We seem to be heading for a cycle where publishers are releasing ports of beloved games for a high retail price while doing the the bare minimum, or even no work on them.
Starting in 2021 we got the much rumoured and massively anticipated remasters of the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy, GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas. Fans had waited years for HD remasters of these games and in November 2021 that dream was shattered when Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy The Definitive Edition launched.
Calling these games buggy would be an understatement. Unplayable would be more accurate. All three games shipped with game breaking issues ranging from falling through the scenery, progression issues and crashes.
It did t take long for the community to discover these were the mobile ports of the PlayStation 2 games ported to the PS4 with almost not improvements made during development.
And what did Rockstar see fit to charge us for this mess of a game collection? £54.99.
What stung even more what just a month prior the Crysis Remastered Trilogy had launched to high praise from reviewers and gamers alike. Saber Interactive even managed to pull off Ray Tracing in Crysis 1 on the PS4 Pro showing how a remaster should be done and for £10 less than the GTA Trilogy.
Fast forward to August 2023 and Rockstar are up to the same old tricks.
Porting Red Dead Redemption to PlayStation 4. This is another title that fans have wanted for almost a decade and they put absolutely no effort in apart from a resolution bump to 4K and no 60fps mode and asking for £39.99 for a straight port of a 13 year old game.
Now we have Konami pulling the same tricks with Metal Gear Solid The Master Collection Volume 1.
For £49.99 you get the PS1 original running at PS1 resolutions and frame rates with absolutely zero upgrades. You also get Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 running at 720p on a PlayStation 5 because again, absolutely zero work has been done to justify charging premium prices.
We are being taken for suckers when we’re asked to pay premium prices for sub-par products that the publishers know will still sell because of the title on the box.
It needs to stop but to make that happen we need to start voting with our wallets.
If you must play these games and don’t have the original hardware the games launched on then at least buy them pre-owned so the publishers don’t see this as a win.
Or zero effort, high priced ports will be all we get.
I hoped Rockstar would use the RDR2 engine and map to recreate RDR1 while refreshing it a bit for current gen and I would totally pay that price they asked. But they made it for last gen and it doesn’t even run in 60 FPS on PS5 - this is laughable…
IIRC the entire RDR1 map is in RDR2 which was developed for PS4. So it’s all there already. But then it would have meant doing actual work and would probably cost £70.
You say that like it’s recent.
In the 80s-90s, it was arcade ports, most of them were shitty.
In the 90s we also got shitty mobile ports on gameboy, or Tiger if gameboy was out of your reach.
2000s was a better time for me personally, but that’s because I just played wc3 and all the maps were free after the initial purchase
2010s were even shittier ports as PC was just starting to pick up with console devs, and then we’re at today
Shitty ports never stopped, and have always existed. Unless you let them die when they deserve to (ala Cyberpunk’s old-gen versions) nothing happens, but they also don’t stop because of it.
edit: I did forget the 2000s brought us screen crunch GBA ports, especially for those SNES platformers that are borderline unplayable because they weren’t designed for the screen crunch
In the 80s and 90s, arcade ports were shitty because they were being ported to console hardware that was much more limited than their arcade counterparts.
The thing is, I can literally (and legally) load my copy of MGS1 into Duckstation, with its texture upscale ability, set to the full resolution of my screen, and that’s already a better product than the MGS1 package being shipped in the MGS collection
In the 80s-90s, it was arcade ports, most of them were shitty. In the 90s we also got shitty mobile ports on gameboy, or Tiger if gameboy was out of your reach.
Woah there! That’s a bit harsh. In the 80s/90s arcade hardware was better than what we had at home. You weren’t going to get good ports most of the time. I think Chase HQ on the ZX Spectrum was fantastic though!
As long as they sell this shit, they keep milking that cow. They know, if they dont fuck up too bad, people will forget and keep buying the new hype
I worry that the rampent blind hate for straight ports is going to kill cultural preservation of old games. These rockstar ports are way too expensive for what they are, but people complain about straight ports regardless of price.
That’s just it. If this was £15-£20 I don’t think anyone would complain as it’s around £10-£15 for a used Red Dead Redemption Game of the Year Edition on PS3 which is essentially what this is.
Nobody minded the Cryisis Trilogy’s £39.99 price because actual effort was made. They even managed rudimentary ray tracing on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.
It’s the fact they’ve done almost no work on RDR but they want us to pay almost new game prices. That’s what stings.
Straight ports are fine as long as they’re priced to reflect the effort that has gone into it.
My point is actually that people would complain, as they have done before. The price here in this situation is obviously too high, but people want everything to become new again and will complain if it’s just a straight port for any price.
I think we’re getting these ports because manufacturers like Sony aren’t into backward compatibility. If Sony would let you play games from previous generations on the ps5 (not just the ps4), the developers would have an incentive to work for real on these remasters.
I love PlayStation, but Microsoft is more consumer friendly regarding backward compatibility. And I say that as a Linux user who hates Microsoft…
Sony is getting better at back compat but it should be doing more. They are slightly more restricted than Microsoft thanks to the difficulty of emulating the PlayStation 3’s Cell Processor. But if the people without access to the source code of the PS3 can write a very functional emulator for Windows I’m sure Sony could do it for the PS5 if they wanted to.
But in the meantime there’s no good reason to not let us put our PS2 DVD based games in the PS5 and play them on the same PS2 emulator that the PS Plus classics games use.
The big downside to that is none of the blue backed CD based PS2 games will work in a PS5 nor will any PS1 disc as the PS5 lacks the CD lens in the disc drive.
Well I don’t think you can really say that they’re getting better except if you’re just talking about ps5/ps4 compatibility.
