“A remaster makes sense if the game is more than 10 years old”

Yesterday, October 28, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition was released, a conditional remaster of the project of the same name, released five years ago. To coincide with this event, we decided to have a short conversation with Alexander Kutekhov, producer of the publishing house “Buka“.

A remaster of Skyrim has been released. Do I even need a remaster for a game that was released relatively recently?

Alexander Kutekhov
The position of the remaster should always be considered from two sides.

From the position of the publisher and from the position of the players. Based on our practice (Buka has re-released many of its old titles on Steam and partially on mobile in recent years), it makes sense to re-release games older than 10 years.

Why?

The game needs to “lie down”, its audience should miss it.

Plus, it makes sense to release a remaster for the event. For example, “Siberia 3″ is coming out soon. For an event of this magnitude, it makes sense to release a remaster of the previous games in the series. And we have already released them: both for Steam and for mobile platforms.

Now there is a lot of debate on the quality of the Skyrim remaster on the web. Before that, they argued about the quality and remaster of Batman. They say, the textures were slightly improved, the lighting was tweaked and that’s it. Benoit Sokal had previously insisted that the remaster should be reduced to optimizing the game for modern devices. From your point of view, how big should the remaster be?

Here the two positions mentioned just enter into dissonance. The first is the position of the publisher: it is desirable to invest as little as possible in order to get as much as possible. For example, only to “roll out” a patch that will allow you to run the game on modern computers.

The player’s position is different. He has already played it, remembers those impressions. But you need to understand that the requirements for products have changed, and the player, in addition to the old fan, is waiting for a new user experience, something fresh.

And what to do? Skyrim is the same as, however, Bioshock a little earlier, judging by the angry comments, did not give a new one.

I can only rely on our own experience here. When we ported the series “Petka and Vasily Ivanovich”, we used a “hybrid” approach. Not just “rolled out a patch”, but completely rebuilt the game on Unity, finished the backdrops. We took into account that the situation on the market, the requirements of the players have changed. On the one hand, we have left classic controls, hard pixel-hunting, and puzzling riddles for the old-school audience. For new players who just heard that there was such a cool quest about Petka and Chapaev, we simplified the controls, hints, highlighting, etc.

But you didn’t translate it to HD at the same time?

No.

Why? If you release a game with new graphics (from scratch), it can seriously increase sales, can’t it? This is what Square Enix is doing about now with Final Fantasy VII. She was persuaded for a long time, the company only made remasters at first, but in the foreseeable future there will be a completely new version.

And the meaning? The graphic style of “Petka” is such that nothing will change there from a full HD translation.

If you seriously alter not only the graphics, but also the gameplay, you will get a completely different game. By the way, we are now thinking about the release of our titles in not quite, let’s say, familiar mechanics. For example, to make a shooter based on Petka and Vasily Ivanovich. It’s a joke, of course, but…

But this is brand development already, not a remaster.

And these are very large investments in a very limited market, if we talk about Petka. At the same time with great risks. And this dilemma is faced by any publisher who is thinking about whether to make a big remaster or limit himself to a patch.

No one likes to take risks, so they make patches. So it turns out that a remaster for any publisher today is just a way to earn some more money on an old title, a way to remind the audience about their franchise. The less you invest and the more you get, the better.

And best of all, old games “come in”, we learned this from our own experience, for certain events — the release of new franchise products, anniversaries, etc. There should be a thoughtfully worked out strategy, and not just a desire to earn a little by releasing a remaster.