While extremely linear and fairly short, this Starbreeze Studios-developed FPS was quite a looker back then … and it played well, too. In fact, Syndicate was ahead of its time in terms of gameplay. Being able to “breach” your opponents to cause damage/modify behavior eventually became a staple of modern shooters like Rage 2 and action-RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077. Syndicate’s art style, despite being 11 years old, remains current outside of the excessive bloom. It’s a beautiful, beautiful game.
It shouldn’t be too expensive (or too much trouble) to take the PC version and make sure it runs at 4K/60 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X – including HDR support, of course. As far as I know, EA owns the IP so remastering Syndicate should be a no-brainer. An exciting 7-hours single player campaign with fun gunplay and plenty of eye-candy – what’s not to like?
> It shouldn’t be too expensive (or too much trouble) to take the PC version and make sure it runs at 4K/60 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X – including HDR support
Erm… you’d be surprised.
If you’re looking at actual remaster… that’s not only getting access to original source code, and re-writing it to an engine that’s current and supports HDR/ 4K resolutions, but you’ll need huge art teams to re-do all of the materials and models, then there’s level design to ensure that the levels are recreated in the newer engine to include all the quirks of the previous game, but working in a modern engine. Animations need re-doing to animate with at least 30FPS…
It’s effectively creating a new game from scratch, but having reference source code, models, story and the likes. It would take years.
Unless you mean MGS-style of re-release. Where the resolution is still 360p, with absolutely zero changes to the game to meet modern requirements.
Yeah, but this got a PC release. What did the PC version look like when fully specced out?
As good as a 2012 game would look… which is not great by today’s standards.
It would require a lot of work, by multiple teams, which would take years to complete and a lot of money to pay for such a project.
There was no 4k resolution support for games back in 2012. Sure, you can do it now, with some config editing and what-not, but this would just make the image look worse than the original target resolution, due to low-resolution material textures and lower poly-count models.