Revealed: Sega's cancelled Shenmue HD remake - with fully updated graphics (EuroGamer) Update 16/10 - Sega respond

AnimeGamer183 said:
This changes so much that its hard to even fathom, this whole situation is so loaded now i dont even know where to begin.
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I wont lie, those last 3 paragraphs of that article made me happy af, literally made my day and I have absolutely no shame about it. d3t should have never touched shenmue and their lax attitude is finally being addressed. I have no pity for d3t what so ever, they got themselves into this and they couldnt deliver, bottom line. Now they have to answer to original team members, what about the respect for them having this release in such a state? How are the people on the original team supposed to feel? Understanding towards d3t? I would say likely embarrassed. Someone has to answer for this, and for now it looks like its d3t for not getting the job done, guess they should have put more people on the project, either way it falls on them.
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Get em kasahara-san! GET EMMMM!!!

Finally! Some one needed to light a fire under d3ts ass, and I like kasahara's attitude. Enjoy pissed off Sega japan employees and have fun dealing with their japanese work ethic d3t, guess you should have skipped the shitty fork lift cake employee parties and lunch break work outs and kept on working, I see many all nighters in your future.

Finally we get a little justice, hearing this is a huge relief and hopefully we get some results, bout time some one in authority took notice and did something. Things are moving in a good direction now.
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An apology to d3t may be a start.
 
To be honest, I don't like the look of the remake and wouldn't have wanted it over the remaster we got (bugs aside, of course).
 
While I dig the look, I can see it would have been lambasted on release for looking too '360-ish' and likely compared unfavourably to Kid Nocon's UE4 tech demo. The graphical enhancements they managed to build on top of the Shenmue engine are impressive but it would have been a ton of work for little return or thanks.
 
Amir said:
An apology to d3t may be a start.
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Why? No one knew about this until today. It’s easy to be all high and mighty now but there were serious problems with the port that needed fixing. All we knew was that dt3 made this port and it was full of flaws. I agree some people were too harsh but that doesn’t invalidate our critiques of the port based on the knowledge we had at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.
 
whats the meaning of "Sega UK closed up shop"? Sega UK is Sega Europe.
i didnt hear anything about that anywhere and they are still offering jobs at Sega Europe.
i doubt that they are closing the only big office left in Europe. or are they moving the complete UK team to Bulgaria?
 
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What this revelation hopefully does is make some fans think twice before they rag on a developer, because we actually have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

It's an interesting fan theory that d3t were given the assets from a previous remake, but it seems unlikely. d3t have spoken about working from original source code multiple times, and the version we ended up with seems like it was essentially the same base project as the remake, with all the extra remake stuff ripped out. If Microsoft were allegedly funding this previous remake who knows if they'd even be allowed to use those old assets.

I could be wrong, but it seems like a bit of a stretch.
 
Guangyan Wang said:
Why? No one knew about this until today. It’s easy to be all high and mighty now but there were serious problems with the port that needed fixing. All we knew was that dt3 made this port and it was full of flaws. I agree some people were too harsh but that doesn’t invalidate our critiques of the port based on the knowledge we had at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.
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I can't see any context where wanting people to be chained to their desks for a bloody video game is OK. Or extrapolating that because they had one forklift cake that they've been lazy up until that point. Why automatically assume the worst of people? It's the worst of entitled toxic gamer culture. Obviously bugs should not be above critique, and I'm still baffled as to their decision for example to encode the audio at such a low bitrate, but there's a difference between criticism and such utter bile and vitriol.

If you don't like a game, feel free to make your feelings known and get a refund. But to then wish to strip people of their livelihoods is a step too far.
 
Tosh said:
whats the meaning of "Sega UK closed up shop"? Sega UK is Sega Europe.
i didnt hear anything about that anywhere and they are still offering jobs at Sega Europe.
i doubt that they are closing the only big office left in Europe. or are they moving the complete UK team to Bulgaria?
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Apparently Sega Europe's QA department will be relocated from the UK to Bulgaria in the year 2020 to accomodate expansion. This is not good news for those working for Sega's QA department in the UK but it does not look like bad news for Sega themselves or even d3t.
 
From the gamesindustry.biz article they're at least offering them the chance to relocate, so it's not completely terrible, though obviously that won't be an option for everyone: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-11-sega-shifts-qa-team-from-uk-to-bulgaria

I'm still unclear as to what "Sega UK" actually did apart from QA? Were they doing actual dev work on this cancelled remaster/remake or were they doing the QA while d3t were the main developers?
 
orient said:
What this revelation hopefully does is make some fans think twice before they rag on a developer, because we actually have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

It's an interesting fan theory that d3t were given the assets from a previous remake, but it seems unlikely. d3t have spoken about working from original source code multiple times, and the version we ended up with seems like it was essentially the same base project as the remake, with all the extra remake stuff ripped out. If Microsoft were allegedly funding this previous remake who knows if they'd even be allowed to use those old assets.

I could be wrong, but it seems like a bit of a stretch.
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Yeah, I doubt there were ever any previous remaster attempts prior to this. Wasn't it just a single screenshot of Shenmue II on a 360 dashboard that led to that speculation? Could have just been an up-rezzed version of Shenmue IIX, I can't see Shenmue I being ported before d3t's efforts.

I'm pretty certain by now that 2005 kikizo "article" was a load of tripe, and that Sega Europe really started to look into porting these games in 2015 (d3t say they started work in October 2015). Obviously I'm sad this remaster was cancelled, but it would have been really hard to justify from a business perspective. I think all eyes are on Shenmue III at this point.
 
Amir said:
I can't see any context where wanting people to be chained to their desks for a bloody video game is OK. Or extrapolating that because they had one forklift cake that they've been lazy up until that point. Why automatically assume the worst of people? It's the worst of entitled toxic gamer culture. Obviously bugs should not be above critique, and I'm still baffled as to their decision for example to encode the audio at such a low bitrate, but there's a difference between criticism and such utter bile and vitriol.

If you don't like a game, feel free to make your feelings known and get a refund. But to then wish to strip people of their livelihoods is a step too far.
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I agree those comments were too much. At least that should end now. Maybe it would have been better for dt3 to reveal this shortly after launch. It would have stopped so much criticism in its tracks.
 
Guangyan Wang said:
I agree those comments were too much. At least that should end now. Maybe it would have been better for dt3 to reveal this shortly after launch. It would have stopped so much criticism in its tracks.
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Yeah, there was a tweet from one of the devs at the time about how people wouldn't know what they went through. At the time I assumed it was a reference to having to deal with the (lack of ) source code, etc., but this must have been heartbreaking, especially having to keep quiet about it :/
 
I'm not sure SEGA UK played much of a role in the development. SEGA have only ever mentioned d3t on dev duties, and d3t have always acted as if they're the sole developer. If SEGA UK were mainly a QA branch, maybe they just provided QA, but to be honest, it doesn't seem to me like the initial version received much QA testing, or maybe it did but there was simply no time to implement the changes before release.
 
The decision to delay the Japanese release to November makes me think there was a disagreement between Sega of Europe and Sega of Japan as to the state of the ports. Seems Europe thought they were in a good enough state to be patched later, or at last convinced themselves of that because of Gamescom, which was likely a non-factor in Japan's decision-making. In a way, Western gamers ended up becoming the QA for this port; I doubt the Japanese release would have been as good had it not gone through the "QA en masse" of the Western release, but it's still a bittersweet situation all around.
 
Hey everyone, just going to ask that we don't reignite old arguments from other threads.

I know there are certain comments which may seem especially harsh with the new information coming to light, but these discussions are in the past now and ultimately redundant at this point.

We've all done a good job at staying levelheaded today despite the disappointing news so let's keep aiming for that :)
 
With Shenmue III being made in UE4, the dream would now be to one day get a Yu Suzuki-overseen UE4 remake of the first two games. Imagine bringing the "Character Perspective System" to Shenmue II so you could play as Ren in Kowloon, similar to what the Yakuza series did with Majima in the Kiwami games? Would love to see something like that.
 
The more I think about it, the more I think it's mad that such a project got this far. In the video we can see remodelled environments, improved lighting and shadows, and a handful of remodelled NPCs, but then you have to think about everything else that would have had to be remodelled for a consistent aesthetic: the other NPCs and Ryo, more environments, all the interiors, AND all of the many objects.

We know they were thinking of reworking animation, and God knows how long that would take; and then to have only the original Dreamcast audio files after that? Do you keep the synthesised music or go full orchestral? That this went on for two years before these questions were seriously considered is surprising. Maybe even some of the business people at Sega really wanted this to happen as well, so they ignored the financial realities of how expensive such an undertaking would be.
 
There's no doubt the project probably turned out to be more complex (and thus, expensive) than originally intended, but there's also the issue of timing. Maybe they were not confident they'd hit the market before Shenmue III.

After all, SEGA has pretty much nothing to do with Shenmue III in terms of production, and at the time of the cancellation the deal with Deep Silver hadn't been made yet, so I bet SEGA had no idea the release date would eventually get pushed out by another whole year.
 
That is true; if they were waiting on sales figures of Shenmue III to justify further expenditure, then the delay of that game left the remake's future less likely.
 
BalHan said:
Don’t lose hope. If Shenmue 3 and 4 does well, then a remake of Shenmue 1 and 2 may become a reality.?
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I don't really mind that much.
Shenmue was a product of it's time, the HD remaster (now), is making justice to what the game was. Big part of the appeal today is the nostalgia, and the history the game represents, hell, even the bad voice acting.
At the time it was graphically (and technologically) state of the art, today it would be pointless trying to grasp that feeling.
Would be welcomed though, there are not many games with the "shenmue feel", and if I want to play Shenmue HD we will always have DC emulators (and now the remaster), so having another take at it would be cool.
 
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