It’s only been a few days since Konami officially revealed Silent Hill 2 Remake. Now, as it turns out, the game is almost done with development.
Bloober Team president Piotr Babeno has revealed in a speech that they had been quietly working on Silent Hill 2 Remake for three years. Bloober Team is now at the point where they’re polishing the game up.
With all that said, Piotr still doesn’t have a release date to share. Piotr disclosed that Konami covered all development costs for the project, and that the public should be hearing from them for a final release date soon.
To put this timeline in perspective, Bloober Team made their name as a horror video game developer with Layers of Fear, a psychological horror game where players had to interact with haunted paintings, back in 2016. In between this three year period that Bloober had been working on Silent Hill 2 Remake, they also developed and released Layers of Fear 2, which eschewed the paintings for film reels, Blair Witch, an official video game adaptation placing you in the witch’s haunted forest, and The Medium. Interestingly, The Medium is a completely original game that Bloober set in the milieu of post-Communism Poland, to teach players about their own country’s history.
Those three years of quiet work on one platform may prove to bet worthwhile. Bloober Team had previously revealed that their Silent Hill 2 Remake will not have any loading screens. While Bloober Team made all the expected changes to bring the game up to standard with what is expected out of modern games, this performance achievement in particular indicates how far Bloober Team has taken development. Silent Hill 2 Remake will also have an over-the-shoulder perspective and other fundamental changes to the way the game is played, meaning it will feel like an entirely different game.
It all seems to go back to Silent Hill HD Collection from a decade ago. A critical and commercial failure, part of why fans were so disappointed with this collection of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 is that Konami lost the original source code for the finished games. They built these HD ports with the surviving prototypes, never mind that both games were also available as PSN releases as their original PlayStation versions.
Here and now, the proper approach to a video game remake is to code the entire game from scratch. Much like the series of recent Resident Evil remakes, and the upcoming Dead Space Remake, starting over from scratch is an opportunity to add to the game the things that were not possible on the original platforms, with the new technology, and also new ideas and innovations in game design. Hopefully this means new fans will experience an even better Silent Hill 2 than the original players did all those years ago.
Silent Hill 2 Remake will be releasing on PC and PlayStation 5 first. It will be console exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation for the next twelve months.
Source: PSU
