How deeply shall we read into recent comments from former Destiny 2 lead and Bungie vice president Mark Noseworthy regarding “a certain remaster” which absolutely shall not be named? I probably should’ve asked this before I got up to my collarbone in Destiny 1 musings, but, well, here we go.
Twitter user Mikie, clearly a Destiny fan mourning the end of the game, asked Noseworthy whether he thinks “a certain remaster could be helpful in the same way during these trying times.” This was in response to Noseworthy’s remarks on The Witcher 3 getting a surprise DLC ahead of The Witcher 4, but it’s not too hard to read between the lines here. We sure ain’t talking about Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, for which Noseworthy was project lead back in the 2000s, or Halo Reach, which he also worked on but which is already part of the Master Chief Collection.
“I’m not going to comment on ‘a certain remaster’ but I’ll share some general thoughts that I think apply when execs and teams consider the merits of remasters from a business perspective,” Noseworthy says in response.
The body of his post is a screenshot of notes which he’s dubbed “Generic Video Game Remake Calculus.” Again, you will notice that Noseworthy does not call out Destiny by name, but the target of this discussion seems about as well hidden as a horse behind a telephone pole.
Noseworthy examines three “core questions,” starting with how costly remakes and remasters actually are. He reckons, “Remakes are often more expensive than you might imagine. Especially if the content and tech needs major updates.”
This is a big reason that a Destiny 1 re-release has always sounded impractical to me. Bungie is already wrestling with a complex engine and a live service game. Digging up a generations-old project and fitting it for modern tech and player expectations, just to gussy up a deeply flawed game, simply ain’t worth the squeeze in my mind. We’re getting into remake versus remaster a bit, but I think some dogs should just stay sleeping. WoW Classic and Old School RuneScape are great, I agree, but I think that’s because old WoW and RuneScape 2 are great and distinct in a way that Destiny 1 just is not. But I digress.
Noseworthy also looks at the “opportunity cost” of this kind of project. “If remastered, does that effort take away resources from a different project?” he wonders. In this purely hypothetical situation, those different projects would be Marathon and Bungie’s incubation projects, which the studio will have to balance after sunsetting its longtime breadwinner as it looks to get something else off the ground.
“Opportunity costs are high if you are people or cash constrained,” Noseworthy adds. “Studios can only afford so many bets at once. Outsourcing is not a silver bullet either (even less so for complex projects).” We obviously don’t have exact numbers outside of Sony’s $765 million write-down on Bungie, but even the most generous napkin math suggests the studio is, indeed, cash-strapped after Marathon’s apparent underperformance and Destiny 2’s decline. Which is to say nothing of its manpower after multiple layoff waves and reported plans for additional cuts.
Finally, Noseworthy interrogates whether there’s even “a big enough market to justify those expenses and make a suitable return”. Do people actually want that dreamed-up remaster? Would they stick to it long-term? Would they pay for it? Or are they, perhaps, flailing their way through the stages of grief and treating anything they collide with as a life preserver?
“Intelligent people can disagree here,” Noseworthy concludes. “Case by case basis. Obviously lots of good examples exist like [the] Resident Evil series. But opportunity cost could be a big loser depending on situation.”
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