Hazuki00 wrote: Everything sounds really good from the interview, however this part...
"
You have to remember that all the city / village residents in 1 & 2 had a "real" simulated life, thats a really complicated and tough quest and the budget for Shenmue 3 is probably not big enough to do that again.
Question 3 to Yu:
Will there be voices and sound for everything in the game?
Yu's answer:
We don't know yet. To tell the truth - the amount of text is getting bigger and bigger and not all of it is planned, so we don't know if all of it will be available with sound.
"
It will be very rare seeing a lot of NPCs in the villages but few of them doings their rutines or none of them, standing in their positions. Will they be there at night too?
Another thing is voices, Will Ryo ask a question to a NPC and this one would not speak and only a text will be displayed?
it sounds worrying, but if you think about it Shenmue II only had individual schedules for a few characters- Fangmei, Joy, Eileen, etc. I don't think you saw Jianmin anywhere except the park, you wouldn't see him walking home. Most shopkeepers, unlike Shenmue I, didn't have names, and were pretty much only seen at their shops and then they'd be gone at night time
In the first game you'd see the shopkeepers and all NPCs go about their personal lives, eating at specific restaurants etc, and since Shenmue II was structured around traveling rather than living in your hometown, you didn't really notice the difference, and mostly just noticed the few characters that did have schedules. another difference was that Shenmue II had quite a few characters that mostly couldn't be found during regular gameplay, like Xiuying and Ren.
also, I think Shenmue III was always intended to be a departure from the environments of the first 2 games, and the lack of detail in the NPC's would be made up for in the depth of interaction between Ryo and Shenhua. Hence the idea that the game would expand inward rather than outward. I think nostalgia for the first 2 games compelled him to make Choubu the size of the areas from the second game when it was intended to be set in pretty small scale settings.
if none of the characters had schedules that would suck. but i'm pretty sure that what he means is that it'll basically be like wan chai in shenmue ii in terms of character detail.
as for voices, the lack of npc voice in Yakuza is one of those things that makes it feel less special than Shenmue. So I hope they voice as many characters as possible.