I spent most of my summer staring at Joel Miller's goatee. Naughty Dog, as it often does in the off years between major releases, unveiled its latest back-catalog remaster during 2022's patchwork E3 facsimile. This time, the team was resurrecting the bleak, apocalypto-Western classic The Last of Us with the processing power now available on the PlayStation 5. It's called The Last of Us Part One—formalizing its Godfather-like relationship with its 2020 sequel—and the graphics czars over at Digital Foundry posted a side-by-side comparison of Joel's scruffy visage so the audience could marvel at the new duds. The problem? I could barely identify any tangible difference in fidelity.

Here is the goatee in question. In the remaster, you will notice that Joel's hair follicles are flecked with a few stray gray hairs, and that the shadows on his face are mildly richer, but that's about it. The gut punch of a generation leap—the ache of knowing that your tech is officially outmoded—was nowhere to be found. Instead, at first brush, The Last of Us Part One made me wonder if there is only so much juice to be squeezed from a remaster, particularly for a game that was released in 2013 on the PS3, upgraded in 2014 for the PS4, and is now being primed for the PS5.

I am not alone in this. By and large, fan response to The Last of Us Part One has been fairly tepid. Yes, more footage of the remaster has trickled out ahead its September 2 release date, where Naughty Dog's modernization efforts have been more apparent. (In a deep dive into the changes, the studio outlined its full overhaul of the game's textures, including bullets that are capable of “ripping apart environmental objects” and cinematics that “transition seamlessly to gameplay.”) But nobody believes that this assemblage of smoother animations, crisper mechanics, and prettier combat arenas will be a revelatory experience for players. Instead, customers will receive an updated version of a canonical PlayStation game that is optimized for the latest suite of consoles. Oh yeah, and it retails for $70.

By and large, the critical response to Part One has been positive. To nobody's surprise, the remaster is incredibly visually impressive; Naughty Dog are some of the best in the business, specifically when it comes to graphic realism, and their latest model is already being consecrated as the definitive way to experience the opening chapters of the Last of Us saga. And yes, this is a game that still looks pretty solid on the PlayStation 3, to say nothing of the gorgeous version available on PlayStation 4. We are living in an era where the fidelity gaps between hardware iterations are growing increasingly modest.

What do those diminishing returns mean for the video game remastering sector? How much do we have to gain by mining the very recent past? Are we really capable of being blown away by a slightly more polished chin?

“In terms of limitations, the older a game is, the more room you have to iterate,” says Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, a company that upgrades old, semi-forgotten titles from PC gaming yore. “We went from sprites in the original System Shock to 3D models in our remake, which is probably the biggest jump you can take. For Naughty Dog the difference between The Last of Us on PS3 and the remake on PS5 is most likely going to come down to frame rate and lighting. While the models and textures will certainly be of higher fidelity, I don’t think it’s going to be noticeable enough to warrant the effort. You might see pores on someone’s skin during a cinematic close-up, but there won’t be anything you haven’t seen before.”

As Kick mentioned, Nightdive is currently hard at work on a full-fledged remake of the 1994 System Shock game, which was originally released on MS-DOS and required 4 megabytes of RAM. Like all of its compatriots from the '90s and early 2000s, a System Shock revamp is functionally immune from market oversaturation; all Nightdive needed to do was add in a few basic ingredients of modern design—fully rendered environments, a few particle effects—to totally lap the original. The Last of Us Part One, on the other hand, is incapable of shifting the paradigm. How could it? Video games simply haven't changed enough in the last nine years. Somewhere along the way, the term remaster stopped referring to the wonder of, say, George Lucas returning to The Empire Strikes Back to add in a more celestial Cloud City, and it started referring to a bump to 4K and some better water physics. The magic is gone, and as someone who buys a lot of rereleases, I have no one to blame but myself.

“It is surprising to see The Last of Us getting a full-on remake at this stage of its life cycle,” continues Kick. “I think it’s a missed opportunity for the insanely talented people at Naughty Dog to do something original, or revisit another one of their beloved franchises like Jak and Daxter.”

