Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26213067-20150601151815/@comment-53539-20150601180633

V4 was rushed out pretty much because Hideki Kenmochi was retiring. The new guy (I don't know who he is), wants to add a lot more to the next version. So they didn't really have time for ceremony or anything like that. It was rather sudden, and likely done as soon as VY1v4 was ready to be tossed out.

Mostly V4 amounts to a quality leap and a few new features. It reminds me of the current console generation, how every generation of consoles sees fewer and fewer release date games. This is because the consoles are tossed out before the majority of early games are finished.

Yamaha's currently streamlining its services so most of the Japanese stuff goes through VOCALOID NET, so there are some big changes this generation... Just not in the engine itself.

On the other hand, at this point we have so many voices from v2 and V3, the engine was strong anyway. I mean, it impacted past V3's with multiple voicesbanks, suddenly they can use XSY. For a producer just getting into vocaloid, V4 offers more then V3 did as an engine off the bat. Sadly... I just wish for us long term fans it was more interesting. I'd like to retire the V3 links on the mainpage, since V4 is out... But I'm not sure because of how underwhelming it was.