StarCraft remastered was done really well, but I believe they built on top of their existing engine.
No one seems to care about Witcher 1's engine, because it was hot garbage. Any engine (even an off-the-shelf one like Unreal5) will be grossly superior to the trash that the original game was.
This remake can have slow, barely workable controls and pretty bad graphics and still be far better than the original game.
They really just need the Witcher 1 remade so that people have an entry point into the story. The actual "gameplay" from the original will _NOT_ be missed. IMO anyway.
What are these engine issues in Witcher 1 you speak of? As a player I did not notice them back in the day.
I've played many 3d action-RPG games. Zelda, Monster Hunter, Dynasty Warriors, etc. etc. Witcher1's combat is by far the worst of the series.
Just... laggy, non-responsive controls. But in a bad way (ex: Monster Hunter is also laggy/non-responsive, but in a way that's "obvious" that the slowdown is purposeful and tactical. You need to be very careful about when you attack or not attack vs various monsters in that game).
Witcher 1's combat in contrast, has a lot of repetition and not a lot of depth IMO. At least, from what I remember. Witcher2 onwards had much better ideas of "fun combat" experiences.
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I can still go back to old PS2 era Dynasty Warriors, mash square and have fun. Its not about "dated graphics". I admit dynasty warriors is a mashy-heavy game with a casual mindset, but I think Witcher couldn't really decide if it wanted to be a punishing slow game (like Monster Hunter/Souls series), or a faster twitch game, and just weirdly plays in this unfun position between the two extremes.
Its fine to have a slow punishing game (Monster Hunter / Souls / etc. etc.), but you need a huge variety of bosses to keep interest. Witcher 1 felt pretty stale after a short time, since there's just not as much variety.
Somehow, I don't find Dynasty Warriors gameplay stale (despite being a square-mash simulator). I don't fully understand why however. I guess DW is more about positioning of the player-character (the enemy army is always winning where you are _not_ located, so Dynasty Warriors feels more like a firefighter simulator, where you're running around the battlefield trying to fix issues in the army... rather than really being a combat game?)
Once you 'get' this, everything makes way more sense, the game flows, and it becomes really quite fun. I played it when it first came out. I didn't get it, and quit before beating the first chapter. I later replayed it, got it, and ended up playing through it multiple times on max difficulty.
That's actually why I stopped playing Monster Hunter: I really hate the non-responsiveness, it feels like wading through molasses.
Monster Hunter basically forces you to memorize the way the monsters move. Its not for everyone, but its in the title. "Monster Hunter". You gotta keep practicing vs the same monster over-and-over until you memorize its patterns before you really get the joy of success in that game.
When you're finally cool with one monster, you move on to learn the patterns of the next, etc. etc. Its a "take it at your own pace" kinda game. No story, just hunting.
But that's not what I'm looking for in a game, I generally want the agility of e.g. Mirror's Edge ^^
Indeed, it would be weird if CDPR had trouble with Polish.
In other words, the first Witcher game is in more of a niche genre with significantly less mainstream appeal in terms of gameplay and UI.
The fighting system is pretty old-school but once you get used to it, it is quite fun. It is very authentic to how Geralt is fighting in the Witcher books. It is simply more about rhythm and tactics than one might be used to.
Just because Witcher 1 is kind of hard to recommend for a casual gamer in 2022, does not mean it is garbage. It is just different. It has more of a niche appeal.
I am absolutely glad I got to play the original and some of its charm are the things are probably going to be modernized away in the remake.
They picked an off-the-shelf engine that was designed to simulate tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons in 3D. Maybe they got a good deal on it.
The bird's-eye click-to-move camera mode is what the engine was designed for, but the developers kludged in some keyboard controls because they were making an action game.
The odd timing-based fighting styles sort of make sense, because the engine wanted to handle combat with dice rolls on a mostly-fixed interval.
It could have turned out a lot worse, when you consider what they were working with. I hope they keep some of the weird quirks, like the rhythm swordplay.
Witcher 1's main quest is the most interesting of the 3 games, I hope they do not commit the mistake of adding a minimap to casualize the remake, paying attention to the dialogues, environmental details and exploring the maps is very much what made the game interesting to me. It's one of these games where you can get stuck if you are not paying attention to the story, or miss certain timed events, which increases its replay value. It's much more interesting that just spamming witcher senses all the time to complete quests.
To those who didn't play the game, this is very much a "detective" story and most quests are shrouded in mystery, it can works ONLY if the player has to pay attention to the dialogues, lore and story. It will not work if the player is spoon-fed every little detail about who is whom, what potion to use or the devs resorts to bringing back the "witcher senses".
Just like Witcher 2, one can "side" with either of 2 camps, unlike Witcher 2, one can decide not to side with anybody, although choosing the latter option might not lead to the most positive outcome...
absolutely. whenever a friend is playing anything with specific shader/specular/lighting styles I always yell "Unity!" while watching him. I'm generally dead-on accurate with those guesses. It's definetly not coincidence at this point; there is some default behavior or lighting gimmick I can generally always cue in on with regards to Unity. I think it's their style of specular lighting glow that gets painted onto way too many things by most creators.
I don't use the engine myself, so I can't tell you exactly what it is I hone in on, but I can for most titles.
Great game though.
One of the biggest things indie game developers can do to not look like an indie game is to stop using the default settings on the default materials. Not necessarily even using custom materials. Just don't use the default settings.
these are more examples of modelling issues but it shows how little care and QA went into the remake:
they rounded out this 6-sided nut : https://old.reddit.com/r/GTA/comments/quutz7/definitive_lazy...
hot dog fingers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQWw0hHMUoc
This is nice usually, but such a curse for procedural games. Once you start internalizing the RNG you stop thinking of yourself as exploring an environment, and more in terms of rolling dice: "oh, rolled a general shop, no mimic, one fountain and the Gnomish Caves entrance". At least nethack has enough crazy shit happening that it gives the levels personality regardless.
Same thing with AI enemies in strategy/4X games. Deep down it's just some form of RNG+rules based on "personality" values and current situation, but there's no real strategy. Just a simulation of it.
Which makes you think, with AlphaStar defeating pro players since 2019, where's the AI 4X games deserve? While 4X games might be crazy when good humans play multiplayer, the average 4X solo player does a limited set of actions and uses much less strategy than in StarCraft.
Compare with Warcraft III Reforged. Modding with the original WC3 was extremely popular: DotA started as a mod for WC3, so Blizzard should have focused on compatibility. Not doing so led to the poor reception.