Gaming
Shenmue 3: What Is Sony Actually Doing?
Shenmue 3 got the crowd cheering when the trailer was shown at Sony’s E3 press conference. When it started playing, the crowd went wild. Halfway through the trailer, it was slipped in that Shenmue 3 needed funds through Kickstarter. The crowd fell silent for a few seconds.
Then the trailer ended and the applause resumed, but people still weren’t quite sure what was going on. Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki stepped onto the stage and a countdown appeared on the screen. And when it ended people didn’t quite seem to know what they’d been counting down to.
Of course, we all know by now that the countdown was for the launch of the Kickstarter campaign for Shenmue 3. It was a little awkward to see the E3 presentation, watching Suzuki and the suit tell the crowd they’d only get a sequel to their beloved Shenmue II if they forked over $2 million. Watching the crowd try to comprehend what was happening was even more awkward, because it was so unexpected. It’s just weird to see a company the size of Sony asking for Kickstarter funds.
That wasn’t the only weird thing about the Shenmue 3 reveal. For one thing, $2 million is nowhere near what is needed to create the game. The first Shenmue cost $70 million to develop, to put it into perspective. Over on Reddit, Suzuki held an AMA to talk about the campaign’s stretch goals. He said they really need $10 million for it to “truly have the features of an open world.” He also said that the game has other financial backers, including Sony.
It’s all a bit strange, isn’t it? Sony has said the $2 million Kickstarter was really more of a way to measure public interest in Shenmue 3 than a serious step towards funding, but something about that doesn’t ring true. There are plenty of ways to measure public interest in something. Most of them don’t involve a huge corporation sucking upwards of $2 million out of the public’s pockets. And having one of the world’s biggest corporations use the world’s biggest gaming stage to announce a campaign on Kickstarter – a site built to allow start-ups to seek funding – seems almost comical.
The decision to launch the campaign at Sony’s E3 conference has, of course, been widely criticised for some very good reasons. Some people worry that the $2 million of Kickstarter funds are just going to Sony, which seems unlikely. What’s more likely is that Sony actually has next to zero confidence in the profitability of Shenmue 3. Of course, that makes their inclusion of its Kickstarter campaign in its E3 press conference pretty strange. Maybe its inclusion was just a result of the bad judgement of some Sony executive.
Not much is known about the precise funding arrangements of Shenmue 3, which Suzuki has said is due to the privacy policies of the various backers. But it would certainly be interesting to know just how much of Shenmue 3’s funding is coming from Sony. It might answer some of the (many) questions about what’s going on.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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