Gamers... Ugh... I've never understood the need to have a physical copy of a game. I wonder if any of those refusing to pledge because of it have ever purchased a game on the App Store...

You still have, love and enjoy Shenmue I and II, right? Don't you want to be able to enjoy Shenmue III at some point in the future after it leaves Sony's servers? Or are you fine never playing the game again? I have still supported the Kickstarter and will happily buy the physical game again at retail but there are very legitimate reasons that we should demand a physical console release.

What about the PC physical copy? Why such a disdain for PC games? Anyone can explain that to me?


I think its abit of both sides though imo. Yes we are making a purchase of a product(s) and yes we are supporting the project. Best of both worlds. Thats why I really love the idea of kickstarter more and more when I think about it.
Ya Sony bankrolling the project would have been better, but they are not, so we definitely have both a product purchase and development support at the same time. The ideal kickstarter scenario.

You are right. Thinking better, maybe I should think all of this as an extravagant pre-order. There's no perfect world where people would just shell out big bucks for their favorite developer just out of love, and not requiring anything in return.

I'm really against the English dub, as this would take out a huge chunk of budget that could have been allocated in other more important aspects of the game.

Can't tell if trolling or not.

But I'll bite anyway.

You do realize that a HUGE part of the fan base speaks English, right?

And do you really think the game will sell at all (to anyone other than rabid fans and even then not so much) if there is no English dub?

When I was working at a video store and Pan's Labyrinth came out, people were PISSED that it was only in Spanish. That movie was INCREDIBLE.

I seriously cannot believe that anyone could have this opinion. It's just beyond absurd.

I'm sure you are aware that dubbing is not cheap right? Plus Shenmue has VO for every single character. So if Shenmue 3 were to have English and Japanese dub, I wonder how many new npcs Yu Suzuki would have to sacrifice to accommodate your ENGLISH must have attitude. Why not Chinese as well? The story takes place in China after all, and the potential of selling copies in the Chinese market is more appealing than in the USA, where the Shenmue's sales proved to be not so great in the past right?

Q: Love your work! You are a pioneer in this industry! As for my question: How much game elements/features will we be missing in the game if the campaign doesn't reach the $5 million mark?

A: I will say this: if we reach the $5 mil mark, one of the things I really want to do with Shenmue 3 will become a reality.

At $10 million, it will truly have the features of an open world.


That my question! :D Then $10 million it will be!

I gilded the main post. Now he has a gold star. At the very least it draws more attention to the AMA. I haven't even pledged to the campaign yet. I plan at least 300 but am waiting to see what other tiers look like.

Oh I didn't know it would help draw more attention. If that is going to help hype the campaign, I will be more than happy to give him a gold star as well!

It's really disheartening knowing that we have fans who clearly have the money, but deem Shenmue 3 to be worth only $29 for the lack of a phsysical Sony official stamp. I don't even know if there are brand new Triple A games in the PS store that cost only this much. I wonder how I am going to convince people outside this forum to shell out even $5 bucks now... Wish me luck!

Yu expecting 10 million from a kick starter is kinda silly though, its unheard of for a video game. I really hope the things he wants via these stretch goals are small frills and he's just not communicating it properly... he made the 10 million goal sound essential...

I do agree that whoever is running the kick starter for him is doing a terrible job of ensuring communication is clear and concise.

That amount might be unheard of for a Kickstarter game project, but It's also very unprecedented for a game of a scope like Shenmue 3 (a 3D free-roaming action adventure game with multiple game mechanics) to have to resort to Kickstarter. Usually the platform is used for "indie" projects, and their best efforts so far came in the form of 2.5D action platforms (ie. Bloodstained) and isometric RPGs (ie. Pillars of Eternity). I don't expect we'll reach the $10 million (glad to be wrong though), but having a clear number to strive for lead all of us to be desperate and more focused in trying to bring extra funding for the campaign.


On a side note, Riku is right. We might need organization, just for the sake of efficiency. I suggest we create a poll to vote on an OFFICIAL SHENMUEDOJO CAMPAIGN LEADER. The leader will gather input from all members into one unified topic (hopefully because we need to keep everything at one place), sort and put in writing priority tasks, delegate & designate specific people to handle essential "jobs"; And the leader will then coordinate with other forums such as SHENMUE500K to get this all done as true teamwork.

This is my suggestion, but feel free to correct and implement on any of my ideas, just whatever to make this work, but we need to do it ASAP.

