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Genuinely curious if this ever ships. It was meant to release in January this year, but the devs pulled the launch after it got a terrible reception from fans.

What has been shown so far looks worse than many of the free modded versions out there, and with AI lowering the bar for modifying games every week… As an experiment I asked Claude to take the source code from the browser port of the game that appeared on GitHub recently, add coop multiplayer, 32:9 ultra wide support and as much of the graphical enhancements from the remaster video.

It took about 4 prompts, and I have builds playable on Linux, MacOS and Windows, with coop. Gets well over 300fps on my Mac Mini as uses metal on an a Mac.

It really makes you think how long the business models of companies like Nightdive Studios (specialists in remastering old games for modern systems) can last, when you can “remaster” entire games in very few prompts.

by rjh292 hours ago|

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The studio will be fine. They'll use AI but it won't be a buggy vibe coded mess; they'll actually test it and refine it. That's the hard part.

by soulofmischief48 minutes ago|

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Nightdive already does it with AI upscaled textures. Stephen and Alix are a national treasure because no one else is taking the time to secure the rights and literally remake these old masterpieces in new engines with attention to faithfulness and cognizance of how people like to play modern titles.

I am SO hyped for the Thief remaster they're putting out next month, and I enjoyed chewing through the Shadow Man remaster this year, but I was disappointed by how some of the textures looked when upscaled. Lots of artifacts. Of course, everyone is doing this now. Look at the absolutely horrible textures in Square Enix's KH1 remaster. At least with Shadow Man, a majority of textures were recreated from source. And also, at any time you can switch to the original textures! Truly a passion project.

by AlexandrB2 hours ago|

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A lot of modern remakes become "demakes". Often a remake focuses on surface level improvements, like graphics, but damages the underlying game systems that made the original beloved in the first place. Another common problem is lazy graphics upscaling that improves the resolution but makes the result look cheap or incongruous with the game's original style (GTA3 remastered is a great example[1]). I think there are a handful of truly great remakes a bunch of mediocre ones and a surprising number of total disasters like Warcraft 3.

But probably the worst trend with modern remakes is taking the original games off of online stores or "upgrading" them to the remake thus making the original unavailable. Combined with the "demakes" trend above and it seems like we're actively destroying many historical games with these "remakes".

[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-...

by komali22 hours ago|

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Nightdive studio will be fine with their Sony and Nintendo devkits and arrangements with them, store access, publishing deals etc. They'll just use the same AI tools to get things done faster, presumably.