During the Sega-nama live stream, Yakuza Studio head Toshiniro Nagoshi revealed that their upcoming Fist of the North Star game Hakuto ga Gotoku will not be using the new Dragon Engine, but the older engine that was used on Yakuza: Kiwami.
Nagoshi said there are two reason for this…
- First off, the “Dragon Engine” is an in-development engine, and while it performs very well, it can be peaky and difficult to work with. Recently, there was a structural change at Sega Games and with it the team expanded, so a large number of staff that were not involved in the Yakuza project came in. Under such circumstances, given that things like the tools environment and development know-how of the earlier engine are complete compared to the Dragon Engine, it was more appropriate to use the earlier engine, which nevertheless has sufficient performance.
- Hokuto ga Gotoku‘s graphics are realistic, but there is a bit of manga-esque shading called the toon shader. Considering that, they came to the conclusion that they should use the earlier engine rather than the Dragon Engine, which is more realistic and harder to work with.
Hokuto ga Gotoku will release in Japan some time next year exclusively on Playstation 4.
