It’s a simple concept to those who regularly play video games, but it’s an interesting discussion and debate to be had while also minorly arbitrary, still, when someone calls a project like 2019’s Resident Evil 2 a remaster, it does bother me just a bit.
Let’s go one by one and I’ll give a few examples for each.
Remakes
Remakes occur a majority of the time when a developer, commonly a team under the same game publisher as the original, entirely remakes one of their older titles to reach its fullest potential with today’s technology and standards for game development. This means that Resident Evil 2 (1998) and Resident Evil 2 (2019) offer different experiences of what is arguably the same game; they have different gameplay styles, art directions, etc., but their stories are nonetheless the same. More examples of this include titles from the Crash Bandicoot series with the bundled installment titled Crash Bandicoot: N-Sane Trilogy (2017), Final Fantasy VII (1997) with Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020), and the upcoming remakes of two popular horror games from the PS2/Xbox and PS3/360 era, Silent Hill 2 (20??) and Dead Space (2023).
Remasters
Remasters occur when an older game, in its original form, is updated and released on newer platforms to be experienced. These don’t take as long to develop and are more common in the industry. Recently, remasters were especially prominent in the PS4/Xbox One generation. Games like The Last of Us Remastered(2014), Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection (2015), Halo: The Master Chief Collection (2014), and Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2021) are prime examples of remasters. They weren’t made from the ground up like a remake would be, they are, at their core, their original games and maintain their original programming, gameplay, etc., only their graphics are enhanced and the target frame rate increased to the ideal 60 frames-per-second.
The line between the two types of games has gotten blurrier and blurrier over the years, but when it comes to it, it’s important this line becomes more clear, mainly for consumers expecting one thing, and getting another.