Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion Remaster Confirmed From Nightdive
Nightdive Studios has announced a Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion remaster due out later this year.
Nightdive Studios has already released remasters of the first two games in the cult-classic Nintendo 64 first-person shooter franchise. Now it’s the turn of Acclaim’s Turok 3, which launched in September 2000 on Nintendo’s console.
The Turok 3 remaster comes out on PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and Nintendo Switch during the fourth quarter of 2023 (October to December). Steam Deck support is also planned. The announcement trailer is below:
In an interview with IGN, Samuel Villarreal, Lead Kex Engine developer at Nightdive said a significant amount of manual work was done to make the original Turok 3 textures look crisper.
“A lot of the textures in Turok 3 were 32 x 64 images, so they were small and blurry,” Villarreal said. “And of course a lot of them were used on wide and large surfaces, so they would appear extremely blurry. So the artists did a lot of work on up-rezzing those assets.”
Artists added more detail to the Turok 3 models, making the animations more fluid by adding additional frames. “Some of the frames were jerky in the original game,” Villarreal added. “So the artists went in and inserted more in-between frames to make them appear a lot smoother.”
Fans of the original Turok 3 will notice the up-rezzed assets immediately. The remaster has a new lighting system, too. The game still uses the original logic of the original game, so it should feel familiar, but with a new “skin”.
Elsewhere, the characters in the opening cinematic now have facial expressions that make them look more lively. The character cinematics in the original were stiff and uncanny, with some characters not even blinking, or talking just with their lips moving as their body sits completely still. Nightdive’s artists touched up these animations to make the remaster’s cinematics look better.
Interestingly, Nightdive’s Turok 3 remaster adds some cut content. Assets that were only found in an alpha build of the game that leaked a few years ago are included. This includes a cafeteria area in the starting room that was eliminated for the original game. Now, when you start that level in the remaster, all that cut content is in.
You can also toggle the alpha version of the player’s heads-up display (HUD). The player’s HUD in the alpha version had a silhouette of the character, which was used as the health bar. In the remaster you can play with this alpha HUD, or use the classic HUD.
Nightdive also addressed any gameplay logic considered buggy or not fun. For example, the player movement in the original game feels extremely sluggish in 2023, so Nightdive made minor tweaks to make player movement more responsive.
It’s a busy time indeed for Nightdive, now owned by Atari and fresh from the successful launches of the Quake 2 remaster and System Shock remake.
The Turok 3 remaster likely closes the book on Nightdive’s work on the franchise. “We’re considering this at this time the conclusion of the Turok trilogy,” Larry Kuperman, Director of Business Development Nightdive Studios, told IGN. “That said, Nightdive’s avowed purpose is to bring back every lost classic, so who knows? But we also have a pretty full calendar for next year. We’ve had an incredible pace of releases this year, but next year it gets really busy.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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