Monday, February 3, 2014

Will Shenmue 3 debut at GDC?

When people saw the photo of Mark Cerrny and Yu Suzuki last year, a lot of rumors started going around that they might collaborate on Shenmue 3 for PS4.  I didn't want to get my hopes up.  Recently it has been announced that Yu Suzuki will be doing a post mortem speech on Shenmue at Game Developers Conference in March 2014.  Mark Cerny will be translating Suzuki san's speech at the event.  Now I would like to speculate that there might be a Shenmue announcement there, but after years of delays and missed opportuinities to see Shenume return, I was keeping my expectations cautiously low.  recently even Gamespot.com has predicted that GDC 2014 will actually feature a Yu Suzuki announcement of Shenmue 3 for next gen consoles.   Shenmue was originally dubbed the "Virtua Fighter Rpg".  I always loved that game and the sequel.  The game was ahead of its time. It was like the precursor to open world games.  If Suzuki just took the game one step further and let you beat up and accost pedestrians, he could have stolen GTA's thunder.   The game genre was dubbed F.R.E.E.  If they gave players total freedom, like GTA, it could have been as big a commercial hit as it was a cult classic.

      The good part of the Shenmue legacy, open world adventure games , lives on.  Unfortunately the bad part of Shenmue's legacy, QTE's,  also lives on.   Quick Timer Events are one of the worst things to happen to gaming.  The QTE's in Shenmue 1 and 2 were actually really good. I never found myself hating them.  I guess it's because they were cinematically well done in Shenmue, that they blended better with the overall game.  I guess you could call it a good idea gone bad.  They way other companies have implemented QTE's in recent years have been so badly done that they have soured me on those things altogether.

   I think the Walking Dead games from Tell Tale Games have been the best implementaion of QTE's I've seen since Shenmue.  I'd be grateful if they ever finish Shenmue 3, QTE's and all.

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