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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.
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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.

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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-...

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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.
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