Will Shenmue III Be A Bugfest At Release?

Shenmue III will be?

  • A Buggy Mess.

    Votes: 4 5.6%

  • Have some bugs, but still stable.

    Votes: 28 38.9%

  • A mostly flawless experience.

    Votes: 16 22.2%

  • You're worrying too much, get a girlfriend or something, dude.

    Votes: 14 19.4%

  • Polished with minor imperfections.

    Votes: 18 25.0%
  • Total voters
    72
Jigen

Jigen

Man Mo Journeyman
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Shenmue II
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This thought has had me considerably worried, I trust Yu Suzuki and that he will make a quality product, but the reality still stands. This game is a medium budget AA game with a small staff, Yu no longer has Sega money or a staff consisting of hundreds. Kingdom Come Deliverance was developed under a similar cirumstance it even had 4 years more of dev time and still came out buggy at launch, these bugs affected the game's critical reception, do you think Shenmue III will be stuck in the same situation, or do you think bugs will be handled effectively by release?
 
I kinda wish there was another option on the poll here - I picked "mostly flawless" but only because of the word mostly. I expect it to be a lot more polished than other open world games due to Yu Suzuki's reported perfectionism, but expecting there to be absolutely no bugs is a pipe dream. Maybe I should've picked the second option. IDK.
 
If there are bugs, even significant ones, then I hope fans will be pragmatic and constructive about it, rather than hysterically twisting the knife like some were doing last August. Report the bugs but don't scream about them all over social media, creating a lasting impression of the game and series beyond any fixes that come.

I know some people see that as putting the necessary pressure on the game makers to fix the bugs, but public tantrums are counterproductive to our long term goals in the uniquely precarious case of Shenmue. You can be disappointed but still work toward a solution that doesn't jeopardize the future of the franchise any more than the bugs themselves. If the car's teetering over the edge of a cliff, then help pull it back, don't jump up and down on the roof hoping it'll rock in the right direction.
 
sporkaganza said:
I kinda wish there was another option on the poll here - I picked "mostly flawless" but only because of the word mostly. I expect it to be a lot more polished than other open world games due to Yu Suzuki's reported perfectionism, but expecting there to be absolutely no bugs is a pipe dream. Maybe I should've picked the second option. IDK.
Click to expand...
I think I had every possible option really, but I'll add a Polished with imperfections button if that helps you out
 
One of the key benefits of having a publisher is utilising their QA department. I hope Deep Silver is providing this service to YS Net because it doesn't matter how skilled or careful your developers are, bugs are unavoidable -- especially in open world games -- and QA is an integral part of polishing a game.

I think there will be some bugs, but overall it'll be fine. Just my gut feeling.
 
i'm pretty sure it will have bugs and some small performance problems. its a small team but a big game.
they had to start as a kickstarter project and after that was over, they were able to make it even bigger
because of Deep Silver. so pretty much the same path that Kingdom Come took.
its a different engine than before, its a different budget and they want to include as much as possible
for the S1 and 2 fans. minigames, side missions that are interesting, the game has to look like a modern game,
a main story that can stand on its own, the game is needed to open the door for other Shenmue games.

so a lot of things for a small team. you need a lot of staff, testing and time to make an open world game completely perfect
and smooth in every category. not even a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 is able to achieve that.
 
No game is bug free, and at this stage it'd be impossible to predict how buggy or not Shenmue III would be.

I understand reaching for Kingdom Come comparisons because it was a Kickstarted game later published by Deep Silver, but the important thing is in how these games are constructed, rather than how they were funded and published. Kingdom Come does a deep dive into world simulation, alongside a quest structure that allows you to skip steps, fail quests, or miss them entirely. That's going to throw up a lot of potential bugs. I guess there are also questions about how they've structured their code on the back end, but I don't know enough about how that works.

shredingskin said:
Japanese companies and PC don't have a specially good history :S
Click to expand...
?

Plenty of Japanese games on PC run fine, amazingly even.
 
Spaghetti said:
No game is bug free, and at this stage it'd be impossible to predict how buggy or not Shenmue III would be.

I understand reaching for Kingdom Come comparisons because it was a Kickstarted game later published by Deep Silver, but the important thing is in how these games are constructed, rather than how they were funded and published. Kingdom Come does a deep dive into world simulation, alongside a quest structure that allows you to skip steps, fail quests, or miss them entirely. That's going to throw up a lot of potential bugs. I guess there are also questions about how they've structured their code on the back end, but I don't know enough about how that works.
Click to expand...

Shenmie III is definitely going to have a quest structure, I mean the original games did, it just all happened in the background. YS said he also wants to put a lot of time into accurately simulating the martial arts. I think these games actually have a lot in common, both will be quite complex with tons of different systems.
 
Obviously Shenmue III will have a quest structure, but traditionally the series doesn't handle it in the same way Kingdom Come or other open world RPGs do.

Shenmue's quests usually funnel you towards event triggers (find the Heartbeats Bar, get $500 to meet Ren, etc), other open world RPGs may handle questing by finding specific people or objects in the open world, getting into dialogue skill checks, or watching a scripted event unfold without a transition into a cutscene. There's more that can go wrong with the second approach, largely in part because people or objects may go missing because of a bug, or if there's a conflicting action or something preventing the relevant NPCs hitting the markers to trigger the scripting.

It's hard to say what will happen with Shenmue III without knowing how, if at all, they've changed the traditional approach.
 
Every game in history has had some bugs. I don’t think they’ll be as rare or hard to find as in the first entry though. With the significantly smaller workforce it’d be incredibly short-sighted to expect a flawless game.

As @Let's Get Sweaty said though, report the bugs when you come across them, as it’s the most practical way to go about it. Moaning on here or social media would be - as they say - like shouting down a well.
 
I've gone for some slight issues. The game will have some form of bugs. Everyone has stated why comprehensively above.

What I hope is they continue to fix them for a while after release. The plus side is Yu Suzuki will want a certain quality of product which reassures me any issues will be minor at worst.
 
Perhaps this has been asked/answered elsewhere, but do we know roughly how many programmers are on the team?
As ironic as it sounds, I suspect the fewer the better. Like one of those massive meat producing plants, you're more likely to have aberrations with a greater number of people (each person is focused only on a specific aspect, "someone else can fix that", etc.) With fewer staff members, each has to know the game more intimately, and they can likely better sniff out issues.

Regardless, I'd suspect it's likely buggier than the originals (at least on the surface vs., say, hunting for walls to clip), but not in any earth-shattering way. Still stable.
 
D3T got a raw deal, not that it particularly matters in the context of this thread and has been discussed to death in others.
 
Hopefully, the upcoming beta will provide a good sense of what we should expect, both from a bug and quality control standpoint.

Judging from the last video update, Yu Suzuki-sama seems to be living and breathing QA. The man was quality testing like a madman while in the recording studio.

 
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