I've been looking at this place and Gaf from the backseat but the way you guys are going you won't hit the $10 million. I think we can all agree it should hit around $6 million just based on how it's going. The thing with the Bloodstained Kickstarter was they took control of the community and how they spread the word. Someone has to take charge of everyone and arrange something, set a calendar with what the community as a whole can do each day. One day tweet and the next day do something else. As it stands you have 200 people doing 150 different things. The Team Tu guys, Shenmue 500k, dojo members and Gaf members all have to come together under one roof and have a game plan. Not start a thread saying everyone tweet this hashtag and run off.

There are many sentiments like those above among the members of Dojo. We might need organization, just for the sake of efficiency. So I'm suggesting we create a poll to vote on OFFICIAL SHENMUEDOJO CAMPAIGN LEADERS. The leaders will gather input from all members into one unified topic (hopefully because we need to keep everything at one place), sort and put in writing priority tasks, delegate & designate specific people to handle essential "jobs"; And Dojo Representatives will then coordinate with other forums such as SHENMUE500K to get this all done as true teamwork.

This is my suggestion, but feel free to correct and implement on any of these ideas, just whatever to make this work, but we need to do it ASAP.

Anyone willing to step up and take charge? Hopefully older members? I'm willing to share the burden, but not alone.

I was saving my own questions for the time I would somehow meet Yu Suzuki in person and ask him myself but well... Now I see this thread, and so here goes my little research about the origins of the Shenmue Mirrors.

http://s27.postimg.org/qpxb5ndr7/800px.jpg

The mirror in the picture above is a replica bronze mirror (三角縁波文帯四神二獣鏡) found in the Archaeological Research Center in the Gifu Prefecture, Japan. There were specific round bronze mirrors called "Deity and Beast" mirrors (神獣鏡), such as the one mentioned, that were decorated with images of gods and animals from the Chinese mythology (such as the Phoenix and the Dragon!). One side was polished for practical use just like a glass mirror, while its back had representations of legendary Chinese creatures, Shen (like in Shenmue, as 神 meaning god or spirit) or Xian (仙 for immortal).

That style of mirror was common during the Han Dynasty, the three kingdoms and dynasties between the first and sixth centuries in the common era. Japan started producing such mirrors after the spread of the Chinese bronze casting technology through trading. There are records of Emperor Cao Rui of China gifting Queen Himiko of Wa (Japan) with "one hundred" bronze mirrors in 239 CE.

http://s27.postimg.org/mcoh7a9dv/hqdefault.jpg

The characteristics of the Deity and Beast mirrors resemble the ones found in the Shenmue mirrors, as both had a circle in the middle of the mirror's backside and feature engravings of deity figures and animals in the surroundings of that circle (Phoenix and Dragon in Shenmue's case).

If we're going to be negative, can we at least report actual facts? This type of thread lowers morale.

I agree with everything described in the above post, though. The fact they haven't even changed the layout of the main page is really annoying.

http://s12.postimg.org/88qwlziv1/Untitled.png

If we compare the Bloodstained Kickstarter to Shenmue 3's one side by side, Shenmue 3 already hit its lowest point with $31,704 early in the campaign period while Bloodstained hit $36,589 as its lowest around the half point period. One point to note though is that Bloodstained had from the very beginning a bigger "drawing power" to its name as it's at the same time a brand new IP and a familiar series, so it was easier to market to both old and new gamers.

But even having said that, there's no reason to be ENTIRELY negative about the current situation. If you look at the initial pledging days, you can see why Shenmue 3 broke all records. We are still in early stages of the campaign and Shenmue 3 managed to gather $3,591,739 within 9 days compared to $2,429,094 from Bloodstained in the same period. That's over a million! I attribute this to the fact we got to know Shenmue 3's ideal target ($10 Mil) and the relentless work done by all of us to help generate hype and gather funds, without the help from even the people behind the campaign (thanks Awesome Japan)! And we got YouTube celebrities like HappyConsoleGamer and Adam Koralik behind us too!

So if we keep this up, things will certainly turn around. Awesome Japan is already starting to listen to us, as they have implemented new stretch goals, reward tiers and finally built an official twitter page. It's still not the ideal, but we are certainly getting there. The Gods of Lucky Hit are with us!

Yu Suzuki will be attending the MAGIC event on February 27, 2016.
Monaco Anime Game International Conferences (MAGIC) is an open event organized by Shibuya Productions, so expect the presence of Cédric Biscay there as well.

http://s4.postimg.org/c5d6ip2gd/Untitled.png

For more information, here is the MAGIC website:
http://www.magic-ip.com/en/1044/

Someone pointed out "magic maze" was something Suzuki-san discussed during his Shenmue postmortem. In that he described creating complex algorithms that would create large landscapes but wouldn't take up much data/storage.

