Silent Hill 2 Remake is likely all but done with now apart from the potential odd patch with some fixes, so Bloober is already preparing for its next project.
Look, I love Silent Hill 2. It is one of my most favorite games. Top ten, maybe even top five.
Bloober’s remake is mid. At best.
The change in camera perspective shifted the gameplay to be more of an “action shooter” than “survival horror,” just like what happened to Resident Evil when RE4 came out. The optimal way to play the game used to be killing the least amount of enemies possible, choosing to not fight unless absolutely necessary (in fact, fighting was never actually required in the original, you didn’t even have to kill the tutorial enemy). This actually fit the character lore of James quite well, because his personality is one that runs away from his problems, he is not a person that naturally faces his problems head on. In the remake though, combat is pretty much mandatory. And there is a lot of it.
Many, many things were changed, and it seems the changes were made simply for the sake of making changes. Like, if you’re going to make that many changes, just make it something new. The character designs are all completely different, with only James looking kinda familiar (the changes they made from initial reveal were good but they didn’t go far enough IMO). Not a fan of what they did to Eddie, Angela, or Maria. Laura is give or take IMO, not terrible but not as good as the original design either. The changes they made to Pyramid Head’s design aren’t the best IMO, they tried to lean to heavily on the movie designs (again, I guarantee that Konami mandated this because they have been meddling in SH development sver since they hacked up SH3). He doesn’t even have his “tongue hatch” or webbed nitrile gloves anymore (the gloves are some strangely clean white linnen or something now for some reason).
This isnt even touching on the Bloober Special. The bad performance. And holy moly, even the unpatched SH2 HD Collection on the Xbox 360 didnt have performance this bad. As I stated before, it wasn’t hard for Bloober to reduce a lot of the performance problems. Few clicks of a button here and there, and probably could have just ran their models directly through Blender Decimate without any touchup for LOD models. Would have vastly reduced performance problems. They just didn’t, and the reason why is entirely either they were too lazy or they didn’t know. Both of these options are pretty bad explanations, but make complete sense when you look at Bloobers past games. I would expect their next game that seems to literally just be a project duplicate of SH2 remake, CRONOS, to probably have all of the exact same problems.
Look, I love Silent Hill 2. It is one of my most favorite games. Top ten, maybe even top five.
Bloober’s remake is mid. At best.
The change in camera perspective shifted the gameplay to be more of an “action shooter” than “survival horror,” just like what happened to Resident Evil when RE4 came out. The optimal way to play the game used to be killing the least amount of enemies possible, choosing to not fight unless absolutely necessary (in fact, fighting was never actually required in the original, you didn’t even have to kill the tutorial enemy). This actually fit the character lore of James quite well, because his personality is one that runs away from his problems, he is not a person that naturally faces his problems head on. In the remake though, combat is pretty much mandatory. And there is a lot of it.
Many, many things were changed, and it seems the changes were made simply for the sake of making changes. Like, if you’re going to make that many changes, just make it something new. The character designs are all completely different, with only James looking kinda familiar (the changes they made from initial reveal were good but they didn’t go far enough IMO). Not a fan of what they did to Eddie, Angela, or Maria. Laura is give or take IMO, not terrible but not as good as the original design either. The changes they made to Pyramid Head’s design aren’t the best IMO, they tried to lean to heavily on the movie designs (again, I guarantee that Konami mandated this because they have been meddling in SH development sver since they hacked up SH3). He doesn’t even have his “tongue hatch” or webbed nitrile gloves anymore (the gloves are some strangely clean white linnen or something now for some reason).
This isnt even touching on the Bloober Special. The bad performance. And holy moly, even the unpatched SH2 HD Collection on the Xbox 360 didnt have performance this bad. As I stated before, it wasn’t hard for Bloober to reduce a lot of the performance problems. Few clicks of a button here and there, and probably could have just ran their models directly through Blender Decimate without any touchup for LOD models. Would have vastly reduced performance problems. They just didn’t, and the reason why is entirely either they were too lazy or they didn’t know. Both of these options are pretty bad explanations, but make complete sense when you look at Bloobers past games. I would expect their next game that seems to literally just be a project duplicate of SH2 remake, CRONOS, to probably have all of the exact same problems.