I think some people on here were looking forward to this. Anyway, here’s the debut trailer:
I laid down a $5 pre-order on it the other day! So excited! 
Have to love the way the trailer ends! 
Thanks for the link!
IMO This is the best game to come out of SEGA since Panzer Dragoon Orta . What the team onthe Hardware is just amazing , its like a interactive Sammo Hung flick and the animation is just brilliant (you really feel the pain) . Half the time it looks better than the PS3 Kenzan .
I so very thanful to SEGA West for having the balls to bring it over , knowing full well they’ll be lucky to break even . So of the old SEGA spit is alive and well . Now just give us a new Jet Set Radio and I’ll be happy
Oh come on! If they managed to afford three Yakuza games in such a short time frame then surely they could have afforded a single Shenmue 3 as well… They could have made that a whole lot darker which would fit the story more than the original style anyway.
This is a whole lot better than getting nothing of course but seeing the similarities between the games, and simply knowing that an all new Shenmue part three with the same production values (which are still behind western companies for the visuals side, but that’s fine with me) would be absolutely rocking, is still so very heartbreaking.
As for “knowing full well they’ll be lucky to break even”, well, for the US and EU releases they only have localization (no English voices this time, both good and less costly - not that those shit actors must cost much), advertising and publishing costs to think of, don’t they? That means that all they have to do is make sure they don’t publish too many more units than they expect to sell. I see no risk in bringing this over really. I’m sure they’ll get some decent profit out of it even if it doesn’t become a big hit.
Even with out a English Dub I bet this is going a fair bit to translate given it a 2 disc DVD game , it must be a massive task, I still think its risk bring this over .
As for Shenmue III it would cost loads and loads to make , the Whole Project cost SEGA 70 million and was years back on DC hardware I think the 2 Yakuza games have cost SEGA 30 million so far , you can’t even compare the 2
It will cost a Bomb and takes a Massive Team to make Shenmue III for today market … and even then , I doubt Shenmue III would finish the series . I mean there’s some 10 plus chapetrs left , thats not all going to be done one game .
I know its hurts , becasue we all want to see the series finished off,. But I get sick of people moaning , when Yukuza II is one of the very best games SEGA made , and at last I can play it in English . Christ the likes of EA wouldn’t think twice about bringing a sequel over , if it sold as bad as Yaukza did inthe West . People should be thankful and Happy, that SEGA is bringing the game over and a part of the old SEGA is alive and well
I used to think this place was one of the last strongholds of the SEGA faithfull , this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore
Localization is not that much of an issue unless these companies are doing something very wrong with it. Getting a load of text files dumped on the desks of your multilingual staff for translation is hardly costly or time consuming regardless of a game’s length.
Amateur projects (which often involve one or two people) for movies can get a translation done within a few days of a release. I get movies in Greek when they were just released in the U.S. for example (yeah I do buy them when they become available officially so :P). A full studio that actually gets paid should have no problem with even a large game unless they don’t actually have staff who can speak the languge. Of course, that would make it a pretty stupid choice of a studio in the first place.
I still believe there’s zero risk in bringing Yakuza over if they handle it efficiently, and anyone who actually works for a high profile company like Sega should be able to do so.
Anyway. As far as game development costs go, the only way the original Shenmue cost that much is with Sega’s incredibly bad time and budget management. Let’s not forget it actually started as a Sega Saturn game, which means all the development costs of that version were more or less wasted and the whole project was restarted from scratch. Perhaps that happened more than once during development, increasing costs like that.
The Yakuza games are up to par in terms of, well, everything from the engine to the actual art and as you say, those cost much less. A new Shenmue could use the same core engine as Yakuza 3 which means near ZERO cost in that aspect. Then it would be just a matter of creating the art and given the size of previous Shenmues that also couldn’t cost so much.
Games that cost much less to make have a lot more actual content to offer than any Shenmue did. The fact Bioshock is “just a FPS” instead of an adventure or RPG doesn’t mean the actual (and beautiful) art presented is any cheaper to produce!
So basically, they have the engine done and they have the capable artists that they need to pay anyway. All that could make Shenmue 3 cost more than Yakuza 3 is if they decided to hire another million of crappy as hell actors for it. Who thinks they would do the same horrible mistake again though? Moreover, WHY would they? We don’t need a different actor for every generic person that makes no difference whatsoever to the storyline, just put the funds where it counts, to the main characters, of which Shenmue doesn’t have more than Yakuza or any other similar game.
With the above said, why are you so certain that a new Shenmue would cost so much more than a new Yakuza game? The new franschise is certainly on par with everything Shenmue had to technically offer. Slapping the name and theme of Shenmue on a game doesn’t automatically make its cost magically increase tenfold. We did see a sign of the supernatural in the end of the second part but I don’t think that’s what it was about.
