SotC's remake is looking like it will be soulless. Graphically nice I admit but it seems like the developers of this are going through the motions, tightening up the graphics on level 3 while ignoring every little detail in the art direction.
Here's a comparison video of the two intros. Let me analyze the intro sequence bit by bit to point out all the things wrong.
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post a webm or i am not watching, kiketuber
In the first pic you can see the difference in the mission statement of the two games. The original is grey sludge, but it's also consistent in drawing your eye to the distances it features. The remake has a very busy sky that takes up your attention and a high contrast cliffside that focuses your view near to the camera. Also if you observe carefully you can see the gates to the forbidden land in the original horizon, but not in the remake.
Overall the original does everything with a purpose, the remake just wants to look busy.
I just hope they don't fuck up the physics.
The bird has to fly under a stupid waterfall for some reason in the remake. Why.jpg
In pic 3 we can see the difference in Wander between the two versions. In the original he's much more tightly designed and obeys usual art rules, in the remake he's more awkwardly proportioned and his cloth shows the less attention to detail that was being paid to everything in general as well, by being less animated and too short which pisses me off. Buy a longer poncho you lazy mexican bastard.
The high contrast cliffside of the remake draws your eye much closer to the camera than the original where you are more meant to observe the stone pillar in the distance. This shows the difference in attitude towards what view is important and affects the entire feel of the intros. The focus in the original is always on looking as far away as possible, sotc is meant to be an agoraphobics nightmare of a video game while the remake just plays it by the book.
Again the original appears to be grey sludge, but that grey sludge is the backdrop for carefully controlled contrasts between the horse, the rider and the background. You can clearly see Agro and what he's doing in the original, and you can see Wander much clearer as well. Because they are the focus of the scene. The remake ups the contrast between Agro and the world, but loses the details of the horse in the process. You see the sulhuette of Agro much more clearly but you can't see what he's doing exactly anymore. Wander in the remake is basically camouflaged.
Then don't watch?
if they include the cut colossus… collossi(?) I'll get it, otherwise I'm not terribly interested.
Are they going to add more content in this version?
While this pic doesn't show much, if you watch the sequence in the video where he's riding you can see the difference between the two games clearly here. The moon pops up exactly once in the original, every leaf and branch comes together to give you that moment exactly once. In the remake the trees are just sort of there and are going by without much change. You might think this is a completely minor thing but it again highlights the lack of care. In the original Ueda tightly controls this sequence from start to finish but in the remake it's just bog standard.
It's the difference between a Flintsones background going by and a Simpsons background going by.
They're going to keep making these as long as it gives them shekels. There's not even the need to add something new.
These two pics show the difference in attitude towards scope and distance the two games have completely. In pic 8 uo can barely see beyond the first tree, in the original it's about the reflection of the forest in the pond. Japanese love reflections in ponds.
But the real showcase is pic 9. This picture sums it all up. In the original it's a tightly coreographed moment meant to draw your eye towards the gates of the forbidden land in the distance. It shows the journey Wander undertook since the first frame of the intro where you could see the gates very far away (in the remake not at all so that purpose is also lost in this scene).
But observe how busy and weird the remake is. Your eyes are lead to the pond, the tree in the foreground and everywhere except that fucking gate. There's even a tree in the distance with as much screen real estate as the tiny gate.
I doubt most people will even notice the gate at all in the remake.
Wow, did The Last Guardian really tank that hard sales wise? I can't think of any other reason for them to be remaking this old game. They should've been working on creating a new adventure altogether imo.
Once Wander does reach the gate you can see a big problem with modern tree tech. The compete inability to convey a sense of distance.
The original builds a big field in front of this ominous portal, the remake looks like someone's overgrown backyard.
It's a minor thing but you can also see the lack of attention to detail in that they made Wander stop in the remake, while in the original they move him back a little so he can continue to ride Agro seamlessly.
The remake also handles light much worse than the original.
I appreciate the autism, OP, but that's all it is.
And finally here we are. The single biggest problem with the entire remake of SotC.
