Gaming remakes have always done things differently to every other medium. While we see cover versions of songs with new arrangements, productions of old plays with fresh staging choices, and remakes of movies by new directors shooting things in a different way with a different script, gaming remakes often try to be perfect recreations, as seen in the recent Until Dawn.
There is a belief, motivated in part by arrogance and in part by needing to appease a gaming audience that simply wants the same thing but somehow better, that these classic games need to be fixed. That they were held back by their technology and are inherently lesser than games made today because they don’t look as much like photographs. And now, through Fortnite and Overwatch, gaming has started to eat itself.
Fortnite And Overwatch Are Remaking Themselves
Overwatch 2 has just announced the classic 6v6 mode is coming back for a limited-time event, while Fortnite is bringing back the OG map as a permanent fixture. People are happy about both those things, and I don’t want to sap that joy away. But in an era when traditional single-player games are either taking a decade to make or being sacrificed at the live-service altar (or both), I’m more than a little jaded on gaming’s future.
These live-service games, for all the many faults I feel they have around normalising microtransactions and establishing player retention as the most valuable metric by which success can be measured, at least looked to the future. They were always doing new things. They brought some old skins or maps or guns back from time to time, but they kept up their end of the bargain. They were the new game, forever and always. Constantly evolving, constantly changing. Now they are regressing.
Again, people will have a lot of fun in 6v6 (many still feel it is superior to the 5v5 system Overwatch shifted to with the sequel), and I see the point behind Fortnite’s endeavour too. The problem with a game that is constantly changing is that if someone takes a few months off, they can be lost when they return. The OG map offers a time capsule, and there’s value in that. Live-service games have problems with preservation, and Fortnite making this permanent solves that.
Everything Is A Remake Of A Remake Of A Remake
The problem is our lives are becoming time capsules. Movies have followed gaming’s lead in recent years with reboots, remakes, and Robert Downey Jr. back in the MCU as IP becomes the only thing that matters. Gaming is rapidly running out of things to remake, and has trained audiences to settle for less. The charade of testing the appetite for new games has been abandoned, and reruns are our future.
It used to be that when games were remade, fans were told that if it was successful, new games would spring forth. We now know (if we already suspected) that this is not true. Dead Space was supposed to lead to a remake of Dead Space 2, but that was scrapped outright – a new game was never considered. Dead Rising’s success led to the developers dangling a remake of Dead Rising 2, but why not just make Dead Rising 5? Fans are debating what game should be remade after Silent Hill 2, but the answer is, and always has been, ‘none of them’.
Don’t get me wrong, there are remakes that I love. Resident Evil 4 is the greatest horror game of all time, and the remake managed to keep the atmosphere and quality while ironing out the flaws. A lot of people who would not have touched the original have now played Silent Hill 2, one of gaming’s most legendary stories, and that’s a net positive. These defences to the trend of remakes work in individual cases, but they’re not enough to justify the industry’s shift en masse to easy wins at the cost of making fans shell out all over again for games they already own and love.
On the one hand, it’s not a big deal that Overwatch is bringing back 6v6, or that the OG Map is in Fortnite. But on the other, this is part of a desperately depressing trend. There seems little desire from developer or audience for anything actually new, only for old things in new boxes. And if everyone but me wants this, maybe I’m the one that’s wrong! It just feels like developer’s time could be better spent than on making games we’ve already played, and our money could be better spent than on buying them.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
77/100
