Recently, a remaster of the classic adventure Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition appeared on Steam. Even from its trailer, it was clear that it was not the “best remaster of all time” – but the reality was even worse.

Westwood Studios (developer of Command&Conquer and Dune strategies) released Blade Runner in 1997. Then the game received positive reviews, and even now it has its own circle of admirers because of the authentic atmosphere and the feeling of a real sequel to the original movie.

So you can understand their outrage when they received Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition from Nightdive Studios a few days ago (a developer who mostly specializes in classic remasters – in particular, last year he updated Quake, in plans for the future there is SiN Reloaded and System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition ).

The game received 60 fps (twice the original) and increased resolution, but the smoothed image looks much worse and gives the impression that it was simply generated by some neural network. In addition, “old” pixelated characters on “smooth” backgrounds look as unnatural as possible.

In addition, new bugs have appeared in the remaster, which were not in the original (Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was not ported, the game had to be “collected” from scratch ), the quality of the music has deteriorated, and some localization languages have simply disappeared.

The reaction of the fans was so violent that the developer … added an original game to his remaster as a “bonus”. But even here they managed to make the situation only worse. The fact is that Nightdive Studios used a fan upgrade based on the ScummVM project, which until recently was available at GOG – but is now unavailable and is being offered as a free add-on to Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition.