Shenmue 1 was really hard to finish due to the sheer amount of bugs. The game was just so large, and it seems the QA team couldn't actually skip time whenever they wanted, or cutscenes. If they wanted to test from beginning to end it could take the team 3 days to do it
Technically speaking QA best practices is to do just that; you have to start the game from the beginning, especially close to release, because you have to replicate the end user experience exactly. Obviously there should be dev tools in place to skip to any point in the game--I'd be shocked if that wasn't available in S1 (imagine if there was a bug during the 70 man battle??).
The main criticism of the first game that stuck with Yu all these years is the fact that your Father's just been murdered but you can go to the convenience store, do a bunch of other menial activities that don't contribute to the overall story. He says that, nowadays, most games are like this and no one complains
I don't really see how this is true at all. Most games start with a fast paced action hook to draw the player in and set the story up (like, you know,
Shenmue 2), this was common practice even at the time, which is probably why it was a criticism of S1 and is
still a criticism of S3. It's possible that something is getting lost in translation and he's talking more specifically about having the
option to do menial activities, but in S1 (and S3), even if you follow just the story you have to do menial activities, which is where I think the criticism lies.
Just look at the dojo, people even complaining because you need to get money (hello? it's called immersion?!?!)
I found it completely immersion breaking that a remote village, in 1987, where people need to make a 2 day journey for supplies, would have a $2000 bottle of wine for sale; to say nothing of the fact that the game would require me to grind up that much money when you make like $70 per job. Let's stop defending this nonsense unless you actually want more of this in the series moving forward. In S2, when I was asked to make $500 to meet Ren and then he stole that money from me, I did not consider that to be a pillar of the Shenmue formula going forward.
picking flowers (you hated that system in Skyrim right?!?!?!)
Did someone actually complain about this or are you making this up? Because tons of beloved games let you pick flowers (Witcher, BotW, Skyrim etc.).
trashing because there is a round circle in the flowers to help you see them (so we don't want quality of life with that now?!)
Right, because the quality of life improvement we were all begging for was a giant circle indicating what's interactive in a game where every drawer has exactly one interactive item in it and there's only ever one plant on the screen at a time. Never mind that it's one of the ugliest parts of an already very ugly UI.
The community it's toxic and retard. If you actually do a good game (let's call, Assassins Creed Oddysey) the community starts trashing saying "uugghhh, it's the same graphics that AC Originsss (did you complain when they did that with 2, BH and Rev? No you didn't, right?) omg Ubisoft are so lazy, this is not a game, this is a DLC!! (a DLC of more than 100 hours of gameplay yeah kid go to sleep, it's late). So why are we surprise of this? The fact that some people waited almost 20 years doesn't make them better at all. And the same it's happening with Half life 3, that's why Valve isn't gonna make it unless they REALLY need to (Epic Store, Valorant > Counter Strike, etc). Just imagine the comments if they release it tomorrow. "What? 13 years for this?" "So that's it?" "This looks like a 2009 game" "If you gonna do this, don't do anything and let's remember the myth of Half Life 2". This comments sounds familiar? It should. It. Fucking. Should.
Complaining about people complaining makes the environment more toxic, not less. If you disagree with the complaints, then explain why you disagree; don't poison the well by inventing complaints (seriously, no one has ever said S3 is bad because you can pick flowers) and then using that to dismiss valid criticism. People hold the Half-Life games in really high regard so if Valve releases HL3 and it's as half baked as S3 then they will rightly be torn up and down the internet for it. The reason they're not making it is because they only want to do it when they have another breakthrough mechanic like the gravity gun specifically
because they understand how high the stakes are (and because they have just so, so much money that they don't actually need to make it).