Will Shenmue III Be A Bugfest At Release?

[punkmanced]

It definitely won’t be a bugfest; that position in the franchise has already been filled

It’s YS, so I’m hoping for a “polished with minor imperfections” scenario. Curious to see the end results.

 

[WildManofBorneo]

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 really hope Yu decides to go with Pole To Win for quality assurance.

 

[danielmann861]

No game is free of bugs. Shenmue 1 and 2 weren't free of bugs. I don't think it will be a broken mess, but there will be bugs waiting to be found, for sure. People will find them. :) Look at Resident Evil 2 Remake; damn near perfect as a game yet still has a game breaking bug that lets you skip some of the boss battles. No game is free of bugs.

I hope Shenmue III is not a bug filled broken mess like the Shenmue 1 and 2 HD remasters were (granted, they have fixed a fair bit but damn that release felt unfinished upon release) but I do expect bugs to show up none the less.

 

[NotInTheShenmood]

I picked "A buggy mess" and "Some bugs". Just because of the kind of game Shenmue is, there just naturally isn't room for a ton of bugs. However I think there'll be more than just "some bugs". The team is so small and the scope is so big(At least as far as we know, the game can come out and end up being small and short), the game could easily be a broken mess at launch.

I would hope that its just fine but I really doubt it just due to the circumstances.

 

[Yokosuka]

I never saw bugfests in Japanese games in my whole life. Japanese culture is too meticulous to let this happen. The only one was FF15 but specifically because Tabata imitated the West to save the ambition of his project and the moral of his team.

However, I've mixed feelings regarding Shenmue 3. Gaijin engine, the bug who led YSnet to cancel the facial animation at the time, very young and small team for a complex game design and a lot of pressure, Yu's ambition which may submerge the month(s) originally dedicated to the debugging phase because post release patch anyway. A lot of reasons suggests to remain cautious.

 

[Spaghetti]

Gaijin engine, the bug who led YSnet to cancel the facial animation at the time

I'm not sure the fact the engine isn't Japanese makes a difference? Considering the documentation is available in Japanese, the growing adoption of UE4 in high-end Japanese development, and there's approximately the same framework for troubleshooting as in English.

I also don't think it's fair to bring up that animation bug when talking about how buggy or not the final game will be. Bugs are a natural part of the development process, there would be no point in doing debug if all games were created without bugs in the first place. It was fixed by the time we saw the game again in the September '17 KS update, which was over a year and a half ago now. I just don't see the relevance.

 

[orient]

It's true that Japanese developers were typically ahead of their Western counterparts for a good 20-30 years, but the rest of the world caught up during the PS3/360 era. Thoughtful, polished, well-designed games come out from all over the world now, constantly, and more and more Japanese devs are using Western-developed tools.

With that said, Yu Suzuki is a Japanese development veteran, and I'm sure he still has the same eye for quality and polish that made his games special 20-30 years ago.

 

[mjqjazzbar]

This is the era of patches and games that are released when they shouldn’t be. If it’s buggy, it’ll be fixed.

 

[darksniper]

If we get something like the stairs glitch in Shenmue 2. I won't be complaining :)

 

[WildManofBorneo]

I never saw bugfests in Japanese games in my whole life. Japanese culture is too meticulous to let this happen. The only one was FF15 but specifically because Tabata imitated the West to save the ambition of his project and the moral of his team.

However, I've mixed feelings regarding Shenmue 3. Gaijin engine, the bug who led YSnet to cancel the facial animation at the time, very young and small team for a complex game design and a lot of pressure, Yu's ambition which may submerge the month(s) originally dedicated to the debugging phase because post release patch anyway. A lot of reasons suggests to remain cautious.

Unreal 4, now in its 7th year, is a very stable and well renowned engine (more so than Kojima's Fox Engine or Square's Luminous Engine). So stable in fact that many Japanese developers have forgone their traditional in house engines for Unreal 4. Among these are:

Atlus: Shin Megami Tensei V
Bandai Namco: Soul Calibur VI, Tekken 7, Jump Force, Summer Lesson, etc
Capcom: Street Fighter V, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite
Konami: Pro Evolution Soccer 2019
Nintendo: Yoshi's Crafted World, Daemon X Machina
Square Enix: Kingdom Hearts III, Octopath Traveler, The Last Remnant (Remaster), Final Fantasy VII Remake, Dragon Quest XI

And there are many, many others which can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_4

It is also worth noting that Epic has a local office in Japan to assist developers with Unreal 4 development. Additionally, there are more than 20 games in development from Japanese developers for the Nintendo Switch ('17).
https://80.lv/articles/20-japanese-switch-games-use-ue4/

 

[DigitalDuck]

I was required to use UDK as part of my University course and two words I would not use to describe it are "very stable". In fact, at one point I was using three computers to work on three different areas simultaneously, because the time taken for it to close and then reopen after a crash was longer than the time it spent working before it crashed. In writing up the process, I provided a selection of "in-development" screenshots, all of which were the "UDK.exe has stopped responding" dialogue box overlaying some area of the level.

Granted, this was between 2010 and 2012 so things may have changed since then. It's definitely not something I want to relive, and I've actively turned down jobs that require use of Unreal Engine and UDK.

