It being a HD game already increases the scope and I would think the team would make a game more suitable for the hardware, such as larger areas with more details.
Well if your increase in scope "only" has to do with going HD then it makes sense, a good example/comparison could be Tales of Vesperia, it's pretty much what they did before but in HD, there's no notable difference otherwise both on the content and gameplay front.
It was more expensive, and harder, to develop than previous entries but not by a wide margin and it just came from keeping up with the hardware and keeping the same level of quality.
And that's where our definition of scope for a game vary, let's say for example that one day Square Enix does a remake of Final Fantasy VIII on PS5 that is almost 100% identical to the PS1 game except on the graphical front and on minor gameplay adjustments.
Would the scope of the game that is Final Fantasy VIII increased with its remake? Barely
Would the development budget be notably higher than the original game? Assuredly so
Here's the thing:
SMTIV was already greater in scope than
Nocturne for a few reasons:
- Complete character/equipment customization: This requires a ton of art assets to be built/tested
- Over 400 demons that can be recruited and/or fused (even if they were all 2D art)
- A more intricate world map and dungeons in terms of art and texture detail
- A much larger number of side quests and optional content atop an extensive main story
- An overhauled and much more in-depth and user-friendly Demon Fusion system
- The App system, which allows you to assign different perks to your party's progression
- StreetPass functionality
All of this stuff adds up. Add to this the fact that
SMTIV is simply a much more "playable" game than
Nocturne, and I think it's fairly safe to say that it was greater in scope in a number of ways. (Which isn't to say that
Nocturne wasn't a huge undertaking in itself)
Fair enough, though in your list there's a huge variety of things ranging from more content to new gameplay features, graphics*, small details, to just... things that should be expected from a new game (like improving the UX/UI over previous entries, especially when said feature was reused and improved in spin-off ever since)
Overall it's just a given for the most part, every new game in a series should have new gameplay features, improve on existing ones if reused, as many new visual elements as possible (especially in SMT case where you have such a huge gap between each main entry) use its hardware as efficiently as it can and being at least on par with previous entries in term of content.
The more defining arguments, I think, are character customization which is very costly and isn't done so often (I do wonder if they will keep that for SMT V btw), more content and detailled textures where I will trust you because it's been more than a decade since I last played SMT III :p
*Regarding demons it's worth pointing out that there were animated assets reused from Strange Journey and for the others most had existing sprites as a starting point, a non negligible amount had very poor animation as well like just stretching the artwork.
For SMT III they started from scratch.
There's this, too. While there is no one magical "HD feature" that can be attributed to increasing a game's scope, the fact that you have to create, render, and output everything at a much higher resolution does take significant effort--especially for a team that hasn't worked on an HD project before. (#FE was heavily outsourced)
To think that many were laughing at Nintendo because they were so late to transition to HD with the Wii U five years ago, now here we are with Atlus :p
As it's been said before we should expect a lot of asset reused from Persona 5 regarding demons, it would be odd if they didn't in fact.