As for your last paragraphs, I never said I don’t want to see the Yakuza games released in English or any other language. I’m saying that it’s bullshit to claim development costs are the reason for discontinuing the Shenmue saga then going and making three parts of a new series that is too damn similar and serves as a tease for the fans.
Oh I think its more work than you like to make out , and translating for Japanese to English is always more time coming and troublesome . Also unlike a Film every time you change a bit of code for the game , its needs to bug tested and make sure its correct , when it games of the size of Yakuza that?s no such a simple task . With a film there?s no player interaction and game code to change , a far easier and less costly task me thinks .
As for Shenmue The very 1st game cost SEGA 20 million on big ones for the Japanese version on its own , and took more than 200 people to make , and the whole project some 70 million that?s before the 2nd game even made it out . I like both games and while they share a lot in common they?re really diff projects. Just walk around in Yakzua to than in Shenmue and it?s a completely diff experience , in Shenmue you can look everywhere you want , go and talk to anybody you want, and examine almost anything you want . To model that kind of work takes time , huge teams and tons and tons of money.
With the 1st 2 games costing SEGA 70 million and only selling somthing like 1.7 million on 2 diff platforms . You don’t have to be a wizard with numbers, to work out why SEGA isn’t so ready to make a Part III. IV, V (or what ever) to finish off the series .
BTW You should play Kanzen , Its engine is a huge ledtdown
Actually, yeah Team Andromeda is right to an extent, Translation is a lot more work to do than simply taking the Japanese words and changing them into English.
Unless they want to take the “All your base are belong to us” route that Zero Wing took of course.
Although they don’t have to actually change the code, not unless there is some severe timing issue with subtitles.
It is simply a case of swapping the original files with english language ones in most cases.
As for Shenmue III, Shenmue III could be done for much less than Shenmue I and II, because the Dreamcast version wasn’t as expensive as it was because of the size of the game alone.
You have to factor in, that they essentially made the game twice for both Saturn and Dreamcast, this would have impacted Development cost severley.
Replying to the above, I never said they would translate it word to word. Like I said, “dump text files for translation” and like you said, they’d replace the Japanese with English language files. I mentioned the translators have to speak the language which means being able to understand it properly to convey the same feelings in a different language.
That’s obviously taking some effort and time but doesn’t add to the costs as much as some people seem to think and that’s what I tried to explain by simplifying my description. Sure, it doesn’t take a few hours or days to do it like my last response perhaps indicated, but it certainly doesn’t really take years and a massive amount of cash either.
It just seems that some people think that when a game gets a delayed English release it’s because 100 dudes sat in a chair for 2-3 full years with a Japanese language dictionary in hand, and they got paid by the hour.
As for Yakuza 3’s engine, it’s no more a disapointment than the Yakuza 1 & 2 engine compared to what the rest of the world had been able to offer on the same system. I don’t think it compares faborably with the engines of MGS3 or GTA:SA at least. But that doesn’t make it a bad series does it? Shenmue’s engine wasn’t that great either, in the end it’s the art and gameplay style that makes things look good (or not so good as in Yakuza 3’s case).
They could still use it for a Shenmue and simply make better art now they have more experience as they seem to be total newbies with technologies like normal mapping and pixel shading. Not just Sega, most Japanese companies it seems, I think that’s why Kojima recently said that the western world has far surpassed eastern games companies…
Anyway, no new comment on the other things said relating to Shenmue 3’s cost, I think my last response still applies fine if it’s re-read. Actually, I will comment on the supposed differences between the series which apparently show why a Shen game costs more… Well, they don’t.
Being able to talk to “anyone” doesn’t mean much when that “anyone” is mostly generic NPCs who have a few set responses. RPGs have been doing it since the dawn of time or close to that. It’s really not that costly unless you decide to hire a million shitty actors just to say similar generic lines over and over. And then hire another million for the English version.
As for the interactive world (though Shenmue was hardly interactive anyway), that also can’t really take so much. Modern games have a lot more detail than Shenmue 1&2 (duh, it’s teh future!) even if you aren’t able to examine everything. Still, art has to be created in the same way, whether you have an examine function or not in your game so that makes no difference in cost whatsoever.
I wouldn’t care if I couldn’t examine everything in Shenmue 3 anyway but I’m also sure it is also MUCH simpler to do nowadays with the physics engines that exist and allow realistic interactions with the tiniest of objects.
