How do you think Shenmue III would fare if released on the Dreamcast?

[Ruffles]

From what I understand, Shenmue III was always supposed to be a different game than the first two. Yu Suzuki said in an interview many years ago that hos idea of S3 is a dialogue based game and less action oriented. At that time I imagined S3 to be more like disc 4 of S2. S3 on PS4 was of course something different, much less epic than S2 but still with some action in it.

If released on Dreamcast, I would likely still have thought less of it than of the first two games. But not waiting 18 years would've made me more forgiving of its flaws. Maybe the story would've progressed a bit further if it had had solid funding from Sega.

Shenmue III on Dreamcast (or Xbox) in 2003 would have been better I think.

 

[Thomasina]

If released on Dreamcast, I would likely still have thought less of it than of the first two games.

I think no matter what, the two teams would have made something much different from each other.

And the momentum of previous development would have carried over, versus starting from scratch with a whole new team. It would have been much more fluid and natural.

 

[SMDzero]

Shenhua would have worn her original outfit, I'll tell ya that much.

 

[JCJ]

This is a fun exercise. Sometimes for the trivial things:

• The main menu would have retained the same music as the first two ones. And I always imagine it with a greenish background.
• We would have got the original cursive logo.
• Most shops would have had doors (and loading times).
• Ryo and Shenhua would have probably slept in the same room at their house (with the divider that was seen at Shenhua's house at the end of II, though)
• Shenhua's outfit and voice actress would have been the same as in II
• There would have been no recycling of music, but new compositions instead (well, maybe some of the Guilin music could have been reused, sensibly).
• Bailu kids would have worn strange and "poorer" outfits like in the Langhuishan section of II, I guess.
• Niaowu wouldn't have been called Niaowu, but Fenghuang or some other real place.
• Niao Sun's hair would have been black.
• They would have reused the model of Delin for his brother.
• We wouldn't have got the forklift in Niaowu, and probably not the telephone calls either.
• We would complain about the little plot advancement, but would attribute that to Sega stretching the series for more installments, for pure greed with the big success the game was enjoying :-).

I'm pretty sure we would have got the fishing, the herb hunting, and night conversations with Shenhua. And also the main plot points (Niao Sun betraying Lan Di and getting the mirror, heading to the cliff temple, etc.)

 

[Ruffles]

I think no matter what, the two teams would have made something much different from each other.

And the momentum of previous development would have carried over, versus starting from scratch with a whole new team. It would have been much more fluid and natural.

Yep, likely. All the effort put into fan service wouldn't have been a thing. Probably still another type of game than S2, though.

 

[mjqjazzbar]

So the shops don’t have doors in Shenmue 3 because of technical limitations and not because their absence is true to the areas where the game is set? Starting to think they should’ve passed on UE4 if they couldn’t handle it. There are some strange things going on here, from the sparsely populated streets of Niaowu to the thing with the doors. These are things I don’t think I’ve ever experienced in a PS4 game, maybe not even PS3. Are you sure about the doors, @jcjimher?

 

[Yokosuka]

So the shops don’t have doors in Shenmue 3 because of technical limitations and not because their absence is true to the areas where the game is set? Starting to think they should’ve passed on UE4 if they couldn’t handle it. There are some strange things going on here, from the sparsely populated streets of Niaowu to the thing with the doors. These are things I don’t think I’ve ever experienced in a PS4 game, maybe not even PS3. Are you sure about the doors, @jcjimher?

I understood rather as Dreamcast preventing the developers to display all the 3D indoor models and NPCs in one place.

Hong Kong did have outdoor shops but not much. Languishan port had some ones too but they weren't interactive.

I don't remember Suzuki said anything about the outdoor shops in Shenmue 3, apart the seamless aspect.

