Shenmue III’s stiff facial animations are temporary

Earlier this week, Shenmue fans got their first look at in-game footage for Shenmue III. With the game still at least a year away, there were some areas where things lacked polish, in particular, fans noticed the stiff facial expressions of the characters. Fortunately, Yu Suzuki has explained that the trailer isn’t entirely representative of the final game, as there are still areas that need to be “fixed up a bit”.

As Gematsu reports this week, Shenmue III’s lead director and creator, Yu Suzuki explained that character models are currently incomplete. For instance, Shenmua, Ryo and other characters are mostly temporary for now. In particular “Shenhua still has to be fixed up a bit”.

Higher quality character models are being worked on but it seems that the team “was unable to ready them in time for this trailer”. So in order to still have footage to show off at Gamescom this year, the studio settled for lower quality models. With this game still being at least a year away from release, it makes sense that parts of the game have yet to be perfected.

Beyond that, while character models are in the game, facial animations were not present in the footage shown. The studio has facial animations but they were temporarily removed from the build being shown at Gamescom.

All of this follows the announcement that Shenmue III will now be published by Deep Silver worldwide.

KitGuru Says: There were some complaints to be had about the early Shenmue III footage shown earlier this week but the fact is, this game is still very much in development. I’m sure at some point next year, we will see a much improved version of the game.

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