Observe the horse's butt. Watch the video and gaze at it.
Every single time a hoof hits the ground in the original the horse's ass wobbles. Like in real life. In the original they went to such trouble to model the horse that they included the way soft tissue wobbles on a horse's ass when it walks.
In the remake the horse walks like a robot without any wobbling.
SotC's heart and soul is in that horse's ass. It's the essence of everything put into that game. Without the horse's ass wobbling there might as well be no game at all.
Whats the fucking point then?
We can see the bridge here as well. The original bridge was otherworldly flat, unsettling and was entirely dominating the scene. The remake adds unnecessary bells and whistles that make it feel a lot less flat. Also the baked in lighting of the original on the side is meant to emphasize the lines of the bridge, no such detail can be achieved with the remake's dynamic lighting.
The original leads your eye and is very 3D, the remake is flat and lifeless, contrastless.
And finally if you observe the mountains in the distance you will notice that a game from the PS2 era has a much farther viewdistance than the remake.
nice try shill.
Wow, you've been holding this in for a while, haven't you? You even had a furfag rant ready on how the horse's butt doesn't look right.
That's ok, fam. Just let it all out.
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THAT HORSE'S ASS IS VERY IMPORTANT I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW
YOU STARE AT IT FOR THE ENTIRE GAME
Not according to Ueda
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Didn't we already have a sotc remake?
I'm 100% fine with this existing and the only changes being graphical.
I mean, he's not WRONG…
To generate interest for the upcoming movie.
imdb.com
OH FUCK OFF I DID NOT KNOW ABOUT THAT ONE
That's a funny way of saying that the PS2 didn't have the processing power to handle polygons for smaller details.
They could've added those guiding lines to the side even in ps2 times. The whole thing is deliberately made out of cubes.
I don't think the graphics are bad per se but they are definitively going for a standard style more palatable to CURRENT YEAR audiences than respecting that beautiful "dreamy" style from the original game.
Personally i would have preferred another HD collection at stable 60 FPS for new console generations but that just wouldn't sell outside the very dedicated fans, at least this remake will allow a new generation of players to get to know this amazing game and maybe even interest them enough to try the previous HD collection or the original PS2 title.
>>>/pone/
heh
Shadows are also different in the remake shots. I know all it in reality it notes is the angle of the sun, but the shadows stretching far off to the left gave a feeling of how tall the bridge was.
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choose one, weebtard
Oh no.
Looks great and my attention was drawn to the right pane over the left.
It's a worthy overhaul of the visuals, if you're a purist that prefers the PS2 graphics then just stick with it.
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ANGER
>Writer: Seth Lochhead (guy who wrote for Hannah that one movie about the loli who fights people inna woods
This will surely end well.
I just think that many of the design choices in Shadow of the Colossus were merely the result of limitations. I do dislike many of the enhancements nevertheless, because it makes it look more like an Unreal Engine 4 tech demo. What it needs is more of that dreamy bloom that obfuscates many of the detail so it return to that otherworldly feel.
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Them's aces, one and all.
Because of the tech limitations in the original it gave all of the architecture a more "worn down by time" appearance. It looked the the reason everything was smooth without little details sticking out everywhere was because this place was so god damn old that wind sand and time itself had taken it's toll.
good attention to detail user
Sometimes shit just comes together accidentally.
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You totally skipped the biggest and most obvious fuckup: the lighting and skyboxes. The dark storm clouds and dense forest canopy in the original were deliberately chosen to create a feeling of foreboding; you immediately know without being told that this is a place where you don't belong. The sun only emerges as Wander finally reaches the gates.
The remake loses almost all of this. Now the path to the forbidden land has gone from being a long and harrowing journey, the first real trial in Wander's quest, to a peaceful little stroll through the woods.
I think pic1 kind of goes in that direction. The skybox is a bunch of ornate clouds and a full moon with tons of things making it interesting rather than foreboding as you said.
Of fucking course.
well time to get off.
who cares you fucking spaz, it looks fine.
Sony said they were going to make this a film in 2009. There's no funding behind it yet and plenty of time for the project to fall apart before even starting.
