Want to know something scary? No, it doesn’t involve Pyramid Head – in fact, it’s much scarier. See, Konami has confirmed that the recently released Silent Hill HD Collection was ported from incomplete code. Yeah, that’s pretty messed up, isn’t it?
Senior producer Tomm Hulett revealed in an interview with 1UP that the Japanese publisher no longer has access to the final versions of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3.
He said:
We got all the source code that Konami had on file – which it turns out wasn’t the final release version of the games.
So during debug we didn’t just have to deal with the expected ‘porting’ bugs, but also had to squash some bugs that the original team obviously removed prior to release, but we’d never seen before.
A lot of assets such as textures and sound had to be taken out of the compiled game, and that brings with it a host of unique issues, especially taken on top of the tricky coding workarounds at play in the original games. We certainly had our hands full. I think at one point Heather was blue.
The final release of the Silent Hill HD Collection received an enormous backlash from the series’ vocal fanbase due to its poor conversion and buggy nature. We suppose this revelation goes some way towards explaining the existence of those issues.
This isn't the first time a publisher has misplaced source code, and probably won't be the last. But still, we’re just not sure how this is allowed to happen – especially to highly regarded titles such as Silent Hill.
[source 1up.com]
Comments 6
Read something very similar on Eurogamer.net last week.
The dev's behing the MGS HD collection's (Bluepoint) view is that source isn't the way to go, and that for them their best results come from using a retail disc (and reverse engineering it) to ensure that they're working from the final product. Given the apparent quality of the MGS upgrades it just goes to show how different ways of working can alter a game drastically.
This makes complete sense. When you arrive at Lake Toluca in SH 2 it looks horribly unfinished. I was so excited for this release only to be very disappointed how it turned out.
@Heavy_Barrel
The article I read had the dev's really struggling with the game, even that the main character (I forget, her name, also, not a fan of SH) was blue for a long time because they couldn't work out how to put her right.
As he states about the 'workarounds', there were a few bits of code thrown in to to final retail games that was never recorded too, so without reverse engineering a retail disc they never would have seen them!
I didnt like any of the games, wont be buying this.
It's such a shame about this port being so bad....I will be keeping my SH2 for PS2.
There were so many more problems then just how bad Toluca Lake looked. It was the constant slow down, the audio voices being out of sync and missing sound effects that dragged this port down so bad. Apparently a patch is in the works for this title and Downpour.
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