- Joined
- Sep 3, 2018
- Favourite title
- Shenmue
- Currently playing
- Strider (2014)
You bring up some good points, however, I must respectfully disagree. This might sound insensitive, but for someone who ended up with a twenty-million-dollar development budget, had access to Shenmue's intellectual property rights, and had several publishers backing him, should have come out with a vastly superior product. Many independent developers would have killed to be in Suzuki's position. It's no one else's fault that Suzuki hired the staff that he hired or how he directed them.I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but imo it's also worth pointing out
If you ask me, I think the majority of S3's dev time and cost had to go into aspects of creating an infrastructure where the development of a large game can occur. This is a matter already taken care of and paid for ahead of something like the latest Yakuza game or even the previous Shenmue games.
- Shenmue 1 had the benefit of working with the already created and familiar VF3 engine, which itself had the benefit of the VF2 engine, which had the benefit of the VF engine. And of course, Shenmue 2 had the benefit of Shenmue 1. S3 had fucking nothing.
- Shenmue 1&2 had the benefit of primarily being made by a large group of employees that are actually in direct contact with each other, are used to working with one another, and are used to working under the production infrastructure Sega spent decades creating and refining for peak efficiency
- Conversely, S3 had no such pre-existing infrastructure to work with. They had a small handful of people that worked on phone apps. They had to build a new team of people that have never worked together, many of which were contractors from overseas that don't even speak the same language as them since they didn't have the same preexisting supply of full-time employees Sega did. Sega effectively paid the cost of creating that well ahead of Shenmue ever beginning production.
- Yu was probably rusty as fuck at the start of S3's production since he hadn't made a new non-mobile game in about a billion years. Conversely, he was a well-oiled machine during S1&2 considering he was producing several titles every single year around that time.
Also, take into account that many independent developers with fewer resources and manpower than Suzuki have created outstanding video games. Or the fact that as technology has evolved, so too has the work process. In other words, what was expensive and laborious in the late 90s and early 00s could be simplified today.
Since Suzuki is a legend who revived the Japanese arcade scene in the 1980s, I have higher standards for him than your common developer. This is not to say that Shenmue III is a terrible product from an artistic or technical standpoint, but it could have been better.