So much progress has already been made. One more year and this game will finally be ready.


2016
https://i.imgur.com/fKt1dTF.png


2018
https://i.imgur.com/iSn8wol.png
Slight typo there, 2016 when it should be 2015.

But yeah, the visuals are only really just a piece of the puzzle, but how far it's come cannot be understated (I wish the habitual graphics bitchers would take a look back to recognise this progress once in a while). This still isn't "final" either.

If this were a AAA game that showed a smoke and mirrors vertical slice, you could expect the visuals to stay roughly the same as reveal, or even get a downgrade when the devs realise they can't get the game to run acceptably on console hardware with that level of graphical fidelity. Ys Net's visuals, along with the rest of Shenmue III, will be developed iteratively and the game will likely look its best at release.

Obviously it won't turn into Uncharted 4, but they're hitting all the right notes to ship as a respectable looking AA game. I'm not sure we could ask for more than that.

The game might start off with Shenhua wearing her old clothes, before changing to the new clothes we've seen. I think part of the reason they've got rid of the skirt is because it didn't look suitable for action scenes.
It'll be interesting to see if Yu's proposed idea from a few years ago about Shenhua changing her clothes will pan out. The fact that Shenhua's hair length has changed from the January screen in the same way it did throughout the Gamescom progress video, makes me wonder if they're trying to include some kind of feature that alters her appearance.

And then there's the costume change feature for Ryo that Yu suggested. If whoever handles the KS messages these days was telling the truth and they do plan to deliver on all rewards featured, that'd obviously mean the in-game backer-only jacket is still happening, and I guess that would imply they have a system like that planned or implemented.

Ryo still needs some work.


Shenmue II

https://i.imgur.com/1WrPTqS.png


Shenmue III

https://i.imgur.com/BclsovY.jpg


He's lacking a certain innocent youthfulness, a certain purity in the current model.
Why are you showing a Photoshopped image? There are photos of the most recent model in this the OP and on previous pages. What's slightly more perplexing is the youthful innocence bit when the financial meeting footage showed Ryo the most content looking he's been in the series ever .

This is the old 2015 model that everyone hated, just with some filters applied to it. It looked bad back then and it looks bad now.
110%.

Remember kids, when you say you want that model, you say you want this:

http://images.pushsquare.com/news/2015/06/e3_2015_shenmue_iii_searches_for_sailors_on_ps4/attachment/0/900x.jpg

Coined "fake Ryo" back in 2015 for a reason. Technically and artistically inferior to the most recent model in every.single.way.

I wish they had gone with Kid Nocon's character model of Ryo rather than the one they're going with in the latest images shown.
That was basically just the passport model/All Stars Racing model though. I just... I don't see how that's better. Even when rendered in UE4 for the amazing Hazuki Dojo recreation.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jpzRBC5zvaI/maxresdefault.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BTWExd_3vbk/maxresdefault.jpg

http://www.seganerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/5254431_this-fan-made-shenmue-remaster-is-pretty_cebde50_m.png

It looks old geometrically, which it is, and largely suffers the same >:( face problems that this model got mocked for:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/shenmue_iii_ryu.png

Just to point out- Hellblade has a cast you can maybe count on one hand (haven't played it but I know it's very limited with characters), and one of Ninja Theory's key design goals was AAA visuals on an indie budget.

Shenmue III has to realise a semi-open world with hundreds of NPCs. Although the aesthetic was an art choice, there's an element of practicality to it that probably informed the decision.

This might be tangential, but one thought I had is that the scenes we're seeing might not be locked to any particular time of day in actual gameplay. One person might arrive at the scene with the little girl in the morning, another might trigger it in the afternoon. This would account for some of the differences we've seen between otherwise very similar shots and clips.
Yeah, that's also true. The lighting set up we saw was quite an extreme "early morning" look and not really reflective of how the game will look in more neutral conditions.

