A Remastered Version Of Darksiders Is Coming, Get The Details

One of the more underrated games from last generation was the action-RPG Darksiders from developers Vigil Games. The comic book-based game will be getting a remastered edition for the Xbox One, PS4, PC and Wii U called Darksiders: The Warmastered Edition.

IGN is reporting that the new publisher of the Darksiders series, Nordic Games, has a product listing on their official website for Darksiders: The Warmastered Edition. The game already released in HD back when it first came out six years ago for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. However, the remastered version will support full HD for the home consoles (something that was already available for the original PC release) along with a smorgasbord of new graphical enhancements.

The product listing states that the new version of the game will come in 1080p support for the Xbox One, PS4 and Wii U, and that the former two consoles will support full 60 frames per second refresh rates, while the Wii U version will run at 30fps.

The texture resolutions have been doubled for this iteration of Darksiders, but once again if you're playing on PC and you have the anisotropic filtering turned up to 16x, then you're still getting a higher fidelity experience than what you would get on the home consoles. They've also improved the shadow rendering, and they say they've reworked the overall shader rendering. I'm not really sure what they mean by that but if I had to hazard a guess I would likely assume they mean better light filtering, higher reflective effects and better light mapping and color saturation.

These remastered versions of games from the seventh gen HD era seem a little bit like overkill. When it was games coming form the PS2 to the PS3 or the PS2 to the PS4 it all made perfect sense. Older games that couldn't visually do what the developers intended for them on the limited hardware are given new leases on retail life when brought up and over to HD platforms. Again, that makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is taking an HD game and then re-releasing with slightly higher HD resolutions and then charging full price for it again. For PC this really doesn't make sense because many of these touted features on the product page are already available in the base game if you just head into the options and turn up the settings. Worse yet is that there are already SweetFX shader mods for the original Darksiders release on PC, so any improvements to the shaders of the game can already be tweaked for the original if you get the shader mods.

Now, for people who may have missed out on the seventh generation of gaming, I can see how the new Darksiders: Warmastered Edition probably looks appealing. You get all the bells and whistles that the eighth gen consoles are capable of, but with the added bonus of higher frame-rates and performance stability.

There is no release date yet for this new version of Darksiders and there is no price set for this version of the game either. Hopefully they won't be charging $60 for what's essentially a PC version of a game with a few of the graphics settings turned up to "High".