Nightdive Studios has mastered the art of early 3D game remasters and is hoping to move on to a new game.
In an interview with VGC, Nightdive Studios head Stephen Kick said the developers are interested in remastering games in the Xbox 360 and PS3 eras.
NightDive is responsible for numerous retro game ports to modern platforms, including my mouthless.
It mainly focuses on games that originally had a PC version, and uses its own Kex engine to develop ports. However, the studio aims to expand its catalogue to include games exclusively for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
“We’re ready.”
Regarding these ports in the new console game, Larry Cooperman, the night dive director of business development, said “We’re ready.”
He goes on to explain the process of introducing these ports into development, as well as the games saved for modern audiences, and say they start with a few questions.
Was it exclusive to the Xbox360 or did you have a PC version too? It’s also a small preservation available, as it changes things. Do you have the source code? If so, what is the quality of the source code? What about assets? These are the kind of considerations we have there.
But things are more complicated with games where studios are closed, as many people in a time of game development problems have. Kick uses Hayes, an unfortunate PS3 first-person shooter game, as an example.
“We go to the former designer. “It didn’t go as well as you’d like. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of time to rum and think about what you did differently,” Kick says.
This is clearly a conversation with some of the original developers of the game they remastered, giving them the opportunity to go back and do things differently. Newer, more powerful hardware is everything you need to smooth out some issues from the original release.
However, porting and emulating games originally released on the PS3 introduces some unique challenges thanks to the console’s unique system architecture. This was a hindrance to game development at the time, but I’m sure NightDive can make it work.
“The architecture remembers the talk when the system was first released, how difficult it is for developers to ‘get’ it. That’s a big issue with backward compatibility,” Kick mentions how the original PS3 model handles PS2 backward compatibility by including physical PS2 hardware in the PS2 motherboard, and how the Console shows it’s not compatible.
Still, he is confident that his studio has “enough experience in a place where he can do serviceable work with the PS3 Remaster.”
For now, NightDive still deals with System Shock 2 Remaster and System Shock 3. This is currently in a “very complicated” situation.
