[youtube id=”gY6GzhjPXaE”]

From a bygone era that nearly broke Sega, Shenmue III rose from the ashes to breathe life into a franchise that had one of the more dedicated followings among gaming communities online: once developer Ys Net and creator Yu Suzuki presented the unveiling of the Kickstarter project at E3, it sent ripples felt all over the gaming world. This was, to me, one of the larger announcements of the entire conference and, as such, was the center of a lot of controversy.

Now in it’s third month of development, Suzuki revealed on Shenmue III‘s Kickstarter page that most of the planning for the game has come into its final stages and it’s finally time to start making things real. He opened up about how planning for stages were going and how development for some of the core placeholders for the game were coming along but the big thing that everyone’s been salivating for are these screenshots:

Considering this is all very early work it’s hard to not get excited if you have played any of the previous Shenmue titles at all: they were perhaps the first foray into a truly open and alive world that lived and breathed much the same way the real world does. Of course, back then, this was a very expensive undertaking and if that was them going all out back then I can only imagine, thanks to these small tastes of what’s to come, what this could mean for this day and age.