Re-Re-Master: The State of Remasters

Last night Sony fanfared their latest State of Play to announce the death of new ideas. While I am quite excited for a new setting for the Ghosts of… series, PlayStation also announced a number of Remasters. As a big fan of VR, it was nice to see that PlayStation remembered that they released a VR headset – seeing a new take on the Metro series with a new game made from the ground up in Metro Awakening looks great, but the patched-in VR controlled version of Hitman: World of Assassination does not look as enticing –especially if the recent Meta Quest release is anything to go by (although I remain hopeful this may have just been a testing ground to sort through a Hit list of issues that can be fixed ahead of the PS VR2 release.)

Two of the bigger headline announcements from the State of Play were Remasters. With a remaster of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1+2 that fans of the original have been asking for many years and the (much rumoured) remaster of the first game in the series Horizon Zero Dawn – that if the comments section is to be believed no one was asking for. I am sure there are mega-fans of the adventures of Aloy who are pleased by this news, but many people seem to echo the opinion that this is too much too soon. There was also the announcement of the Lunar Remastered Collection. All three game series are called remasters and come from different time periods. Lunar* and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver were originally PS1 games (although I also associated Legacy of Kain with the Dreamcast, as this was where I first encountered it) but HZD only came out on the PS4. (EDIT – *As noted in the comments below, this was actually not the first version of Lunar!)

I would preface that any real complaints of remastering Horizon Zero Dawn can largely be offset by the announcement that there will be a £9.99 upgrade path for anyone that already owns the PS4 version and this was a wise move from PlayStation. Nipping many complaints in the bud. They also spoke about how they are re-recording facial captures and porting the original PS4 game into the engine made for Horizon Forbidden West – but was anyone really complaining about the visual quality of Zero Dawn? It still looks good by modern standards – in fact I would say it looks better than half the games in last night’s State of Play –especially when looking at the ugly arse dragons in Dragon Age: The Veilguard! (This may need a graphical remaster before release, especially when compared to the graphics of Monster Hunter Wilds later in the presentation.)

There are also a number of rumours that Days Gone is due for a remake but aside from BRB’s Coleman love for that game, I am not sure who this is for either. I swear there are more zombies in one scene of that game than there are players who played the original let alone are clamouring for a remake. There are so many more fans of Bloodborne who would literally kill a whole village of people for a remake of that game and it seems that FromSoft have no interest in working on a title that will only be released on PlayStation, but Bluepoint Games did such a good job on the 2020 remaster of Demon’s Souls that accompanied the launch of PS5. A year after this in 2021, PlayStation acquired the studio. They are currently rumoured to be working on original content, but given that they had proved themselves to be the masters of the remaster, this seems like a crazy decision. I swear if they are working on a live service game, that is a decision that needs urgent, violent remastering.

The three new games announced in the State if Play were all arguably AA games rather than AAA :– The Midnight Walk, AcheAge: Chronicles and Hell Is Us all looked interesting and will likely gain some interest but none are these are liable to be pushing the PS5 to the point where people are going to be rushing out to fork out cash for the £700(!) newly announced PS5 Pro. If the thinking behind remastering HZD is that they can zoom in on a blade of grass or the shiny new detail of a robo dino to convince me to go Pro then I think that will come up short too.

PlayStation faced criticisms for the pricing of the Pro, which were quelled slightly by the subsequent announcement of the popular 30th Anniversary Grey colour variants – although the premium extra price and limited quantity of these may end up doing more for scalpers than fans or restoring PlayStation’s desire to be seen as “for the fans”. There was a cursory nod to the PS5 Pro with it being mentioned briefly alongside a slightly expanded list of games that will be enhanced for the Pro, but given how much criticism that the price came under and given that this event was their first major chance for the games to strengthen their argument, I thought this fell slightly flat.

Most notably, the montage of games hoping to sell the PS5 Pro were quickly glossed over to move on to the final announcement of the State of Play. It was known that Sucker Punch was working on a follow-up to Ghost of Tsushima, but most people assumed a direct sequel rather than moving over to the mainland with a new main character for the all-new Ghosts of Yōtei. This made for a great endpoint for an overall okay State of Play. Ghosts of Yōtei will probably do more than most of this presentation to help sell the PS5 Pro, but that isn’t coming until sometime (and I would guess later) in 2025. We started the PS5 generation with a PS5 remaster of Ghost of Tsushima as part of the Director’s Cut re-release that saw features such as haptic feedback introduced to the game – this helped cement the game as possibly my favourite game of all time. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to sell me a PS5 Pro. Zooming in on Rachet’s butt hair pixel-by-pixel details did not enhance the chances.