The game got a lot of negative reviews right after its release despite the studio's experience in remastering old games.
When Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was released in June, it was not met kindly. Players complained about the quality of cutscenes and their AI upscaling, bugs, the lack of a 16:9 aspect ratio, and other issues they encountered.
The backlash is surprising because Nightdive Studios has made many great remasters of old games in the past, so what happened to the Blade Runner remake?
PCGamesN asked the director of business development, Larry Kuperman, and Dimitris Giannakis, the lead producer of the game, to find out what went wrong.
“The responsibility for the ship date and, in retrospect, the failure to change the ship date resides 100% with me,” said Kuperman. “The ship date was picked because it aligned with the 40th anniversary of the movie – that seemed that it would be something that would be a really cool thing to do for the fans.”
“I think it was more of a death by a thousand cuts,” added Giannakis. “We had a lot of small things that were kind of upsetting people or bothering people about the game. I wouldn’t say there was any one major showstopper – we heard feedback about things like, ‘we don’t like the border that you have, can we turn that off?’ Or ‘there’s no brightness settings in the game, can we have that?'”
The next day after the launch, Nightdive added two ScummVM-powered versions of Blade Runner to the Enhanced Edition – the original version and one with some unused content that had been cut from the Westwood release.
The studio attributes the unfinished state of the game to the challenges it faced during development. To remake the 1997 point-and-click adventure game, Nightdive reverse-engineered it and rebuild it from the ground up. Giannakis said the process took thousands of hours.
“Everything’s done in a 3D world, even though it looks like a 2D adventure game,” Giannakis explains. “There’s lighting in there, there’s shadows, there’s depth of field – all sorts of 3D concepts before 3D became the norm.”
The quality assurance team also encountered some issues because of the game's use of RNG, which adds to the time needed to test it, as well as COVID-19 and Giannakis' cross-country move.
“Anyone who knows me knows I have a strong personality,” Kuperman said. “Maybe Dimitris [Giannakis], if he’d been on board, would have been the one that said, ‘hey, we’re not ready.’ Maybe it was because of my personality, because of who I am, that nobody told us we weren’t ready.”
Kuperman added that most of the problems were caused by human issues, and he couldn't guarantee that if the team had spent more time on the game, it would have been better as anything could happen.
Since the game's launch, Nightdive has worked to improve the Enhanced Edition: it fixed a lot of issues, such as menus that weren’t using updated resolution settings, progression locks, memory leaks, and more. Nightdive is working on another patch and says it plans to add features like a toggle between original and Enhanced Edition videos, improvements to the UI and the menus, better pathfinding, and others. The date for the patch is not revealed yet:
“As opposed to the 40th anniversary [of Blade Runner], we’re going back to our old standard of saying the second patch will be out when it’s ready,” Kuperman said. “When it passes through to QA, and when we’re sure that it fixes as many bugs as we possibly can.”
The patches have done what they were supposed to, and now new reviews are mostly positive. Check out PCGamesN's article here and don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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