Sonyfags are still going to buy this "new " game.
FUCK SONY
and fuck you vols
I see what you mean in all respects. The original was a really nice example of that PS2/PS3 era palette that sometimes emerged- you called it 'dreamlike,' Demon's Souls is another good example- as a result of both technical limitations and very good art direction warping around said limitations for the better. It's likely that the original choreographer for the scene had no hand in this part of the remake, resulting in key visual aspects being lost amongst a lot of noise.
The question here is; will everything else make up for this visual snafu? Will the green mossy look of the architecture stick around in the areas where that would be inevitable, or will it all have been turned into this bland sandstone color? Will this remake be more than just a copy & paste and actually bring out the intended scale of the game, with the return of the lost-in-development colossi?
If so, it might be worthy still. If not, I don't see much reason to not just play the PS2 version. I really hope that this is all a sign of in this case misguided ambition garbling up the visuals as they seek to do more than they were originally able, and not that they're clumsy incompetents throwing together a big pile of uninspired whatever that vaguely resembles the original and adds nothing that was lost.
Beyond more potential money, I don't know. It was especially telling when The Last of Us was given the "remaster" treatment barely a year after originally being released.
I recently played Ico for the first time, and it greatly defied my expectations. Obviously I had known of it since release, but never owned a console to actually try it myself.
1. Ico is not a desaturated game: it has its style of colouring, which is almost but not quite similar to the Xbox 360 malaise of grey-green graphics. Structures range from earth tones to brick orange, while sky and grass are so saturated they look like neon.
2. The game is not about leading a lemming through a series of puzzle platforming. First, it is mainly about exploration: up to the point where it seems like a game, that's 2 or 3 steps in the future of walking simulator evolution. Second, Yorda can't fight but she can follow you just fine: the few moments you are separated from her, are hectic and scary because enemies can rape her at any time.
3. It's an agile game that opens up in the end, not a hulking search for items and levels through a bunch of rooms. If you had these expectations, then the first few levels will be spent trying to explore and memorize rooms that simply don't matter. It's actually rare to backtrack in this game, you are expected to open a new way and move on. Also the last third of the game is much faster paced, with genuinely good vistas that still hold their own despite coming from a PS2 launch title.
If they are going to unnecessarily fuck with it anyways, why not go ahead and add content as well?
I think it's just a case of Ueda being an art major, and also a control freak. So every frame of the original was tightly supervised by him and obsessively corrected.
The more I watch the intros side by side the more nuances I notice in Ueda's work, like the greys of trees and architecture washing together to create a sense of distance, while in the remake they are sharp lines which make you feel like you're in a much smaller space.
I'm getting a very FFX remake vibe from this one, they had the problem of just slightly fucking everything up.
No. Ico was part of the autumn/winter 2001 bunch of noteworthy releases, whereas the PS2 itself had launched in North America in autumn 2000.
T. butthurt director
Go back to art school fag
No it's not, the new detail is comparable to bumpmap height that looks more like relief than bumps or steps.
The problem are the bits that are not part of the big cubes. The original has a very dangerous look, saying you will fall off at a slight misstep. The outer ridges on the new version, though, diminish that look, as it creates a visual barrier between the main floor of the bridge and the drop off the sides. While it's no less dangerous, it definitely has a less dangerous tone to it.
Ico is a great game, but often overlooked as it's in the Shadow of the Colossus.
I don't have the screencap, but there was an user listing exactly this as part of the marks of the pretendo. "Fictional game development story": talking about made up events to support one's shit opinion.
The other marks were gaming theory (implying games need to follow a formula, to work well) and something else.
I guess you could say we were the shadow of the colossus all along.
It's like they missed the entire point of the shots.
AAAAAA game developers are as creatively bankrupt as Hollywood, remake after remake with DLC popcorn.
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Yeah, sometimes playing a game on older tech does infuse it with some ancient visual artifacts that HD remasters or modern day HD games simply can't replicate nowadays. The surreal looking fogs of the PS2 era Silent Hills are one such example, seemingly more haunting and real than any of the fogs in current installments imo.
