I''d like to kno what you guys think of the design in Shenmue for Sega Dreamcast. I was pretty dissappointed. The game is graphically breathtaking, and the story is not bad, but the interaction is limited, at best, and the gameplay that is there, is simply week. A good part of the game is just moving around town following clues. The clues are easy to follow, but the pattern gets mundane quickly: Ask person ''n'' about object ''A'' person ''n'' replies, "I don''t know anything about object ''A'', but ask person ''n+1'' they might know something." Repeat this until you''re at person ''n+5'', then the clue about object ''A'' is finally revealed, and you start asking about object ''B''. It was a lot like watching a movie, but I had to walk the hero from one minor character to the next, perhaps only to justify the existance of the controller in my hand. Yeah, there''s some ''Dragon''s Lair'' type events (these absolutely do NOT present any gameplay value), and there''s a ''Final Fight'' section every now and then. This game has gotten some high marks, (daily radar, next gen), and I think Sega has a great talent for developing original games, but this is a poor game. What do you folks think?

This is only the first chapter, I think the designer was afraid of loosing too many people by the time based events, and ever changing world.

Some might be stressed thinking they will lose if some date came.

So gameplay was downgraded because of this.
As for the gfx, they can have been a little best.
(I know well the DC Hardware, especially the PowerVR chip)

Nothing is really new, I designed something similar two or maybe more years ago.
The idea was floating around and finally a game designer had the chance to use it.

I like the game it''s interesting.
It allow me to see my design flows I must avoid in my game

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

The question is: How can you produce a game that should be like real life and still make it simple enough for a typical console game...

I think the game has sometimes this Blade Runner feeling, a game I hate to death ;-) Cool and realistic feeling, but the gameplay of Myst.

After all, I think Shen Mue is a pretty nice game

Tim

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I thought Shenmue was fun, but it did have some big flaws such as the ones you mentioned. The game was impossible to lose, even if you got beat up or killed or whatever- it started you from just before you failed, with no consequences. There was no interaction that wasn''t placed there in the story, the only thing that made the world seem persistent was the fact that the npcs moved around in relation to what time it was, you had a curfew, and got an allowance every day. It seperated the player too much from the character; it made it seem like you were just turning the crank that kept the movie rolling by making you do the character''s walking for him.
But other than that it was good as far as adventure games go.
It did have good graphics, which is something adventure games are usually at the forefront of. It had an interesting story, the fighting was fun, and the forklift job thing was pretty cool.

Nothing is difficult, only the mind makes it so.

In my opinion Shenmue is ground breaking game when we talk about adventure games. It has still the same problems as lucasarts games had, object based puzzles, but even more annoying dialog-based ''not-so-puzzle-but-more-plain'' problems. But this "go to n, go to n+1, go to n+2" is quite nice, since you don''t have to go trough every character if you just think for a bit about the clues you have, since in many points you can go straigh to person who you need to see IF you just get an idea where he is, and THIS ISN''T POSSIBLE in Lucasarts / Sierra games, since they are extremely linear. And when we think about this, Shenmue really shines by being quite well "non-linear", even though player cannot change the plot too much =)

Anyway, I was dissapointed when I found out that the game was two-part game, but shortly I understood the fact: I HAVE TO GET THE SECOND PART! =D

-Paladin

You can''t fault Shenume for being an interactive movie--with all the connotations that go with that phrase--because that''s what the designer intended. As another poster mentioned, it is extremely difficult to come up with a game that lets you perform all sorts of real life actions (more than running, shooting and jumping) while maintaining some sort of reasonably understandable control scheme.

Shenmue is beautful to watch and an interesting design experiment, but my gut feeling is that the high cost of production more than outweighs the results. Costs were supposedly in excess of 20 million US dollars and involved a team of over 200 people. Was it worth it? Maybe, but I''d rather not see game development head in that direction.