I wonder what this means in the context of Shenmue III...

You are right about the Magic Maze meaning the use of algorithms to replicate large areas. Yu Suzuki used that term on occasional times when talking about creating the Guilin forest part in Shenmue 2. I recall this feature is often used by Naughty Dog in their games as well to avoid use of loading screens.

Though the idea of a literal Magic Maze is far more interesting.

My Spanish is really rusted by now, but I can vouch that what you wrote sounds almost if not entirely native like. It's very intelligible to me, and I can't even spot typos. Good Job!

PS. I think I would though change "Pero ya no es hora de tener vértigo" to "Pero ya no es hora de rendirse". Vertigo sounds a bit strange to me, but probably you know better.

I wrote one in Portuguese if you want it too.

Então Yu Suzuki precisa de $11 milhões. Isso não é impossível. É na verdade muito possível. Se o time do Awesome Japan abrir a opção do Paypal para doações como eles já sugeriram, isso se tornará um novo meio para Yu poder alcançar o seu objetivo. Se continuarmos a realçar o nosso esforço em doar $30 dólares no dia 3 de cada mês nós certamente iremos atingir a meta.

Se $30 dólares é muito para alguns, não tem problema. Afinal a sua saúde e a sua família tomam precedência acima de tudo. Mas para aqueles que possuem equilíbrio financeiro, nós podemos fazer uma grande diferença para Shenmue 3. E eventualmente $30 dólares de cada um todo mês virarão 11 milhões!


PS. I used this little excerpt as a base:
So Yu Suzuki needs $10 million. This is NOT unreachable. It's actually VERY reachable. If they open donations to PayPal as they've suggested it will become the avenue to Yu's goal. If we continue with the monthly thunderbolt and focus our efforts on donating $30 on the 3rd of each month we WILL hit that number. I anticipate the Kickstarter will end up earning between $6 millon and $8 million because at the end everyone who hasn't donated will scramble to get their rewards and those who have extra cash to throw at it will do that. Even if it only makes $5 million that's fine.

PayPal is the ticket after July 17! If they keep PayPal open indefinitely we can continue to give month after month. And that's where the "$30 on the 3rd" makes BIG strides for the campaign.

$30 is nothing to most people. If you are struggling to make ends meet, please take care of yourself and your family first. But for those of us who are stable enough financially we can make a HUGE impact for Shenmue. $30 each month adds up, fast!

Sony's involvement was more than welcome for the sake of the campaign. The problem is that whenever bad publicity is on, Awesome Japan doesn't do much to try to address the issue on the spot.

I feel bad for Yu Suzuki, as Awesome Japan is his only avenue of communication and he can only depend on them to make this work.

It's unlikely to me that it's possible to change teams now (they could hire external help though if budget allows Yu to do so), otherwise we will just continue to do what we must do.

It was no kidding when Yu Suzuki said that the future of Shenmue 3 was in our hands, literally. :rotflmao:

I made attempts at contacting the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter team regarding the explanation of stretch goals, new rewards, VO choice and budget, redoing the video campaign, the reason for the choice of multiple playable characters and how to reel in the general gaming community when most never even heard of the first two games.

My plead yielded the following reply:


Hello,

Very sorry for not getting back sooner! Ok, here we go:
Stretch Goals - Thank you! We are working on it! Trying to be more specific with the SGs and will try to get the explanations moved over. Mr. Suzuki does not want to get too deep without giving all the story away!
Mirrors - Trying!
Video - Still very early development, so there is not much game footage yet. As for scene requests... I think we will have to leave that up to Mr. Suzuki. Again can't give away the story!
At the current stage of funding, it is still hard to know how much voicing there will be. There have been lots of comments for language switching and Mr. Suzuki is aware of the situation.
Why multiple characters? Mr. Suzuki has stated this is one of the things that he really wants to do with Shenmue 3. Will definitely let him know though!
Why care about Shenmue 3? Got it. You are very right. Top priority now getting the message across. We will have the page updated soon.
More rewards? Yes working on them now. Thank you for the ideas!

Thank you very much, please keep your ideas coming, because they will keep us going forward.

Joel &
the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter Team


PS. I did not question the integrity of the work done by his team, because I believe it's counter-productive and unnecessary at this point.

