- Joined
- Jul 28, 2018
- Favourite title
- Shenmue IIx
- Currently playing
- Ghost of Tsushima
- PSN
- mjqjazzbar
A glimpse of the future?
(EDIT) It's pretty safe to rule out S4 using this engine though...
It would depend on 2 things:Why do you say that? (Not trolling, just genuinely curious as i'm not a technical person)
I don't think i've been wowed with graphics since the move to HD, but watching that video was impressive. What I got out of it was how smooth it all was. One of my favourite things about Shenmue III was the lighting and the use of colour, so imagining that with UE5 would be impressive.
I take it that moving from one UE to the next is not as simple as it sounds?
It would depend on 2 things:
1. How easily everything ports over; things tend to break just by changing versions of UE4 (so going from 4.24 to 4.25 for instance), most games lock down after a certain point in development even if the engine gets updated for this reason.
2. Art assets. This is specifically designed to basically handle raw geometric data which means that everything that's set up in S3 will need to be completely re-imported and set up again from scratch and, depending on how everything was modeled, likely won't have the detail level that would merit the upgrade. UE5 is pushing film quality assets and people thought S3 failed to live up to the standards of this gen, so it likely won't be worth it for them.
It's also worth mentioning that as soon as you increase quality to a certain level (much less this level) everything else needs to match. Could you imagine how out of place the facial animation and stiff movement would look if everything else was basically photo real?
In my experience, Epic offers buyouts for exclusivity and a discount on the percentage they take for using Unreal Engine, both of which need to be negotiated by the publisher unless YsNet has an existing relationship with Epic.I wonder if Shenmue IV were to be on Epic Games Store if YsNet would get a discount, same as using UE4?
While I would love to see a Shenmue game using this engine, I don't think it's reasonable to think S4 would be a good fit considering that it's going to be exclusive to next gen hardware and ultra-high-end PCs (to say nothing of the development time). The games most likely to make use of this technology are games with lucrative Sony, Microsoft, and Epic contracts, at least for the foreseeable future.I'm sure Suzuki must be looking at this with great interest.
Having an existing engine that's already been play tested is massively attractive to publishers because the initial cost is drastically reduced. Unsure if YsNet is going with DS again, self publishing, or what but there are massive benefits to sticking with what works. Anything short of Sony writing Suzuki a blank cheque like Sega did in the 90s makes being an early adopter a very risky prospect.But to be honest, if it's easier to simply use UE4, then it's probably better to stick with that.
Good thing he is at least on Epic's radar after giving them a big exclusive, even if many of us thought that an unwise union...