Shenmue 3 delayed into 2019

Shenmue 3 has been delayed until next year, publisher Deep Silver has announced. It was due to release during the second half of this year, but developer Ys Net will now take extra time to "polish the quality of the game even further, to the high standards it deserves and release the product in the best possible time frame".

Game director Yu Suzuki apologised for the delay in a Kickstarter post, saying: "After much discussion with our partners, Deep Silver, we have concluded that extending the release will allow us to deliver Shenmue III at its best. We promise to use this time to improve the quality of Shenmue III."

It's hardly a huge shock: Ys Net has already pushed it back once, having initially penciled in a late 2017 release date.

It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of $6,333,295 in 2015, which made it the richest video game Kickstarter campaign of all time. We still know very little about it, but back in February we got a bunch of new screenshots showcasing the game's characters.

The first footage of Shenmue 3 arrived in August, and earlier this year the game's producer teased "many other surprises" in 2018, which some took as a hint that we'd get a remaster of the original Shenmue games.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.