To add to this though, I do think 2 was also just a little more stylized than the first game. Perhaps you could argue 3 is just continuing this trend, and maybe Suzuki had always intended this sort of progression.
I don't think it's ever been confirmed, but Shenmue II boosting the colours and trending into more extravagant designs always felt like a choice made on purpose to highlight the difference between China and Japan; as a way to heighten the feeling of going to a strange, new place.

I don't like the lighting. Everything else, aside from the animation, looks ok to me.
While I think the lighting is improved vastly from last year, I do agree I'm not sure I could accept it as "final". Realistically though, it will still change.

Even with games that have smoke and mirrors vertical slices where all the presentation elements are rushed to final quality, the biggest difference between those demos and retail release usually will be lighting. I doubt that Shenmue III's lighting will remain untouched for the rest of development, especially knowing how iterative the development process has been so far.

The animation looks okay for Alpha, IMO. If that stuff was done we wouldn't be having a delay to 2019. Ryo's subtle transition in and out of smiling in the new clip of him and Shenhua looks quite encouraging though.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/HotLikelyGoldeneye-max-14mb.gif

Maybe so. But 30 million+ going into Shenmue III is better than I could've imagined. 5 years ago I would've thought that would be impossible. The fact that we're even having this discussion right now is a testament to how far we've come.

Not sure of the exact numbers right now, but through crowdfunding Shenmue III earned about 6-8 million. If DS adds about another 12, Shenmue III would be at a modest 20 million dollar budget. Which again is more than I could've ever wished for given the circumstances.

Given Yu Suzuki's track history, I'm excited and confident that a modest bump in the budget is exactly what he needed to deliver the Shenmue III not to our standards, but his own. At this moment we still have no idea what the real Shenmue III really looks like so there's a lot more to look forward to.

Right now Shenmue is in a great place and I'm more optimistic than ever. I'm happy knowing that YS is at work and whatever happens, happens.
All I'm saying is to not let your expectations rise too high. We're definitely in a better position than if Ys Net had stuck with their KS/Shibuya money, but at the end of the day the game was always going to be made modestly.

It was the lighting but even in the shot that Jibby posted, he still looks great. You just need to ask two questions when it comes to the character model of Ryo. 1) How badass/cool does he look (which may sound weird, but it fits with the rest of Ryo's features. E.g. the spiky hair, his clothing)? 2) Does he look Ryo-like?

Now when I see the Shenmue III Ryo, it does not give the impression that he is a fighter/martial artist. To be honest, he looks more like a tourist (with Shenhua being his tour guide!).
But it has the same problem even in different lighting conditions, that part was exactly in my post.

See:

http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/media/shenmueonline/01.jpg

Same scrunchface as in Jibby's shot. Really highlights how unusually narrow his face is too, now that it comes to it.

I don't really get the rest of your criteria. It's a bit funny calling him a tourist when he basically is and one of the core pillars of the story is Ryo exploring a foreign land. Same with the fighter part, Ryo isn't meant to be intimidating and that's 99% of why so many street punks think they can take him.

--------------

Anyway, sort of back on topic, I had a shot working on the image Jibby posted above (trying to prove the theory a few tweaks really tie the model together):

https://abload.de/img/ryocontour2v8rbi.gif

Apart from the minor proportional changes, I'm starting to think that little bit of contouring on Ryo's cheek makes a nice difference, and helps break up that cheekbone/jaw space that makes his head look a little too big for his face.

How's they are recording voices even when they haven't finalished polishing Ryo's model? Don't they need to finish geometrics of the model first?
No.

Native language VO is usually done with the game/animation/whatever still incomplete in some visual respects.

It's hard to make out, but on the reference screen there's a caption at the bottom reading along the lines of "This part is under development [illegible] placeholder or tentative".

Hazuki00 wrote: I'm curious if they'll remake the scene where we enter in the cave and place the phoenix mirror in its place to make it playable or only as a flashback

It could be Ryo retrieving the mirror from the device, rather than placing it.

