Sega was working on the Shenmue remake before canceling it

You could have looked for sailors in a drastically altered game.

Sega finally ended up free Shenmue 1 and 2 HD, remastered moderate Dreamcast classic games to get fans to speed before the launch of Shenmue 3, the next long-awaited entry into the franchise. However, once he was working on something much more ambitious – a full remake of Shenmue.

Eurogamer shared this news today, as well as images of the aborted effort. Apparently, the remake had been in development for quite some time before budget and resource considerations led to its cancellation. The remake would be a major redesign of the original game, including appropriate shadow maps, revised rendering and geometry, higher resolution textures, advanced lighting techniques such as occlusion ambient, improvements to NPCs, etc. You can see below what it looked like when canceling the shared sequence.

It's a shame we did not get the remake, but rather a more conservative remaster, at least Shenmue the fans have some modernization of classic games, I guess. You can play Shenmue 1 and 2 HD on PS4, Xbox One and PC.