There are a bunch of people interested in hacking it, so I'm sure many backups will exist. A kickstarter update went out this morning, the keys for the backer trial will be sent out this weekend. Everyone who backed in the appropriate tiers will receive a code, including those who want a refund. I suppose that might help some of them change their minds. It takes at least a day for FanGamer to send out their mass emails due to rate limits from various ISP's, but I'm going to assume keys will probably start going out on Friday since I doubt they're actually going to work on the weekend. I have my own email server so I usually get the kickstarter & fangamer emails early on because they don't need to throttle them. They're still showing 100GB as the size requirement for the full PC game. The trial version requires 20GB, so at least we know it won't be another Mighty No 9 situation where the demo can be hacked into the full game. It was also confirmed that it's not a stand-alone scenario, but actually an objective from early in the game. From the details provided, it sounds like the E3 / Gamescom / TGS press demo but without a 20 minute / 45 minute timer. (Although the time will still run out at 9PM in-game time at which point you can start over.)
Since the PC trial version is *apparently* available to those getting the PS4 version on that tier, I'll probably give it a shot this weekend. Assuming my PC can actually run it that is
The PC trial dropped a few hours ago. I streamed my playthroughs of it, although with technical difficulties. Here was my third playthrough: (Edited after original post, so this is 1080p) I haven't streamed a PC game before, and I wasn't configured for it yet so it was kind of trial and error. The first stream attempt died after about 2 minutes 30 seconds. This was because I was streaming in 4K and my bandwidth could not handle it. This was an accident. The framerate on the stream was really bad as a result. By my 3rd attempt, I finally figured out that it was 4K and bumped it down to 1080p, but then I was accidentally using software encoding and it died again. For the one linked above, I bumped it down to 720p, lowered the bitrate and used hardware encoding. The bitrate might have been about half of what I should have used, so it's a little bit compressed at times. I also was running in 4K a so the framerate stutterred a bit. I use a different computer for capture, so at least capture wasn't slowing the game down. About half way through my second playthrough I found the graphics options and lowered them to medium and now I get an almost solid 60fps at 4K. I'm sure by this time tomorrow there will be better videos. Early impressions: It's Shenmue, the level is detail is there. I spent that second playthrough doing a lot of exploring, including opening drawers in the store and looking through cabinets. The new fighting engine takes a little bit to get used to, but I'm starting to get the hang of it and it's fine. Conversations can be awkward like the originals, especially if you start ignoring the objective and converse with random people. But the conversations for what your objective is are mostly normal. Some music is new, some is returned or remixes from the previous games. Overall after the second playthrough it was starting to feel right. My thoughts based on the trailers we've seen so far haven't changed. I like the way the game is looking so far and playing. It's not perfect, but it's a lower budget Shenmue with roughly the same scale and detail from the originals. As a continuation of the previous two, it's good enough for me.
I'm not installing EGS and signing up for an Epic account for a demo or retail of the game. I will be waiting for the crack.
FYI: My video above now has fucked up audio, I don't know when it broke but it seems google re-processes archived streams and they get messed up. I will replace it at some point, but there are probably better ones to find now. I mentioned some of the below on Discord already, but also mentioning here for easier access. There's no DRM in the backer trial and it doesn't require EGS to run. Feel free to pirate the demo, or if you happened to back at a high enough tier, install EGS and use it to download the game, back up game data, uninstall EGS. The demo is a ~7.4GB download which decompresses to around 12GB. (Assuming 20GB in the specs was for initial download, so compressed + decompressed size) They did scrub all game data from areas not present in the demo, so you can't hack it to play the full game now. Files for areas, subtitles, etc, from outside of what you can get to in the demo are not included. But an unfinished version of the entire soundtrack is present in the game files. (I say unfinished because there are extra tracks that will definitely go away or change, including 1 Van Halen song by itself in a folder that probably will go away in the final. And I heard some minor issues in a couple of tracks, like one of the returning tracks had a short skip in it, and another track had clipping. But the vast majority of it is all good. This demo was originally built for E3, but they seem to have merged updates from their main code base in August) There are 289 music tracks in the demo files, of course less than 20 are actually used right now. There's a mix of new tracks and returning ones in high quality, I'd have to build a massive spreadsheet of what's what to figure it out. I originally thought it was roughly half new half remastered, but there might be slightly more that aren't from the previous games. The music works a lot like on Dreamcast where all we have is track numbers, but it's organized by area and mini games have their own folders, so we at least know from the folder names some things that weren't known before. Spoilers: Spoiler There are 16 music tracks for Ship, so we basically know now that the boat portion of the game will be playable. There are folders for 12 mini games, including forklift, fishing and wood chopping that we already know about, but also RC boat racing and golf which was in the corner in one of the arcade screenshots. At least they'll potentially have some fun ones to make up for no Sega arcade titles.
