http://spaces.msn.com/members/haydafran ... !122.entry (copy whole url)
I'm not too hot on French.. and from what I gather.. most of it is about past rumours... but there is an interesting part at the bottom (could be very old) which goes into technical details....
He confirmed that Shenmue is supposed to have 16 Chapters, but the Story finds a rather "satisfying" (but not final) end after Chapter 9 or 10, he did not remember. And here comes the meat. He told me that the storyline, the characters, the dialogue and like 80% of the locations (I tried to get some info about Tibet, no luck) until Chapter 10 (or 9) are actually finished. Most of the stuff is already prerendered in the current engine, though it is of course not polished, it basically consists of placeholder textures/animations from Shenmue I&II. Of course he did not reveal a damn thing about how it goes on, he only smiled when i mentioned our every day discussions about Baihu, Lan Di, Ziming and so on... but still, he revealed that Suzuki had the story for Shenmue finished for years, the Saturn Shenmue would prove that, as they had progressed until Chapter 5 in pre-renderings (btw, he mentioned that it still had VF Characters back then). He got a little uncomfortable talking about Yu Suzuki, I felt he kind of said more then he had planned to. Though, he said that no one knows when, if, and on what system the following chapters would appear. He said that it depends on how the sales go, how Sega would support AM2, and how much Sega would believe in Shenmue. Although the basics are finished, the most expensive part of Shenmue is the scripting, dubbing and debugging, along with the research & creation of textures (cant remember exactly), and only a successful Sega, AM2 and Shenmue II would allow them to invest in a third installment
Wondering if anyone can pick anything out from the French text which surrounds this english snippet.
Thanks.
Gotta get myself out of the habit of using lines from Shenmue.