I guess I feel the same way about SotC and Ico, too. I've played them both on PS2 and PS3, but the PS2's slight blurs make it more subjectively impressionist.
nah
Much of the blur you talk about is because you most likely played using composhit cables instead of component. SotC even supports 480p on ps2 which outputs a crisp clean image.
You've done it, Link. Now you're the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.
I wouldn't exactly call 480p "crisp" or "clean", but I do feel like the game was only made to be played on the PS2 in mind. The HD remaster did blow up a lot of visual oddities that the developers were hoping to mask/blur with the PS2's older technological output, given the jaggy-ness of the polygons that the HD remaster emphasized.
Nice analysis. I agree the newer version is soulless and inferior. Anyone know what Ueda's up to now?
I can see what OP is getting at. The game definitely misses out on some of the atmosphere of the original. The first one gave an air of a solemn journey to a cursed wasteland, whereas the remake makes it look like a casual stroll to a cool tourist destination filled with moonlit strolls through the woods and peaceful meadows along the way. They changed the architecture in the same way as well. They gave it more noise which in a way made it more "livable" while the original looked solid and foreboding and claustrophobic; like the place doesn't want you to be there.
Also looking at other video comparisons, the Colossi don't look nearly as intimidating. They almost look cartoonish in their appearance. They don't look like the dark, looming hulks of stone and moss as they were in the originals. They look like out of place oversized muppets. It might just be a problem with the shading and coloring, but I think they also made their heads a bit larger too which makes them look more like puppies than lumbering brutes.
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Old version looks like shit now.
Now that you mention it, a lot of the colossi had this interesting effect with the baked-in lighting of sucking in the light around them, if they weren't in a completely sunlit area. The first colossi you posted is one of the most visible examples. Considering they're prisons for the essence of Dormin, who is made entirely of shadowy gloop, this is in retrospect a very neat visual touch, and another presently lost.
They should have left the insane amount of bloom in. It was almost a trademark for sotc
I admire your autism, OP.
I had the same problem with the Majora's Mask remake. More emphasis on polygon count than what the point of the visuals are in the first place.
calm down sperg
The original is not that great to begin with tbh. Sure its nice as a "art peace" but has zero replay value because the fun was solving the puzzles, once you know the answers its kinda pointless. That said, as an artist I personally think the new aesthetics look impressive but I doubt I'd buy it.
it was, and it was pretty creepy having that much light in the sky but at no point was there any visible sun and the direction of the sunlight was always arbitrary. Perfectly set the tone for the forbidden land.
the moon should never be visible also.
you don't know what you're talking about
your shallow opinion fails to be backed up with any substantive supporting facts. SoTC is a bit higher tier version of Journey or Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Its a well made art peace that (while better then the other games mentioned) has zero replay value.
You're the kind of retard that thinks this is acceptable.
you are the kind of retard who think that strawman constitutes an argument. Kill yourself nigger.
Ok
Most of your examples I'm not too harsh on, but the second one in this post is an absolute failure. Whoever designed this shot completely failed storyboarding/layout 101. In the original, everything points exactly to what you're looking at using form and negative space. Simple. In the new version, it's a cluttered mess, and you have no idea what you're supposed to be looking at. The first thing your eye notices is the dark jutting rock in the midground, because it's the largest thing of contrast. You can barely even notice the gateway you're supposed to be looking at.
So I'll agree with this complaint. Makes me feel like John K.
I've literally played it a dozen times. It also has the time trails which reward you with fun shit like an invisibility cloak and exploding arrows.
games don't need replay value, and sotc has quite a bit
You're forgetting the time trials for unlockables, hard mode, and hard mode's time trials for an entirely different set of unlockables. Also, just knowing how to beat a colossus isn't enough. There's still a level of skill involved in avoiding its attacks and getting to its weak points, a skill which is fun to test, no matter if it's your first or fifth time. You sound like a faggot who thinks games aren't replayable unless there's something different each playthrough.
