New Forgotten Looks Like a Remake

When Bethesda finally revealed her forgetting earlier this week, I could hardly believe my eyes. Somehow famous for its weird potato facial characters and smeared low-resolution green grasslands, Tamriel Tour is now the best Elder Scrolls game ever. The long history of HD overhaul made me expect huge results for remakes – Mass Effect Legend and Dark Souls are barely different from their Xbox 360 parents, so the Imperial City I explored nearly 20 years ago in Unreal Engine 5 with Ray Tracing. Not only that, but also combat with upgrades, RPG system and many other details, the game can be enhanced. I wonder if Bethesda and Virtuos, the developer of the project, took all of this into consideration. Of course this is forgetting Remakenot remade?

It turns out that I am not alone. Many Fans announce it's a remakeEven Bruce Nesmith, a senior game designer for the original forgetting project, said “I’m not sure (word) remake is actually fair.” But, while I doubted the remake statement of Bethesda and Virtuos, after playing for a few hours, it was actually obvious – Oblivion Remastered looks like a remake, but it plays like a remake.

There are many reasons why forgetting looks like a remake, and it can be easily summed up: experts have done a lot of work, “every asset is redesigned from scratch.” It's all new in terms of what you see on the screen. Every tree, every sword, every shaking castle. This means forgetting meets modern graphic expectations. Not only is it beautifully textured, it also has gorgeous lighting and a brand new physics system that ensures that every strike of arrows and weapons actually affects the world. While everyone you meet in the game is recognized by the same people you crossed the road in 2006, every NPC model is a brand new creation. It's an impressive overhaul, refusing to make the idea of ​​something that “looks like you remember” and instead aims at the great things of the 2025 standard. This is the best Bethesda Game Studios RPG has ever seen, and if I had seen it before the remake rumor began, I might have believed that it was Elder Scroll 6.

However, it's not just a visual effect. The battle has been overhauled, so wielding a long sword no longer feels like fencing with a balloon. The third-person camera is actually actually functional due to the addition of mesh. Every menu from Quest Journal to conversations to locking and persuasion minigames has a refreshed interface. The original, terrifying leveling system has been replaced by a more logical mixture of forgettable and Skyrim approaches. and at last You can sprint. With so many visual and game upgrades, we will surely be firmly in the remake realm?

The biggest problem here is not technology, game changes or project scope, but semantics. Without industry-defined remake and remake parameters, publisher recklessly abandoned the terms. The “Authoritative Edition” of Rockstar’s “Grand Theft Auto Trilogy” is undoubtedly a blocky PlayStation 2 era game with a high degree of texture and modern lighting effects. But the collision Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy also made a new graphic asset for the remake, sports, that looks like a game from the modern era. Things are even more chaotic when we do the remake: BluePoint's Colossus Shadow and Demon's soul both rebuild their respective games from scratch, but faithfully, is the 1:1 entertainment activity of the original experience. Meanwhile, Resident Evil 2 has no original blueprint in terms of structure or no longer posted the original blueprint, but has completely redesigned the way you interact with your survival horror idol. We will then have the remake and rebirth of Final Fantasy 7 that completely completely revolutionizes the rhythm of the original game in the rhythm of design, scripts and even storytelling. All five examples are considered remakes, but there is little common philosophy between them.

At some point, the general consensus seems to be that if the game is rebuilt from scratch in a modern engine, it is considered a remake. At the same time, more limited upgrades have been made within the original technology of the game. However, such a definition is obviously outdated. Today, it seems more appropriate to say that the remake is a graphic overhaul that retains the original game’s design (game upgrades that limit the quality of life), while the remake’s remake has been redesigned from Scratch. Such a definition will “reduce” the demon’s soul and the upcoming Metal Gear Solids: Delta, and ensure that the remake term is only applicable to games that truly feel new ideas.

So if we accept these proposed definitions, is this a remake or a remake of the forgotten new version? As anyone who has only played for an hour can clearly see, Oblivion remake definitely has the right name. Yes, those new assets and Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing effects make it look brand new, but under the glowing skin, it's a collection of 20-year-old bones, organs, and muscles, all roughly nailed in Bethesda's way. As the studio explained: “We looked at each part and upgraded it carefully. But most importantly, we never wanted to change the core. It's still a game from the previous era and should feel like one.”

The symbols of that previous era are everywhere. It is in the loading screen, with almost every door hidden behind. Despite the interface upgrade, it's still in a confusing persuasive mini-game that makes little sense and is completely out of touch with your conversation. It is in the design of the city, which has a simple design of the theatrical stage suit, rather than a complex, tangled arrangement of the true demographic center. It lingers like a clumsy automaton in the NPC and talks in the How to Be a Society handbook with all the grace of AI. It's in the battle, and even after a major escalation, it still feels clumsy and clumsy. It's in A long list of bugs and faults Still preserved religiously in the name of maintaining the original quirky charm.

Just a few months ago we were declared the announcement of Obsidian, which provides a vision for the future for some of the main key blocks of the Elder Scrolls. Compared to the remake of Forgotten, its dynamic combat is actually the space age, and its rewarding exploration method makes Colodiil's rolling hills and rough cave feel very much a relic of the past. Such modern systems help to remake forgetting into context. This is not to say that this classic classic is not available in 2025 – far from it. Its world magic still shines, and its open fields like Arhat are filled with dozens of mysteries and weirdness. Even two generations later, most of its ambitions remain intact, e.g. Dynamic Goblin War Its salary among NPC clans, or narratively satisfying pursuit structures, still outpaced Skyrim's many “Access Dungeons Filled” tasks. In an era when we now reject the handheld nature of the 2010s game, its many old-fashioned ideas about player freedom are refreshing. But the forgotten particles are obviously gray with long teeth. Its dialogue has no skills and no elegant system interconnection. And, both caves, castles, or cursed lands that have been forgotten themselves, will become very old. The job of the remake is to update all these ideas, but the project is about rebuilding the old ideas. This is: Forgotten Remade.

Video games have historically favored other media terms. In the world of movies, the remake is a brand new work that includes fresh casts, crews, scripts and sets. Reproduction is an existing film that can be enhanced as much as possible to match modern image quality standards. But an old movie is still an old movie. The 4K jaw and Godfather repairs look incredible, but they are clearly a product of the 1970s. You can see it in the direction of direction, delivery and effect work. It is the texture of film. Forgettability is like the Blu-ray restoration of a classic movie. It drives visual quality as much as possible, thanks to a more extensible video game medium that means recreating the “outside” of the project in a completely new engine. But under that shell, forgetting is undoubtedly a product of the 2000s. Virtuos executive producer Alex Murphy has a perfect analogy in the reveal process: “We think of the forgotten game engine as the brain and Unreal 5 as the body. The brain drives all the logic and gameplay in the world, and the body brings nearly 20 years of love to life.”

Forgotten remake is exactly what it says, and this should not be seen as downplaying its achievements. We should actually use it as a quality standard, rather than insisting that it is a remake, we judge it from recreators from other Titan-scale AAA companies. This is what the legendary version should be, not a clean-up reissue. Here's what Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy should have been, not the incredibly cynical cash rush. Because there is nothing cynical about the repair of forgetting. It looks like a remake made by passionate hands, but plays like a remake that love fans keep, and that's what it should be.

Matt Purslow is an advanced feature editor for IGN.