansion, rather than the full-fledged entry it was billed as. If Capcom were to truly deliver that, they’d have to maybe finally remake Code Veronica.
But I digress – there are many ways to remake a game, an almost infinite variety. While we might say we want things to be one way or another, the reality is we’re looking for something familiar yet surprising. It’s like hearing a joke again for the first time – a genuine magic trick if done right. In no way is that a simple task, but if the essence is in focus, the changes benefit the core experience.
