I’d never thought I’d be excited about Quake 2, but here we are. I loved Quake 3! It’s the reason that I didn’t learn any computer programming in my computer programming class. But Quake and Quake 2 were always games that didn’t do much for me. I could appreciate they were good, I could appreciate what made them good, but they neverꦗ really connected with me. I had crushes on people who liked Nine Inch Nails, but I wasn’t a big Trent Reznor person myself. In fact, I simply happened to end up owning the games on Steam throug꧟h a series of sales and late night depression purchases.
And then Bethesda/168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision/Nightdive/Whoever announced that they were releasing a Quake 2 remaster. And this baby wasn’t just modernized controls and better graphics. It includes the entire version of Quake 2 for Nintendo 64 as well as a whole new campaign. That’s a lot of good shit in a remaster. And for a lot of consoles, it’s also the first time you can buy it. It makes sense to pay the ghastly, horrid full price of $9.99 on Switch w💝hen you get that much material.
But here’s the thing: they updated the old copies people owned on PC. Sure, they already did that with the original Quake and whatever. But I want to hit this point again: Bethesda released a video game remaster, and allowed owners of the original to get all the updates and content. For free. I downloaded Quake 2 on my Steam Deck and immediately was offered choices that diꦫdn’t exist the last time I’d played this 26 year old game. They simply added them in! I didn’t have to pay for some ‘HD Graphics Pack’ bullshit DLC. The extra games and new levels didn’t cost me a goddamn penny. I owned Quake 2 before, so I own all of Quake 2 now.
Folks, we could just make this the standard. Our industry doesn’t have to be run like a restaurant that charges you for the glasses of water. We can actually reward fans! For example, I own the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 1-6 pixel ☂remasters on Steam. These were advertised as the definitive versions of those games. They wouldn’t have been anyway, but we don’t have time to argue that point. W🐲e were all told - hey, this is the Final Fantasy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and even 6 that you should own. Best version. Awesome. The last one you’ll ever own.
Oh, and more good news: they later announced those games would be coming to Switch and PlayStation. With improvements ranging from accessibility options to a font that doesn’t look like dogshit on Ozempic! We’re about four months out since those ports of ports came to port, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix has yet to do anything with updating the Steam version to match. Reading the Steam forums for the remaster Final Fantasy games is a sadness wrapped in false hope. ‘Are they ever going to update our versions?’ ‘Of course. Patience. Patience. Now put on this blindfold and stand near that tree’. It’s not hard to mod these games, but why the **** shou𝓀ld the users be the ones responsible for fixing them?
I get that it’s certai♈nly Square Enix’s prerogative to force people to buy multiple copies of the same game. It’s why they keep releasing them with slight changes and calling these newest ones, finally, for the last time, seriously, pinky swear, the definitive editions. Until another triple-A game flops and it’ll be time to trud▨ge these ************* back out onto the stage.
And, no, Square Enix doesn’t have the best history with PC updates and upgrades. It’s as slow as the last third of Final Fantasy 16. But at this point, they’ve been in the PC game for years, folks. Final Fantasy 14 is a hit! You can legally, officially play almost any game in the Final Fantasy series on a PC right now. This very moment! So let’s get past this ‘we are just a humble console game company’ shit. Hell, this isn’t even the most egregious example. When it released an updated, expanded version of Dragon Quest 1, it sure as hell didn’t pass that ܫalong to owners of the original. It didn’t even 🌳offer a courtesy upgrade price. It was ‘buy what’s ostensibly the same game again’ or ‘shut the **** up’.
This isn’t just about Square Enix. As far as I 🅘can tell, Bethesda itself never implemented easy-to-use console controls on older games like Fallout 3. Well, Fallout 3 works with some controllers. But that ‘some’ is doing heavy ******* lifting. To be fair, these are older examples - but they’re both popular games made by a popular company that still blasts them out every Steam sale. A patch to make the games run as well as they do on an Xbox Series X might not be a practical task, but I don’t really care. Companies do impractical things all the time.
I can acknowledge that it costs money to update a game. But Bethesda could have easily charged Steam users $9.99 🍸for a newer, better PC version. On the flip side, Bethesda could’ve released its console-friendly versions and shrugged its shoulders at a PC release. ‘Who cares? We already got their money once. We don’t need to give them an extra prize’. Instead, it did what should be the bare minimum: it updated games that people actually paid for. It kept their games consistent across platforms. It didn’t use big changes as a pressure point to buy the game again. It’s rare in games that you get rewarded for being a longtime fan rather than getting indirectly punished.
I don’t believe in much ওof humanity, but I’m relatively sure we can try to ******* update games across platforms. It may not be easy to always do. As I said, I’m not a programmer - which, as we’ve established, is the fault of video games and not my own decisions. I know that mods take care of a number of these issues but, again, that itself still puts the onus for getting the full experience on the work of fans alone. It sucks, man!
Quake 2’s glorious re-release coming as a🤡 free update to previous owners shouldn’t be the exception to the rule. It should be the rule. Also, I was wrong. Quake 2 is pretty great.