More bugs that affect the artists (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, December 09, 2019, 10:49 (1600 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

It’s also really tricky to describe visual changes as purely good or purely bad. The original release of Reach suffered from a great deal of visual ghosting, particularly when rendering objects in motion. That blurry, “double-vision” look was ever-present. This MCC release has fixed that problem. I look at it and think “this is how I’d always wished Reach looked”, but from a purely archival point of view, this improvement does change “the look” of the game.

This is fine, because it preserves the artistic intent. The temporal anti aliasing is shit, but necessary because of the hardware. New hardware, no longer necessary. This is more of a technical choice than an artistic one in my opinion.

Same goes for the frame rate. Stutter and slow-down was part of the original look. Playing the game at 60fps is not “true to the original aesthetic”, but I’m sure most people prefer it nonetheless.

This is a technical improvement, not an artistic one. Stutter and slow down were not used purposefully in some artistic manner. There are some games (mostly older games for older consoles) that were balanced around this, and thus it IS a part of the game. Gradius 3 is an example. There is a ROM patch out there which makes the game play smooth, but it is unreasonably hard as a result. Case by case basis.

At the end of the day, all this stuff will boil down to personal preferences. In the case of The Last of Us Remastered, I actually preferred the visuals of the original PS3 version. The artistic design that went into creating the textures was perfectly suited to the screen resolution of the PS3. The lower resolution actually helped blur the lines (literally) between texture maps, sprites, and fully 3D assets. In the Remastered version, the higher screen resolution just made it easier to see the separate elements that were layered together. Walls that looked like cracked brick covered in vines on the PS3 now looked more like a smooth surface covered in wallpaper painted to look like bricks and vines, with a few sprites sticking out to give the illusion of depth.

I never played it on PS3, but this kind of the thing I'm talking about.

All this to say, I think it’s perfectly fair for someone to look at a game like MCC Reach and day “I prefer the look of the original”. I don’t happen to agree in this case, but that doesn’t matter. Where I push back is when there are claims of disrespect to the original vision, or something along those lines.

It's just carelessness. That can be disrespectful depending on how you look at it. This is not nearly as bad as the Halo 1 'classic' mode on the visual side. But on the audio side I'd say it actually is disrespectful to release as it now sounds.