Amazingly it runs well on my aging PC! Not too sure about the new fighting engine, especially given how it uses the left stick exclusively for direction inputs rather than the d-pad like 1 and 2. But hey.....It's not like they made it turn-based for seemingly no reason or anything I'll get used to it!
In the demo can you change the languages? A question I haven't seen a straight answer on is if region will matter for languages.
If we get the AES key for the pak files, it looks like debug mode is a simple setting in the scripts folder...
Yes. The options screen allows you to switch vocals between English or Japanese, and subtitles into 5 different languages or so. The languages were mentioned in a kickstarter update. It is not. Someone already pulled the key from memory and decrypted them, but the game won't accept unencrypted data. It needs additional hacking and they're working on it. Meanwhile, I did some simple in-memory exploration today. With a few minutes of searching you can find the player coordinate in memory and just change it to warp past the places where Ryo doesn't want to go. They did a decent job omitting assets that aren't needed in the demo. The other half of Bailu is mostly empty, the arcade for example has nothing inside, it's just an empty building. Same for most of the buildings nearby, they are empty. And some of buildings are completely missing on the edge of town, you just see doors floating in the air. There's one exception, and I'll spoiler tag it. Spoiler If you head past the training hall back towards Shenhua's house, it is in the game. From an initial glance, everything looks as it did back in Shenmue 2 from the outside, just better given the newer engine. But if you look closely - second spoiler warning: Spoiler There are some differences inside the house. Shenhua's bedroom is accessible, it's in the back of the main room (to the right of the kitchen if facing the kitchen). And the kitchen has a refrigerator. There is a gas generator outside of the house on the West side, which explains how they have power. I think they modernized Bailu a little bit for Shenmue 3 so that they could put the Arcade in it but still make that level of technology realistically feasible. Also when you try to leave the area of Shenhua's house, you get a prompt as to where you want to go. The game has quick jump like Shenmue 1 and 2 did. The cave from the end of Shenmue 2 is a separate map and not in the demo. If you head in that direction, Ryo doesn't want to go that way and turns around like when you try to escape the demo areas. If you warp past that point, the map just ends where the stairs to the cave should be, as in you would just walk off the edge of the map. If you fall off the map you get warped back to the bridge at the beginning of the demo. I can't provide any memory addresses for someone to reproduce this, because they change every time you start the game. But player coordinates are floating point and if you know what you're doing they're pretty easy to find. Edit: Out of bounds video
What it sounds like you're saying is that the game won't accept the repackaged files without the encryption? That doesn't mean the exe isn't looking for the debug mode setting in the scripts folder...
It's my understanding based on what he's said that all of the settings are loaded from copies of the config stored inside the encrypted .pak files and the default config files aren't helpful. I suspect we'll probably have some kind of modding solution ready in the next few days though. They've had a few failed attempts so far. What are your thoughts on the demo, or have you not played it since you were trying to improve keyboard support?
My thoughts? I think it's unplayable without a gamepad... I haven't looked into remapping but I can't even remember what the "A" button is mapped to "K" and "B" mapped to "L" I haven't even touched gameplay yet. I'd be interested in that AES key tho.
Not touching Epic Games Store. Watched a stream. Gameplay wise it looks like Shenmue (yay!) but the characters still all look like plastic residents of the uncanny valley (boo!). I'll enjoy it for what it is and make a note never to get my hopes up for a Shenmue 4. Looks like a lot of fun either way and look forward to my PS4 copy.
I've played it a couple times, and I gotta say, I'm really happy. It definitely feels like Shenmue. I'm super excited to see where it goes. The fighting system is a little wonky, but so was Shenmue 1 & 2's.
