Would gaming today be the same without Shenmue?

After beating the Last of US about 2 or 3 hours ago. I'm kind of pondering if something like this game would have been possible if not for Shenmue. Granted Ryo and Shenhua are still in that Cave waiting to rain Vengance down up on the Chi You Min. The game was never considered a Success either. Yet I play A game like the Last of Us, Or Assassin's Creed, Even GTA and other open world games and ponder how much of these games and how they pan out they owe to Shenmue.

So I'll just simplify my question then discuss. Could a Game like the Last of US, or Assassin's Creed, Exist if Shenmue had not existed?

 

I'm not sure they would exist in the same form as they do now. Shenmue was one of the first games that had a fantastic story with good gameplay and action (that wasn't an RPG). I think what really was the game's biggest contribution was the level of interactivity with a world, something which some games (I haven't played the Last of Us or the AC series) still haven't accomplished.

In short, they still probably would have existed, but as more straightforward action games.

Also the QTE probably wouldn't exist.

 

Well the QTE existed long before Shenmue, lest we forget Dragon's Lair

 

You got me there, the Sega CD interactive movie games were full of them.

 

I've never played Shenmue. I've seen only snippets of footage and it didn't make me want to play it. I hear lots of people that like Shenmue praising it like it's the second coming. The idea that it was so pivotal is just silly. Some games do influence others for sure. But it certainly doesn't work that way. Shenmue was a DreamCast game and yet you mention all these current generation games. There are so many games between that time, so aren't those due credit as well? But I figure this is just a thread to go on about how Shenmue is your favorite game, at the moment.

 

Yes, it just happened to be Shenmue. If Shenmue was scrapped after the first tests on Saturn, eventually another game studio would have tried the same.
Also i think GTA III is the one to blame for more sandbox games.

 

Ugh, remember in the mid to late PS2/Xbox era, where EVERYONE made everything a sandbox game?

Stupid GTAIII

 

x

 

Those were not just Sega CD interactive movie games, since most of them are cheaply digitized conversions of older Laser Disc interactive movie games, existed way before the Sega CD and in a much higher visual quality.

 

Actually no, I haven't played either Shenmue or Shenmue II for close to 10 years. But I see it's influence everywhere.

 

I know, I know, most of them also got ported to the 3DO and CDi, I've just always associated them with the Sega CD. I mean, Dragon's Lair looks fantastic on the laserdisc, but the CD format at the time couldn't handle it.

 

Everyone is still making sandbox games. Hell, every game is a sandbox game anymore. Ubisoft just said they wanted to make something like three sandbox games a year. Before long we'll have sandbox 2D shooters.


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Oh wait, Armada on Dreamcast. Actually, that was a pretty cool game.

 

Yup.

Pretty stupid thought process in my opinion. Kinda the same as saying if oranges hadn't evolved into being would Apples still exist today?

While I understand that influences do ripple through every industry I think you're pinning too much responsibility on Shenmue. It didn't really do anything groundbreaking or unique, the marketing, execution and somewhat cult following that appeared sometime after the demise of the Dreamcast simply fooled you into thinking it did.

In reality it was just a culmination of many existing ideas and somebody else would have put those pieces together in some capacity anyway.

 

Unless you can provide an example...

WRONG

 

This is easy to say and I feel like I instinctually agree, but without concrete examples (other titles), this thread will continue to go in circles.

For example, I'm trying to think of games that came before Shenmue that combines all of these elements into a persistent world:
-Day & Night (yes, Castlevania III did this)
-Weather (kinda related to Day & Night, but it is different)
-Interactive things that have nothing to do with the main quest (vending machines, arcade games, etc) - I know action/adventure games (like beavis & butt-head) and RPGs have used this)
-NPCs that were on a schedule
-Fully voiced NPCs (I really think this was the first game to use this at the time).

Maybe some of these ideas weren't new, but certainly no game offered all of this in an open world/action/adventure/genre bending game. There's something to be said for Suzuki and Shenmue for adding all of this together. After all, a skateboard is "just" a surfboard with wheels, right? And snowboard is a skateboard without wheels...

You can feel the influence of Shenmue in games like GTAIII and Devil May Cry* which would go on to influence tons of games in their own right.

p.s.: I would say QTE is a very lazy game mechanic & having controller buttons flash on the screen really takes you out of the game world.

*I know DMC also owes a lot to Resident Evil...

 

Only one person on another board I brought this up could cite a game from the same timeframe as just as influential as Shenmue and that person Said Metal Gear Solid. And since Resident Evil is also cited above YES I think RE did influence alot of games before the series itself became a bastardized shadow of it's former self.

 

The only game I could say it try to take the Shenmue place was Yakuza but never at the quality of Shenmue. The games of today most of them are just sandbox of Shenmue, GTA, metal gear and Resident evil, sadly the RE pass from an horror survival to a cheap 3rd person shooter.
Many people talk about The Last of us, that game for me is just another post apocalyptic world zombi game and gameplay like the other mention before.

 

Then you totally missed the point of the Last of us. It flew way over your head then smacked you. It's not a Zombie game not even close to a zombie game. It's a Story of Redemption closer to a Western than a Zombie anything. In much the same way Shenmue was about Revenge but seemed to be leaning towards something bigger and we never found out what that was.

 

All valid points but how can you be sure it was a case of people needing to see Shenmue to be inspired or just the hardware limitations holding back those developers with similar ideas?

I won't lie, Shenmue is impressive and I love some of the little details but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The topic question is "would gaming be the same today without Shenmue?" Yes. Yes it would, not many ideas in this world are unique and if we were living now sans Shenmue, somebody somewhere would have come up with all of those elements based on the hardware capabilities available alone.

How can I be certain of this? Imagination. As a kid friends and I would dream up games where you could do mad stuff, heck even my dad once said in the mid-nineties he'd love to see a game where you could just wander around in a realistic world and buy food and stuff. If it can be imagined and the tools are available it will be done.

There is nothing in Shemmue that would not have been covered by now and many things had already been done.

If we're going to be really pedantic about it I guess you could argue that gaming would not be exactly the same due to the butterfly effect and all of the time changing shit but you get my drift.

 

This is like saying that if the printing press were not developed when it was, eventually someone would've figured it out. For one thing, we really don't know what the world would be like without Shenmue, so this is all merely speculation. The fact that you're "certain" of this shows how little thought you've actually put into it. Secondly, the more important thing to note here is that Shenmue was extremely influential on many games that came afterwards. True, there are few games that tried to directly mimic what Shenmue did, but there are many games that took some of Shenmue's concepts to heart and applied them in different ways.

Crazy Taxi is another SEGA game that was also very influential on the open world genre. It came out at roughly the same time as Shenmue (actually a few months before, I think), so it deserves some credit too. The driving mechanics of GTA III were obviously influenced by Crazy Taxi.