It’s why I hate auto updates on Steam. That and sometimes updated have broken my game installs since I game on Linux.

Yeah, me too. I didn't list the example I'm about to list because unlike my example in the OP with Gothic 1, almost everyone would agree that going through the entire animation of standing/bending down and cooking the meat 50 times is objectively worse than being able to go through the bending and standing animation once.

For a game I own on Steam entitled Motorsport Manager, some of the patches were much more subjective. I really, really hated a couple of them (but many others liked them) and it would have been nice to be able to play the older version instead (for me anyway).

It's like going to a car dealer and buying a blue car. If that worked like Steam's policy of forced updates, then the dealer could at any time decide to recall that car and paint it purple or green. Some of the patches in Motorsport Manager were literally that extreme as they fundamentally changed the game to such a degree.

There's also the Skyrim 1.2 incident. Skyrim, when it first released, was actually quite functional; it had far fewer serious bugs than any of the older TES games had at release. However, they then released 1.2, an update that broke many things, including elemental resistance (making it easy to kill Flame Atronochs with fire, but also meaning your Nord no longer resists cold), and dragon AI (some dragons were observed flying backwards). This wouldn't have been such a problem if one could choose not to update, but unfortunately the update was required, and steam would refuse to launch the game if it knew about an update available. (This is before the beta branch feature was introduced, and this update may have been the reason for it.)

Of course, even when an update doesn't cause problems, it can still break existing mods, which can be a problem for certain games with active modding communities. Also, there's the issue of balance adjustments, which in certain types of games can result in ruining a playthrough, if the balance changes make the player's build non-viable. and the game systems aren't flexible enough to allow pivoting to a build that does work. (RPGs and RPG-like games with skill point systems or other irreversible level-up choices are prime examples of this.)

The question brought to my mind my experience with the game "Bedlam". I got it while it was still in Early Access, and greatly enjoyed it, the voice acting was great, the gameplay was fun and the story was enough to pull me in. I completed the game and gave it a glowing review.

At some point before getting out of Early Access, they made some changes to the gameplay and maps so that now it now feels stale and grindy, and you end up roaming aimlessly figuring out how to complete missions.

It's weird that I played a game that nobody else will now be able to play, and enjoyed an experience that is forever unavailable to others.

One of the many reasons I only play DRM-free games: they can not enforce updates ;)

While not the same way, there is one user interface issue that Morrowind has that Arena does not.

When making a spell in either game, for some spell effects (notably damage or healing in Arena, but nearly everything in Morrowind), the magnitude can be expressed as a range, so you might have it be 10-30 points, but often you might want more consistency and go with 20-20 damage.

In Arena, if you want 20-20 damage, all you need to increase is the minimum value, and the maximum value will increase to match. Hence, you only need to set one value to make it a constant.

Morrowind, however, isn't so nice. I believe that it simply won't let you increase the minimum above the maximum, so you need to increase the maximum first, and then the minimum. Needless to say, this is quite annoying.

(I don't remember how Daggerfall handles this. Oblivion got rid of the ability to set a range, so you can only set a constant strength, and while that is a simplification, I think that particular changes was an improvement. Skyrim, on the other hand, threw out spellmaking entirely, though enchanting weapons still has you selecting a number, with no range.)

True - I also don't like the argument where people try to explain whether one alteration is better or worse than another; once they start messing with content, it's the thin end of the wedge. Of course, there's also the issue where you have hypocrites who agree completely with some changes that align with their personal views while then shouting down others that don't.

Ultimately, companies should just leave original versions that work well alone and confine changes to getting games to work on modern hardware and adding optional QOL improvements.. Leaving aside the gated content, this is something that CDPR did quite well in Witcher 3 RTX - they added a couple of new quests, largely leaving the original content as it (unless anyone has any evidence to the contrary?) and also made the quality of life improvements toggleable.

Think the YT comment sums it up: "Died from epilepsy."

I'm going to also refer to Gothic here, but Gothic 2's expansion, which just trashed character development, making everything have increasing costs and supposedly partially compensating for it by adding the tablets that add to skills. But on the one hand, that means that the character development is in good part fixed, depending on the tablets and all sorts of other permanent boosters available, and on the other it means that you need to know precisely how you mean to develop your character, how many learning points you'll get by the end and exactly what permanent boosts you'll find, and hold on to all those boosts until you train skills as far as you mean to use learning points, and then use the permanent boosts (and there are also the items that lower a skill, so if you find and wear them at the right time you get to train some more at a lower cost), because otherwise you'll end up with a massively weaker character. I mean, 80 LP to get something from 10 to 60, but the same 80 LP will only take you from 90 to 110, or from 120 to 136. That's really bad design.