NPCs definitely need to improve, but again it's probably just a case of a better production process that could improve that.

Like for example, Peter posted that old article from the Dojo main site a while back about the voice actor for the English dub of II having to stretch themselves to ridiculousness just to find the different voices required by the voice director, when he explicitly told his agent that he couldn't take jobs with that amount of range.

Ultimately the people at fault there were the agent and voice director, rather than the actor.

I knew the "M--" file naming convention on the screen reminded me of something...



From Ryuji Iuchi's blog, last May. Curious.

Credit to mjqjazzbar for finding this out, but the Sound Director in the image is Takayuki Nakamura who has been working in sound on video games for nearly 30 years; including AM2 titles like Virtua Fighter/Virtua Fighter 2, and Daytona USA.

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/takayuki-nakamura/credits/developerId,78235/

http://www.vgmonline.net/wp-content/uploads/takayukinakamura1.jpg

https://abload.de/img/03_recording_offshottmux9.jpg

Added the images, did some formatting.

Oooof, surprise update and a very welcome one too. I guess English recording has been pushed back, but moving ahead with the Japanese dub as the "native" language track for devs to work with makes sense, and is really encouraging about forging ahead with progress.

The shot of the game in this image is fucking incredible by the way:

https://abload.de/img/06_recording_offshotdvsst.jpg

Exaggeration and stylisation was always there in the design. In the 2D art indisputably, but I'd wager some of that carried over to 3D models too even if they were at the time "realistic".

https://i.neoseeker.com/ca/shenmue2_conceptart_VfMWk.jpg

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JFCT1S6MoeU/WSuosYWgnjI/AAAAAAAACVw/p3oikZ1SlqcltyMSYHWsTsxcHOPuyrpRgCLcB/s1600/1.jpg

There's no real gulf in the design work going on here, just that 3D artists can interpret those designs in higher and more accurate fidelity.

I hope we get some recent build screens around E3, as that will be a big positive along with this to help offset the sour taste of a delay, even one we all saw coming.
I wouldn't bank on this happening. It's not impossible, but everything might be loaded towards later in the year now for a bigger splash.

A few screens at E3 would be just a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the news breaking at the event.

Personally I have no beef with the game possibly starting in the cave. I think it's a big nod to the fans by picking up literally where they left off, and it's hardly like people unfamiliar with the ending to II will toss the game out the window because they don't understand the context of what will literally just be the first few minutes of the game.

redline wrote:sounds like game was pushed back 2019 only because they are touching up the graphics(?)

Nah.

Visuals will definitely keep getting worked on from now until probably quite near release, but the reasons for the delay will span further than that.

Uncle Ryo's revenge rice...

I'm going to break this post up a bit if that's okay.

Maybe not absolutely intimidating, but not exactly baby faced either (Shenmue III Ryo basically). He should have that Akira Yuki look to him (i.e. cool looking martial artist but not big, hulking guy type of intimidating).
I'm not sure your vision of Ryo quite matches up with how he's portrayed in the game though. Ryo's youth comes up a lot in the series from all kinds of characters, constantly being called boy, schoolboy, etc. Even Ren, who is only marginally older than Ryo, brings it up.

While I agree he's maybe a touch too baby faced as it is right now (and why a bit of cheek contouring can really help there), the Online CG and Passport models have always looked too lean and betray the fact he's meant to be a young looking character.

Regarding the narrowness of his face, it's roughly the same as every other Ryo model so that should not be a negative.
On the Online CG model though, it's... over the top. From the image I posted, the width of Ryo's head is almost the same as his left bicep. Even taking perspective into account, something just doesn't look right about it. Like I said before, the model looks fine from the side but once it comes to the front it all starts falling apart.

