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Super Mario RPG - Review MegaThread
(lemmy.world)
A community for everything Nintendo. Games, news, discussions, stories etc.
Game | Date
|
Mario & Luigi: Brothership | Nov 7 Donkey Kong Country Returns HD | Jan 16, 2025 Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition | Mar 20, 2025 Metroid Prime 4 | 2025
Not sure I follow. How does having reference art, an already finished story, completed level designs, etc. not make it easier than starting from scratch?
They reworked and looked over all the existing content. And added lots of little changes here and there. They redid all the graphics, and added little changes here and there. They looked at all the mechanics, and added little changes here and there. If you don't think going back into old code and either trying to add new code to it or rewriting it all from scratch in a modern style adds up to as much work as writing it in the first place... I mean there is a very good reason most companies don't update something unless it was originally made to be updated and we'll documented, or the original coder(s) are still on hand to dig back in and figure out what creative solutions to problems they had to figure out out how that crazy code even still ended up working... Believe me, it was just as much work as making the game the first time.
You more or less described what goes into making a game in general. They'd be doing that, plus all the work that goes into writing the story from scratch, designing characters from scratch, designing levels from scratch, etc.
There's simply no way it's same amount of work to remake a game as it is to make a similar one from scratch. It's just basic logic.
Well the work in some areas was a bit lighter, but the work in many other areas was notably heavier. The newer graphics and sound would have taken much more man hours than the originals, even given the advance in tech tools over the time. Games used to be made alot faster with much smaller teams back then.
And all the polish and finishing work necessary to make sure the remake captures the same feel as the original despite being completely different fundamentally can't be understated. When a game is made for the first time, it doesn't have to be exactly one specific way. You have a reference to work from both originally and with a remake, but accuracy to the reference is much less demanding for an original game.
But if we're talking about price, we're comparing it with other, similar games made using today's tools and engines.
And there's simply no way it takes the same time to build that from scratch, than to build it using an existing game as a reference.