Fast forward to some time later... they made a demo to impress Warner Bros and it had exactly my style of health bars in it!! Again I often say things that people aren't ready or willing to listen to immediately it seems..

Let’s go ahead and assume that we skip all of the legal rights and licensing issues and treat this from the perspective of a project that has already obtained the green light from the appropriate rights holders and check writers. First... let me say that we lack a lexical definition for “remake”, so it includes things like “remasters”. The only real requirement for a remake is a development budget and the fact the old game was already released. Beyond that, it’s a question of what is available with regards to the old assets, tools, and tech and the remake’s project scope.

When I say “what is available”, I mean this - a lot of old archived code and assets won’t build anymore. A game for the Playstation 2 was built on vastly different development hardware than we have today. I started working on PS2 games as my first job in the industry, we were using Windows 98 machines and using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe to save all of our code and assets - neither of which are supported anymore. Many publishers don’t have their old archived code or assets anymore either - those data archives could have been corrupted or lost long ago. In these cases, all we have left are the compiled and finished assets and binaries. In these cases, we usually have to [emulate the original game] instead and [add additional bells and whistles to it]. The gameplay of the original remains unchanged, and any adjustments we make are required to be small in scope due to the constraints of not being able to make meaningful changes to the old game.

In situations where the old archived code and assets will build, we can actually replace and update things in game on an individual basis, as well as add new features and update and fix bugs. In a like manner, if we are given free reign to essentially rebuild the entire game in modern tech (e.g. how the System Shock remake is being rebuilt in Unreal), we can also make relevant changes where we need for modern design sensibilities. These tend to be for remakes of either newer games with available archived assets or remake projects with larger budgets. The scope of these projects necessitates being larger than an emulation/port job because it requires more people to make things work, but the results tend to have better production values and be better products overall.

I should also address the elephant in the room - FF7R pushed the concept of a remake so incredibly far that, as far as I know, nobody else is doing anything even remotely close to it. The new game has only the story, settings, and characters loosely in common with its originator, while most of the game design and technology have been scrapped entirely, it’s basically its own AAA game remake more akin to the 2013 Tomb Raider franchise reboot than a “remake” as we know it. It’s the weird anomaly that breaks the rules, it is highly unlikely that any publisher out there is willing to commit such a massive budget to a remake, or even if they have a single game with enough interest that would get a reasonable return on that kind of production budget.

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