Phantom Dust Re-Release: New Details And First Look At Gameplay

Phantom Dust fans have a lot to look forward to in an upcoming remaster of the game for Xbox One and PC: it supports widescreen and higher resolutions, and it makes some key changes to the way the single-player story progresses, Polygon reports.

"The biggest thing is moving [Phantom Dust] to 16:9 and moving to [higher resolutions]. So what that basically means is that if you’re playing on Xbox One, you're running at 1080p so the game is going to render at 1080p; if you're on a PC and you’re playing at 4K resolution, the game will render its assets at 4K," Adam Isgreen, creative director for Microsoft Studios, told Polygon. You can get a first look at the remastered version of the game by watching Polygon's video below.

There's still no official release date for Phantom Dust, but Microsoft has previously said the game would come out in 2017.

Isgreen said there have been some substantial challenges in bringing the game back to life, since there was no final source code when Microsoft recovered the game's archives from Japan.

"So everything that we've been able to do in this version of Phantom Dust has been through reverse-engineering the binaries, and actually hacking and cracking the code back open again," he told Polygon.

Microsoft has made a few changes to the way Phantom Dust's single-player story works, in the hopes of getting players into the deck-building action sooner than in the original.

"If you fail three times on any mission while you're playing the campaign, you can skip it...You still get your rewards, and we're OK with that. There are some achievements that are tied to not skipping and doing challenging things, so if people just want to experience the wonderful story of Phantom Dust, that's definitely one way they can do it,” said Isgreen.

"So if people want to grind and they want to play exactly like they did when the original game came out, that is all in place. Everything about how the game works and functions is there. We really wanted to allow people to jump into multiplayer and play immediately," he added.

Our Phantom Dust review scored the original version 8.5/10. Reviewer Erik Wolpaw called it "a cross between the deck-building and card-collecting elements of Magic: The Gathering and the controls, speed, and environmental tactics of a shooter." His major complaint was that the single-player campaign took too long to get going, a problem the team behind the remaster is promising to solve.