Adventure Gamers - Forums

I sure wish they would have finished it. 80% done…. I wish instead of scrapping it, they would sell it - even unfinished - for cheap and just make some money from it.

I heard that Simon the Sorcerer 3 was 80-90% finished too and then the company that bought them out (can’t remember who) scrapped that and changed it to 3D and keyboard and they had to start all over. I wish that game would be offered too. I bet that would have been better than the buggy Simon 3D that they put out. However, I do like Simon 3D, just not as much as the first two. And the bugs in the game drove me crazy! I’m lucky I even finished it.

tomimt - 28 September 2013 09:17 AM

This might be relevant to the thread. I did this some time ago: http://tomimt.deviantart.com/art/DOTT-carjacker-361923669

Man you were just discussing about DotT HD lol.

I liked the Monkey Island remakes, and I suspect I would have liked this remake.

But the original holds up pretty well anyway…voice-acting and pretty good graphics, so no big loss.

Also would have had a HEAP of backlash from fans decrying they RUINED DAY OF THE TENTACLE, no matter how lovingly put together it was, so in the end THEY are probably the ones who dodged a bullet.

A well-made remake would be nice, but honestly I’d be happy if Disney would just make arrangements for GOG to sell the old LucasArts classics to which Disney now owns the IP.

Caliburn - 28 September 2013 08:31 PM

A well-made remake would be nice, but honestly I’d be happy if Disney would just make arrangements for GOG to sell the old LucasArts classics to which Disney now owns the IP.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the guys at GoG are already in the process of trying to get them.

I can understand making older games easily playable on modern machines, but I never quite understood why anyone would go to such lengths and expense to remake an old game when, with a bit more effort, they could just make a new one instead. I guess that makes me an idealist.

Television and Hollywood have taken that route, and I have little to no interest in remakes/reboots.

So, I won’t lament the fate of a DOTT remake…I enjoy the original as-is.

El_Pollo_Diablo - 29 September 2013 08:20 PM

I never quite understood why anyone would go to such lengths and expense to remake an old game when, with a bit more effort, they could just make a new one instead. I guess that makes me an idealist.

Three reasons come to mind, but they basically all amount to “money” and won’t likely sway the idealist in you, which is fair enough.

1) Lower budget

Saying it’s “a bit more effort” to make a new game compared to a remake is, I suspect, underestimating the difference in cost. I would presume that remaking a game, even from the ground up, is often quite a bit faster and cheaper than making a new game. This is because much of the expense of game development comes from the iteration process: building something, playtesting it, finding out if it’s fun, reworking it, etc. It’s rarely a clear path from design document to final product. With a remake, much of that iteration becomes unnecessary: assuming you chose a worthy game, you already know that the underlying structure of the game is solid. The programmers also know how the end resulting systems are supposed to function, so unless the remake’s design is very different from the original game, development will be smoother, and the programmers won’t have to make hacky changes to their code mid-development to support unexpected new features. And it probably takes less time in pre-production to settle on an art style and get the team on the same page about what the game vision is, when you have the original game to refer to.

2) Easier marketing

We live in an era of greater media saturation than any time in the past, and it can be quite hard to draw attention to new IP. This is why Hollywood and AAA games are obsessed with reboots and long-term franchise potential—basically, they need anything with a name people will recognize. To be fair, big-budget remakes (as opposed to reboots like Tomb Raider) don’t seem nearly as popular with games as with movies, probably because trends in game design move forward like a train, and it can sometimes be a hard sell to get people to want to play a game with an older style of design even with new art. But most game remakes don’t seem to be that high a budget because they’re either small enough in scope (Monkey Island: SE, LSL: Reloaded, Ducktales Remastered, Bionic Commando: Rearmed) or they’re just HD upgrades of recent 3D games with minor tweaks to resolution, textures, lighting, etc. (Kingdom Hearts, Zelda: Wind Waker, Beyond Good and Evil), so you don’t need to sell as many copies. Since the remake is cheaper to make than a new game, and it has built-in audience awareness of the IP, that alone can make the remake more likely to be profitable than gambling on a new game. Some of the people who played the original may buy the remake, and you also lower the barrier of entry to new players.

3) Extra revenue stream

One of the biggest challenges the games industry has compared to, say, the film industry, is that there aren’t as many revenue streams. A film has a theatrical showing, rentals, DVD and Blu-ray sales, digital downloads, licensing to premium channels, networks, and streaming video. A typical studio game has a retail release and a digital release—and maybe a Collector’s Edition or Game of the Year re-release, depending on the game. This is why we see models based around microtransactions, DLC, and any other ways the games industry can think of to make extra money off successful games. DLC and remakes get media attention for the game out there again and hopefully attract new players. And they monetize the depth of interest that existing players have, much like Collector’s Editions or Kickstarter do. Viewed in this light, a remake provides a way, when you have a hit game from the past, of making a little more money off it, even if you do have to spend a bit more as well compared to a simple re-release.

Not saying a proliferation of remakes is a great thing artistically, just that remakes can provide a service that many customers appreciate and can make sense from a business angle, so that’s why remakes will continue to be done. Speaking personally, I worry sometimes that games as a medium have a problem of older games being treated ephemerally. It’s getting better, for sure, but we don’t do that great a job of preserving our heritage, much like the early days of television did not. So if the occasional game remake means more people encounter an old classic, even with new or modified art, I don’t mind much, as long as it’s a good remake. Of course, as I implied in my earlier post, preserving the original game on services like GOG, Steam, or console e-shops is great too, and even more important for posterity.

Day of the tentacle still holds very well today due to the art direction LA took with the game. I don’t thonk it needs a remastering. What it needs is a sequel

The Sequel of my Sequel is my enemy.

Bt

Dodged a bullet for sure. Let the game be as it is - no sequel either. DotT is a classic that doesn’t need to be revisited or reiterated in any way. I don’t want a sequel two decades later.