The 'jump cut' issue

Yokosuka said:
The game needs improvements everywhere: fight, amount of dialogues, music integration, camera handling in talk cutscenes, animation and bizarre loading. This is going to be a massive work so I expect some elements will not get any improvement in Shenmue 4 (my bet is the fight and the UI).
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I thought the amount of dialogue was more than serviceable (sadly most of it was throwaway lines and not really story related), same with the dialogue camera it's totally Shenmue DNA (and have you seen most JRPGs and WRPGs ? It's just a closeup of the face, this is miles better).
I've played the game in japanese, and the animations felt ok most of the time, I'll start again in english to see what the fuzz is about.
 
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mjqjazzbar said:
I find it hard to read. That's my main issue with it. It's just very cluttered and the fonts aren't great. I also find the way the game switches you from the analog stick to the D+pad to confirm things could be a little confusing for some people. R+1 is also kind of an odd default button to bring up a menu; why not option?
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Now you mention it, it might be both cleaner and a little better if the system menu was seperate from the inventory menu. The options button could bring up the system menu and the inventory and other stuff menu could be seperate and mapped to triangle.
 
Tosh said:
I think these stop & go dialogue cutscenes are weird too
but i also watched the live stream of Maximilian Dood and there were 8 or 9 thousand people watching
and absolutely no one, for real, no one said anything about these cuts.
Max didnt say anything, the chat didnt say anything.

The top complaints were #1 english voices, 2# animation quality (face expressions)
Those were the two topics on the negative side.
So i think overall its not that problematic to the big audience.
There were waaaaaaayyyyy, way, way more comments about the voice acting and dialogue face expressions.
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Yeah, I tend to find in some regards Shenmue fans actually nitpick the games more than a lot of the more casual audiences we expect to ridicule and dissect them. Of course though in other areas we're also more forgiving.
 
Cutscenes and dialogue direction were better in Shenmue II. It's really jarring. Sometimes the camera doesnt even make sense. It's weird af.
 
Tosh said:
I think these stop & go dialogue cutscenes are weird too
but i also watched the live stream of Maximilian Dood and there were 8 or 9 thousand people watching
and absolutely no one, for real, no one said anything about these cuts.
Max didnt say anything, the chat didnt say anything.

The top complaints were #1 english voices, 2# animation quality (face expressions)
Those were the two topics on the negative side.
So i think overall its not that problematic to the big audience.
There were waaaaaaayyyyy, way, way more comments about the voice acting and dialogue face expressions.
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It's really a shame more work wasn't put into the faces. When Shenmue came out the faces in it were revolutionary in games, sadly 3 cannot say the same.
 
Vasid said:
It's really a shame more work wasn't put into the faces. When Shenmue came out the faces in it were revolutionary in games, sadly 3 cannot say the same.
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The problem with the animations as a whole is that they're of various quality. Some are good, some are terrible. It's like there were different people handling it and some were really bad at it.
You can see it in mini games for exemple:
One Inch Punch: Animation is good here. Ryo's entire body is moving in a faithful way, the animation change depending on the level, and Ryo's face is convincing, as he looks focused, with eyebrows serious, and his eyes arent dead but staring at the point of focus in a realistic way.

Wood Chopping: Ryo looks fucking dead. And he's moving like a robot.

And you can see the same kind of differences with betting games. The flower, fish, bird, wind one is well animated. The dice one ? Not so much.

And throughout the game, especially during dialogues, there are multiple instances where character have dead eyes when they should just be moving toward the point of interest.
 
GhostTrick said:
Cutscenes and dialogue direction were better in Shenmue II. It's really jarring. Sometimes the camera doesnt even make sense. It's weird af.
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Shenmue 1 and 2 had a lot of cutscenes, in this game there are very few, most of them are just ingame conversations, it's due to animation, it's quite a resource intensive and quite a hurdle on a technical level for a small team, the more realistic the game looks the more on point animations need to be.
I think most of the cutscenes were pretty good in Shenmue 3, though they still had some rough edges, and martial arts choreography is difficult to direct in real life, I can't imagine doing it in 3D (I struggle to do basic shit).
The establishing shots were all amazing.
 
