Yu Suzuki is hard at work in creating Shenmue 3, which shattered Kickstarter records last year by raising over $6 million for the game's development. Since then, the developer continues to keep backers and gamers up to date on the title's progress.
Over the weekend, Suzuki revealed new screen shots from the game at the Monaco Anime Game International Conferences (Magic), and then posted those images online for Shenmue 3's Kickstarter backers.
These new images show some of the settings players will see during gameplay, but the developer still noted that everything about Shenmue 3 is still a "work in progress."
Magic also saw some new footage from the game revealed, too:
Suzuki originally announced that he had rights from Sega to create a third game in the franchise at 2015's E3 conference. In just eight hours, a Kickstarter campaign to fund the game met its target of $2 million and eventually took in over $6 million, which made it the most-funded video game in Kickstarter history.
However, in the gaming industry, $6 million isn't as much as it sounds, especially for such a highly-ambitious RPG for both PC and consoles.
"Kickstarter's not the only source of money," said Suzuki to Eurogamer. "There's also funding from Sony and Shibuya Productions. Before we started Kickstarter, we had goals set around the budget — so if we only got $6 million, we'd create Shenmue 3 based upon what we could do with that $6 million. We're still trying to gather funds. Obviously, the more money we have the more we can do. Even if we don't get as much budget as the previous games, we'll still make this game."
In September, Suzuki launched a secondary campaign for fans to donate funds to the game via PayPal. For $60 (the average price of most AAA video game titles), players can donate and receive a physical copy of the game in an exclusive case. However, a donation of just $29 gets a digital copy of the game for those who just want to play it.
Shenmue 3 won't get a release until December 2017, meaning that there's still plenty of time to become part of its development.
