by Yokosuka » Sat Aug 09, 2014 7:13 am
Creating an engine (graphical and physical) seems so expensive nowadays that I would accept without undue difficulty the fact of Suzuki not using his own, depending on the engines prices on the market.
On the other hand, create his proper engine can be the smartest opportunity to start new ambitious projects for the company, like Naughty Dog sharing the same self-made engine between Uncharted and Last of Us.
Unreal 3 would have been terrible for Shenmue I think but Unreal 4 looks pretty interesting. The crucial point is how it would be flexible according the essential parts of shenmue :
- environment details that make you want to take time for exploring and feeling the exotic local atmosphere, to walk instead run, to accept by your own will the typical slow narrative pace of Shenmue. Notice that the original Shenmue engine was beautiful despite very poor compressed textures. The fact that the story took place in poor districts when the respective countries were still in a developing process, maybe helped psychologically, I dunno.
- high number of polygons for the characters, feel strongly you have a person with his chair and his bones in front of you, not an articulated puppet like it's almost always the case in videogames. Weak framerate is one of the another reasons that's usually not click.
- face details, possibly the most important point of shenmue spirit (keep in mind we're talking about the most humanist videogame of history). I always found the faces terrible in this generation : show up odd emotions, excessive sweating, and often over-acting. Not to mention the impression of clones. Don't underestimate the uncanny valley issue too. The original shenmue engine is still awesome despite a quite low number of different available expressions for modern standards. I remember the transition of DC nba 2K to the first nba 2K on xbox/ps2 : the new faces were a step down because the "2D face" style of dreamcast was still more expressive than the "3D face" style of the new versions.
- pretty bright colors, allowing a lively artistic direction. Maybe not as important as it was in the past, all modern engines seems basically perform on this area. In Shenmue II, the most impressive part of the artistic direction was that each district had really his own flavor. Each place was a singular painting, an individual piece of art emphasized by its own music. No other game give me ever this feeling of a well balanced level-design architecture.
Shenmue gameplay is still unique in 2014 : it's not a sand box game, it's neither exactly a basic adventure/action game, that's why it needs an pretty accurate engine. Btw that's really surprising that no one has copy them yet, apart the Yakuza. Maybe the patents ? Even the QTE strangely sucks in other games.
I pay a lot of attention to it because I consider that as much as important than the story. Without one of them, no Shenmue spirit. I fear future Shenmue as a simply basic video-game indeed.