DrCrowTStarwars said:
There were some things that I liked about that game but what I would really like to see is a game like Grad Theft Auto or Mass Effect where I feel like the NPCs in the hub areas exist outside of just giving you missions and selling you stuff.
I don't know, maybe I am alone in this but I feel like if the NPCs were more real the whole world would feel more real and I would be more invested in the game and more likely to buy the next entry on release day.
From a recent article I read about Shenmue:
This was the type of grandness that Suzuki was aiming for—realism in a deeper sense that just visuals. He wanted players to believe that the game was somehow alive.
This way of thinking lead to such innovations as an in-depth weather system that randomly cycled through different forecasts (until a player beat the game, and then they were given the option to play again with the exact weather that occurred in the real-world counterpart on whatever date the game was taking place). If it rained, NPCs would bring out umbrellas; if it snowed, piles of slush would mound up it in the gutters. Throughout the course of a Shenmue day, the cities would alter drastically. If you looked out the window of any building you were in, you could watch the sky outside change colors as day gave way to night. People's shadows would lengthen and rotate based on how late it was—something that, these days, game engines like Quake will calculate automatically, but back then every tiny aspect had to be meticulously programmed by hand, back when shadows were no more than a semi-transparent disk underneath a sprite's feet.
Still, as impressive as the playable environment is, the most profound aspect of the game are the inhabitants themselves. Not only is the world populated by over 300 NPCs, each one was given as much love and detail as any of the main characters. In Prima's Official Strategy Guide, pages upon pages are devoted to the NPCs. Each one has a name, biography, age, address, height, and even a designated blood type, including the stray animals scattered about the towns. If a young gamer were to pick up and play Shenmue today, she would most likely ignore 90% of the sprites, assuming that they were randomly generated from a batch and would likely cease to exist once off screen, as modern games have taught her to do. She would never know that if she were to randomly pick any of them—maybe the old woman sweeping in front of her hair salon, or the business man waiting by the bus stop—and follow them around, she would learn that person's daily schedule—where they lived, what time they woke up, where they worked (if they worked), what ramen joint they would eat at for lunch, who they would socialize with on the weekends, what bar they would frequent on Friday nights. Sadly, she would never know the staggering amount of life teeming inside this game.