To be clear, we are well away from the ceiling of what is possible with a GPU. The apathetic vibes surrounding The Last of Us Part One are not indicative of some sort of generational fidelity peak. Alexander Battaglia, a producer at Digital Foundry, notes that while it may seem that studios are bumping up against the technological limits, as they comb over Joel's facial hair for the umpteenth time, the games industry is still nowhere close to generating a truly photorealistic piece of interactive media.

“There is a lot of room for improvement,” he tells me. “There is the future full switchover to handling all rendering and lighting with a form of ray tracing, characters and objects still move and deform in very unrealistic ways, and the artificial intelligence driving characters is still rudimentary in comparison to the decisionmaking that we see elsewhere in the tech industry.”

But Battaglia does believe there are inherent constraints for any studio asked to touch up old code for state-of-the-art hardware. A game like Part One is not being rebuilt from scratch, so it doesn't have the advantages that a full-blown remake like System Shock does. The gunfights we'll be playing through were all designed for whatever Naughty Dog could pinch out of the PlayStation 3, and the development team can't reimagine the scope of The Last Of Us because, well, that isn't what a remaster is supposed to do. This doesn't matter as much if you're rebuilding relics like Shadow of the Colossus, because customers are buying that remaster specifically for the improved visuals. But that simply isn't the case with Part One, and Naughty Dog doesn't have a lot of real estate to compensate for that deficiency in the margins.

“Each section of the game takes place at a fixed time of day, with mostly fixed levels with very little dynamic changes, and no or very few lights capable of being moved. The remaster will inherit these aspects to keep the gameplay balance and mood similar,” continues Battaglia. “If the game was instead designed for current hardware capabilities that support fully dynamic and possibly ray-traced lighting, then the game's encounters, mechanics, and level design could radically change as well. A game designed from the ground up with modern technology will show off greater fidelity and differences than a remaster of an old game using ‘modern technology.’ At that point, you are in remake territory though.”

Battaglia also tells me that Naughty Dog might have not put its best foot forward when it unveiled Part One. Specifically, he mentions how the 2013 version of the game packed all of its cut scenes into preloaded video files on the disc. The game didn't render those sequences in its engine, which is what made them look far superior to what a PS3 was capable of—even at the end of the machine's life cycle. So when we stare at that mashup of Joel's beard, it's important to remember that the PlayStation 5 is actually sweating out that quality on its own accord. (Naughty Dog has said we'll be able to experience cut-scene-quality graphics throughout the scope of Part One, which is a legitimate feat.) Once the game is in our hands, the improvements Naughty Dog has made will probably be far more apparent than what we can glean on YouTube. As always, there is some important context that's been cast aside in the throes of gamer rage.

Still, I do believe we are teetering on the edge of some sort of remaster fatigue, particularly given the deluge of bad remasters we've been inundated with lately. (Remember when Rockstar absolutely desecrated three of its stone-cold classics last year?) John Linneman, another Digital Foundry producer, notes that one of the core appeals of both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 Pro is their robust backwards compatibility, with both machines effectively eliminating some of the technical hang-ups that dogged those older, jankier titles. (It's true, Fusion Frenzy runs a lot better on 2022 hardware than 2002 hardware.) And yet, customers are already receiving their first touch-ups from the previous generation—at $70, no less—without anyone desperately begging for the opportunity.

“It makes it seem like there is a lack of creativity here,” adds Battaglia. “A bit like Hollywood’s obsession with remaking movies just a few years later.”

So maybe gamers are reappraising how they approach their hobby. Fidelity used to be the benchmark of progress. I mean, at how many E3s have we watched Sony and Microsoft showcase the rain droplets on Ferrari windshields? How many times has EA detailed the sweat on its football players? But as the journey to photorealism becomes more subtle, it seems like the public has become less impressed with the precise schematics of goatee whiskers. Maybe, to really knock our socks off, studios need to find a way to alter how we think about games. I'm not sure where they'll find that answer, but it probably won't be in 2013.