Remaster Disaster (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, February 03, 2022, 10:19 (813 days ago)
edited by Cody Miller, Thursday, February 03, 2022, 10:38

The Life is Strange Remastered collection is not good.

I think it's once again a confusion of remaster vs remake, and a real lesson in artistic intent. There's technical issues that are bummers for sure (loading between smash cuts that weren't there in the original game, the eclipse disappearing, etc) which ruin artistic impact too, but the biggest things are the model "upgrades", the "improved" facial animations, and the lighting.

The remaster moves the game to Unreal Engine 4, and with it comes a lighting upgrade. The lighting is more correct in a technical sense, in that the global illumination is calculating everything realistically. However, this really clashes with the original graphical presentation. Instead of walking into a dorm room that's painted like a watercolor, you get a weird combination of realistic lighting on paint like textures. Everything is more contrasty, with areas of dark shadow that weren't there before. The aesthetics clash horribly. Now True Colors had this type of lighting, but it also abandoned the painted texture look. So it worked. This does not.

Lighting is also a huge huge thing in what generates a feeling in an image.

Boy you said it.

The improved facial animations likewise kind of miss the point. This was never a problem with the originals, because the jank was a part of the design. Nobody ever thought Life is Strange wasn't realistic enough and was held back by graphics. The art style, and even the animation were never meant to convey emotion in that way, and were more or less crafted to present us the story without super detailed faces. It just ends up being weird with the art style and looking off, and some characters (Kate is the most egregious), come off completely differently! Weirdly a lot of the expressions either come across as inappropriate, or too over the top.

True Colors has all this stuff - the lighting and the facial animation, but notice how that game abandoned the painterly style of the other three games (excepting the in game photographs). There, the technology works beautifully to support the style, rather than clash with it.

It's just… yeah don't get this.