Blade Runner Enhanced Edition Launched Unfinished To Coincide With Film's 40th Anniversary
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition arrived on June 23 as a complete disaster. There were game-breaking bugs that could freeze your character, audio would cut in and out, textures looked washed-out, and some visual effects were outright missing. The AI upscaled cutscenes might have been 60fps, but you couldn't tell from the stuttering or how blurry they looked. And worst of all, the remake retained the 4:3 aspect ratio of the original title despite not being the standard in decades.
It was a rare misstep for Nightdive Studios. Reviews for Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition on Steam are currently just 48 percent. Outcry against the remake was so bad that Nightdive released the original version of the game as a free update so fans could play that instead until Enhanced Edition received a few patches.
Related: Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition Is A Faithful Remaster Of A Cult Classic
Those patches are on the way, but in the meantime, Nightdive's Larry Kuperman, director for business development, told PCGamesN what the hell went wrong.
"The responsibility for the ship date and, in retrospect, the failure to change the ship date resides 100% with me," Kuperman said bluntly. "The ship date was picked because it aligned with the 40th anniversary of the movie – that seemed that it would be something that would be a really cool thing to do for the fans."
As for what made Nightdive fall behind on its planned ship date, Kuperman explained it as the “perfect storm” of problems. To start, Nightdive wasn’t able to use any of the original Blade Runner’s code, forcing the studio to reverse-engineer and remake the game from the ground up. Second, this time-consuming process was further exacerbated by its random events, which can totally change
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