Sega had previously said it was "investigating" a potential re-release of the Shenmue games, although at the time the publisher said it wasn't simply a matter of porting the titles to modern consoles. "With games as immersive as [Shenmue and Shenmue II], there are further complications [involving] licensed products that were included in the original games," Sega Europe community manager Dan Sheridan said
Sorry suddenly realised that this quote wasn’t part of the thread and from a gamespot article! To be clear the previous post was answering the forum question of what my fears are - my fears are it’s a lie and it’s a basic Xbox port.
From memory the only licensed products in the EU version was the Timex watch other than Segas own IP. Happy to be corrected on that. So they have simply banged in a quick port of the Xbox version:
From the trailer it looks very like the X-Box version which runs on Direct X8.1 (As do all X-Box games). There’s also nothing graphically new, so there would be no reason not to take the already (quite complicated) work done of converting it from the Dreamcast PowerVR graphical hardware to run on the DirectX (windows/Xbox one/ not sure on PS4 some work may of had to go on there but again probably not) platform. It doesn’t appear that they are redoing any lighting and there is a lot of 4:3 on the video. The textures don’t look like they’ve been touched.
All of this is fine but to package it up as some big HD version is a bit of marketing. It’s a PS Store release dressed up as a proper remaster.