Reprise said:
Yeah, I tend to find in some regards Shenmue fans actually nitpick the games more than a lot of the more casual audiences we expect to ridicule and dissect them. Of course though in other areas we're also more forgiving.
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Maybe because contrary to casual audience, fans have shenmue 1 and 2 as base for expectations.
For example fans could be more forgiving about the voice acting but less forgiving about the cinematic work.
 
None of these are things that make me say, "Yu should call it a day." They're just things I hope they can analyze and learn from if they're lucky enough to make a fourth game. Budget is clearly a killer, but some of these are simple presentation issues that I think could've been cleaned up with a little more care... We saw signs of these odd aesthetic choices going back to the beginning. I know they mostly learned UE4 from scratch and were on a tight schedule, so I think they can get there next time.
 
mjqjazzbar said:
None of these are things that make me say, "Yu should call it a day." They're just things I hope they can analyze and learn from if they're lucky enough to make a fourth game. Budget is clearly a killer, but some of these are simple presentation issues that I think could've been cleaned up with a little more care...
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There are indeed budget issues. But I think there's also talent issues in some part. I think there's a lot of young people in the team. Some that might have been fairly inexperimented.

And from what I heard on Dojo, budget has been a killer when it comes to what Yu Suzuki first wanted to do. It's true that many things seems to have been axed. Especially Baisha.

But there are other things which aren't a matter of budget and more of a matter of direction. Story is one.

Honestly, if they get the chance to make a 4th game, they should really tighten the ship and kill useless things like english dub for one, and for second, focus on a less bigger scope. It's great to have a Shenmue experience, but I feel like it should also be more about the story and characters (which the game seems to be lacking) within a reasonable sized world.
 
Yes, the dub is definitely a resource hog and has made up the bulk of criticism so far, yet they thought it necessary to spend money on it. I know a few people here say they'd be unhappy without it, but it really just turns the game into somewhat of a joke for many people. If Yu really wants to make 2 or 3 more games, he has some lessons to learn. I'm on board, but a publisher's not gonna want to risk picking up a risky game with no end game in sight.
 
mjqjazzbar said:
None of these are things that make me say, "Yu should call it a day." They're just things I hope they can analyze and learn from if they're lucky enough to make a fourth game. Budget is clearly a killer, but some of these are simple presentation issues that I think could've been cleaned up with a little more care... We saw signs of these odd aesthetic choices going back to the beginning. I know they mostly learned UE4 from scratch and were on a tight schedule, so I think they can get there next time.
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I think a lot of the stuff is due to his team. All what seem to be inhouse characters went through a lot of changes (because honestly they looked and animated like shit), after they announced they were outsourcing some characters and received assistance they started to look better. Apart from retweaking the characters they also had to redo the facial animation pipeline, those things are novice mistakes specially for a storydriven game, but it took away from development time and resources.
 
The face animations are ok, but they would better get rid of the head circle movement the NPCs usually do when they're talking to you. The animator must have thought it was cool and realistic but it's clearly not lol, not at this frequency. Shenmue 1 & 2 didn't need such patterns to make their characters brilliantly expressive.
 
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I also think characters kind of shake their arms and hands around too much, like they're on some kind of stimulant. Oh, but do really like this game. I promise.
 
It's pretty jarring at the beginning of the game. Not a good first impression. Let's recap the series intros.

Shenmue 1: Iconic scene of Ryo arriving home and witnessing his father's murder. Very cinematic and dramatic.

Shenmue 2: Epic boat arrival scene at Hong Kong. Again, very movie-like with great camera angles and fitting music. Very adventurous.

Shenmue 3: A pretty decent scene recapping Shenmue 2's ending. Then... talking... with the weird jump cuts. Just, chatting about her father. Really? No scene of them exiting the cave? I'm picturing blinding light, then revealing the beautiful world ahead of them. This stuff writes itself. I don't know. I was just very disappointed by the beginning of the game, especially compared to the last two.
 
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Tensega said:
Dude, the screen where you select New Game, Load Game, and whatnot looks so amateurish. I thought it was just a placeholder for the demo, but they actually kept it for the final game to my surprise.
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Yea, this sticks out like a sore thumb. I really thought the title screen was going to be the mirrors just like the previous games - kind of a no brainer right?

But yea the main menu looks really basic
 
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