Originally Posted by
RAIST
It's not because there are PS2 players necessarily. It is because of the legacy code that is still being used across all platforms. PC players still deal with the limitations in the code. Getting people off the PS2 won't mean they can sutdeenly ramp everything up--they have to rebuild portions of the engines driving the game.
SE did not want to support 3 different versions of the game (PS2 specific code, 360 specific code, PC specific code). So what they are doing is running the same PS2 specific code on all three platforms, and two of those run through a wrapper that allows that legacy code to run on those platforms.
The proper way to do this would be to work on a whole new environment designed from the ground up to take advantage of the next higher platform with better specs (the 360) and build a PC wrapper for it. Then, they can announce an end of life for the PS2 version to give everyone a reasonable time frame to convert over to either 360 or PC. They could role it out in advance of the PS2 EOL date so they only have to support both environments for a short time, and get everyone excited over the change to spur the PS2 die-hards to convert.
To pull this off properly would take some time, and would probably be best to do with a major expansion. that could be the big driving force behind it. They could announce that in one year they will be releasing a big expansion, but it will only be available to PC/360 users as it will be a rework of the engine to provide multiple enhancements. Thourghout the uyear, they could leak amazing screenshots and gameplay videos, as well as details on interface tweaks and such to bait the PS2 users along. By launch date, they would likely have everyone moved over who wants to stay in the game, those who don't would basically be on their own--still able to play in the old world perhaps, but if soemthing goes wrong, SE would be under no obligation to help them fix it. Eventually, if they really like the game... they would upgrade and move to another platform.