Don’t change a hair for me, not if you care for me
As the sun begins to set on a generation of consoles, our thoughts inevitably turn to its legacy. The era of PS4 and Xbox One was one of unprecedented change. Walls that previously felt unbreakable came tumbling down as cross-platform multiplayer became a reality. Midgeneration hardware refreshes came with hefty power increases; consumer VR actually happened. Brick-and-mortar retail was rendered as good as irrelevant by the rise of digital sales, with frequent storefront discounts crushing the secondhand market. And the concept of the game-as-service dramatically increased a title’s staying power.
Yet for all the forward progress made, it was also a generation defined by nostalgia, in which we proved to developers and publishers our undying eagerness to revisit the classics again and again. That’s certainly something Yu Suzuki, who stars in Collected Works this issue, can appreciate: Kickstarter quickly proved itself the natural home for developers seeking to bring back forgotten favourites, and Suzuki’s Shenmue III remains the most successful Kickstarter game to date.
The addition of backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 was the turning point for Xbox One – the moment at which Microsoft embarked on a generation-long campaign to restore the goodwill it lost at the console’s miserable unveiling. Today, compatibility defines the Xbox project. It’s just one of the issues that makes the coming generation so different to what has come before. In Knowledge, while we wait for concrete details on the new consoles to emerge, we try to make sense of it all.
Over the course of this generation, the phrase ‘remaster’ has come to mean many things, and not all of them are positive. But there is no faulting Capcom’s handling of the Resident Evil back catalogue. After last year’s winning remake of RE2, it is now turning its attention to the third game in the series – and from what we’ve seen, it’s a fitting swan song for one of the great generations of hardware. The story begins on p58.