If you're concerned about the scrunchness of his face, that can be fixed, And you see, that's the best part about the Shenmue Online Ryo. It can easily be copy and pasted on to next-gen hardware and then whatever shortcomings it has (tbh, I still don't see anything wrong with it!), they just have to adjust them slightly.
So, that Gamescom/Shenmue II Ryo composite has been posted enough times by now that it'll probably forever be considered a monument to how something very close to the original can still be shunned by certain people because it no longer looks 1:1 with the original. I'm sure in whatever alternate universe Ys Net did use the Online CG model or Passport model as a template, the complaints about it not looking right would begin to emerge from the purists once changes start to happen. And even then it has to be considered that the Online CG/Passport model is not a catch-all for pleasing fans or a definitive image they have in their minds.

I've been lurking comment sections across the internet since Shenmue III was announced, and the range of opinions has greatly varied over what looks like Ryo, what looks like a Dreamcast model, and these same opinions cropped up in different configurations for every iteration of the character models we've seen so far. It makes me glad that to some degree Ys Net have followed their own instincts, because as it is, the "feedback" that has come their way is a cacophony that can be very hard to make sense of.

People are entitled to their opinion on the matter but there's such a disparity in those actual opinions, and a pretty low threshold on acceptable changes, that railroading Ys Net to follow one look absolutely feels like asking them to just chase their tail. I'll be honest here; at this point IMO, it's time to let go of the old stuff and concentrate towards feedback for Ys Net that helps them improve the aesthetics of what they've got, rather than saying "make it look like X".

Nice tweek by the way!
Thanks. I think the base components of a better Ryo are definitely there, just a few nudges and refinements can make a lot of difference.

I knew the "M--" file naming convention on the screen reminded me of something...

http://www.ryujiiuchi.com/images/diary/2017/20170518.jpg

From Ryuji Iuchi's blog, last May. Curious.
Small bump, Ryuji Iuchi brought this photo up on Twitter the other day. Switch graciously translated the tweet as the machine translation wasn't very clear.

Unfortunately this had nothing to do with Shenmue, seems the naming convention was just a coincidence. We'll probably be hearing more about the music sometime in the future anyway, though.

I agree that a Shenmue III showing doesn't exactly need Yu, but he's effectively the face of the project and the person most of the press would be interested in talking to (for both Shenmue III reasons and for his legacy). If there's going to be a showing of any substance at all, press interviews would be on the cards too, and that will likely be centred around Yu.

He might be accompanied by Harry Morishita, one of the producers, but I don't really expect Yu to bring like... programmers with him. Even when he does trips to Monaco, Cologne, wherever - the development is still ongoing at the studio and those programmers are probably going to be needed. Yu can at least delegate some work to Keiji Okayasu, although I have a sneaking suspicion Yu still gets work done even on the business trips.

Are you a PMP? You use a lot of project management parlance.
I'm a P-I-M-P 8)

Sorry, no. Since Shenmue III went into development I've gotten really interested in how game development works in general, and a lot of project management terms came with that. Some of that was spurred by Yu himself talking about using Agile, which added a lot of context to what we've been seeing in the iterative approach.

Most of that list are soft targets because of prior leaks, stuff we already know exists, first party games, games that have association with PlayStation that have upcoming releases, etc. It's plausible in so much that any bozo could write their Sony E3 expectations down and get a few hits.

But it's still a fake itinerary.

Don't smash the panic button just yet.

The games in the collection aren't ports, they're using an emulator wrapper. Going by D3T saying they were asked to just add new features and do the shovel work to get them onto console/update the PC version, it's fairly likely they're using the same emulator SEGA have been using since last gen too (which was criticised for imperfections even back then).

In the ERA thread linked you'll find speculation Unity not playing nice with the emulator may be the issue here, actually. SEGA Forever suffered a lot of the same issues, and that was pinned on Unity.

At the end of the day, this was just a cheap and cheerful compilation collection. D3T weren't asked to write a new emulator, or port these games from source. They still deserve trust with Shenmue considering neither of the factors likely at fault here (Unity, emulation) are going to be involved in the release of I & II.

No, but they're not particularly comparable considering the NPCs in either of those games are largely just crowd filler you can't really interact with outside bumping into (Yakuza), or tackling for funsies (Sleeping Dogs).

