In quite a shocking piece of news, Deep Silver has announced that Shenmue 3 won’t be hitting its intended platforms this year. The most generic of reasons has been given by the publisher, having said that the ‘extra time will be used to polish the quality of the game even further.’ This game was made possible by a Kickstarter campaign that was launched as far back as 2015.
The makers of Shenmue 3 have told us to expect the game’s arrival sometime in 2019. This throws quite a dampener on those who had hoped to jump into the extremely anticipated game this year. But we have at least something to look forward to in the form of remastered versions of the first two Shenmue games which will be arriving this year.
Although this comes as a shock, we’d be lying if we say we weren’t expecting this delay. Like we said, 2015 was when it met its Kickstarter goal, and there have been very few concrete details about its development since then. It had famously met its initial target of $2 million in just under eight hours, making it the fastest Kickstarter campaign to reach that amount.
Also read: Shenmue 1 and 2 headed to PS4, Xbox One and P
What pleased fans the most was that series creator Yu Suzuki is going to act as the writer, director and producer for this game. It is being created using Unreal Engine 4, and will land on the PS4 and PC when it arrives. No news about any other platforms has been announced yet. For now, only a single-player campaign will be present in the game.
With the announcement of the delay, we are left with yet another broad timeframe to look forward to, as the makers have not specified the month in which Shenmue 3 will arrive.