Shenmue 'FREE' vs Open World

[TheThirdComing]

Hi ladies and gents,

thrilled with all the news of late about Shenmue III, it's been making me think about what will become of the game and it's structure.

Many of us fell in love exploring Yokosuka & Hong Kong, I for one find it to still be one of the most endearing locations within any game i've played. What made it so special was that each building was unique and had it's own purpose but did feel like a blatant excuse for plot development. I loved exploring the town, entering businesses like the barbers or raman shop and speaking to a character who would have information which may be useful as clues. The NPC's in this game felt liek they actually lived there,each individual had their own schedule and you'd see them about their usual times. I still haven't seen an open world game apply such structure to their environments and people like this.

With the rise of open-world games in Shenmues absence do you think we will see changes to the structure of the game or will it still be 'FREE' like the previous 2 games. Looking at a closer comparison title in Yakuza, the environment it much bigger now, but the people in the city scape are your run of the mill NPC's and locations serve little purpose other than mini-games - going into a restaurant you can eat but it felt like a gimmick at times. I like Yakuza very much but its very different, the day to night cycle isn't present and changes upon the story progression for one thing. Also there is a big empathis on logging sidequests, it kind of feels like a checklist at times. Where as in Shenmue, I found that I'd get involved in 'sidequests' more naturally.

Looking at the trailer the environments look stunning, so I think we will get a lot of space to explore but I just hope it's not empty space like in modern open-world games. This is Shenmue on a budget of course so consessions will be made and with a span of over 15 years abscense changes will happen, but I hope the experience doesn't fall into many modern open-world tropes and plays like the previous 2.

Just curious to what you all think on this, it's something which I have been thinking about alot lately.

[Yokosuka]

Last Yu's statement about open world:

As you know open world games cost a lot! [laughs] So it is challenging for me to deal with the budget issue. Even after we completed the Kickstarter project I have been looking for other partners to join us and as you know we have now partnered with Deep Silver. So I’m now comfortable in saying, ‘Don’t worry, I can make the whole game you imagined!’ Even if the sense of size cannot compare with the biggest open world games, that is impossible without a much bigger budget.
I believe the open world of Shenmue is very different from the other open world games that exist. Although Shenmue was the first open world title it is still very unique and so we can focus on other things that do not depend solely on money. So I think there is a lot of playable and very unique elements in the open world that mean I don’t need to compete against other big open worlds.

http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/28/shenmue-i ... z4r8Ci7O4r