Joel Tess wrote:
At the current stage of funding, it is still hard to know how much voicing there will be. There have been lots of comments for language switching and Mr. Suzuki is aware of the situation.



Sand4fish - what was your question here? Were you asking about the the likelihood of English VO's or whether everything (ie. Non-cutscene gameplay) will be voiced?

I questioned specifically on whether having both Japanese and English VOs would be detrimental to the budget towards other game elements, such as sacrifice of NPCs and extended dialogues or refinement of certain game mechanics. That's why I personally prefer Shenmue 3 to have only Japanese VO, as Masaya Matsukaze is already attached to the project, but I understand my view is on the minority side.

http://s11.postimg.org/5mcjsz3yr/Untitled.png

Shenmue tree in Bailu?
Edited.

Real Bailu Town, Pengzhou city
http://s23.postimg.org/jri7ele4b/110306105437e4d1f2dea5163b.jpg
http://s28.postimg.org/ipju91vhp/j_M46_Evm_D0a_M.jpg
http://s4.postimg.org/b4u5nx7m5/image.jpg
http://s4.postimg.org/ru06xktl9/7431204_211521517102_2.jpg
http://s13.postimg.org/fvr93e87b/image.jpg

I know what I say here will make no difference as the whole of this site seems to be intent on this "$30 dollars on the 3rd thing". But I really think this has been a misguided idea and not thought through particularly carefully because:

1. Most Shenmue fans aware of the kickstarter will have already have pledged as much as they can afford
2. Even if they haven't, just yelling at them to up their pledge will unlikely provide much motivation for them to do so
3. The whole thing is insulting for the fans who can't afford to up their pledge
4. It will come across as pressurizing, and may even put people off pledging at all
5. Since this new initiative is essentially hijacking the long established tweetathon which uses #SaveShenmue, a slogan Yu Suzuki and his team now also embrace, people may assume this initiative has Yu and his team's blessing (when it doesn't), or was even organized by them themselves, and as such, this runs the risk of reflecting badly on them.

As I said, I'm sure no one here will listen, but this idea smacks of desperation and lack of forethought.

The tweetathon you've mentioned mostly likely reached its maximum function by now, so yes we are desperate. We had other ideas, but it seems the $30 on the 3rd is the one the collective fans agree to most. We are all adults here, so the idea of feeling pressurized by the internet is a bit silly IMO. Besides all of us, including the person who came up with this idea (elfshadowreaper), state clearly, while spreading the word, that taking care of yourself and your family should take precedence over a game. This is good community effort.

Wait, so magic maze is an idea from 1998? When was that presentation? Because 1998 was from before Shenmue 1 and that stuff looks like it's from Shenmue 2...

GDC 2014. The magic maze idea was being played around before production of Shenmue 2. In the Saturn version, there was a section of a demo which had Ryo running through the Guilin forest, and Ryo exploring buildings in Kowloon. Probably at that time they were already thinking of ways of replicating large areas within the memory constraint of CD-ROMs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-O8jRokADU&list=PL6C3CEE910876223E

http://s27.postimg.org/626gqtgkj/Untitled.png
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http://s22.postimg.org/ngzgu6qe9/original.jpg

They need to add some stretch goals between $5.1m and $6m. That's too wide of a gap to not have one.

Yep, the only way we really have any chance of hitting $5.5M+ is if there's some good stretch goals added between $5.1M and $6M. Letting Awesome Japan and Ys Net know this should be priority #1 right now. Look how quickly we're hitting these $200K stretch goals.

We can do this if we were all together in pleading AJ Japan to do so through the KS page. They listened to us before after all.

Yu Suzuki's Kickstarter for Shenmue III has climbed its way past Torment: Tides of Numenera to claim its place as the second highest funded video game on the crowdfunding website.

With regard to all Kickstarter projects, Shenmue III currently stands as the 10th most funded campaign.

The project, which still has another 11 days left in its campaign, is currently sitting at $4.3 million in funding, trailing behind Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the current leader in the video game category, with a whopping $5.5 million.

Just last week, we learned that the original Shenmue voice actor will be returning for this third installment. Additionally, PlayStation 4 owners will now be able to get a physical version as one of the campaign's newly-added reward tiers.

Some recognition from the gaming media without the usual Backlashing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDsGVNILB1o
Source: IGN

I can't get behind this idea as well. Games like Tomb Raider (reboot) and The Last Of Us have multiplayer components outside the core game, and though they are a welcome diversion, no one really remembers them. It simply doesn't enhance the core experience, and so it's deemed to be a waste of resources. It's something Shenmue 3 specially can't spare.