Spaghetti wrote: Yokosuka's comments about Yu using the "Agile" methodology might be pertinent. We see games very early on because the "Waterfall" development style in games often leads to a highly polished "vertical slice" of early gameplay being created that aims to look and feel as close to the finished product as possible, even if the rest of the game is relatively incomplete.
God of War's showing this E3 was a vertical slice, for example. They didn't show at PSX because taking time out for another vertical slice takes months out of development of the game as a whole.
Many individual components of Shenmue III may be in an advanced state of development, but not necessarily combined in a game-ish way, or polished enough for a big showing.
But honestly, none of this is going to matter when they do show it for real.
As someone who works in software and follows agile in our development process, i can confirm that projects are usually pretty rough until quite late in the process because you're often working iteratively on multiple parts of a feature/app/game/site at the same time vs finishing one feature completely and moving on to the next. This compounded with the fact that we're talking about a project 1 year into development means it isn't crazy that we haven't seen much from the team.
I also think it's super cool that they're using agile, it makes me optimistic because agile helps teams constantly reevaluate their progress and identify risks much earlier than waterfall development does.
I certainly am curious about this aborted e3 trailer folks mentioned and wonder whether something similar happened here given Cedric's tweet teases.