I remember Spaghetti saying there was another Great Wall in the south, but I couldn't find any pictures for it, If it resembles the great wall in the Shenmue 3 screenshot, then I guess there goes my wild theory :D
It's not 1:1 with what we've seen of Shenmue III's great wall but you'll find some images of the Southern wall on this site: https://www.topchinatravel.com/china-attractions/southern-great-wall.htm .

Given how close geographically it is to Fenghuang (the IRL Choubu), I would probably put money on it being the Southern rather than Northern wall.

EDIT: Found a few photos searching with it's proper name, Miaojiang.

https://photos.travelblog.org/Photos/219004/851994/f/8120292-Miaojiang-Great-Wall-0.jpg

https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/09/ac/7c/76/miaojiang-great-wall.jpg

https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/09/a6/58/18/miaojiang-great-wall.jpg

Nah I mean, I don't think a IV Kickstarter will do as well as III in today's climate either. The bad narrative has really damaged crowdfunding games, which is worse overall for the landscape. It might recover one day, but probably not.

Luckily, even back in 2015/2016 it sounded like from Cedric that the plan was to make the series sustainable enough that they wouldn't have to crowdfund another. Like III was getting the engine started on a car or something. If I & II, and III do well enough for SEGA/Deep Silver I could easily see there being no need to go back to Kickstarter to finish the series.

All we need to do as fans is protect, promote, and support Shenmue products the best we can as a community.

The_Intruder wrote:Is the 5 hours for the entire game script per character?

Depends on the length of the script/character.

In the case of Shenmue, definitely not. They're doing multiple sessions.

I was thinking maybe what if they have some lines ready and tease something at E3 maybe is just wishful thinking.
Yeah, anything at E3 is wishful thinking right now so don't get too excited.

On if they have lines ready , well... they've definitely got some recorded from what we can see, but it's another question to implement, animate, and test all that in the game. Plus, what they've recorded so far might not match up with scenarios they would want to show in a promotional video, and won't want to jump around in the production process just to record (and possibly implement/animate) trailer lines that'll get redone later anyway.

Gamescom is still our best bet for seeing more.

I have a question about the stretch goals. Do you guys think after Yu getting more funds from deep silver they will include all the remaining stretch goals I really want to see magic maze in Shenmue 3
It's safe to assume the Choubu stretch goals are being included at this point based on what Yu has said, but the Bailu ones are a mystery; and probably will be until someone asks Yu about it or we play the final game.

The_Intruder wrote:I went over the stretch goals in the Kickstarter page I'm confuse what does Choubo Area Expanded Game Stalls means? I hope Yu was able to get the funds for every stretch goals from Deep silver.

I think that means more mini-games, or more mini-games + expanding the game world.

https://twitter.com/OlivierComte1/status/1006242532395704321

Although not properly at E3, SEGA still seem to be taking meetings for Shenmue I & II.

16:9 cutscene footage from the original game there, FYI.

Always pays to have a little faith.

Sony were also weirdly quite selective on which 3rd party games/publishers got into the press conference too. Maybe Microsoft sucked 'em all up?

Either way, start setting your watches for Gamescom. Only two and a half months to go.

I think its all smoke and mirrors with him though. Just trying to promote his channel.
I believe the SEGA Europe rep themselves has said Adam knows a date. Think it was in the 500K Facebook group.

Whatever you think of Adam, he's still the guy SEGA picked from the community to promote the game in some way. I don't think he'd bullshit about stuff like that knowing a.) SEGA Europe are watching what he says and b.) he's got access to a lot of information we don't currently have so what would be the point in making something up on top of that?

Not trying to be an asshole by replying like this, but, as a person involved in development myself I know the typical product won't be fully polished until roughly 3-4 months (sometimes 3-4 weeks) before release. Most of the footage is typical development growth pains, they made a huge mistake showing early footage.
Oh trust me, even as a layman I've been mostly hammering roughly the same lines. Games that look "polished" are usually slices pushed to a near final state specifically for a trade show or other promotional purposes, and don't reflect the state of the game as a whole.

