Yu Suzuki has provided a few comments regarding the latest Shenmue 3 trailer and the game’s new logo, on both the official PlayStation Blog and the Kickstarter page. You can read the comments below, as well as find a batch of old and new screenshots of the game. I also looked into the comments from Kickstarter backers on the latest update.
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Shenmue 3 has received its first teaser trailer, finally giving us a bit of a closer look at the state of development of the game. According to the official description, the first teaser of Shenmue III is built from a small slice of an in-development build of the game, and it delivers small peeks in new look of main characters, new characters, and feels of Shenmue world. You can view the video below!
What stands out is that a lot of the scenes in the video look far too dark to discern any detail, which is likely something done in post-processing of the video itself. Otherwise, it’s clear that the animations and faces still need some work. The environments on the other hand do look good, even if the video doesn’t always give us a good look at them. All things considered this first teaser seems to be in line of what we can expect from the game, given its low budget, and I’m looking forward to see more of the game as it progresses.
Ys Net posted a new update on their Shenmue 3 Kickstarter page, announcing that they have signed a global publishing contract with Deep Silver for their game. This means that Deep Silver will apparently be in charge of publishing Shenmue 3 worldwide. SEGA and Atlus fans in Europe already know Deep Silver, given that they’ve been handling publishing of their titles there for a while now.
At the same time, the new title screen that comes with the press release finally reveals what appear to be the updated character models of Ryo and Shenhua, Previously, Ys Net had in fact resorted to changing Ryo’s face through Photoshop, replacing it with the one from Shenmue 2. So far, it seems the new models are receiving a mixed response from fans. What’s curious is that the Shenmue 3 logo on the new title image is also different from the new logo that was revealed in their June update.
In its latest “Dev Report Vol. 3” update, the Shenmue 3 team has revealed a new character for the game, along with some basic character animation in the Unreal Development Kit. At the same time, the team also states that they won’t be present at any gaming shows this June. Instead, they want to devote their time to the game’s development instead. Many fans had hoped for the game to be featured at E3 2017, which takes place June 13-15, given that the targeted release date is still December 2017. However, given what little has been shown so far, it’s unclear if they can still manage to finish the game this year. Hopefully, we’ll get a new trailer sometime this year to give us a better indication of how far along the game is in terms of development. You can read the message from the devs below, as well as the video showing the new character.
After a long silence, the Shenmue 3 team has posted a new update on their Kickstarter page, titled “Dev Room Progress Report Vol. 2”. It shows us a few brief glimpses of the game, although it’s stated that all characters shown are used from older resources. Which is likely also the reason why the developers are still avoiding showing Ryo’s face. Other than showing us the development team at work, the video features Ryo performing some basic animations, and also reveals an in-game arcade cabinet. You can view the video below!
Shenmue 3 is still scheduled for a release in December 2017 on PlayStation 4 and PC.
When Shenmue III was initially announced during E3 2015’s Sony Conference, fans immediately began to hope for remastered re-releases of the first two Shenmue games. Considering the difficulty of acquiring the two games at the current time, and as a means to boost the profile of the Shenmue franchise ahead of the long-awaited third title’s release, it was an oft-made suggestion.
Recent news of certain website domains being registered offers some hope in this direction. Initially, TSSZNews.com broke news of the registering of shenmuehd.com. Additionally, Shenmue Dojo noticed the registering of shenmueremastered.com. These two URLs, alongside a shenmuegame.com (which redirects you to YSNet’s Kickstarter page), were referenced in SEGABits‘ article on the domain name registrations; their article also includes a reference to a reversewhois page from sega.co.uk – which was used to register these URLs. But if you try to visit the URLs now, you’ll be taken to blank webpages.
As Gematsu notes in response to a SEGA Central community issues discussion video made during May of last year, SEGA has previously mentioned interest in exploring options to bring Shenmue to current gaming consoles.
The news of these two domain names being registered offers hope to the prospects of the Shenmue and Shenmue II re-releases! Let us hope that the games do come to fruition.
From time to time Digital Foundry revisits classic games in their Digital Foundry Retro articles, and the latest one features Shenmue 2. Around a half our long it’s the longest Digital Foundry Retro video yet, and explores not only the original Dreamcast version, but also the Xbox version, its emulation on Xbox 360, and emulation on PC via DEMUL. They also compare the Japanese and English voice acting and the work of the modding community on the Shenmue Dojo forums. It’s definitely worth watching for anyone interested in Shenmue, Dreamcast or just video games in general. You can find the DF Retro video of Shenmue 2 below, as well as their video for the original Shenmue. It’s worth noting that DF Retro also took a look at Daytona USA some time ago.
A new update to the Shenmue III official website contains a web video diary, titled “Development Report Vol. 01”, offering a behind-the-scenes look at developing a QTE and an accompanying event scene, which involves Ryo Hazuki evading a rockslide. While the text update is short, it does treat viewers to another two minutes of the development process, and it suggests that the development team hopes to provide monthly updates on the Shenmue III project in the future.
It’s already been one year since the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter was launched, and Ys Net have posted an update on their Kickstarter page to celebrate the occasion. While the video posted with the update uses mostly footage of areas that we’ve already seen before, it does feature Yu Suzuki, who looks back on the work the team has done over the past year.
The Shenmue 3 team have posted a new update on their Kickstarter page, revealing that they’ve begun testing of several motion capture systems, starting with a new motion capture system by Xsens. Initial testing of the system appears to have been promising, as the system is apparently highly responsive with little noise interference. When all systems have been tested, the team will announce the final winner.
The update also puts the spotlight on some of the gifts that the team has received from the fans as a token of support. Lastly, they’ve also attempted to upload the latest screenshots of the game in a higher quality, but the process appears to have failed and they’ve contacted Kickstarter to help them upload the correct ones. In the meanwhile, the team is pointing people to the official website to get higher quality images. Those appear to be the same quality as the ones we’ve posted in an earlier article (courtesy of Sony).