I admit I got a little excited for a short while yesterday, after hearing that the Mass Effect trilogy is set for a remaster.
I came to the adventures of Shepard late, missing the first game altogether. I had never been too enamoured with space games and I inadvertently stumbled upon the second game in Blockbuster Video when searching for something to fill a weekend many moons ago.
I loved the whole concept of the game and I even tried not to be too disappointed with the ending served up by the third game. I was probably one of the few who enjoyed Andromeda too, putting the lip synching and all that to one side.
That doesn’t mean I should be too thrilled at the remastered trilogy though, rather I should rejoice at the news that Mass Effect 4 is also being developed. Retro gaming and old games often induce a feeling of nostalgia and we feel that we will enjoy playing through them once again with better graphics, but I’ve spent the last 24 hours wondering if maybe, they should be left in the past.
‘Our goal was not to remake or reimagine the original games, but to modernize the experience so that fans and new players can experience the original work in its best possible form’, says director Casey Hudson, who will help bring the games to a new army of gamers who have perhaps not played them. However, will they be truly appreciated as the excellent titles they were?
The problem, for me at least, is that games are judged by two audiences, those who played them the first time and those who did not. If you played the original trilogy then sure, maybe you want to throw another 100 hours at them looking slightly better, but I worry that some of the limitations of the age will become glaringly obvious. It’s a bit like with the recent Mafia remastered release; sure, they game looks better, but gameplay, mechanics and themes have moved on since the originals. Are they not better remembered how they were, not measured by today’s standards?
That brings me to the new gamers playing these titles for the first time – the only yardstick they have to measure them with is that of current generation games, and that means that they get a bit of a unfair ride. Take the Assassin’s Creed series; the Ezio trilogy was cutting edge for its time, but with limited side quests and some questionable mechanics, does it really stand up to the likes of Unity? For its time, it was a better game, but pound for pound, did the remastered trilogy offer the same depth and variety as a release several years later which was panned by critics? Maybe, maybe not.
I can’t help but feel I might pop the Mass Effect titles in my machine and have some of the memories spoiled a tad as I try to rank it by today’s standards. It’s the same reason I couldn’t get through my attempted playthrough of GTA Vice City – it was a great game of its time, but not by today’s standards and I just kept being reminded of how far gaming had come, not how good it used to be.
In my opinion, gaming is very much ‘of the time’, and a classic is so because of what it achieved on the machine it was released upon. Remastering a version appeals to our sense of nostalgia and a desire to look back fondly on things, but it is also a cheap win for a developer looking to prise money from your wallet. I know, I’ll get shot down for this by many (I say many, maybe ten read these articles and maybe two care), but classics might be best left in the past. I would much rather developers put their time into ensuring their current releases don’t need opening day patches, or lack the same impression on the current machines that the older title have, than try to live the glories of the past with games that were great in their day, but are best remembered as they were back then, not as they are by today;s advances.