Nightdive sheds light on why Blade Runner Enhanced Edition was such a disaster
I was heartbroken by the state that Nightdive's Blade Runner Enhanced Edition released in(opens in new tab). As someone with long, fond memories of sitting at my dad's enormous grey Fujitsu PC and running around the original's rain-slick LA streets, I was excited for the surefire nostalgia hit that I thought Nightdive's remaster would be.
Well, the rest is history. The smudgy upscaling, unnatural framerate, and a litany of new bugs combined to make sure the remaster turned out a worse experience than the original. Those of us who were looking forward to stepping into Ray McCoy's gumshoes were sorely disappointed. But at least now we know why.
A new interview from PCGamesN(opens in new tab) with Nightdive's Larry Kuperman and Dimitris Giannakis—the company's director of business development and lead producer on Blade Runner Enhanced Edition, respectively—sheds some light on the «perfect storm» the project faced before it was released.
«If anyone thinks… that we sat around a table and said we're going to ship a game that’s not up to our Nightdive standards… that didn't happen,» Kuperman told PCGamesN. Instead, the pair attribute the bulk of the blame to a confluence of factors, namely Kuperman's desire to ship the game in time for the original movie's 40th anniversary and an absence of QA staff because of Covid-19. With Giannakis taking time off to move across the country, there was no one around with the willingness to pull the handbrake on the project.
«Anyone who knows me knows I have a strong personality,» said Kuperman, adding that, if Giannakis had been available, he might «have been the one that said, 'hey, we’re not ready’» and averted the game's disastrous launch. That certainly wasn't the only issue: the pair
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