Whether they implemented that function or not, I really don’t see myself picking up every dish and can in a Shenmue 3 just to look at it and going “wow” at the graphics or something. It would be cool to see all sorts of stuff smash during a fight though, but again, that’s easy to do nowadays and is considered the standard for even the shittiest of modern games out there.
I take it you’ve never played Yakuza II ? ecause its one of the most impressive games onthe PS2 . Its much better than MGS 2/3 in game when it comes to animation , the scale is also far in advance of what I saw in MSG 2/3.
I’ve never been that impressed with the GTA game engines of the PS2 , Something like Silent Hill 3 really pushed the PS2 imo .
Kenzan is not Yakuza III , and it terms of animation and effects is worse than Yakuza II- the water effects are almost an embarrassment .
I don’t agree with you on Shenmue either , that game still looks great even today , and the Head demo still looks stunning and impressive , Along with VO II its the best demo of DC power that I saw .
No , you’re right , being able to talk to every character in a game is nothing new , after all SEGA did just that with Magic Rayearth. Talking to every character, them going about thier dail life’s inside the game was somthing we had no seen much before ,…and still not many games give the Impression of the game being alive as well as Shenmue (well Half Life II does).
With Shenmue III people would be expecting knock out graphics and a game ofthe scale to that of the 1st two only with next gen graphics and physics, now when relative simple games lie Halo III or Lost Planet can cost 20 to 30 million to make, one wonders how much Shenmue III would cost to make . I doubt SEGA could use anyone else game engine as Shenmue is pretty diff to most games, and stuff like Unreal Tech is pretty crap when it comes to outdoors and animation , and Kenzan is pretty poor game engine , III .
There?s more to SEGA than Shenmue III or Panzer Dragoon Saga II .
All SEGA fans want those games to be made, but its makes me sick to see people moan at SEGA for making the likes of Yakuza II or Valkyrie of the Battlefield, rather than a Shenmue III or Saga II .
Nothing more than that would please me more (well JSRF II would) , but I’m well happy with Yakuza II and thats is coming to the West . It be nice if other SEGA fans would Celebrate the fact , rather than go on and on about Shenmue III .
What’s more is, a lot of the NPCs in Shenmue were using the same sound samples for what they were saying, like the “Oh No no No I’m too tired right now” etc.
Shenmue was quite interactive, being able to examine things was part of the novelty of it and attraction - it would have taken a while to code all the things in game novelties one can take advantage of.
However, the intial back breaking work was all done in the original code.
If Shenmue III were to come out, they would be able to adapt large portions of already existing code to work on new hardware, assuming it was written in relativley portable languages (Which I assume it was, since they managed to convert Shenmue II to Xbox with no problem).
Like that helped with the DC version , most of Shenmue story, charcater desgin ect was done onthe Saturn . Trouble is one needs to re-model all the world and game characters to take adv of the new graphics chip set , now of coruse all the models would need to be redone in high def too = More money and more work
Look at RE 5 , Most of the ground work was done with RE4 in terms of getting a basic engine and camera angle fit to push the series forward . The new game is still taking ages to come out, and I bet its costing millions to make and the team is massive . GTA IV is said to have cost 100 million and I fail to see any diff inthe game to that of whats gone gone before , bar next gen gaphics
Every “first” costs more then people realise there are easier ways to do things. That’s why Shenmue 1 cost so much, that’s why GTA IV cost so much, because they were both the first games and engines to do things never seen before on the respective systems. And also because of poor budget and time management 
I’m sure 3D realms will come out and say Duke Nukem Forever cost fifty quadrillion to make, but that game has gone back to the drawingboard fifty million times anyway. It sort of makes sense, and they shouldn’t add that to the cost of the actual game. Instead say “we wasted this much cash, then the actual game took 1/1000th of that to develop”, heh.
By the way, Unreal Engine III is actually quite good for open environments, even Unreal Engine 2.5 was amazing in the amount of polygons it could push and sitll run smooth on semi decent hardware. Not that Shenmue had many open areas anyway, there were a few different roads to take and all leading very restricting paths.
I still maintain that Shenmue was not very interactive. Being able to pick up something, look at it, and then put back in the exact same place it was before is hardly interactive. Today’s engines can do that much easier and do much more than that (again, physics). Even stupid FPS games often allow you to pick up all the crap you want like cans, boxes, and all sorts of objects, though once again they’re not useful for anything (press E near any object in HL2… or use the grav gun…).
Also, how can you possibly think that the only game that comes close to Shenmue in terms of characters is Half-Life 2? Half-Life 2 is a brainless 100% linear shooter. Or are you just looking at the pretty character heads and animations even though your point was about following a character’s life or something…? Anyway that’s also cheap and resourceful to develop since it’s more code than art (though obviously pretty Alyx helps) and once you have one character working you can make a billion of them working just as good with the same backend.
