Outside of its announcement at E3 2016, information on the re-release (or remaster) of 2004 Xbox game Phantom Dust for Xbox One has been pretty light. Now, the folks at Polygon recently got a first extended look at some gameplay footage and some new details in an interview with Microsoft Studios creative director Adam Isgreen.
The most interesting bits to come out of the interview involve the amount of effort involved in putting the game together for its upcoming Xbox One release. As Isgreen notes, the team received the original game archives from Japan without the final source code. That meant the team essentially had to reverse engineer the game from its binary, making for what sounds like an arduous task.
According to Isgreen, the re-release will be rendered in 16:9 at 1080p on Xbox One and up to 4K on PC. And because the original game assets were of such high quality for the time, those playing through the re-release should notice much better clarity on things like signs and in-game textures thanks to the higher rendering output.
Some of the other improvements to Phantom Dust include support for achievements, options to skip story sections, and more. The game can even be rebalanced with little effort because its card data is stored in the cloud. If multiplayer balance is out of whack, tweaks to cards can be made and easily distributed to all players. And speaking of multiplayer, those who want to jump into it right away can do so with a batch of free cards and skills available out of the gate.
There's no price set yet for the Phantom Dust re-release, but Isgreen noted that fans should be pretty happy once it's revealed. DLC is also in the works, but it shouldn't impact the way the original story plays.
Phantom Dust is expected this year, potentially even before E3, so we'll likely see much more about the re-release soon.