yeah but eh, while i prefer remasters from the original dev/publisher, there are times where mods do that and more.
some modders go to crazy lengths redoing basically all textures, lighting, updated models (including geometry), etc etc
Well yeah. Hence why i also mentioned mods which can give Qol gameplay improvements as well as improved textures, lighting and models
It depends on how much the modder screws up the artistic intent of the original. That's why it's good to separate modding from official remastering to the point where they have separate terminologies. Not saying either option get it right 100% all of the time, but on average modders can sometimes go a bit overboard with changes(especially with character models) to improve things to what they
deem is better. They will do that instead of just enchancing things very carefully while keeping them as close as possible to the original, which is usually intent of official remastering projects. This part however, is a nice bonus when it comes to user mods:
but honestly, playing an old ass game at like 32x the original resolution + increased color depth + better performance can feel like a remaster by itself.
4k is ~150x the ps1's lowest resolution. that's crazy.
Now, to address the below...
In FFVIII the biggest bump is resolution though. Or at least the result wouldn't seem nearly as significant if the original wasn't shown at the original PlayStation resolution so that only the new textures (also shown unfiltered in the original as they were) remained as real improvements. That's why most official comparisons show the original resolution, to make a larger impact, proving that's actually a big part of what makes them look better nowadays.
They redid the models for FF8 and used A.I. upscaling for multiple parts. That counts as remastering, same as below.
As for Metroid Prime that's an outlier since it basically is an 1:1 remake (not reimagining) marketed as a remaster, it's doing the same thing as Demon's Souls on PS5 on a lower end platform. Way to argue against your own point by having to use these two particular examples to make it to begin with though.
Some of you are so busy trying to jump at any opportunity to dunk on others that you don't look up other examples first before posting.
Texture updates can count as a remaster as long as the game still retains the original code. And before you bring it up, this also doesn't mean each game will fully update each texture, as they normally will pick and choose what to update based on what looks good and what looks really bad when doing an upres on the original texture. Nintendo obviously goes the extra mile when remastering, but everyone knows this. That doesn't make it their effort a remake though, it just means that they're much better at remastering than nearly everyone else on earth.
What Bluepoint did with both SoTC and Demon's Souls went well beyond that(
especially the changes to Demon's Souls), which is why you had fans of the originals feeling that something was off with the controls/feeling of each and nitpicking them to death while providing video evidence of the slight changes.
Besides that there are plenty games that weren't originally on such a spec starved platform that are indeed basically remastered when you play them in high resolution and/or fps since the original resolution (or rather the resolution most people could run them on release day when we're talking PC games) actually hid detail that was there already or only visible when assets were seen very close up to take up enough pixels to show their full glory (like many PS2 games look great on PCSX2 where the official remasters only altered little bits of content, not everything and not always to be better anyway, often without the same vision or even automatically upscaled with AI which you can do with mods too in many cases). Not to mention the example game in the OP is Morrowind which obviously has far more extensive upgrade work available for it than any official remaster but it's also all optional as mods so every player can experience it as they see fit. You can even play it in full VR with hand controls nowadays.
This was not what I'm pointing out in my original post. I'm well aware of games at lower resolutions having details that were not originally shown to their fullest and are shown once you emulate them to a better degree.
This is the gaming industry's problem because they didn't fully agree to hard definitions on the differences between remaster and remake, so you have people thinking Nintendo remade Metroid Prime when that product is technically a remaster. They put the word remaster in the title for crying out loud. It's just that some remasters are so barebones that it makes Nintendo's remaster look like a remake by comparison. That's not their fault.