I'm just noting that there's still a visible incline in progress with Shenmue III, and I think we'll be able to recognise more of that progress the next time the game turns up. I'm not expecting the game to look final, and I don't think Ys Net will change their process of avoiding smoke and mirrors polished slice methodology. They might be more selective with the footage they present, though - and hopefully don't have to contend with any serious bugs that affect presentation such as having to disable facial animations like last year.

I will say though, it's hard to blame Ys Net showing early footage as a "mistake" given the pressure to do so as a partially crowdfunded game. It was explained in interviews that last Gamescom's showing was largely down to them not feeling they could make the Deep Silver announcement without footage, and cobbled it together as a result. They would have caught significant flak if they'd stuck to their guns and kept a lid on things. It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Some fans were turning mutinous, and the press buzzards were already circling.

Spaghetti you may be right, I am just going off of like BOTW numbers which were around that size (50-100 with Monolith as contracted designers for a few months) plus Shenmue 3 has a Miyamoto type working with them so it gives them an advantage, many critics forget what a visionary Suzuki is and I still think he will find ways to innovate without a massive budget because, frankly he is a master and can look at the medium in a completely different way than most can. The mainstream press have gone after Suzuki because with ambitious projects comes a perceived sense of arrogance and the egomaniacs in mainstream gaming hate when something goes against the grain and does it so well they have to give it a good review like in the case of the original games. (In my opinion).
Ah. Nintendo aren't AAA, at least not in the traditional sense. They're kind of in a class of their own where they don't have enormous teams using cutting edge tech, but still put out fantastic games thanks to inventiveness, innovation, and their "finding the fun" mentality (not unlike Yu's Agile methods). It's a good reminder that quality video games do not come solely from budget and team size alone, or pushing the bleeding edge of technology.

Shenmue III is a big task no matter which way you cut it, but a tremendous amount of hard work has gone into the project so far, and a lot of prudent decisions have been made about the game that give it the best chance of success; like using UE4, using Agile, expanding inwards rather than outwards, mechanical changes the increase the depth in the gameplay, and ultimately wanting to focus on being unique rather than chasing the pack and the AAA crowd.

Maybe I'm cynical about games journos, but part of me thinks some will shit on the game regardless. Doesn't matter what PR moves are pulled, or how good the game actually may be, it'll be a matter of ego, a morbid desire to slaughter a "sacred cow", and to say "I told you so".

Some of those people are genuinely m-i-s-e-r-a-b-l-e .

From the 500K FB group (the poster is yu02 on here, I think?):





Still preliminary specs, but I expect the large file size is down to a lot of audio + high res textures.

I took one for the team and bought the Xbox magazine. Wish I hadn't.

https://s22.postimg.cc/b6ymxw66p/IMG_20180615_132449208_HDR_2.jpg

Riddled with errors and childish jabs at Shenmue 3 and the "other" console.
Wow. Couldn't even get the developer right.

Somebody got PAID to write this. PAID. Games journalism really is money for old fucking rope.

Personally, I think I'm going to try treading the line between something than maintains the immersion of the game, and thanks Ys Net for all their hard work.

"It's been 18 years since I was last here, but it's good to be back, feels like home" etc, etc.

I know it's not been talked about a lot, but even if it's just a fun little mock-up, the image that came with this update is looking pretty great IMO.

It's yet to be proven/disproven, but I have a theory even the old compositions will be rearranged/re-recorded with modern synths/live instrument elements.

Depends on the year for how much of a show Sony puts on. I wouldn't expect a press conference or the like.

Gamescom is stomping ground for Deep Silver/THQ Nordic anyway, and they're going to be doing the heavy lifting on promotion here. YouTube upload and maybe another guest spot for Yu on the PlayStation blog is all I expect from Sony.