Shenmue 3 went gold this week. This was not confirmed by an official announcement, they just answered a few people who asked via email and Kickstarter. I don't know if they plan to make an announcement but it's at least unofficial confirmation. In other recent news: Game Informer has an article about the game in their November issue, featuring some new screenshots including the character render for Niao Sun. It also shows some images from the post-launch DLC that they are now working on. The backer trial got a patch last week, which reduced the size of the demo by 1.1GB. They removed a bunch of the extra music that should not have been there, as well as assets for Shenhua's house and a few other out of bounds things. I show the differences at the end of this out of bounds video. The patch did actually fix things, MT mode for fighting was fixed because in the original build you were stuck in Automatic which is the mode that lets you map a set of moves you want to use for quick use without having to press the button combos for them. (It doesn't add the keyboard customization, but they already mentioned before the demo released that it was done for the full game.) Yu Suzuki was confirmed as a guest at MAGIC Kyoto next month, on November 6th. There will be some new stuff shown then. It's the last event before release where they will promote the game. (Presumably) Ryo's final character model in the Shenmue 3 demo is modeled after the Shenmue passport model from the first game. This was confirmed by the same guy who has made Ryo mods for a few games in the past based on the passport model. He said he might do a comparison video, but he is 100% convinced that they used the passport model as a reference as the facial structure is nearly identical. Obviously the texturing and poly counts are different, but any differences to the previous game are not the model itself. He even posted images of the Shenmue 3 model using Shenmue Passport textures. (Note that the rest of that thread contains big spoilers) I agree, but after playing the demo several times I realized that one of the things that initially annoyed me was actually a huge improvement over the previous games. I had always felt like training in the previous games did not change fights much at all. It might have made them faster (?) but otherwise you could usually spam 3 kick combos, knock enemy down if they didn't block, repeat. In the Shenmue 3 demo I was initially bothered by how crappy Ryo's attacks felt. You'd hit enemies, even with the tornado kick, and it would barely have any effect. But once you train and start leveling up, the entire flow of a fight changes. Once you start training a move and leveling it up, and also Ryo's attack power, the fights are completely different. Something like Counter Elbow attack can knock over the bookie in that fight once you've trained it enough, whereas at level 1 you never knock him over. The whole progression of training making fights go better is something I never really felt in the previous games, so I like that. My only remaining gripe about the battle system is that the buttons don't seem to have as clear of a meaning as they did in the previous two games. In 1 & 2, Y was dodge, X was punch, A was kick and B was grab. In Shenmue 3, Y / Triangle is jab, L1 is block, and A / Cross is probably kick, but the actual meaning of each button doesn't seem as clear to me. In the previous games, the button combinations made perfect sense, like A + X moves involved both your arms & legs. There seems to be some consistency to the move button combinations in 3, but I'm not sure yet if it's as intuitive as the previous games. I guess I'll have to wait and see once the full game is out and I've had more exposure to how the game teaches you moves. Aside from that, I'm fairly confident after playing the demo many times that it at least lives up to the standards of the previous games and exceeds them most of the time. It retains the detailed level of exploration that the originals were known for. (openable drawers & cabinets) The English voice acting, while still being awkward in places, is definitely higher quality than the previous games. Many of the NPC's in the demo don't sound like one person trying to do crappy voices for multiple characters, they actually sound like real voices. There weren't any game-breaking bugs like the 1&2 ports had at launch last year. Characters still have daily routines that they follow, going home or to eat after nightfall for example. From a standpoint of basic gameplay mechanics, they all seem to be there. I don't know how the general public will react, because the game still gets a lot of "this looks like a PS2 game" even from people who aren't familiar with it and aren't trolling, but outside of the fighting system the demo felt like a perfect evolution of the previous two games into a current engine.
As they previously announced, each region's copies of Shenmue 3 would be shipping to Kickstarter backers from that region. Today Fangamer started shipping the North American version of the game to backers in Canada and anyone outside the US who requested the NA copy. There are reports elsewhere of people getting shipping notifications along with tracking numbers from them. It's expected that they'll start shipping to US backers late next week, but there's no official confirmation of that yet. There was a kickstarter update earlier this week promising more details in a few days. Either way, it looks like many backers will get the game on time or even early. The game releases in 10 days. I don't know if there's much more to discuss, since this thread hasn't been active and this isn't really the best place for news. There have been several new promotional videos dropped over the last 4 weeks and Deep Silver has also started advertising with ads on Facebook and YouTube: The PS4 version uses roughly 28GB of space with the 1.02 patch installed. The PC version is expected to be closer to 45GB but we don't have actual confirmation on the size. (The 100GB requirement they list in requirements exists because you need room for the compressed download to exist on your hard drive while the game is unpacked.) I am still looking forward to this game.
Shit, where'd the time go? I still haven't beaten the first one... I finally started up the HD remaster version and I'm at the point where you do the forklift races. I know you're not really supposed to "rush" through these games but I may have to. >.>
I'm watching with faint anticipation. The original game was unique and fun, but the sandbox genre has evolved since its release. I didn't enjoy Shenmue II enough to complete it back in the day, and I think I loaned my Xbox to my little brother so I'm in no position to go back to it. The only things I remember from the game are "How about a game of Lucky Hit?" and a crate-moving minigame that involved way-too-specific timing to get more money. I want Shenmue III to be good, but I just don't have faith that it will be. I hope I'm proven wrong, though!