Agreed for the most part. Especially when it comes to the term "remaster," I do feel that apart from a graphical update, the game should remain the same.

It does become tricky when you are remastering an old game that is notoriously janky though. I did play through Alex Kidd through PS Plus and it is pretty damn janky. I can cough some of it up to age but also feel that SEGA just didnt do a great job with the game (old Super Mario and Kirby didnt feel as janky) so making the controls work better was a pretty important improvement imo.

Dragon Quest 6's remake made some changes that were not for the better.
* The most obvious one is the fact that you can no longer recruit monsters (other than certain slimes that you can talk to and one particular plot-significant one). One of my favorite things about DQ6 is how you could combine monsters and classes, and you can't really do that due to the lack of non-slime monsters.
* Some "balance" changes made things worse. The Vacuum (Thin Air) skill was one of the more useful skills in the original, and the remake made it more powerful, to the point where it feels unfair when it's used against you. Meanwhile, Magic Burst (spend all MP to do 3x that damage to all enemies) was already hard to justify given its cost, and the remake made it do only 2x MP. (Probably following DQ8, but DQ8 has tension to boost it, while DQ6 does not.)
* Another change that was probably for the worse involves Padfoot. In the original, you could use this skill to drastically lower the encounter rate, providing some relief for players who find the encounter rate to be too much. In the remake, the effect is hard to notice.
* Stat growth at level up is now somewhat random. In the original, it was deterministic.
* At least one music track is missing. The original has 3 versions of a certain sad song (one of which is used for game over), but the remake got rid of 1 of them.
* Spells and skills are now lumped into the same menu, instead of being separate. Given how many skills there are, this is not such a good change.

With that said, there are some positive things:
* Setting AI separately for each party member, and the AI being allowed to use non-consumable items.
* Combat is significantly faster.
* After a certain point, you can teleport to one specific spot on the other world, making it faster to go between worlds.
* A certain late game character, who tends to be rather weak by the time he joins, has gotten a little boost.

It does not need to be a remake, in fact I think it is worse when it is not a remake because then even if you owned the original from before the patch it is now forever tainted with the crappy change.

Comes to mind the oh-so-useful change Rockstar made to GTA Vice City, cutting music from the game when the rights expired. Even from people who bought it before the expiration.

"Hope you guys kept a DRM-free installer oh wait I forgot this game isn't DRM-free anywhere, screw you customers *¬¬

At least if the changes were restricted to a remake the owners of the original would still have the music. Thank goodness for the people that created mods that add the music back...

Well duh. Which is more important? Customer-satisfaction or Rockstar's bottom line?

They will probably still make a killing with the new Red Dead port because Rockstar and Red Dead and make a pretty penny, learning all the wrong lessons. But lets be honest, alot of gamers like getting screwed over by studios. People still pre-order and think Starfield is going to be the best game ever despite it being produced by Bethesda (a studio that at best makes games that "eventually" become good).

Worth noting that Bethesda games, or at least main series TES games, have generally improved in terms of bug density over the years.

Arena has fewer bugs because it's simpler, but it still manages to have quite a few bugs lurking about, some of which are just embarassing. Like being able to easily levitate out-of-bounds in a town, causing the game to hardlock.

Daggerfall is buggier than Arena, but that can be explained by the game being more complex, and hence a much bigger bug surface. (For example, Arena's mostly 2d gameplay meant that falling through the floor and into the void would not happen, but Daggerfall being fully 3d allows that possibility. Also, the new skill system is a ripe source of bugs.)

Morrowind isn't as buggy as Daggerfall. There's still falling through the floor (except that the game will teleport you to a reasonable spot in the room when that happens), and I've had the game crash when getting a Cliff Racer to fall from up high into a city, but not as bad as Daggerfall. Also, the game handles the situation of no playable races, something not possible without modding, without crashing.

Oblivion, in turn, isn't as buggy as Morrowind.

I don't think I even had Skyrim even crash once. (Worth noting that disabling the player via the console, which would crash Oblivion, isn't even allowed in Skyrim.) I haven't fallen through the floor, either. An NPC did once fall through the floor when I wasn't here, but after using the console to teleoprt her to where she should be, her AI script started working properly again.