Nightdive Studios is Ready to Remaster PS3 and Xbox 360 Games

The studio head and director of business development spoke about how they would approach remastering PS3 and Xbox 360 classics.

Nightdive Studios, known for its work on bringing back old games to modern platforms with quality of life improvements, has stated that it is now ready to tackle projects involving PS3 and Xbox 360 games. In an interview with VGC, studio head Stephen Kick and director of business development Larry Kuperman spoke about wanting to expand the studio’s line-up of games by including seventh generation consoles.

“We stand ready,” said Kuperman when asked about remastering games that have been lost to time because they were exclusive to consoles on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Kuperman also explained that the process would involve with a few questions, such as whether the game in question got a PC release at all or if it was console exclusive.

“I would begin asking a couple of questions,” he said. “Was it Xbox 360 exclusive, or was there a PC version out too? Because that also changes things, the little preservation that’s available. Do we have source code? If so, what’s the quality of the source code? How about the assets? Those are the kinds of considerations that we have there. That being said, there were some really good games that came out in that era that shouldn’t be lost.”

Kick also spoke about the studio having conversations with the original developers of any given game. Using the PS3-exclusive shooter Haze as an example, Kick mentioned how he would ask the game’s original developers what they would have done differently in hindsight. Similar conversations were had with the developers behind System Shock 2 for System Shock 2 Remastered, for example.

“To your point, though, with a game like Haze – let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right?” said Kick. “We would go to the original designers, and we would say: ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently.’”

“We’ve had these discussions before with [the original] developers on some of these games, and we’ve given them an opportunity to come back and say ‘this is what I would have done’. In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them over import them onto newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, loading times.”

Kick also spoke about the challenges posed by the PS3’s unique hardware architecture. For context, the PS3 was developed using what Sony dubbed as the Cell processor. The system was capable of being incredibly scalable, as well as outputting quite a bit of power when needed. However, it came with its own development challenges owing to the fact that no gaming hardware before, or since has used similar architecture. Kick believes that there is a potential for PS3 remasters to be harder to pull off because of this.

“Yeah, definitely,” replied Kick when asked if porting over PS3 games would be harder because of the architecture. “I think that architecture – I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to ‘get’ it – and that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility.”

“This is a little bit of a different thing, but when the PS3 first came out, it was backwards compatible with PS2. And after a while, they were like ‘well, it’s really expensive, because we’re literally putting in the hardware for both systems in order for that to happen’. Again, there wasn’t an elegant solution where the PS3 hardware could run PS2 games. It just was not compatible.”

“So yeah, if we get to that – or I should say when – we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster.”

Kuperman believes that the fact that Nightdive Studios has its own engine to help it port over older games on to modern hardware offers great advantages in this area. It could also be a chance for the studio to improve on its KEX engine going forward.

“The other part is the advantages of having our own engine, and that’s a really big part of the Nightdive story,” said Kuperman. “There are things that we can do because we have our own engine. So I’m going to guess that were we to go down that road, that Sam might figure something out that he could do with KEX.”

The last major release by Nightdive Studios was The Thing: Remastered. The classic shooter has ended up being the studio’s fastest selling game so far.