Nightdives Studios has proven time and time again that they are some of the most prepared and knowledgeable developers when it comes to remastering old and classic titles for modern systems, with amazing remasters of titles like Quake & Quake 2, System Shock 1 & 2, Doom 1, 2 & 64, Turok 1, 2 & 3, Star Wars: Dark Forces, amongst many, many others.
In a recent interview with Video Game Chronicles (VGC), Nightdive Studios' studio head, Stephen Kick, and director of business, Larry Kuperman, shared their interest and eagerness to start work on remastering titles from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era.
Given how many of the studios from that particular era of gaming are closed or even closing down at the moment, preservation of older and classic titles is at a pivotal moment in time, and when it comes to re-releasing an older title in modern times, Kuperman stated the following:
Larry Kuperman said:
We stand ready.
I would begin asking a couple of questions, was it Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out too? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what’s the quality of the source code? How about the assets?
Those are the kinds of considerations that we have there. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that shouldn’t be lost.
To add to what Kuperman said, Kick also mentioned how they approach the original designers of the game when attempting a plausible remaster of an older title:
Stephen Kick said:
To your point, though, with a game like Haze – let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right? – We would go to the original designers, and we would say: ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently.
We’ve had these discussions before with [the original] developers on some of these games, and we’ve given them an opportunity to come back and say ‘this is what I would have done’. In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them over import them onto newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, loading times.
Additionally, there's also the big challenge of both systems' unique architecture, with both being PowerPC-based, and their specific GPUs, which might introduce obstacles when attempting to port the game for modern systems:
Stephen Kick said:
I think that architecture – I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to ‘get’ it – and that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility.
This is a little bit of a different thing, but when the PS3 first came out, it was backwards compatible with PS2. And after a while, they were like ‘well, it’s really expensive, because we’re literally putting in the hardware for both systems in order for that to happen’. Again, there wasn’t an elegant solution where the PS3 hardware could run PS2 games. It just was not compatible.
So yeah, if we get to that – or I should say when – we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster.
To wrap up the interview, Stephen Kick is confident that their own engine, KEX, will be a huge advantage when it comes to overcoming the hurdles that porting and remastering titles from those specific consoles might arise, and that its lead engine developer Samuel Villareal might figure something out to approach this with KEX.
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