 

[WildManofBorneo]

I was required to use UDK as part of my University course and two words I would not use to describe it are "very stable". In fact, at one point I was using three computers to work on three different areas simultaneously, because the time taken for it to close and then reopen after a crash was longer than the time it spent working before it crashed. In writing up the process, I provided a selection of "in-development" screenshots, all of which were the "UDK.exe has stopped responding" dialogue box overlaying some area of the level.

Granted, this was between 2010 and 2012 so things may have changed since then. It's definitely not something I want to relive, and I've actively turned down jobs that require use of Unreal Engine and UDK.

There is a big difference between UE3 and UE4.

 

[Spaghetti]

I don't know enough to comment with much specificity, but the impression I've gotten reading online + behind the scenes stories about the development of Destiny, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc... is that game dev tools can be a bit busted.

No clue how this reflects on UE4, but would not be surprised that it crashes for someone, somewhere while developing games. So does, I dunno, Unity, RE Engine, Decima, Dragon Engine, Frostbite, etc etc etc.

 

[Zoyous]

I've used UE4 professionally. Not for game development, but for a series of architectural visualization projects that involved huge, partially forested landscapes. It was simply a lot faster to create and render the landscapes in realtime (although at a low framerate) in UE4 than through a typical software renderer in Maya. Personally I didn't encounter crashes very often. I really enjoyed working with it! It's a very powerful engine and it's also well-supported both by Epic and by vendors in the UE marketplace.

 

[Mystere]

"Mostly flawless" and "Polished with minor imperfections"... One of those is surely redundant as they're basically two ways of saying almost perfect. I think the user you catered to was splitting hairs tbh.

Anyway, I went with Mostly Flawless as I think the pride Yu takes in quality control over the years is self-evident, and his clear personal oversight of S3 is pretty reassuring. Sure, there'll be a bug or two, but any that do exist, I'd expect to be the type of unusual glitches that you'd only find in deliberate search of game-breaking tricks. I'm thinking the map glitch from S2, or the other out-of-bounds glitches in both games that required very specific circumstances to trigger. I doubt it'll contain anything like the amount the Shenmue 1 & 2 remasters did, nor anything half as obvious.

 

[Van Joel Sandwich]

Anyone forgeting that is Yu Suzuki that is supervising the game?
I mean, his games are known for solidity and robustness. Just look at Shenmue 1 and 2 that had A LOT of bugs during develpment (confirmed by Yu Suzuki during the Shenmue "postmorten" conference in 2014) and in the final product were super polished and robust games. That's even more impressive considering that those games were pioneers in their genre.
Yu san knows how to make games.
By the way, during some conference in the end of 2015 where he layed out the Shenmue 3 production plan to the audience, there was right at the and a DEBUG phase so...
I wouldn't worry about that until the game proves the contrary.

 

[spud1897]

Anyone forgeting that is Yu Suzuki that is supervising the game?
I mean, his games are known for solidity and robustness. Just look at Shenmue 1 and 2 that had A LOT of bugs during develpment (confirmed by Yu Suzuki during the Shenmue "postmorten" conference in 2014) and in the final product were super polished and robust games. That's even more impressive considering that those games were pioneers in their genre.
Yu san knows how to make games.
By the way, during some conference in the end of 2015 where he layed out the Shenmue 3 production plan to the audience, there was right at the and a DEBUG phase so...
I wouldn't worry about that until the game proves the contrary.

Here is the production map you refer to. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ysnet/shenmue-3/posts/1336892

This is from August 2015.

 

[Tosh]

of course Yu Suzuki is a guy who wants to achieve a perfect quality
but you also have to remember that the Shenmue 1 and 2 team was huge
and they had a budget which was way higher than the budget for other games in that time period.

it takes a lot of time and a lot of people to test an open world game. every npc route,
every quest, every fighting animation, every camera angle in different rooms, the different day and night time lighting,
hows the performance with a lot of npcs, draw distance, quality of shadow ...

this is not a problem when you have a full triple A studio team like at Kojima productions,
but this can be a problem if you have not the time, not the people and not the budget.

it still can work if the whole developing process is well managed and everything works ouf perfect
but i wouldnt expect a 100% flawless and smooth indie open world game.

every game has a phase where they are reviewing and testing if everything is okay
but that doesnt mean that they can find or fix everything.

 

[orient]

Here is the production map you refer to. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ysnet/shenmue-3/posts/1336892

This is from August 2015.

So by the time it comes out, Shenmue III would've been in full production for four years, almost to the day. Such a long development is very rare for mid-budget AA games. Big companies like Bethesda and Blizzard can afford to spend four years developing a game, and some indie devs are willing to work on the same game for years without pay, but mid-tier games rarely get longer than a couple of years in the oven. I'm hoping it's a good thing!

 

[spud1897]

So by the time it comes out, Shenmue III would've been in full production for four years, almost to the day. Such a long development is very rare for mid-budget AA games. Big companies like Bethesda and Blizzard can afford to spend four years developing a game, and some indie devs are willing to work on the same game for years without pay, but mid-tier games rarely get longer than a couple of years in the oven. I'm hoping it's a good thing!

Some of that will be down to the scope of the game expanding to be fair. But yes as you say 4 years development for a AA title is a rare event.

I'm saying this is a positive as it gives the team a good 4-6months polishing the game and getting it right. Small bugs are part and parcel and I'm sure some love finding them so they can play around and exploit them.