And again I’m not devaluing Yakuza series, I’m just saying it’s bullshit to claim development costs prohibit another Shenmue then go and make three parts of a series with very similar style and production values.
I’m glad they learnt from their mistakes and can manage projects more resourcefully to allow such games to be developed but now they have done so they should have given Shenmue another try rather than talk bullshit like that.
For interactivity, look at PENUMBRA, a great series by a very small independent developer. There’s an ancient free tech demo available if you don’t want to buy the games to see it but even that early work shows what kind of interactivity a simple physics engine can allow you to have.
[quote=“Team Andromeda”]
Like that helped with the DC version , most of Shenmue story, charcater desgin ect was done onthe Saturn . Trouble is one needs to re-model all the world and game characters to take adv of the new graphics chip set , now of coruse all the models would need to be redone in high def too = More money and more work
Look at RE 5 , Most of the ground work was done with RE4 in terms of getting a basic engine and camera angle fit to push the series forward . The new game is still taking ages to come out, and I bet its costing millions to make and the team is massive . GTA IV is said to have cost 100 million and I fail to see any diff inthe game to that of whats gone gone before , bar next gen gaphics[/quote]
It didn’t help with the Dreamcast version because the Saturn version was written in assembley.
You can’t port Assembley code to other machines, because assembley involved using acronyms and mathmatical calculations that are relevant to the hardware itself.
Code and data used by code are quite seperate things.
One could take the code from Shenmue II Xbox, and replace all of the character models with higher polygon versions.
[quote=“Al3xand3r”]Localization is not that much of an issue unless these companies are doing something very wrong with it. Getting a load of text files dumped on the desks of your multilingual staff for translation is hardly costly or time consuming regardless of a game’s length.
Amateur projects (which often involve one or two people) for movies can get a translation done within a few days of a release.
I still believe there’s zero risk in bringing Yakuza over if they handle it efficiently…[/quote]
Just wanted to point out that there is a way to express your opinion on things without coming across as not knowing what you’re talking about by not stating things in a definitive way unless you know facts. For example, you could have said, “Is localization that much of an issue? I wonder how much it costs/what is involved with replacing Japanese text with English…”
In this case, however, your assumptions are not correct. Even just the translation costs can be fairly substantial, considering that there are hundreds and hundreds of pages of text, and translation is not cheap. Then you have to factor in the cost of keeping a producer/project manager on both the Japanese and western sides to coordinate, plus keeping a handful of coders to actually implement the text and ensure that there are no issues. Then you run into all sorts of bugs (words getting cut off, spelling errors that spell check doesn’t catch, etc), and the entire PR/Marketing effort to release the game. And that’s just the baseline for the project, nevermind the potentially unique needs of each given project.
Then you need to take into consideration that retailers have limited shelf space, so it takes effort to convince them to stock the game unless it’s a fairly large project. Do you risk pushing a game hard with retailers, but risk having it potentially flop? Doing so would burn bridges with said retailers, making it hard to sell your other games.
Nothing, I repeat nothing is risk-free. Every project has a risk of losing money.
And in regards to the Yakuza vs Shenmue question… wtf? How are these two even related? That’s like saying, “If Marvel had enough money to make an Iron Man movie, why didn’t they write that Dr. Strange comic crossover that I’ve been wanting?”
Shenmue was created by Yu Suzuki, and failed to reach an audience big enough to break even. It was a decent game, but there weren’t enough people interested in it to continue as it was originally envisioned. Toshihiro Nagoshi created Yakuza to create a new series primarily for the Japanese market, and did so for a lot less money and it reached quite a significant audience. Seeing as it was successful, they’ve turned it into a series. I’m not sure I understand why there is more to it?
And no, the “backbreaking work” in Shenmue has not finished. You can’t just replace all the models in the game with higher poly, higher res models and textures. You need to rebuild an engine that can actually support those higher resolutions and textures, advanced lighting techniques, better streaming technology, etc just to start. If it were that easy, any company that had ever created any game ever would have a “super easy time” creating any game from that point on. Just because hardware gets faster doesn’t mean that the software automatically scales with it.
So how much was this substantial localization cost of Yakuza 1 and 2 respectively? Was the translation outsourced or is there a Sega of America studio which handles that and gets progressively more efficient at it?
Yeah, oh em gee, a handful of coders (I think it would just take one really, especially since the translation is so time consuming so there’s no rush in coding it) to fix dialogue bugs. SKYROCKETING COSTS! Not to mention initial development should have taken the possible translations in account in order to make the system flexible and as bug free as possible from start.
