Descent-like retro FPS Forsaken gets a Nightdive remaster next week
All the coloured lighting you can eat
The next old-school shooter to get some modern spit-and-polish from retro revival crew Nightdive is Forsaken, a Descent-like '6 Degrees of Freedom' FPS from the awkward early days of 3D acceleration. The update is being handled by Samuel 'Kaiser' Villarreal, brains behind Nightdive's Turok 1/2 & Strife remasters, plus a couple more done just for funsies like a PC port of Doom 64. Forsaken will be remastered, and relaunched just next week, on July 31st.
While fans had previously assembled their own repack of Forsaken (Forsaken X) tuned up for better performance on modern machines, Kaiser is going the extra mile with this remaster. See, Forsaken was two different games - one on PC, one on N64 - sharing art assets but little else. Nightdive's version is going to surgically reassemble these two games into a coherent whole, with a tweaked story, new levels, boss fights and more. Now, brace yourself for the most 1998 game trailer you've probably seen this year.
Well, that was certainly a weird tribute to the game's baffling American box-art. On top of the new/restored/ported content, this new version of Forsaken will, of course, be a little prettier. As with the Turok ports, the Forsaken update will support modern anti-aliasing, polish up the particle effects, add ambient occlusion and more. Personally I'm just hoping for an option to turn off texture filtering to kill that very '90s bilinear blurring. Those textures were way too smudgy.
If you can get some like-minded pals together, there's even a full suite of multiplayer modes that should be fully playable in the remaster. I remember that Forsaken was always a faster, twitchier, messier game than Descent. It might be interesting to see how it fares stacked up against the recent (and excellent) Descent revival, Overload.
Forsaken Remastered will be available next week, on July 31st, via Steam and GOG, although neither store page is ready yet.