So yeah, apparently at E3 they're going to announce what seems to be a Painkiller reboot.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/05/still-killing-pain-after-all-these-years-painkiller-reboot/#comment-1004034

The good news is that developers are Polish, they're going to use Unreal Engine 3, and that they helped out on Witcher 2. The bad news is that they were also involved in Two Worlds II, and that pretty much every follow up to Painkiller hasn't gotten a very warm reception. There's no website or official announcement yet, but the RPS article does have screenshots.

You should likely mention Necrovision since that's their big real game rather than the stuff they helped out on. Not exactly the best shooter in the world but certainly a solid enough game and a lot better than the other Painkiller releases.

And to derail the topic -what's wrong with TWII? I liked it, it had a good size, looked good, and some interesting ideas and a really unique magic system. Granted archers as a class was not balanced, and the third act was a bit meh, but the game was not bad....

On topic - I would welcome a new painkiller true to the original .

Yeah, I thought Two Worlds II was pretty damn good personally. The magic system was fucking awesome. I guess people just dismiss it because the first one sucked?

Anyway, I'm not a super fan of these super fast shooters but I did like Painkiller 1. I'll keep an eye on this.

They need to get the jumping right. If they fuck that up then it doesn't matter what else they do, it won't be Painkiller.

The problem with that is that almost no remakes are true to the original. They almost always try to "innovate" or "improve the experience", and end up ruining the things that made the original a great game in the first place.

and if you do have a remake close to the original people question why bother in the first place - it is just a reskin, all they did was change the graphics a bit and added a few levels, it is just a addon not a new game, etc etc...

Exactly. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Really, the best solution is the GOG model, which lets you play the original game on modern platforms.

The only really fantastic remake I can think of is The Settlers II - 10th Anniversary Edition. They managed to update the graphics from pure 2D to complete 3D, while keeping the exact same graphical style. This meant that you could zoom in and change the camera angle, or just keep the same viewpoint as the original game, if you so pleased. They also kept the interface exactly as it was, except that they fixed the few annoyances the original interface had. In short, it's one of the few remakes I've seen that actually seemed like a labor of love, rather than a money grab.

Hopefully, the host of Kickstarter remake projects we've seen lately will result in more "labor of love" remakes and sequels, since the development will be funded up front.

See, I don't even think that the first one sucked. It had nice, open world and writing so bad it was funny.

I'm so narrative and immersion driven that the horrible production values of it really turned me off. Going to try it again someday though.

Hope it becomes a good game as i enjoyed the original painkiller as it was a blast of old school fun.

Well me too, but if you brace yourself for a horribly written experience, you get an amazingly crafted, varied world with a truckload of quests.

I think that Blizzard provides a pretty good insight into how you can make a successful game that's still completely misses the point of the original. They've done it three times now and it kind of drives me nuts. They took Warcraft and turned it into WoW, they tooks SC and managed to create what is essentially an esport tuned SC 1.5 as SC2 and now they've turned Diablo into WoD.

I personally have morth faith in projects where the original creators are at least involved with the project as there's at least some hope of them getting it right. But admittedly as iD managed to demonstrate with their reboots on Doom and Wolf 3D, sometimes a game is just too big to remake if you've left it alone for a period of time.

Well, I think there are important differences between a remake, a reboot and a sequel.

Remake: "Let's try that again, but better"

Reboot: "Let's try that again, but differently"

Sequel: "Let's try something along those lines again, but somewhat differently, and hopefully better"

These are obviously just my own definitions, but my point is that none of the games you mentioned (with the possible exception of the Wolf3D one, as I'm not sure which game you mean) are actually remakes as such. They are either sequels or spinoffs.

Oh yeah, Spinoff: "Let's do something completely different, but we'll use the same name and setting, in order to sell more copies because of existing familiarity with the series"

I'd normally go with those definitions, but all the examples were labelled as sequels by their respective developers. And I think that it's a mess to try and figure out what they really are.