Blade Runner - Enhanced Edition

This is my first review on GOG, after many years and many games, and judging from my username I probably care about Blade Runner stuff a bit. As many reviewers already said, this is NOT criticism against the original game (which is absolutely great), but rather a rant against this "enhanced" edition. I understand the code was lost and had to be reverse engineered. I understand that the Blade Runner IP has always been legal hell on account of the so many different rights holders. What I DON'T understand is how any company can have the guts to release this and call it ENCHANCED, more so when there's already a SCUMMVM version that had done the reverse engineering flawlessly and had delivered an excellent product. The work done on this is inexcusably LAZY. You can tell right from the get go when you're greeted by the main menu interface and it's extremely simple and basic UI design. Highschoolers do better than that. Then there's the upscaling. The "enhancement" that acts as selling point. As if it was such a big effort to have an AI upscaler process FMV files overnight. It's erratic: not all FMVs are upscaled, timing is off on some sequences, audio bugs out, voxel characters no longer integrate atmospherically with the background and when the camera pans, they drift out of place. At the time of writing none of this has been patched, and I don't know if they will, but AVOID at all costs. At least on release, this is a joke. Oh and if you were eager to enjoy subtitles, they don't work on CUTSCENES. That's how lazy this is.

The Studio just killed the game... Keep your base-game.

I guess Night Dive will eventually fix most issues like lacking language and subtitle support etc - BUT - the core problem, the soft filter smearings in the videos, the terrible speed changes from 15 to 60 FPS and graphical GUI changes could ONLY be remedied by redoing/ rebuilding all of them from scratch! And I really doubt Night Dive has the budget nor the will to do that and thus there is close to zero chance that this EE-Version can ever be better than the SCUMM version, sold on GOG seperately (again). So as an owner of the SCUMM Version since 2019 I have no reason to keep the EE-Version - this and that terrible passepartout-art to fit the 4:3 graphics onto a 16:9 screen made me request a refund. Long story short: DO NOT BUY THe EE-Version!

When I read "Enhanced Edition" I expect the game to support at least 1080p 16:9 Widescreen and high resolution characters. Since the original game was 4:3, I expected the scenes and character animations to be recaptured from the original 3D models to have a fullscreen experience with high resolution. Sadly this is not the case. No purchase recommendation. I cannot see any enhancement compared to the original version.

If I could rate a game zero stars, I would rate Blade Runner Enhanced Edition zero stars. I see no significant difference between the graphics in the original version (which runs on ScummVM) and the so-called Enhanced Edition. None at all. Also, no noticeable improvement in sound quality. I use headphones with full surround sound support, and it basically sounds like the older version. The only way I could recommend purchasing the Enhanced Edition is the fact that GOG currently includes the original version with your purchase. If GOG ever stops including the original version with the Enhanced Edition, then there's no reason to buy it. Unfortunately, GOG no longer makes the original version available as a separate purchase on their website. GOG - PLEASE FIX THIS. RESTORE THE OPTION TO BUY THE ORIGINAL BLADE RUNNER SEPARATELY.