And it's "piece", not "peace."
also learning plants and mastering the physics swings. sotc not only has a lot of depth, but mastering execution so you can pull off insane leaps is some of the most fun around.
Source on that reaction image, please?
New version has vastly improved contrast. I agree with the thread starter, who argues the original has a better atmosphere and vibe. The remake is going for more of a "wow" feeling than a "subdued" one. It's definitely different, but if the wow factor is as good as the subdued factor I don't think it will end up being a problem
Nigger what? SotC has better gameplay and character control/movement than most action-adventure games of its time and is in no way comparable to either of those artsy turds you just mentioned. You sound like someone shitting on a game he never played (or never played for more than 20 minutes)
Those time trial unlockables were pretty meh tbh. Fun for a while, sure, but the fun factor wears off pretty quick.
I did like the secret garden though. That was nice.
It might be the last game in the world that needs a remake. At least remake something that was shit like Ico.
So the difference between shit and shit?
OP, after reading everything you've posted, it sounds like you listened to a bunch of art lectures on composition and other things but failed to actually grasp what the fuck they were talking about. None of the points you make hold up, with the comparisons both working just as well as each other. I'd argue some of the screenshots from the new one do the things you're arguing for BETTER. This is one of the most autistic things I've seen in a while.
t. an art major it may have been a mistake, but at least I can call op a fucking retard with minor credibility
Wow user you are so clever, I bet it took you an hour to come up with that one-sic
Claiming to be an art student doesn't change the fact that you didn't respond to a single point made.
If I weren't on mobile I would break this shit down for op but I'm not about to bother rn
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Highly credible.
Considering what "artists" produce these days I think having a degree gives you less credibility, not more.
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I really can't tell if you are baiting or just plain retarded.
Have more music as an apology.
I agree, 3DPD shit is never acceptable.
Fuck, I remember a thread about this a while ago where I was given the impression there was going to be some more colossi or something. Was really hopeful for that but I guess Sony decided they can make bank simply by making a version of the original that's palatable to normalfags. I'll probably get this for the Bloodborne Box anyway, it's a great game.
Pretty good analysis, I0m surprised you didn't mention anything about the fireflies, in the original intro they are few, fly low and slow, and don't produce much light, in the remake they are all over the place and shine like the sun. It really makes it more "disney" magical, rather than solemn, which also happens with the moon as many have said.
Another thing they do is make the place seem quite more alive than the original. In the original you get to see/hear some birds, and occasional small reptile, and if you're swimming maybe a fish, I fear they'll throw animals everywhere, which will greatly take away from the almost inhospitable place of the original.
Just remember this is the shit we're missing out on. I was hoping they could add some of the beta colossi in but at the very best they could wind up as shit DLC.
anyone can add movie entries to imdb without any verification you dumb cunt
how is this news
So… I bought Ico back in the day, and beat it, but I didn't really think it was all that great of a game. Never got SotC, and tried The Last Guardian recently on a rental and sent it back in disgust shortly after exiting the first area.
Is the remake SotC worth picking up? Should I just play the original via PCSX2? Or is there a high chance I'll hate it if I didn't care for Ico/TLG?
SotC is very different from both games. The entire game is finding out how to climb on bosses to reach their weak points, with periods between bosses where you explore the world, trying to find them. It's a lot more action-packed, and there's no other person you need to worry about protecting or anything. It's just you, the boss, and sometimes your horse.
Basically They share a lot of the same feel and atmosphere, but SotC is an action packed adventure while Ico can get real boring at times. SotC is definitely the stronger of the two, and I never played TLG.
I'll have to give it a look then. Any major problems with it on PCSX2?
Most of those art type tryhard devs that make walking sims and such story focused video games often cite Ico as one of their favourite games. Both have these simple gameplay mechanics but Ico has features which actually make a good game like good level design to complement it. Those hipster devs just make walking sims with no other good things that make a good game.
Ueda planned for 48 colossi initially but it was too ambitious, so he cut the number in half to 24. Only 16 made it to the game but concept art for the other 8 does exist. Won't be in the remake though, Ueda isn't involved in it.