Yeah, I do agree with that. Honestly part of me wishes they would have used the old assets - put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler, and lock the player's position while the video plays. I mean, your position was locked in the original game.. so that should be possible without breaking things, right?
That said, I really do think all of the tradeoffs that they did make were understandable - pretty much like you said. Doesn't keep me from being nostalgic for the 90s, though.
> put whatever you have thought the best available upscaler
I kind of suspect all they have had at at this point is the over compressed video files that must have been what, 240p at most?
I suspect it may have been just so low that even if they wanted to they would have no choice but to recast and reshoot.
At least they got to reuse the original audio, IIRC.
I’m guessing the original video source was either lost or also possibly low quality/degraded.
All the footage has been archived by The Video Game History Foundation, and is available in their public archive. It’s significantly higher quality than in the game.
https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/934c3e91-4721-49bb-b8...
Oh wow! Yes, those are much better quality than can be seen in the Riven release. I wonder if it's possible to mod them into the Riven rerelease!