There used to be a trend on YouTube of fans 'remaking' classic games in Unreal Engine 5 for a brief trailer, and more often than not, they looked like vaseline-slathered slop. Art direction was gutted in favor of shiny, reflective lights and hyperrealistic models. Now, RTX remixes have supplanted them. Only they're not just 3-minute clips churned out on YouTube for views, they're playable from start-to-finish. Portal and Quake have been through this meat grinder, losing all semblance of identity, and now, it's Morrowind's turn.
Nvidia has spotlighted a new community project from RTX Remix modder Gokuwashere, and it encapsulates everything wrong with these kinds of remasters. The game's surrealist alien atmosphere is paved over with brown, muddy lighting, making the almost psychedelic moody aesthetic indistinguishable from other fantasy games. It's all a bit drab, but worse than that, the game is impossible to read. Everything is darker and blends together, obscuring the visual cues Morrowind uses to guide you towards points of interest and objects.
Considering Nvidia framed this as a new jumping-on point for fans who want to "go back and try Morrowind after enjoying Oblivion," that's hardly ideal. Meanwhile, veteran fans are looking on in horror at how the RTX Remix waste has now washed up on the shores of Vvardenfell. "What a way to ruin the game, no thanks!"
There are a lot of comments to that effect: "RTX stays OFF," "looks like sh*t," "The original looks better," "YUCK dude," "THE SLOPPENING," "Soulless," "oh they're still doing this sh*t," "nobody wants this garbage," and on and on. In so many words, the response has been, 'No thanks, you can keep it.' It's hardly a glowing endorsement for the project that so many die-hard fans have rejected Gokuwashere's efforts.
"High fidelity textures and materials replace the two-decade-old original assets," Nvidia explains. "New foliage and rocks fill out the original sparsely-covered terrain. Volumetric clouds enhance the otherwise empty skies, interacting and interplaying with path-traced lighting to cast shadows. Reflections and object shadows greatly improve the appearance of all scenes, and dramatically improve bodies of water, which back in the day were a showcase for Shader Model 2.0 pixel shaders on early GeForce GPUs. And Remix's Advanced Particle VFX transform the appearance of magical spells."
There's this lofty assumption with projects like this that they're “fixing” the original, as though the game's vision couldn't be fully realized at the time. It's like going back to a black-and-white movie and coloring it in, then proclaiming you've made Citizen Kane better. A game's visual identity may well have been born of restrictions, but those restrictions make the atmosphere what it is. Just look at the fog in Silent Hill. Going back to fill the skies with volumetric clouds and dramatically overhaul the water and foliage is a disservice to Morrowind that ignores its artistic intent rather than seeking to fully realize it, and is exactly why fans widely reject these efforts. They aren't faithful.
Right now, the mod only features a small portion of Vvardenfell, starting with Seyda Neen (which looks closer to the Resident Evil 4 village than a small Imperial port town) and a district of Balmora, including the updated Mage's Guild, but it's hard to imagine things improving much for the final release. There's a charming otherworldly feel to Morrowind that few games come close to, and running it through the generic RTX Remix machine is counterintuitive to its entire design.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/morrowind-rtx-remaster-backlash/
