Nvidia is wallowing in the past when it should be looking to the future.
Alright, listen. RTX Remix (opens in new tab) is a genuinely cool bit of tech wizardry, and it undeniably has the potential to revitalize the modding scene for a ton of old games. I’m already trying to work out how I can possibly afford an RTX 4090; my plans may or may not involve selling a kidney.
As a long-time Elder Scrolls fan, I won’t lie: seeing Morrowind lovingly re-rendered with RTX Remix did excite me a little. I’m already imagining what a Remixed Fallout: New Vegas would look like, and it’s making me less depressed about the current state of the Fallout franchise. I can hear Marty Robbins singing ‘Big Iron’ already.
But there’s something about the whole thing that sets off the tiny ‘something’s wrong here’ alarm in the back of my head. About halfway through my second viewing of the Portal RTX trailer, it hit me: sure, this looks better, but it doesn’t look how it’s supposed to look.
Games are universally bound by the technological hardware capabilities of their time, and a big part of game design involves figuring out how to create a game that looks good within the confines of those capabilities. Today, many triple-A games are edging closer and closer to genuine realism; a few short years ago, that simply wasn’t possible.
So, developers were generally given the choice of two paths: heavy stylization, such as using pixel art or cel-shading, or trying to create as realistic a world as possible with the tools available. The former method tends to age better (provided that the original style was, you know, good), while the latter is a bit more nebulous.
Take TES: Morrowind, for example. While Bethesda clearly wasn’t going for hyper-realism in its game about elves and giant clockwork golems, the game does try to create at least a reasonable facsimile of a live-action fantasy world that could run on 2002 hardware. In a post-Fellowship of the Ring world, it made sense. The problem is that today, Morrowind looks like shit.
That might sound cruel, but anyone who has played Morrowind will likely agree; while the game’s story and worldbuilding have stood the test of time, its graphics just… haven’t. The textures are flat, the overworld’s color palette is frequently bland, and the character faces are frankly haunting.
It’s in games like Morrowind where I do agree that RTX Remix can shine. There’s already a gigantic modding effort to recreate the game in the Skyrim engine — titled ‘Skywind’ — and it looks great. Modders are a determined and phenomenally creative lot, as evidenced by huge projects like Skywind and Fallout: London. Giving them a tool as powerful as Remix makes me excited for what modders could create in the future.
But Portal with RTX? No, I’m not excited about that one. For starters, it’s an official project — this might seem like an odd thing to pick at, but if it’s made in-house by a bunch of paid developers, it’s not a mod. It’s an expansion. Portal’s shiny new reflective surfaces and reactive lighting weren’t produced out of a love for the game and a desire to expand it, the way most mods are.
