Idk I still think it’s way more common for remasters to be good. There’s been a handful of bad ones, but they’re the outliers. What’s way more common seems to be bad PC ports in general, which affects both remasters and new games.
Just looking around for some examples: the Phonekx Wright original trilogy was great for me on PC, and the PC remasters are pretty well-received overall. The Sonic remasters from Christian Whitehead were so good that Sega let him make an original game. The BioShock games aren’t really good to replay, but I didn’t really notice anything different on the PC remasters compared to how I originally played them on the PS3.
Ones that I haven’t played yet but have reviewed well: the Legacy of Kain series, the Last of Us 1&2 (you can argue that the remasters were not needed, and specifically the PC ports of those games had rough launches, but the console versions reviewed well and reportedly the PC versions have been mostly fixed). The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are widely considered to be the definitive way to play those games.
The examples I can think of for bad “remasters” weren’t really remasters. The Grand Theft Auto series might be the most notorious for this, because they removed the original PC ports and released “remastered” prior Android ports instead of remastering the original PC or console versions. Silent Hill is another case- Konami lost the original source code so it was, by definition, a remake that they just chose to market as a remaster instead.
Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary: the remaster was way brighter and removed some of the mystery and fear that was essential to the story. Thankfully, they put in a button to use the old textures, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep it in old mode most of the time.
Idk I still think it’s way more common for remasters to be good. There’s been a handful of bad ones, but they’re the outliers. What’s way more common seems to be bad PC ports in general, which affects both remasters and new games.
Just looking around for some examples: the Phonekx Wright original trilogy was great for me on PC, and the PC remasters are pretty well-received overall. The Sonic remasters from Christian Whitehead were so good that Sega let him make an original game. The BioShock games aren’t really good to replay, but I didn’t really notice anything different on the PC remasters compared to how I originally played them on the PS3.
Ones that I haven’t played yet but have reviewed well: the Legacy of Kain series, the Last of Us 1&2 (you can argue that the remasters were not needed, and specifically the PC ports of those games had rough launches, but the console versions reviewed well and reportedly the PC versions have been mostly fixed). The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are widely considered to be the definitive way to play those games.
The examples I can think of for bad “remasters” weren’t really remasters. The Grand Theft Auto series might be the most notorious for this, because they removed the original PC ports and released “remastered” prior Android ports instead of remastering the original PC or console versions. Silent Hill is another case- Konami lost the original source code so it was, by definition, a remake that they just chose to market as a remaster instead.
Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary: the remaster was way brighter and removed some of the mystery and fear that was essential to the story. Thankfully, they put in a button to use the old textures, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep it in old mode most of the time.