 

[orient]

So the shops don’t have doors in Shenmue 3 because of technical limitations and not because their absence is true to the areas where the game is set? Starting to think they should’ve passed on UE4 if they couldn’t handle it. There are some strange things going on here, from the sparsely populated streets of Niaowu to the thing with the doors. These are things I don’t think I’ve ever experienced in a PS4 game, maybe not even PS3. Are you sure about the doors, @jcjimher?

There are a bunch of buildings with doors in Shenmue III that seamlessly transition from outdoor to indoor, like Shenhua's house, the seedy pawn shop and Hotel Niaowu (some have very short loads like the arcades). It's definitely not a limitation of UE4 or something the game can't handle.

It could've just been quicker and easier to have open doors on most shops as it removes a bunch of pathing and animation issues (NPCs opening/closing doors, blocking doors etc.), although the game does support that; I've seen kids go in/out of the arcades, but like in the original games, it can be annoying, and I get the feeling it's only a limited number of NPCs that do it.

Most NPCs in Shenmue III don't seem to enter shops. It's rare to see an NPC in a shop that isn't sitting down in a restaurant, which makes me think they could've went the "open door" route to hide the fact that NPCs don't really go in and out of places. And when they do, you have to wait several seconds for them to come and go (tolerable back in the day, not so much anymore).

My third theory is, imagine how dead Niaowu would seem if all the shop doors were closed? There's already a limited number of NPCs walking around. Close all the doors (or even half of them) and it'd feel like a ghost town. It's not as if open door shops are unprecedented -- there was tons of them in Shenmue II -- and ultimately I think it's relatively fitting of both locations in Shenmue III.

I don't think UE4 is to blame for the NPCs, either. UE4 is an excellent engine. They probably just made some technical design decisions at the beginning that left limited memory for NPCs depending on the area of the game, or they lacked data streaming expertise. It was a small team, after all.

 

[mjqjazzbar]

I honestly hadn’t thought about the doors as a technical issue til jcjimher made that post. I just assumed it was the general way things looked. The NPCs are the thing that stands out most to me; I wish they could patch more pedestrians in. I can’t explain it, but I feel getting more foot traffic in Niaowu would drastically change my opinion of the area. It just feels wrong otherwise.

I was playing Kiwami 2 the other night and admiring the amount of people in town, even though I could clearly spot clones and folks sort of just wandering around aimlessly. Sometimes the illusion of life is enough. Half the reason I fell in love with the first game is that illusion of life and place that I had never seen in any other game.

When I look back at my experience with Shenmue 3, I realize many of my issues are very superficial and with a couple fixes could be easily remedied.

 

[orient]

I'd kill for a late-game PS4 vs high-end PC comparison of running through the streets of Niaowu (using the exact same conditions) to see how much difference it actually makes to NPC count and pop-in.

I plan on waiting for a PC upgrade before I play it again so I can really max out the visuals and get the smoothest experience possible. I wonder if it'll make the game a bit more enjoyable to play.

 

[code l name]

I plan on waiting for a PC upgrade before I play it again so I can really max out the visuals and get the smoothest experience possible. I wonder if it'll make the game a bit more enjoyable to play.

I’m in the same boat. Playing the demo on high end PC at 4K settings at stable 60FPS makes a huge difference to fluidity compared to PS4 pro version uncapped framerate. Just compare DF footage running on PC compared to console version.

 

[JCJ]

As @Yokosuka said, my guess about closed doors was actually based on the limitations of the Dreamcast. It had much less RAM and much less polygon budget than current systems, thus they didn't have the option back then to make a city like Niaowu with mostly open shops. They had to chop it into small segments with lots of loading in between.

I think Niaowu has mostly open shops because the design team wanted to. Scenarios and architecture is one of the areas of Shenmue III where they skimped the least.

 

[iknifaugood]

I'd kill for a late-game PS4 vs high-end PC comparison of running through the streets of Niaowu (using the exact same conditions) to see how much difference it actually makes to NPC count and pop-in.

I plan on waiting for a PC upgrade before I play it again so I can really max out the visuals and get the smoothest experience possible. I wonder if it'll make the game a bit more enjoyable to play.

I never played on PS4 and I have a pretty powerful PC; I can't say I encountered any performance issues or noticeable technical flaws. Things like shadow drawing and NPC pop in still happen but not enough that I found distracting but YMMV. S3 is a pretty light game in terms of performance so unless you just need to play it at 4K, it should run maxed out on most modern hardware.

Also, and this is really petty, but PC allows you to play with Xbox controllers, preserving the DC button colors; I find the PS4 colors distracting for QTEs, even in other games.

 

[JCJ]

Also, and this is really petty, but PC allows you to play with Xbox controllers, preserving the DC button colors; I find the PS4 colors distracting for QTEs, even in other games.

Sorry for nitpicking, but when played with an Xbox controller it shows the Xbox button colors, which are different to the Dreamcast ones (A being green on Xbox vs red in the DC, for example).

I agree with all the rest. I played on PC too and it had no technical problems. My only gripe was having to wait through those walking sections that were made with the PS4 in mind, when I have a super fast SSD that woulc probably handle the loading :-).

 

[iknifaugood]

Sorry for nitpicking, but when played with an Xbox controller it shows the Xbox button colors, which are different to the Dreamcast ones (A being green on Xbox vs red in the DC, for example).

I just meant the colors and letters are the same, I know the layouts are a little different. For whatever reason the PS shapes and colors just throw me off and cause a weird delay in my brain during QTEs.

 

[Rydeen]

Sorry for nitpicking, but when played with an Xbox controller it shows the Xbox button colors, which are different to the Dreamcast ones (A being green on Xbox vs red in the DC, for example).

This actually messed me up a bit in QTEs, because I'm much more familiar with the colors of the buttons on the Dreamcast, and "red" to me signals "A," for example. It forces me to briefly rely on my System 2 brain functions, reducing my reaction times a little. Otherwise, playing on PC was pretty great.

 

[JCJ]

I just meant the colors and letters are the same, I know the layouts are a little different. For whatever reason the PS shapes and colors just throw me off and cause a weird delay in my brain during QTEs.

Yeah, not only on Shenmue, but in any game I find more difficult to process symbols than letters. I struggled with them Parappa the Rapper and I'm struggling now with the Karaoke in Yakuza 0.

On a related note, I was baffled that both the Shenmue I&II remaster and Shenmue III worsened the QTE icons from the original, making it unnecessarily harder. The main offenders were Shenmue III arrows being green, which got confused with the also green A button and made it harder to distinguish from the background.



And Shenmue I&II remaster buttons having a 50% gray background, which also made them blend too much with the background and made it much harder to distinguish from each other.

 

[iknifaugood]

On a related note, I was baffled that both the Shenmue I&II remaster and Shenmue III worsened the QTE icons from the original, making it unnecessarily harder. The main offenders were Shenmue III arrows being green, which got confused with the also green A button and made it harder to distinguish from the background.

View attachment 7785

Totally agree, this was a baffling decision. I wondered how the command QTEs were gonna look but then there weren't any.

And Shenmue I&II remaster buttons having a 50% gray background, which also made them blend too much with the background and made it much harder to distinguish from each other.

View attachment 7786

This is because the X1 controllers have buttons that look like this and D3T used a standard button template for the QTEs. I can only speculate as to why the HUD buttons are colorful.

 

[DoubleO_Ren]

Shenmue 3 would have been a completely different thing if it came out in 2003/04 like it was meant too. I am convinced the Shenmue 3 we got in 2019 was far from what Suzuki originally had in mind for it.

 

[Yokosuka]

Moreover, the original QTEs sounded way more satisfying.

Don't know why a game excessively obsessed with fan service and budget saving was so motivated to revamp its sound design which became as classic as the exclamation points of Metal Gear Solid. Think about Tony Jaa, 64 and all these youtube memes using Shenmue QTE sound. Just why?