Bambi wrote:Centrale wrote:Some interesting things have been done with emulators. But they are usually accompanied with some serious caveats that would prevent them from ever being released commercially. Like the depth of field effect that looks cool in still images but is a glitchy mess in gameplay. It's a long road from 'this kind of works most of the time' to 'this is ready to be professionally released' and when you're on it, you often find that it ends up being even longer than you thought.
Couldn't agree more, I've been playing the games through emulation for the last 7 or so years and while it's convenient there's a definite immersion trade-off when graphical glitches appear.
I'm sure someone has run the numbers from a marketing point of view and worked out what % of the potential player base will be new and put off by the game's (by today's standards) old fashioned graphics etc. and concluded that it's not a demographic they should pursue.
I think it's amazing these ports are even being released at all, from a costing point of view I think it makes a lot more sense for Sega to release an up-scaled port like this than to sink more money into a series which hasn't exactly been profitable for them.
You're correct, Sega is looking to profit maximize. It's going to cost Shenmue 3 some sales though.
Sega decided it wasn't worth refining the remakes further because they don't have a financial stake in the next installment. If they had greater interest in seeing 3 succeed they wouldn't have put so little into the remakes (or avoided them altogether because you're not going to get the gaming landscape of 2018 hyped with 20 year old games). I'm glad that I'll have them, but that pleasure might be shortsighted if it turns out to jeopardize the future of the series.