Shenmue I & II will be locked to 30FPS on all platforms

Shenmue I and II Remasters are coming to PC, Xbox One and PS4

Shenmue I & II will be locked to 30FPS on all platforms

SEGA has released a boatload of information about  d3t’s remaster of Shenmue I and II, which is set to release on PC, Xbox One and PS4 on August 22nd. 

As part of their new Shenmue FAQ, SEGA has confirmed that Shenmue I will be ported from the game’s Dreamcast Original and that Shenmue II will be ported from the game’s Xbox version.  The Xbox version of the Shenmue II was chosen because of the game’s enhanced graphical features like Texture mipmaps, the game’s Snapshots system and in-game Filter options. 

The reliance on legacy game code has sadly presented the development team with several issues when porting Shenmue I and II to modern hardware, the most notable of which is a 30FPS framerate lock. The game code of the original series is coded to assume that the game’s target framerate is 30FPS, making 60FPS playback impossible. Some Dreamcast emulators can run Shenmue at 60FPS, though this brings with it physics issues and introduces several bugs into the game. 

These remasters of Shenmue I and II will offer 16:9 support in player controlled areas of the game, with a locked 4:3 mode that will be used for cutscenes, which were designed with this display window in mind. Control-wise, keyboard/mouse options have been added to the title’s PC release, and Ryo can now be controlled using analog sticks on modern gamepads. 

d3t has also promised to add options to use both the game’s English and Japanese voice acting, allowing gamers to switch between the two audio options at will and have added several new post-processing effects to the game, hopefully improving the game’s graphical quality. We hope to see anti-aliasing within the game and a modern implementation of motion blur, which was a weak spot in the game’s Xbox release. 

 

To this day, the Shenmue series has an active modding community, who have allowed the game’s original versions to look much better than their stock counterparts using both modified original hardware and emulation, leaving behind hopes for potential 60FPS mods or other visual enhancements for the title’s upcoming PC release.  

You can have a look at Shenmue I & II’s PC system requirements here. 

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