Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition from Nightdive Studios

[CyberWhale]

I genuinely have nothing against remasters, in fact, the more the better. But it seems almost no studio (or at least most of them) is capable of pulling it off properly.

- leave the original game in the store/on abandonware sites
- new remaster should be properly compatible with new OSes
- new remaster should have the option to run like the original, smoothly as butter and with original or new assets
- new assets don't need to be remade, but use proper AI upscaling techniques like the aforementioned FF9 Moguri mod

Is this so hard to ask? Rhetorical question, in theory it isn't, in practice it seem to be.

P.S. would love a good remaster port of Dino Crisis/Parasite Eve games. I doubt we'll see proper remakes, and even if we do, it's highly likely they will end up being shit anyways.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Well, gee! gog must've had some sort of server mishap or something, because all of a sudden my review for Blade Runner went missing.

At first I figured this must be an accident, considering that a whole bunch of them got gobbled up. I'd say a good 70% of the reviews for Blade Runner "Enhanced" Edition are now gone.

Ha, look at this conspiracy theorist! This can't be right! Everyone knows that gog are the good guyz in gaming, no way would they ever do something underhanded!

Or so I thought, until I found this mail from gog support in my inbox...

I was almost flattered - getting messages from gog support these days will usually take a number of weeks at the very least... And I hadn't even contacted support!

Still, I was somewhat miffed by the realization that gog had indeed been nuking negative reviews. Here's my reply to them.

As of right now, they have purged several pages worth of negative reviews. But that's ok, I know how these fuckers operate by now, so I kept screenshots of all the reviews, just in case just this sort of thing happens.

Note how a good portion are from verified buyers (that's what Bestätigter Benutzer means in German).
Negative reviews in foreign languages are still up, because, lololol, gogstaff are apparently too fucking retarded to turn off their own language filters. If they eventually get around to deleting non-English language negative reviews, rest assured there are screencaps of those as well!

PS: Please feel free to post a link to the above review compilation in the Blade Runner "Enhanced" Edition release thread! I can't post it myself, since I'm currently in the middle of a 2 month forum ban.

 

[racofer]

Oh look! My review on the gog store page was too spicy for them was disappeared in some unfortunate website mishap! Here it is in its former glory:

GOGstapo will not have the likes of you spewing dissent on game reviews. Consoooome your product and be glad we allow you to spend your shekels on our store. Now repent and buy from our LGBTQIF++++ catalogue or face the consequences.

 

[Absinthe]

Honestly, the moment I heard they were remastering Blade Runner and the ScummVM deal fell through, I knew it was going to be an absolute disaster. Blade Runner is not an easy game to upgrade, but they saw easy money and went for it. I'm really enjoying how much this has been fucking shit up for Night Dive, but on the subject of Night Dive's incompetence, I'd like to point out that the Blade Runner cashgrab got released during Steam and GOG's summer sales, which, for an oldschool game like theirs which is being released at full price, does amazing things to help ensure that nobody will notice or want to buy it.

Full price, the both of them:

• https://af.gog.com/en/game/blade_runner_enhanced_edition?as=1649904300
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1678420/Blade_Runner_Enhanced_Edition/

And both stores are on their summer sales. Side note: Reviews are saying it's horrible, and apparently GOG has already purged 8 pages' worth of negative reviews off of their Blade Runner page, so it looks like GOG is indeed protecting this shit remaster. And even with that, the reviews are still massively negative.

By the way, I'm pretty sure the ScummVM project that Night Dive has bolted onto their work without permission has non-free content. Not everything ScummVM did is programming content under the GPL license. So ScummVM could actually DMCA/WIPO/etc the Blade Runner release and get it pulled from those stores.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Gandalf final fantasy 9

 

[Ravielsk]

This sort of shit is the reason why I consider modern concept of intellectual property to be nothing but parasitism. Blade runner has been effectively dead as game IP for what... more than 20 years? And just when someone finally makes it again salable on modern systems some asshole swoops in buys the depreciated rights and now gets to "legally" sell someone else's work and even whine when someone dares to give them shit about it. If that is not a form of parasitism then I do not know what is.

By the way, I'm pretty sure the ScummVM project that Night Dive has bolted onto their work without permission has non-free content. Not everything ScummVM did is programming content under the GPL license. So ScummVM could actually DMCA/WIPO/etc the Blade Runner release and get it pulled from those stores.

I doubt it would work. Nightidive would not just give up without a fight I do not think these guys have the cash or the balls to drag them through the courts.

 

[Absinthe]

Night Dive wouldn't, but Steam would just immediately pull the game from their store instead of risk being accountable, at the very least. They've done that before.

The real problem is that ScummVM doesn't have or want to get lawyers, and this is why GOG and Night Dive are so comfortable taking them for granted. It also doesn't help that game modding usually operates under an ambiguous state of legality, especially as far as IP rights are concerned, but that would be counting on EA to smooth things out for Night Dive, and they might not give enough of a fuck to get their own legal involved in this shit.

