Blade Runner - Enhanced Edition

I considered Nightdive Studios the most relevant studio for remastering the old gems. Not anymore. After basically perfect Shadow Man Remastered and not so great, but still very good remaster of Exhumed, we are witness to the worst remaster coming from Nightdive Studios, Blade Runner Enhanced Edition. From where to begin? From the absolutely dreadful, ugly MAIN menu that looks like the menus of cheap porn sold on DVDs back in the day? Or from the "improved" pre-rendered backgrounds that lost many details, many of its original atmosphere? Or from the bugs like at the very beginning scene in the streets in front of the where you cannot move the character the usual way but only after clicking an interactive object? There are gameplay bugs (the shooting section), there are visual bugs (bad scene transition), there are new ugly menus (the main menu, or the "inventory" menu), there are reports on sound bugs and there is a lot of lost in "translation". By translation I mean the improvement of the original prerendered backgrounds completely killed many little things like rain or fog and made the graphics too muddy. On the other hand the voxel characters remain pixelated and jagged as the original ones. Did they even tough the characters? Forget this piece of crap and play the original game instead. For a non-native English speaker there is just one pros in this Enhanced Edition - you can turn on the subtitles which strangely was not the case in the original game.

Blade Runner 1997 from Westwood is an absolute classic adventure game. The GOG non-enhanced ScummVM version is a faithful way to play this game. The Enhanced Edition is such a big disapointment and really is not worth playing if you have the ScummVM or Original Big Box editions. The A.I. upscale they used to "improve" the cinematics and backgrounds actually removes so many tiny details and places a smeary blurry effect on the backgrounds. You will noticed this if you play the original then switch to this version although the original is much lower resolution, you can see small details on signs, definition on bricks and puddles with splashes of rain in them, all of that is Digitally noise reduced out of this version. Having the frame rate bumped to 60FPS but the character models still at 15FPS as well as looking in my opinion even worse than they did in 1997's edition thanks to increasing the resolution, made me personally feel some kind of motion sickness when initially playing. I had to keep looking away from the screen and I am not photosensitive or suffer with motion sickness and never had this with any other game I have ever played. Character models now appear in front of smoke in some areas, there is no autosave feature, small bugs and glitches throughout, they have removed some of the scene transitions. I believe the Scumm VM version actually adds some content that was cut from the initial release, this version is removing stuff that was in the original release. Then there is the presentation of menus and text font. Both of which look so basic and jarring as if it was an afterthought to include the new menu. The good points are now you can change the options before you start a game, so you have the opportunity to make the game harder or have dialogue options from the start menu as well as offering up subtitles. Play the ScummVM version if you want a true Blade Runner experience! The enhanced edition doesn't do enough to earn that title. A real let down

What did NightDive DO? How did they make a game from 1997 look WORSE in 2022. I was initially excited, but then I found out that you can no longer change McCoys personality on the fly, once you pick one you're stuck with it. It only got worse however, because when you first arrive at the Runciters crime scene you CAN'T move unless you click on a clue, very much unlike the original that lets you walk around. It wasn't until I got inside the building that the game granted me the right to walk around. The backgrounds are MUCH worse, not to mention how the character models, the things that were made to look like they were really a part of the world in the original game, now look like they are floating against a flat picture. It is most notable during China Town and robs this game of what made it the bestselling adventure game of 97. Something else that is BAFFLING, is the bug that causes INVISIBLE CLUES. yes, invisible clues. To further explain, when at Runciters the wrapper for the chopsticks and the dog were invisible, but they mouse still glowed green when over there spot. A game like THIS why would any of them be invisible? Then theres the odd visually downgraded transitions between locations either in your vehicle or from one side of Runciters to the other. rather than having the impressive fly by of the original it now awkwardly fades into the next shot. What a disappointment. Do not get this, and stick with the GoG version, until they somehow fix this.

Now, I've seen a lot of gratuitous hate being thrown at Nightdive because of this version of the game, so I'll try to take a more sensible approach. The game is still the same great game it has always been. Graphically, there wasn't much they could have done, since all the original material was lost, and they did the next best thing they could, turning to AI to "clean up", raising the FMV fp/s, upping the resolution, etc. YMMV in this regard; I, for one, prefer some things the way they looked in the original version of the game (some details, like rain, steam, fine print, etc., were lost or blurred in the upscaling process). Due to the FMV being 60fp/s while the voxel portions of the game remain at 15fp/s the game feels clunkier than the original, as well, with characters moving around in what feels like stop-motion while the backgrounds run at full 60fp/s, which will probably feel a bit jarring for people playing this version. Putting that aside, my main issues with this port are of a different nature: while trying out the game, I experienced two crashes-to-desktop, I couldn't trigger specific lines of dialogue that were needed for the story path I was aiming for, the shooting range wasn't working as it should, I couldn't even get the disk from Runciter's. Now, I don't mind the game looking the way it does -- it's not ugly, by any means, it looks like Westworld's Blade Runner, which is fine --, I don't care about the sloppily-made menu, the difference in the KIA interface, all that jazz, but I can't forgive gameplay issues, because this was supposed to be an ENHANCED edition, and in terms of gameplay it ADDED problems. Hopefully they'll fix this, but I'm not placing my bets on that. Even if they do, stick to the original ScummVM version, which is way smaller and still plays and looks better. Get this version only because it comes with the GOG original Blade Runner, since it's the only way to legally purchase it, now, but ignore the EE altogether.