Sega Announces Shenmue Online

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for covering the news that Sega has announced Shenmue Online, a PC MMORPG, "being co-developed and co-published by Sega and Korean firm JC Entertainment", as part of "its new plans to enter the Chinese online gaming market." JC Entertainment are the Korean-based makers of Rush Online (formerly Priest) and the popular-in-Asia Redmoon, and the press release on Shenmue-Online.com states the game, part of the sometimes adored Dreamcast/Xbox franchise, will be a "MMO Action RPG in which tens of thousands of players will participate in the virtual world of Shenmue staged in China including Hong Kong in 1980's. Players, acting as militants, will use mysterious powers, kung-fu, Chinese weapons and Qigong in real-time fight-action."

Sailors?

[jwriney]

As long as I can look for sailors.

Do you know where I can find sailors?

--riney

Re:Sailors?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about raising kittens? Can I do that in this game as well? See this [penny-arcade.com].

The Shenmue Experience

[raygundan]

I have never laughed so hard. The translation was "technically accurate" but got the nuance all wrong, and made it look like you were on an urgent hunt for some oceangoing man-love.

Toss in raising a kitten, the interminable forklift job, great graphics, bizarrely detailed convenience stores (look! I can buy sardines!), and a great realtime fight system-- and you have the love-it/hate-it game that is Shenmue. Parts of it were brilliant, and parts of it were bad enough to make grown men call out for sailors.

Interminable Forklift

[Databass]

It becomes even more interminable if you take this back route through an alley on, I think, Day 3. If you do that, you miss the LineDef that triggers one of the scripted fights and...

Well actually, you go into this weird "Groundhog's Day" loop where you can work the job again and again, getting pay increases each repeated day until you hit the max rate. That's actually making enough money to buy the plane ticket you're not supposed to be able to afford in reasonable time. I've been meaning to test that.

Th

Re:Sailors?

[Alkaiser]

I don't care about you and your hunt for sailors...so long as you STAY THE HELL OFF THE FORKLIFT RACETRACK!

Re:Sailors?

[qbushido]

As long as you can remember that day, when it snowed and the black car. Seriously though, I did like this game for about 4 hours, after that I was pretty much done with it.

Re:Sailors?

[TechniMyoko]

What about the nuclear wessles?

Oh god...

[Anonymous Coward]

...please Mr. Suzuki, FINISH the single-player story first! I'm in the minority that LOVED Shenmue, but I want to see it ended properly before branching out into something new like this...

*cries, but I'll still buy it*

Great idea

[Pluvius]

Even Miyamoto couldn't have thought up the concept of putting together the boringness of Shenmue with the tedium of MMORPGs. This will be a legendary game if the universe doesn't implode from the combination.

Rob

Two words spring to mind...

[wandazulu]

Forklift races.

Leveling up

[Craig Maloney]

Hmmm... maybe after 5 weeks of playing, players will have enough skill to load a gun and play a tape.

i want the single player game, AND....

[Allison Geode]

while i want mr. suzuki to finish the single player game first, what i'd like even more is if it had the first two games ported to whatever system he puts the whole thing out on as well.. i was so upset after i found out that shenmue wouldn't be finishing on the dreamcast that I sold my copy of it and deleted my save, since i couldn't carry my 'stuff' over... and the collectible stuff was one of the funnest parts of the game. (ok, they remedied that at the beginning of shenmue2 by having all my crap stol

Re:i want the single player game, AND....

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I got the Euro import of Shenmue 2 for the Dreamcast. I copied my save game to my computer where there was a program that would alter the region bit in the file, then uploaded it back to my memory card. Then I was able to have part two make use of my old save.

Sure you get your bag stolen at the begining of the second part, but you get it back. All that is really missing is your cash. All your collectables are still there. Plus you get the moves scroll filled in a bit more.

I was really fearing that th

Re:i want the single player game, AND....

[RevAaron]

Ugh. I thought I was the only one. I just bought the original Shenmue for my DC (bought it for emulation) and the voice acting in this came... atrotious.

Re:i want the single player game, AND....

[PhotoBoy]

Bizarrely someone has ripped the English voice work out of the X-Box version and somehow hacked it into the DC version of Shenmue II, I've seen it floating around on Suprnova but there weren't any sources so I couldn't give it a test drive.

I personally would have liked a version of Shenmue I with the Japanese voices and English subtitles but as far as I know that doesn't exist.

Sega online game? Never again

[lightspawn]

Remember Alien Front Online, the game that went offline less than 10 months after it was launched because the server's IP address was hard-coded into the client?

Remember Phantasy Star Online, which was so buggy it allowed malicious players to delete other people's characters, didn't save anything on the server side, and disabled local backups?

Remember how Sega pretty much ignored the bugs, choosing not to inform customers about them, and not to update the client?

Remember Sega first announcing its online Dreamcast games would require a subscription (online play was free when you bought them), then terminating support altogether? It's a wonder no class action lawsuit was brought against the company.

I'll never pay for an online Sega game again, and if I play one for free, it will be a game that relies on short-term fun, not long-term character building.

I learned my lesson - and so have many one-time Sega fans.

Re:Sega online game? Never again

[MBraynard]

In fairness, their sports games have done well lately for online as has Sega GT Online. However, you may want to credit that to XBL.

Re:Sega online game? Never again

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Sega GT Online is doing well? I got it the day it came out. Played it once, and never put it in my Xbox again. It was just Sega GT 2002 with an online componet (poorly) grafted on. I had my fill of Xbox Sega GT a month after I got that game too.

Now Sega GT for the Dreamcast. There was a fun game. They took all my favorite features out of the game for the 2002 version.

Bets?

[supabeast!]

Anyone else want to do a pool on when this game gets cancelled? Because there's no way that even the morons at Sega will be stupid enough to actually launch this shit.

Re:Bets?

[GamingEngineer]

Considering that there aren't a huge number of Shenmue fans to begin with (maybe 11 of us, last I checked) I'm surprised they feel that a Shenmue MMORPG would bring them more revenue than continuing the series with Shenmue 3.

Re:Bets?

[supabeast!]

Games like Shenmue make me wonder where RPG designers got the idea that players wanted games with so much freedom that players don't have to be presented with much of a plot, and should instead just work everything out themselves. I mean, don't they realize that if we wanted a game to be like real life, we would just go outside?

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

This is the worst thing I've heard all year, and we've still got some months left to go. Where the hell is Shenmue 3?

Qigong?

[Mighty LoPan]

Screw Qigong. I'm going to get myself a forklift and Fung Shui the crap out of Hong Kong with many many crates.

Qigong and kung-fu

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> and Qigong

I thought he got killed by Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace.