The trailer is real, he just can't tell anything about the exact content.

A time counter in Shenmue Dojo would be great.
It wouldn't be fair of them to do that. It's not an official countdown. Whether Shenmue 3 will be shown at PSX in December is still just very good speculation. We know they won't show anything before December, we know Yu Suzuki will be in LA in December for a Kickstarter dinner, and we know PSX is in December. That isn't official confirmation that it will be shown at PSX, even though it makes sense.


Also, now that it was mentioned on previous pages I had to go and look at 'the cache' for myself. They can fix that, has anyone tried to notify them about it? I can direct them to instructions on how to fix it if for some reason they don't have an actual server admin to do it.

Today I went in search of my original save file from the first time I beat Shenmue 2. I actually have a copy of it still, because I made a bunch of memory card backups back then. I got the game for Christmas in 2001, and finished my first ever play though on December 28th 2001. Anyway, that's unrelated.

What IS related is the fact that the Langhuishan map appears on the save file selection screen for a cleared save file. It is smaller than the map pictured here, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

The two-day event kicks off with a PlayStation Showcase on Saturday morning, which is the equivalent of the press conference at E3. I think the rest of the weekend is mainly just an expo for attendees to try out various games on the show floor and members of the press to record interviews, etc.
The showcase (where they'll announce things) begins at 10AM PST on Saturday and runs for roughly 90 minutes.
Aside from what you've already mentioned, there are 6 panels planned which will also be held at various times. The panel schedule for Sunday has been announced, nothing to note on there, but there are 3 panels on Saturday that are being kept secret until that day. Each of those panels is an hour long, the first one is at 12:00 PST. There are also some game tournaments in the evening.

If there's anything worth seeing that isn't on the live stream, I'll make my best effort to record then upload it Saturday night.

They posted an update on the event with the rest of the details for attendees. It makes my planning slightly more complicated:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/11/28/playstation-experience-2016-the-complete-guide/

1. Seating to the showcase at 10AM PST is limited and the line starts at midnight. I was planning to get in line around 7AM, I hope that's still an appropriate idea.
2. They're having autograph sessions, and 6 of them are unannounced. What if one of those is Yu Suzuki? Now I need to pack my copy of DC Shenmue 2, carry it with me, and somehow keep it safe during the event. (Or I just bring the cardboard outer sleeve, but then it could get crushed/bent.) I wasn't planning to bring a backpack, but now it seems like it might be a good idea.

It's not too relevant, but I thought I'd share the link nonetheless.

Sony just announced that Hideo Kojima is going to be there and there's going to a panel dedicated to his new game Death Stranding:
http://www.dualshockers.com/2016/11/29/hideo-kojima-death-stranding-playstation-experience/

There are still 2 unannounced panels. Just throwing this idea out there, what if they don't cover Shenmue at all during the Playstation Showcase and instead announce that it's going to be one of the hour long panels? That would be really great. (Just a reminder that those are streamed as well, and they post high quality versions to YouTube later.)

There are no hints of anything secret at the convention yet in case anyone is wondering. The grab bag includes a bronze trophy card, a box for the collectable cards, a PlayStation Experience T-Shirt (has a promo image for the event similar to the ones on the website with characters from a few games), a magnet, a download code for a theme, a pair of plain cheap plastic sunglasses that look like movie theatre 3D glasses, a sheet of various PS related temporary tattoos, a fabric poster which is another PSX promo image, a PlayStation water bottle, and a nice playstation lanyard for the badge.

There were no covered up posters that I noticed in the front area with badge pick-up. The PSX 2016 App is live on the App store, even though the URL to download it on the badge is not active yet. Nothing hidden the app, they haven't added the stuff that hasn't been revealed yet. (Nor the map) I probably won't have time to post anything else regarding the event until tomorrow night after the good stuff has happened.

As I've said in multiple posts, along with other backers who sat with the Executive Producers and Yu himself, we were strongly hinted that Shenmue 3 would be shown at PSX, in 2 months. If they changed the plans, then I would suggest sending them an email and letting them know you are wound up.

I am a little disappointed but I am still happy we have the existence of Shenmue 3. You will too, in time.
I'm several pages behind having gotten back from PSX just a few minutes ago, but at least you're not disappointed that you didn't go anymore, right? That would have been a huge mistake for you based on your previous statements.

I tried to hunt down Corsi at the show today to see if he'd tell me anything, didn't find him. I did see Adam Boyes, but that was before the show and he was walking past while waiting in line to get in so I didn't have a chance to talk to him. I did get a full video of the crowd reaction to the Yakuza stuff, which although I captured it in 4K it's blurry and apparently I wasn't pointing my camera at the screen half the time because I was watching it myself. Oops.

I was disappointed too, as it was my #1 reason for going, but I'm glad I had plenty of fallback things to look forward to. Sonic Mania is awesome, there are some neat things about Yakuza 0 that I wasn't expecting like pinch to zoom on the touchpad for the map, and I finally got to see what difference HDR televisions make. (It's almost something that needs a side-by-side, as it looks very nice a photographic quality and although it looks very nice in person seeing one by itself without a side-by-side to a normal TV didn't make me want a new TV.)

If I happen to see Gio tomorrow, I will of course attempt to see if he can say anything at all about this.

PayPal support is closed? Whats happening...? :|
Their SSL certificate, used for website encryption, expired on Friday.

PayPal's API for payments needs to be able to communicate with their end over SSL in order to make a callback to notify their site when a payment is made. PayPal's systems will refuse to talk to a website with an expired or invalid SSL certificate. It will remain broken until they renew their SSL certificate.

Disclaimer: I don't know how they integrate with PayPal, but the certificate being expired is true and it's likely that this was just a timing coincidence. I'm guessing their admin who would do that probably won't take care of it until Monday.

Hey everyone. I'll keep this quick, still at PSX. I spoke to Gio Corsi in person. Sony was never approached by Suzuki's team about showing at PSX. It was never planned, not cancelled. He believes they'll show backers first. That's about it.

Now that the show is over and I'm back at my laptop, I can elaborate a bit more.

I mentioned to Gio the stuff about fans suggesting it might be there, including Cedric Biscay's comments that they were preparing a trailer for December. He genuinely seemed like wasn't aware of any of it, and he was not dodging any questions that I asked. He confirmed that Sony is still interested in helping to promote Shenmue, and as I mentioned in my previous post there were never plans to show the game at PSX. It even sounded like he wasn't expecting to see more from them until next year before I mentioned the December stuff. I don't remember the exact way he said it, but it sounded to me like he felt a trailer would probably go directly to backers rather than being presented at a show without notice.

Ultimately, I think we were all making connections that were convenient but there weren't there. I'm over it already.

I also asked him about Phantasy Star Online 2 on building the list, and he says he gets requests for it all the time and always passes them on. Ball is in Sega's court on that. I thanked him for their continued efforts to bring Yakuza games to the west, but ultimately that was all we talked about. It was nice that he was wandering around the indie booths at the show, it took a bit to find him though. Had to follow his Twitter and use his tweets to figure out where he was. :-)

Just got the KS email with the screenshots, so I guess it's fair game to talk about them now. I did look at cache early and thought the one with Ryo looked photoshopped too. His face is 'correct' now, but it looks like it was pasted over another image because the direction his face is facing doesn't match the direction his body is facing. And his ears look like they're missing or something.

Since all 3 images are in the kickstarter update, I guess they're the real deal. I mean, they look nice. But I hope they show us a video of it in motion because right now the art style doesn't look consistent to me between the 3 stills. Still, it's nice to see new screenshots of the game.

Wow.
In my 10+ times playing through the game I've never seen the conversation between Ryo and Joy in the arcade about Master Chen. I thought the only reference she made to "Uncle Chen" was during her call with Guizhang on the disc 3 tape.

Glad I watched this.

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but the domain registration is now private (it was yesterday when I finally saw the news too) so you can no longer see who owns it. You can't prove that Sega owns these at the current time, as they currently point at a registrar's parking page, although I trust that the previous information is genuine.

My other point to make, which I think has been mentioned already but seems to be ignored, is that they were registered on September 7th of last year and somehow not noticed until now. This alone is good reason not to expect that news is pending in the near future. We already heard from them that they were "looking into" it after those sites had already been registered.

The April release thing is extremely likely to be fake just to help this guy sell more goods at his store. If they were actually doing a physical release, it would have to be released to manufacturing next month. When something gets a physical release, not being announced in advance is not feasible from a sales standpoint. It would also show up in a ratings database (ESRB, etc.) if it was ready for manufacturing, which hasn't happened. A physical release would be nice, I'd buy it. But at this point the existing evidence is not credible.

Ikuzuh wrote: Grab the Pal version as your save data from Shenmue 1 can be transferred over to Shenmue 2 PAL

This is unnecessary if you have a cheat device, as you can just use the code that allows you to import any region save into Shenmue 2.

If you have a cheat device, just buy whichever is easier or cheaper.

Anyone feel free to pre-order it after that $33 million clears from that bank in Nigeria that nice man randomly emailed you about last week.
Really? If this is true then that money should be donated to Shenmue III. Wow, that would be amazing!
http://www.sappharad.com/images/facepalm.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

Care to provide the Action Replay / Codebreaker version of this, so it can be used by people with original discs?

If not I can go ahead and convert later, just want to give you the opportunity to post it if you were planning on it.

The best we could hope for now, is if Yu decides to ever do an in-depth dissection of alpha builds of Shenmue, or if the Saturn Shenmue code is rediscovered.
Wait.. when was the Saturn Shenmue code initially discovered????????????
I believe Spaghetti is referring to the fact that Ryan Payton was looking into it last year and that no one has / remembers much about it.

It has not been rediscovered. The "initial discovery" in this case would still be the video that you unlock after beating Shenmue 2.

Just to provide you some advice in case you want to try again or 'fix' the majority of concerns that people have...

The reason so many people are skeptical of what you're doing is because many of us could have done the same thing. I could go out to vgmusic.com and download some Shenmue MIDI's, use GarageBand to make them into piano music, and then post a video of it just like you did. If you had previously worked on Piano albums before and referenced that work, people would know you could actually do what you want to do and not have reason to be skeptical.

Without that, you might actually have to do more to earn people's trust. For example, plan out what you want to include in your album, create a "sample" video of someone practicing playing one of those songs (since it would be a video it wouldn't be the quality you want for the actual album, but then you'd see someone is capable of performing the work and the funding is just to pay for professional quality) and then maybe it would seem easier to trust you. I hope this helps.

Check out this video I just made in 15 minutes. It is not affiliated with this project:
https://youtu.be/BTue5kaOYpU

With the Wayback info from Kiske, that's kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I'm not particularly worried, though. SEGA's stated intent is to do a remaster right , and I think they'll follow through on that no matter who gets it. For Blitworks it's certainly a passion project and we can expect them to treat the game right.
I wouldn't want Blitworks to do the ports, at least they wouldn't be my first choice and I'm surprised by the enthusiasm over them. I've complained about Blitworks in the past, and I'll restate some of those reasons again. If Blitworks does it, you're not getting the quality you deserve. You'll get an emulated game with the same limitations as the original and some new menus randomly injected into the game that don't match the original. Both of the ports they did for Sega were mediocre bare minimum jobs.

Let's start with their first port, Sonic CD. Originally, Sega commissioned them for an XBOX 360 and PS4 port of Sonic CD. They emulated the Sega CD and emulated it poorly. It ran at 30fps even though the original game was 60. This build was posted onto Xbox 360 PartnerNet back in December of 2010 and you can find details (and I think there was even a video of it at one point) elsewhere. That version was rejected by SEGA and instead they had Blitworks scrap it and port Christian Whitehead's mobile remake instead. His engine is extremely easy to port, essentially they barely had to do any work other than hooking it up to the console API's.

Their second SEGA "port" was not a port either. Jet Set Radio is a hybrid emulator where they just emulate the original game and inject changes into the emulation where they were needed. They've got their own widescreen hack in there, which is slightly more advanced than the community built hacks for the Dreamcast version and they inject new menus into the emulated game to handle native stuff. Their menu system is rather primitive compared to the 'native' ones in the game, just featuring basic 2D artwork for navigation purposes. Their port also suffered from the exact same framerate issues that the Dreamcast original had, in the initial releases Bantham street had several areas where you'd see slowdown just like in the original game. These issues were eventually corrected in a later patch, and they delayed the Vita version because of performance problems and by the time the game launched on Vita it ran better than the original unpatched PS3 release.

Blit might be capable of doing a better job than they did with their previous games, but their current work is not a good indication that they would be great for "ports" of Shenmue. I think whoever ends up doing the ports needs to take the approach that was taken with Shenmue 2x, and by that I mean an actual port instead of emulation. There are a bunch of nice little improvements that they can easily make (use the original high quality voices, high quality music, full quality models) if they're doing an actual port which would not be easy to do if they're emulating the originals.

However, I don't think Sega gave them access to source code for either game. They clearly have capable people working for them, (they wrote Unsharper after all) but to think they'd be a good fit solely from their previous ports does not inspire confidence in my opinion. I think they'd probably do fine if they had access to the original code, assets, and Sega gave them the right requirements when it comes to improvements they could make that wouldn't damage the original experience.

Did they say see you next month in the last update? I feel like they normally say that. They've got to have an update after E3 anyways, after Shenmue 1 and 2 HD and 3 trailer is shown off obviously right \:D/ ?

Right :mrgreen:
...There must be an update after the reveal trailer and Shenmue HD announcement! [-o<

PS. Yes, they said "See you next month!" in the update #65.
Since the videos were filmed on Saturday April 15th, I feel like they probably had intended to post it last week but didn't get around to it until this morning.

Also, the fact that they're working on Saturdays tells me that they're still trying really hard to make December.

I'll see about setting up a Gofundme tonight. Last night I was busy.
I would suggest refraining from collecting any money until you've completely established what it will be used for and how the gift is getting there.

I would love to contribute, but not while there's still risk of it being a black hole into someone else's wallet.

I don't have problems with 30 fps cap on old ports since that's how the games were designed to run.

Yeah, Shenmue was also designed for 640 x 480 resolution 4:3 aspect ratio, but it would be nice to have widescreen, better resolution and some updated textures.
Widescreen, better textures, better models are things the community has already done. Those are pretty easy to do.

60fps is less likely though, for the same reason as ports of other games from that era such as Final Fantasy X. If the motion capture data for the cutscenes only exists at 30fps, that presents a problem because they won't have the "positions" for movement of characters on those extra frames. There are ways you can try to deal with it, such as taking the average between the next and previous frame to account for the one in between, but that won't be correct if something is accelerating for example. Looking at additional frames could be used to try and pick up those trends, but that isn't always going to work either since movement isn't always supposed to be fluid. We don't know what they have, but 30fps motion capture was common back then, so if they want 60fps there's a lot of work to do there. Square Enix recently did that for their Kingdom Hearts PS4 remasters, and the Digital Foundry video on those talked about it a bit. Apparently some of the cutscenes in the Japanese version had movement issues as a result of them doing interpolation, which had to be manually cleaned up before the US release.

I'm saying they can do it, but it's more difficult than other things they could do. I'm okay with 30fps, since they're probably targeting 30 for Shenmue 3 and it'll be consistent.

I can tweet to him, but are you thinking of getting him to take the gift over?

Nope. It'd be nice if Cedric could be there for the gift. If he can't that's fine. We can send one to the Shibuya Productions at a later date.
I still like my previous suggestion of asking Ryan Payton. He's not directly involved with the project but visits them quarterly based on that interview from last year where he talked about it. He just seems like the best person to ask. What are your thoughts on that?

Random factoid for the day:

By this date in the E3 & Shenmue 3 2016 thread, we had 8 pages worth of comments.

This year - 32.

The attention is real.
This may have been pointed out before, but the Shenmue III forum has more posts than the first two games combined. Although wasn't this originally used during the Shenmue Online & Shenmue Town eras as well, and just renamed?

Random note: Has anyone pointed out yet that April has now passed, thus confirming that the online shop taking pre-orders for the Shenmue I & II HD due for April release earlier this year was full of shit and just making stuff up for traffic? I mean, most of us already thought it was unlikely, but I just remembered it now.

You forgot to give credit where it's due.
https://twitter.com/Shenmue_Dojo/status/868251930228928512

*Slight correction: S4pph4rad from assembler games originally found the 16:9 exploit. Esppiral developed it further for both Shenmue games providing us instructions how to patch it in this topic.
They're different methods of doing the same thing, Esppiral's work isn't really based on mine.

My initial approach for Widescreen hacks was to crush the horizontal camera field of view without changing vertical so that you see more on each side of the screen. This caused minor pop-in on the sides in Shenmue 1 & 2 because the game knows when an object would normally not be visible anymore and doesn't draw it.

Esppiral's first approach was to zoom the in-game camera further out then stretch the vertical field of view so the top & bottom of the screen still end up in the same place they were originally. The game engine knows about the zooming, his approach eliminated pop-in. Since the zoom is a game engine feature though, it didn't affect cutscenes and since the vertical stretching was still there the black bars had to be disabled so you could see the same amount of detail as before.

I'm not sure what approach he took for the Hex patch, I never got around to figuring out why the codebreaker wasn't able to perform the same patch in memory yet. I suspect it's permanently modifying the game logic that calculates the camera parameters. The patches are in the executable range and I've done other codes that patch the executable like the one to let you start a new Shenmue 2 EU game from a US Shenmue 1 save file, so it's still a mystery why his latest patch isn't working. I'm getting closer to finishing up on other projects that I promised to do, so hopefully I can go back to figuring out how to get these working with an unmodified copy of the game.


Random note: the 4's are A's, the previous Assemblergames forum software was disallowing my username when I signed up even though it wasn't taken. I tried to get the owner to change it when I made a rather reasonable donation over a year ago, but he ignored my request.

So, random NPC that you interact with or do we think this character is someone that has relevance to the plot? It's weird to see it rendered without in game lighting and textures, almost looks like a cartoon. That makes it hard for me to see him as something other than someone you move crates with or a street fight.

I'm glad they finally showed character model work, even if it wasn't one we wanted to see. :-)
It's something I was hoping they would have as a filler update for a long time now.

Welp. No E3, unless they're fucking with us.
I don't think they are. If Sega chooses to announce ports of 1 & 2 at E3, they might announce that 3 is being delayed, but at least this pretty much confirms that we are not getting a trailer in June.

YSnet aren't going to say where the money is from, so this is cyclical and pointless if you're not satisfied by valid suggestions made by other posters.
I'm also surprised that nobody has mentioned the recent job listing updates in this thread.

For those who either don't recall or haven't seen it in another thread, (I don't remember which thread at this point) they removed 'urgent' from multiple job listings at some point within the last 2 weeks. Those listings are still up, but no longer urgent. It's likely that they weren't even spending money as a fast as they wanted to because they couldn't hire as many people as they wanted to. The delay gives their existing team more time to finish, and the money they would have spent on additional staff is just shifted towards paying the existing staff for longer.

As others have said, they wouldn't have delayed for that long if they didn't have the budget for it. Although they might be hoping for some additional slacker-backer funds after the first two are re-released.

Since I haven't gotten around to saying this yet...

I'm really looking forward to the next update. The fact that they promised more details about the revised schedule is something I've been hoping they would do since late last year. At the end of last year I was hoping they'd provide a more detailed schedule regarding when they would be doing things (when do they start motion capture? recording the voiceovers? etc.) and it sounds like we could potentially get that information now. The wait will be much more exciting when we have a better idea of what happens when, and they can do this without spoiling any details about the game itself.

We have only a little over 2 weeks left to wait for a potentially great update.

If they announce the demo for September, which of the 3 villages would you like it to be? Baisha, Choubo or Bailu Village. It's a hard pick for me because I don't want to be spoiled too much. Choubo for me then
Based on their level of effort to avoid spoilers by basically not showing video of anything besides Bailu so far, I'm guessing the backer trial is just going to be the beginning of the game. (Bailu)

Because the trial is only going to those who paid $100 or more, it's likely that most of us who paid that much are already familiar with the series and don't need a demo to introduce it. If they were looking to introduce Shenmue to people who weren't familiar with the series Choubu would be be a better choice. Actually, they must account for the fact that people are going to share gameplay of the trial, so maybe Choubu would be in their best interest but if they're thinking primarily of core fans then I think the beginning makes the most sense so they don't need to create content specifically for the trial. Throwing you directly into the middle of the game would require them to actually develop content specifically for that trial to know what's going on, and I don't think they're going to waste funds and time doing that.

I'd be interested in looking into it too. Does anyone know of a good free SH4 disassembler? The Demul one is too painful...
dcdis v0.4a by Lars Olsson

It's a free command line disassembler that dumps the entire 1ST_READ.BIN into a text file. I used it to come up with the hack to import US save files into Shenmue 2 EU. I also used the source code to write the SH-4 plug-in for Hopper Disassembler. (But that's not free)

Edit: It seems to be hard to find 0.4, lots of sites have 0.3.3a. Here is a direct link to 0.4 on his website:
https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~jlo/dc/

Although I prefer the original like most of you and voted for that, I would be okay with them keeping the handwritten one if they cleaned it up a bit. I understand the concern that some people can't read cursive and they want it to appeal to a broader audience, and the handwritten one does kind of look like Japanese characters which is probably the feeling he was going for. It does look bad with the gold effect applied, but maybe if the letters were evened out and looked more balanced like the Japanese logo, or some strokes smoothed, it might look better.


From a fan perspective I prefer the old logo, but ultimately it doesn't matter that much and I'd rather see them take whatever option will portray the series best to those who aren't already interested.

Same shit, different month:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=50539&p=1146391&hilit=Shenmue+pack#wrap

It's the same retailer that has had it posted since January, back then with an April release date. Not real.

One thing to note is that the save needs to me modified as the Beta handles them as Japanese.
Sorry I missed this post. Modding the save is probably not necessary if you import into the EU version using the code I posted 2 years ago to disable the region check. (Or apply the hex changes documented in that thread to patch the game itself)

Just wanted to point this out again since people are still suggesting converting save files:
http://www.shenmuedojo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=49245&p=1121507

Unfortunately it's off-screen, so it's hard to tell if the colors are accurate or not.
You have the Windows start bar at the bottom as a reference point for pure black and white. That doesn't help with color accuracy, but it does help with brightness. If you crop out everything else in the photo except the monitor then do black level correction against the bottom, the blue gets slightly darker. Not sure if that helps or not, as the colors are still crushed a bit.
They are not listed because they are probably distributed by Koch Media / Deep Silver.

https://www.parisgamesweek.com/en/article/koch-media
Deep Silver isn't going to announce a game on Sega's behalf either. It just doesn't make sense, they've never done it before either. And Sony is more likely to focus on games developed by their studios and partners in Europe during Paris games week, such as Quantic Dream or Media Molecule. I'm not expecting much news regarding Japanese developed titles until PSX. (And we already know not to expect Shenmue 3, given the information from Gamescom)

For what it's worth, I will be at PSX again this year but not with false hopes of Shenmue 3 news like last year. I had vacation days to use up, and last year was somewhat fun.

Because they do it by hand, it's not automated.

This is wishful thinking, folks. I do believe Shenmue III will be at PSX, probably HD as well, but to expect gameplay is a bit far fetched. I base my prediction on Yu's statement of ramping up promotion near the year's end and PSX is the only stage capable of doing so, or maybe The Game Awards, but the former has the best shot.

People think Sony fired their heaviest guns at Paris, but I disagree. They still haven't shown Shenmue III, Resident Evil 2 REmake, FFVII, Dreams, Days Gone or other hits they have lined up.

At best we will get a nicely done cinematic trailer, but gameplay still has to be too early to show in my book.
I disagree with some of your PSX predictions. I went there last year hoping for it and was disappointed on that front, and based on my conversation with Gio back then I no longer expect them to do promotion at a trade show unless it's announced ahead of time. To my point, they did tell us about Gamecom in advance. There will be no Shenmue 3 at PSX unless they announce in advance that it or Yu Suzuki will be there. The interviews at Gamescom specifically told us they don't plan to show anything new until the end of the year at the earliest. (Not exact wording because this is from memory) Since 1 & 2 are in Sega's hands, those are still fair game for a surprise announcement, but at the moment it actually seems unlikely to me because the only re-releases of old games they've been doing recently are mobile. I don't think Sega Heritage Collection actually worked out for them, because they seemed to abandon the series after SA2 / NiGHTS / Jet Set Radio several years back.

I do agree that they likely have a good number of titles left to announce/promote at PSX though. Probably Death Stranding unless that's at the Game Awards first, but not FF7 specifically because SquareEnix said it's still a couple years off due to development being shifted in-house. They'll probably show Kingdom Hearts 3 instead, since that's due next year. As far as surprises go, I know Tetsuya Mizaguchi has been working on an unannounced VR game in the year+ since Rez Infinite came out, and I'm hoping they reveal that soon since Rez Infinite was first shown at PSX 2015.

They haven't even announced any developers or guests that will be at PSX yet, other than the return of the collectible cards. The cards are actually a hint at 3 games that will be playable though, since you got them last year for playing the respective games. (Meaning Destiny 2, Moss, and Shadow of the Colossus will be playable) I suspect they'll start announcing booths & guests next week once Paris Games week is out of the way.

For those who don't pay attention to Sony news, there is no Saturday morning keynote for PSX this year. They're having a small event the Friday before it starts and only the first few thousand people who bought tickets will be allowed to attend. They wanted to try and kill the massive line Saturday morning that had people lining up 10 hours early by having a smaller event Friday night with a known attendee count. They also aren't promising any big announcements either, they wanted the convention to focus more on the games playable at the show and showing more about games that were already announced. This is why they had a press conference at PGW last week. I think this news doesn't rule anything out specifically, but we already knew not to expect anything related to Shenmue 3 anyway unless it was announced in advance.

The news kind of annoyed me because the way they initially described Friday it sounded like sort of a meet-and-greet with developers, as opposed to a replacement for the Saturday morning keynote which most people assumed was happening. I missed the cut-off for early-bird tickets by a few weeks because I had some things to work out before I eventually decided to go again. Being in the audience for the crowd reaction to announcements was one of the best parts of going last year, and now I'll have to watch it from a hotel walking distance away from the actual event. Oh well.

I don't have any reason to expect that we'll hear about any HD remasters this year either. There haven't been any hints dropped by Sega's media team to get excited over.

Yes.

How could it NOT end on a cliffhanger? The story isn't going to be finished with 3, so no matter what they do there's going to be a cliffhanger. Even if Shenmue 2 had ended after disc 3, that's still a cliffhanger because you're waiting to go to Guilin.

I think this news doesn't rule anything out specifically, but we already knew not to expect anything related to Shenmue 3 anyway unless it was announced in advance.
My statement above still stands, but...the exhibitor list for PSX 2017 was announced today and Deep Silver has a booth this year. They were not present at all last year, and I can't find any details of them being present at any major US game conventions in the past year. They were not at PAX East, they were not at E3, and they were not at PAX West.
https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/11/16/playstation-experience-2017-more-than-80-exhibitors-confirmed/

Now, keep in mind that Deep Silver is a publisher and has other games coming out next year besides Shenmue 3, however I still found their presence to be notable. Cross-referencing the list of confirmed games for the show, the only Deep Silver title that I saw was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. While very it's possible that their booth is just to promote that one game since it's due out in February, it's kind of interesting that they'll be at the show. It might be a good opportunity to strike up a conversation with any of their PR people who might be present.

It's Bailu Village. Those pics surfaced around 15 years ago IIRC. The basic consensus is that Shenmue II on Dreamcast was originally developed to include it, but was probably cut to give Shenmue II a clearer ending.
No it isn't. It's Miao Village, which we also have loading screens for. The pics came from Shenmue.com in one of the "blog" posts there, and they were of the area cut out between Languishan and meeting Shenhua. It's the explanation as for why the scenery suddenly changes between two areas when you're on the path at the beginning of Disc 4.

Someone mentioned recently, in the last month I think, that this was even talked about in one of the video interviews posted during the Shenmue 3 kickstarter. That video explicitly confirmed that the screenshots were from the cut area.

He starts talking about it at 2 minutes 15 seconds into this video:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ysnet/shenmue-3/posts/1278225

Too many people elsewhere are complaining because they think the team is behind schedule.

These people are quick to forget the days when we didn't even have a Shenmue 3 to look forward to.
Who wants a rushed Shenmue 3 anyway? I certainly don't.
I don't think they're behind schedule to achieve 2018, and they're definitely not rushing. They didn't even start to look at character models seriously until the 2nd half of this year. They're scaling their resources appropriately based on where they are in development.

I have rough estimates for things I would expect to see by certain times (some of which are opinions that I've posted in other threads) and so far that seems to have been reasonable. I was expecting the character stuff that we started seeing in August by last December and once that passed it seemed very possible a delay would happen. The extended trailer showed privately to press in August apparently already showed some form of in-game play. I'm expecting that we will see actual gameplay footage either before or perhaps they'll save it for MAGIC. If we haven't heard any news about motion capture or VO sessions by the end of April, it's going to be very unlikely that they'll make 2018. That's just my personal benchmark for them though based on my estimates of how long things take to do.

What criteria are others holding them to that makes you think they're behind again? We know back in August from interviews that the environments were about 70% done. That's necessary for all of the stuff they'll be filling them up with for the remainder of development, (including the characters) so at this point they're going to be building the part that they can actually show things from, not just random environments.

To be honest, I think they shouldn't have shown anything to anyone until E3 2018. That way, it'd build a lot of hype and anticipation for it. Then when they finally reveal an official full trailer of Shenmue III that blows everyone away and is basically a mic drop moment for them, it would have a HUGE impact on everyone. But still, it's nice that we'll get to see more Shenmue III soon!
Too many people elsewhere are complaining because they think the team is behind schedule. Waiting over 6 months is not going to help with that.

By next June (E3) they will have less than 3 months to finish the game if they want to meet manufacturing deadlines for a physical release by the end of 2018. If they finish in September they won't be able to release until the end of November or early December. The people at MAGIC should be seeing actual gameplay if the project is on schedule for 2018. (At least, that's what I would expect.)

I pointed this out once during a previous discussion in 2016 and I don't remember how many examples I provided, but games are typically finished around 2 months before release. For example, the final build of Uncharted 4 that went to manufacturing was finished March 18th 2016 and the game was released on May 10th of that year.

It looks great, although I may be the only one that sees this image and sees photohop all over it.
I've been meaning to comment on this, but I keep forgetting.

They've photoshopped several character images in the past, with the most obvious one being the one with Ryo's DC face photoshopped into one of the photos from December 2016. Even the image with the shrine maiden was photoshopped. But in all of those instances, it was pretty easy to prove it was edited - they always had shadows on the characters that didn't match the direction of the shadows in the environment they were in.

In this most recent showing, there is no evidence that I can see of the characters or parts of them being inserted into another image. The shadows on the characters seem to line up just fine with the environment around them. To me this looks more like a "photo mode", similar to racing games or Mario Odyssey where additional effects are enabled that probably won't be used in-game.

Either way we'll see it in motion in about a month so, I don't have any concerns right now.

That's the best I could find.
That was the version posted by Shenmue Forever on Twitter right after it was shown, which was split into two parts and both tweets were deleted. Only the last 10 seconds or so are missing. Those last 10 seconds have not been lost though, I have my own copies that I saved and stitched together on the correct frame once I realized those tweets were deleted. I'm not going to share that just yet, because I'm hoping that one of the people who originally recorded it will release their video in full quality. And I also want to see how the whole thing goes regarding whether they get taken down or left alone. In absolutely worst case scenario, it can resurface once we have proper new footage, at a time where the outdated footage wouldn't be a problem to share anymore.

I posted my thoughts elsewhere, but simple summary:
1. Liked the new QTE stuff that we saw, QTE Title Arcade game, and more people in Choubu.
2. Disliked the fact that they showed a video that we know is 6 months old at this point.

In a few days, preferably after we get a kickstarter update about this (and depending on it's content) I will probably quote my old post about why I thought they were still on schedule because they potentially failed my criteria for showing they could meet a 2018 release. It's hard to tell because they're really not giving us any information about what they hope to have accomplished by what times, so I have to base it on what I think their schedule needs to be and in order to evaluate that they need to tell us how various things are going. I now have a new estimate for where I think they are, but I'm going to hold on to my thoughts for a little longer because we haven't heard much from those who attended the event who can provide more information.

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