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Shenmue III Exits Planning Stage, Posts 4 New Screenshots
posted on by Kevin Pennyfeather
Video game developer Ys Net announced in a Kickstarter update for Yū Suzuki's Shenmue III game on Friday that development for the game has exited the planning stages and has entered map testing.
Ys Net also posted four new screenshots from the game including a test model for a thatched roof house, a shot of protagonist Ryo in conversation, and two shots of Ryo in combat. Ys Net stated in the update that Ryo's character model in the images is an older model and that his assailants in black suits are placeholder models to avoid spoilers.
Suzuki announced the Shenmue III Kickstarter campaign at the PlayStation E3 press conference in June with an initial goal of US$2 million. The campaign met that goal within nine hours of launching before adding stretch goals for the previous games' cinema shorts, subtitles in five languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), rapport and skill tree systems, an expanded Baisha village setting, and five mini games.
Shenmue III set multiple crowdfunding records before its campaign concluded, becoming the fastest video game to raise US$1 million, and the most funded video game on Kickstarter, raising US$6.3 million from 69,000 backers.
Suzuki is aiming to release the game for PlayStation 4 and PC in December 2017. Sega released the original Shenmue on its own Dreamcast platform in 1999, and it then released the Shenmue II sequel on the Dreamcast in 2001, and on the Microsoft Xbox in 2002. The series was originally planned as a trilogy.
[Via Gematsu]
