Even the second half of 2018 seems unlikely. For the game to be of high quality, open world exploration, highly cinematic, and a complex combat system…you are going to need at least 4 and a half to 5 years, development time. Unless you have a large development team and I believe the dev team is pretty small. Anything shorter is going to feel rushed, or lacking depth.
We’ll see how it turns out, but I have my doubts. It just seems too fast. And the story isn’t even going to end for God’s sake!
I think Shenmue series is suited to be released in episodes. I wonder if they have considered that. The Dreamcast games were quite large, and they could reduce dev time by releasing a Shenmue III: Episode 1 initially. Of course episodic content doesn’t guarantee that the story will ever be finished (as with Half-Life), but increments can make the development time less of a drawn out process for both developers and fans.
Also, didn’t they already confirm that it was not going to be an open world game @legaiaflame? You might be setting your expectations too high…
I’m not sure really… Can anyone confirm or deny? I think we know very little at this point…We’ll eventually find out more information through the monthly development emails, we get as backers.
Okay:
Interviewer:
“At $5 million, exactly HOW open world will Shenmue 3 be, compared to Shenmue 1/2?”
Yu Sasuki:
“I’m expecting something similar to Dobuita in terms of scale.”
So, I guess open world on a smaller scale?
This was disappointing news, but actually I suspected it for a long time. The Kickstarter updates suggested a very basic development process for a game that was supposed to be out this year.
But I’m okay with it, like Solo says what’s another year or two in the grand scheme of things.
Make that two. Delayed until ‘2019’.
This was to be expected if we wanted a complete and not rushed game. I still don’t like their faces though. Why couldn’t they replicate their Dreamcast facial structures?
Who cares. As long as it’s good, which I feel it will be (based on what we’ve seen).
The only sad part was thinking it’d be in permanent limbo. Now we know there’ll be a sequel. Life is good.
System requirements revealed. 100GB of space required!
There was also an email to Kickstarter backers where you can select which version of the game you want to download. I chose PlayStation given the steep system requirements of the PC version.
Yea, I read that, I wonder what the reasons for this could be. Is the game this big ? Or is it just poorly coded/optimized ? 
100 gb of space is huge! The Witcher 3 only needed a little over 40 gb I believe!!
I just filled out the servey, put my name in for the credits and I will be getting the PS4 version as well.
100GB is just lazy development. Aren’t Blurays only 50GB? Maybe it’s a two disc PS4 game?! In which case… You’ll probably need 100GB free PS4 hard drive space too.
Initially I was planning on getting the PC version as I didn’t have a PS4, even though I would’ve had to upgrade my PC massively. Then I decided it would be cheaper to get a PS4 to play S3 on, so I got one. However, now I’ve upgraded my PC anyway!
Still going to get the PS4 version though as I’m kinda over PC gaming at this point (too much goes wrong).
Shenmue III might be larger when installed than when on the Blu-ray (e.g. if the game is compressed and requires installation to play).
It will be in interesting to find it why the game requires 100GB. Is it just the developers being safe because they’re not sure how much content the final game will contain? I know that previous Shenmue games had a lot of dialogue, but I can’t imagine additional voice recordings would take up that much room, even if the installer contains both Japanese and English recordings. Perhaps some of the cut scenes are recorded separately and then saved (rather than produced with the game engine), like the old FMV movies of the Saturn era?
There’s certainly some additional effort in keeping everything running smoothly with PC games, both time and money. The benefit I see of the PC is it’s large back catalog, which even with Microsoft’s emulation efforts this generation, that catalog is unsurpassed. The conservatism of Windows is both it’s strength and what holds it back. For newer games, there’s not much advantage of buying on PC over console gaming, especially as Microsoft and Sony have changed the game with mid-generation console upgrades. I suspect that in the future the accounts that we use will become more important than the hardware anyway, as purchased games become more fluidly available on multiple platforms.
If MS really want to take backward compatibility to the next level they should make a deal with Valve so that Steam and all its games run on Xbox…
A nice dream, but there would be no benefit to Microsoft in doing that. They want your collection to be stored in your Microsoft account; games that work on both Xbox and PC must be purchased through a Microsoft store so that they can make money off the sale without other middlemen getting a cut. What I meant is that there’s a big reason for companies to make their services available to as many platforms as possible to reach a wide audience. By being a gatekeeper, they get value by you using an account with their specific ecosystem. And maybe you don’t need another ecosystems if you’ve built a large collection with their one (look at how big Steam is compared to other stores on PC, as one example). Even hardware focused companies like Apple are doing it (e.g. their music service on Android). As you grow a large collection, the choice of what store you purchase the game in may become more important than the initial hardware choice… for both the providers and customers.
This is released August 27th 2019!!!
Well, at least in the game, Ryo gets to confront Lan Di in person! The faces still look horrible though…
I wouln’t call those faces ‘horrible’ but they are a bit on the stiff side.
Well, when compared to Shenmue 1 and 2 they almost look worse or inaccurate. Which is hard to believe and pretty bad…
Well, it’s been delayed until November 19th 2019 folks…