Curious about y’alls opinions on this. I like the idea of getting new people to experience an older game by aligning it to modern graphics and accessibility standards. But capitalizing on nostalgia with quick updates to that make it look modern rather than making new games seems like just more of studios trying to squeeze money out of us.
IMHO, it depends on the game and the remake. The old Halo games are probably the best case study on what to do and what not to do.
Halo CE - Don’t do that. The game was old enough to warrant major texture, geometry, and animation upgrades, but the developer also completely changed the art style.
Halo 2 - Do this. It’s the old art style, but with more detail. The game looks like how you think it looked, until you toggle the old graphics on and see how it ACTUALLY looked.
Halo 3 - Do this. The game was in good enough shape to just need a few frame rate, texture, and resolution bumps. New animation and geometry wasn’t needed, and avoiding that was the right call.
Unfortunately it depends on who’s doing it. Who’s creatively in charge and what freedom they get.
At the moment, it’s reliably bad. Even when the vision is good, it’s dominated by invested poo poo.