What was the profit of Yakuza afterwards?
Of course there’s a risk in everything that involves any amount of money, I just meant Yakuza is no more risky than doing anything at all within the business. Surely a less risky move than developing an all new title which has no audience anywhere at all. At least they know they have a solid title that’s popular somewhere in the world and is popular enough overseas to warrant import reviews and an internet full of trailers and other such free promotion.
Also, that analogy would be more like Marvel announcing “we won’t do a Spiderman 4 because we can’t afford it” then proceeding to make Iron Man. I’m sure fans would find that peculiar and all it would have taken to make it better is to simply have said “we don’t wish to do a Spiderman 4, we want to explore something different and potentially more profitable” without ever mentioning it’s the cost of a movie that stops them from making a Spiderman 4.
And again, Shemue should have never needed that kind of budget to be developed, it was a badly managed project from start. I still wonder where the money went, perhaps you can enlighten us on that aspect also, since you know your translation processes so well. In the end, why decide to kill a project instead of better their management? Or, since it seems they have actually bettered their management, why never go back to such a project?
[quote=“Chizzles”]
Like that helped with the DC version , most of Shenmue story, charcater desgin ect was done onthe Saturn . Trouble is one needs to re-model all the world and game characters to take adv of the new graphics chip set , now of coruse all the models would need to be redone in high def too = More money and more work
Look at RE 5 , Most of the ground work was done with RE4 in terms of getting a basic engine and camera angle fit to push the series forward . The new game is still taking ages to come out, and I bet its costing millions to make and the team is massive . GTA IV is said to have cost 100 million and I fail to see any diff inthe game to that of whats gone gone before , bar next gen gaphics
It didn’t help with the Dreamcast version because the Saturn version was written in assembley.
You can’t port Assembley code to other machines, because assembley involved using acronyms and mathmatical calculations that are relevant to the hardware itself.
Code and data used by code are quite seperate things.
One could take the code from Shenmue II Xbox, and replace all of the character models with higher polygon versions.[/quote]
I think that makes little difference, to Japanese developers used to not using C and always working with developer tools and coding to the mental, rather than using middleware.
DC never used your standard language, and it took a while to port the code of the DC version over to MS X-Box, and it was a complete flop. I?ll never be able to prove it, but I think it would have sold 500,000 to a million copies on the DC, but when the X-Box version was announced peoples expectations were raised , and all they got was the DC versions months after it came out on the DC version , looked no better and people hopes were dashed
Now a Shenmue III looking no better than the DC version would fall flat on its ass in this day and age , its a non starter . The huge world and charcater models would need to be re-built from the ground up for the next gen hardware , that alone would cost millions and take a Huge Team . I’m not sure if AM#2 are even set up to handle a project like that is this post 1st Party day’s.
The best bet for seeing Shenmue 3 is if Yu Suzuki funded it himself somehow, or if he could convince someone at the top to reinvent the series. I don’t see either happening due to the kind of manpower needed.
Maybe it’s a tragedy, because Shenmue 2 would have probably sold a million on the DC stateside. I’m not really a fan of the series but I can still safely say that Shenmue 2 for the DC was a masterpiece for what it was.
Truly oldschool Sega.
TA: this coming to Europe too or will we have to import? Just an English translation should make people grateful. I never thought it would make it even to the states. I have to admit though that the loading times in the first game were rather irritating to say the least!
Yeah its coming to Europe its already been confirmed , its also coming at the ?25 price point too .
TA, my point is that now the Xbox version of Shenmue II has been done, it would be easy to recycle code from it and save time, even more so to a simple syste like Wii. As Abadd pointed out, not all code, but deffinatly some code.
Shenmue II on Xbox did look mildly enhanced, such as imporoved lighting and high res textures.
It makes a big difference, writing things in Assembley takes forever.
Abadd,
In the same way that Shenmue II for XBOX was modified to take advantage of high res textures, the same can be done again.
The main problem is that machines like the 360 and PS3 currently use multi core with nothing in the way of hyperthreading.
This would cause a lot of pain, however once hyperthreading takes off (probably next gen when we have PS4… or whatever) porting code from single core to multi core systems will be a lot more feasible.
Basic elements can still be easily ported though, for example "printf “I See” is the same now as it was in the days of the Commodore.
Also we are forgetting that Wii exists, Wiitards would be more than happy to accept an “enhanced” version of the Shenmue engine.
I’m not saying it would be painless, what I’m saying is they don’t have to start again from scratch.
AM2, would have used Modular designs for their engines, no doubt.
Individual modules can be changed/replaced while leaving other parts untouched, and make for much more easily upgradable software.