At any rate, ScummVM does have leverage in this situation, and it's not like anyone is sympathetic to cashgrab remasters and re-releases where you ultimately steal someone else's work to sell your product, so it's conceivable they could crowdfund any legal costs and turn this into an unmitigated PR disaster for everyone else. Having a finger on that button gives them options to force everyone to stop being so goddamn scummy.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I made my own enhanced edition, you must pay me $10 to view this picture

Spoiler

 

[Alienman]

A Steam reviewer wrote:

You can't click around and make your character walk any more.

What does he mean by that? That the character always run, or that you can't walk around in the environment?

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Some more screenshots. This thing is an unfathomable atrocity.

Original:

"Enhanced":

Check out the in-game UI, the floor tiles and the fact that McCoy doesn't even cast a shadow.

But wait, you ain't seen nothing yet! Because this thing looks even worse in motion... Turns out the piss-poor 60FPS interpolation and smear filter may actually be some of the less noticeable problems.

I'll let the pics speak for themselves:

One of the most annoying things (and N00bdive did the same crap in Quake Enhanced Edition as well): There are no more instantaneous screen transitions. All the transitions have to be >1 second dissolves. Apparently they didn't realise that there are moments in this game where the camera will do a tracking shot during a screen transition (a good example early in the game is when you go to the back of Runciter's shop to check out Lucy's desk). What this means in effect is that the game will do a dissolve ON TOP OF the camera movement, which is how you get this:

Also, placement of interactable items during these camera pans is all fucked up. Compare and contrast:

"Enhanced":

Note the airbrushed table to the right and the fact that the candy bar just kind of floats in the approximate vicinity of the table, instead of being on the table.

Original:

These aren't cherry picked examples. This thing is absolutely RIDDLED with these types of glitches (which were never in the original game, where the worst thing you might notice during a screen transition would be the characters jittering slightly). And all this is just a small sample of random crap I encountered during approx 15 minutes of gameplay. And this is early on in the game (ie. the point where you want to impress everyone enough that they won't hit the refund button after 2 hours).

Kotaku, of all places, sums it all up quite succinctly:

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's obvious the game was far beyond their capability to remaster. I don't know why they thought it would be simple, it was one of the most technologically advanced games made when it released and used a lot of tricks that would be very difficult to recreate.
Their insistence on releasing a console version of a game console owners would have zero interest in to begin with doomed them to financial failure. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

It looks like the average of the other remasters of the last few years.

 

[Ravielsk]

Their insistence on releasing a console version of a game console owners would have zero interest in to begin with doomed them to financial failure. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

The industry for some reason has adopted this mental idea that the whole market is just this nothing blob of consumers who buy literary everything and the only reason they dont is because its not available on their platform of choice. The idea that the split between the PC, console and mobile market might be a bit more than just a question of availability sounds like complete science fiction to them. Hence why they burn money on remasters and remakes for audiences that neither care or know why they should care.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Bonus:

Detail "Enhanced" Edition:

Detail Original:

 

[racofer]

A Steam reviewer wrote:

You can't click around and make your character walk any more.

What does he mean by that? That the character always run, or that you can't walk around in the environment?

Obviously that his mouse is broken and the game is not at fault. #wontfix support ticked closed and user suspended from opening further tickets for 2 months.

 

[Alienman]

The Resetera of tech support.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

A Steam reviewer wrote:

You can't click around and make your character walk any more.

What does he mean by that? That the character always run, or that you can't walk around in the environment?

I think it means that you cannot move freely to any position any more. You can move only between defined positions, when you click on an interactable object.

 

[Daedalos]

"Enhanced"....

Fuck you. Go cut yourself with a rusty razor you fucking faggots.

 

[El Presidente]

I've said it before, this is a subject that deserves a good investigative piece on it, like that Karl Jobst video on retro auctions' fraud. Something with the potential to go viral like it.



This is a rabbit hole that goes deeper than most people would imagine. Believe it or not, Nightdive Studios is the least shady of these "indie companies" that are into re-releases of old stuff, Piko for example make them look like total amateurs in comparison. This is a scam turned into a business by these "companies", which sometimes are no more than one or two smart asses that discovered an easy way to make a profit with zero effort, basically stealing other people's works from decades ago.

 

[Absinthe]

It's obvious the game was far beyond their capability to remaster. I don't know why they thought it would be simple, it was one of the most technologically advanced games made when it released and used a lot of tricks that would be very difficult to recreate.
Their insistence on releasing a console version of a game console owners would have zero interest in to begin with doomed them to financial failure. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

They were fucking incompetent, had a vastly inflated opinion of their capabilities ("lol how hard can it be?"), and saw easy money to slap a new coat of paint on an old product and call it a day, collecting money in the process. In brief, they are fucking retards.

I'm honestly enjoying these parasitic remaster efforts backfiring horribly and hopefully taking down the studio with them.

 

[Narushima]

One more for the road:

 

[Comte_II]

One more for the road:

Wait until he discovers what Beamdog has been doing...

 

[rusty_shackleford]

One more for the road:

sooo

is there no way to acquire the real original version?

 

[Narushima]

I'll repost this here, since the thread was split: