The reveal of Unreal Engine 5 and the PS5 makes me hope Shenmue IV will be a thing

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Nov 24, 2019


Read somewhere where someone stated the engine is flexible enough to even run on smartphones.
Coupled with the rumors I'm hearing about it being tailored to the PS5 and the PS5's SSD is also rumored to have tech thats more advanced than many high performance PC's

So besides the notion that if we run Shenmue 3 on PS5, hypothetically that should reduce or get rid of any delayed texture and character model pop ins, the UE5 should bode well for Suzuki's team moving forward.
Hopefully the now also have better motion capture tech so they can put throws back in.
Would also be nice if SEGA got involved so we could get AM2 to help.
 
Part of me's excited because UE5 would represent a huge boon for S4's graphical quality, and it should be easier to work with - having to come up with level of detail models wastes a huge amount of time for art teams - but I'm also nervous that another large technical shift will mean that a lot of the work done for S3 will be scrapped for new and shiny technology. S3 had its issues, but the one thing that it pretty uncontroversially did was provide a nice base for future games to build off of.
 
I believe that if we get Shenmue 4 that Yu Suzuki and his team will undoubtedly use UE5. The team is now experienced with UE4, so they will almost certainly have no problem in adapting to UE5. All of the work that they have put into the making of Shenmue 3 will be portable from UE4 to UE5, this means that all of the assets, character models, etc can be reused or even easily upgraded not to mention the fact that if they are already working on Shenmue 4 in UE4 they wont have to start from scratch.
In fact, I believe that this new engine is the best thing that could have happen to us and Ysnet, because it will allow to carry Shenmue 4 into next gen gaming and it is absolutly F-R-E-E 😉.
 
Part of me's excited because UE5 would represent a huge boon for S4's graphical quality, and it should be easier to work with - having to come up with level of detail models wastes a huge amount of time for art teams - but I'm also nervous that another large technical shift will mean that a lot of the work done for S3 will be scrapped for new and shiny technology. S3 had its issues, but the one thing that it pretty uncontroversially did was provide a nice base for future games to build off of.

I dont think they would be scrapped. Just ported over and improved
 
Impressive Tech for sure, but S4 if it happens at all will still use Unreal Engine 4 and I am fine with that. Unles Yu-San did not get a rich sponsor for s4 there would be no money availabe for using cutting edge technology for the game.
 
To be fair, this type of tech is supposed to dramatically reduce times spent on optimizing dense hi-poly models for use in the engine.. so sculpters will be able to directly import their work into the engine without having to produce bump/normal maps to bring back detail they lost when lowering their sculpted objects subdivision level down to something reasonable for an (of last & current gen) engine to be able to use.

Theoretically this should be good for the majority of studios - if you pay externally for an artist to make your models, there should be less time spent trying to get it into the engine to a point where it's actually feasible (performance etc) and more time working on the actual art. It's a bit of 50/50 right now I'd say, it's possible YS would jump on it, but at the same time, if they're already working on S4, they very well may decide to skip this stuff until S5 or whatever else is lined up for the series.

Difficult to say right now which way it could go, but I'd say it's 50/50 :p
 
Mortal Kombat 11 was released in 2019, uses UE3 and is technically the best looking fighting game of all time.
As long as Suzuki's decision is tempered by reason, it's a win-win situation anyway.
I'm very interested to hear his feedback on all these new techs.
 
Impressive Tech for sure, but S4 if it happens at all will still use Unreal Engine 4 and I am fine with that. Unles Yu-San did not get a rich sponsor for s4 there would be no money availabe for using cutting edge technology for the game.
There isn't any cost normally for moving between Unreal engine versions (although they probably have a commercial license rather than a revenue license - which is available to anyone, you can just go download it).

It really depends where they are on the development because the engine won't be released until year - they are promising it will be a simple update to the engine rather than a complete change that UE3 to 4 was. But if they are taking S3 parts and just working forward it may arrive too late for them.

But in general I believe this is huge thing for medium sized games (in terms of team size). It takes away the heavy lifting of optomising assets etc onto the engine. However this appears to be quite expensive in terms of resources - this was running at 30fps and dynamic resolution (mostly hitting 1440p) on PSV. There are no other characters in this demo and also theres not really much of a "game" running - its a tech demo and while "playable" it isn't a real game.
 
Imagine this w/r/t Shenmue IV. EEK


 
Getting flashbacks to '98 when I look at this stuff.

MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed app that takes real-time digital human creation from weeks or even months to less than an hour—at an unprecedented standard of quality, fidelity, and realism. When your character is finished, you can export and download it, rigged and ready to animate in Unreal Engine.
 
Thanks for the merge. Wasn't sure how relevant it was to Shenmue IV. Nice thread choice.
 
Might as well keep in an ongoing discussion for possible unreal 5 Shenmue daydreaming :)
 
Half Life 2 face demos too. Source engine still looks so fucking good to me.

Seriously, 6th gen was the golden era. Early 7th was like a weird plastic fake trying-too-hard real look, then the charm of 6th gen artistic license gone with too mirror-like ultra real 8th gen and 9th gen

but im old and nostalgia drunk
 
While I am not that big fan of the 6th gen look I have to agree that the 6th time was good. It was the time of new unique gameplay ideas. It was cool to be different. Unlike today where generic games that all feel and play the same. With the pioneer spirit and creativity of the 90s and the tech of today you could make the perfect games. Will never happen though. The creativity is dead... :hmm:(n).


And do not me wrong there ware beautiful 6 gen games but they were the minority.


Shenmue looked great. The Character Design of MGS 2 and 3 was also decent.

But there were also horrible character models back then.

And the horrible ones are more common place than the good ones. That's the major drawback of Nostalgia. We just remember the few decent character models but forget the bad ones. And the bad ones were the norm.


I am not a fan modern gaming because the games lost the magic due the absence of creativity. They lacking the will to try out new things.

If one thing that is not wrong with modern gaming then it is the tech. Unfortunately I prefer creativity over tech.
 
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Imagine this w/r/t Shenmue IV. EEK


I dunno, there's an element of hyper realism with Shenmue character designs and models that won't mesh well with Photorealism like in these videos.

But if this character creator ends up being versatile enough to create Shenmue-style characters, then it would indeed help a lot with the costs & time
 
I dunno, there's an element of hyper realism with Shenmue character designs and models that won't mesh well with Photorealism like in these videos.

But if this character creator ends up being versatile enough to create Shenmue-style characters, then it would indeed help a lot with the costs & time

I dunno, there's an element of hyper realism with Shenmue character designs and models that won't mesh well with Photorealism like in these videos.

But if this character creator ends up being versatile enough to create Shenmue-style characters, then it would indeed help a lot with the costs & time
I hope they end up using this technology because i believe it will drastically improve the facial expressions of the Shenmue characters.
 
Okay, I admit I have no clue how Unreal works. But wouldn't it make more sense for the team to stick with Unreal 4 if they do get the greenlight for IV? I would assume UE4 assets would go over easily enough to UE5...but considering UE4 is established and well documented by this point and everything for Shenmue III was built with UE4, would it not make sense to stick with UE4 as opposed to UE5 and try to wrangle some more out of it?

I would assume there is going to be a learning curve for UE5 whereas UE4 has been around for quite some time that devs surely know what they're doing with it by now. Wouldn't it make sense to maybe stick with UE4 and try to get more out of it for SIV? Everything is already been built. YSNET would have been able to get a handle of it and at least have a better clue going into IV as to how they can get the most out of it. Wouldn't it make more sense to stick with UE4?

Or is my thinking wrong here? Be curious to get an answer from someone who knows what it's like to work with UE in general.
 
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