Shenmue II Beta Aberdeen

[BlueMue]

This may be a very old discovery but there's no talk about it to be found. I personally learned about it when I found a save made by @LanDC on the Dream Explorer Disc. That was maybe 7-8 years ago and I haven't looked at it since.


I'm not entirely sure if this is a testing area or really just a beta map. It seems a lot like the latter, with how the signs point to what should be there.
Very interesting to see how close to the final the general layout already is and how easy it is to recognize things. The placement of shops and such is a whole different thing though. Thanks to @Switch who once again did a fantastic job on translating the signs, it is for the first time easy for everyone to see what goes where.
The convenience store inside Beverly Hills Wharf sure is a big surprise and the area apparently did get cut down quite a bit during developement.

 

[Miles Prower]

Heh, I remember fooling around with this back in the day. I guess it figures that a lot of BHW was cut out/trimmed down, the final area certainly has that feel to it - quite large but nothing really much going on or to do.

 

[Mattis]

Wow, I have never seen this one before. It reminds me of the test levels we used to make when I worked in game development.

 

[Robfozz]

Beta/prerelease content is a massive hobby of mine so this is awesome to see. I played on this map myself and spent easily a couple hours exploring because its so damn big. You can actually clip passed a lot of invisible walls by repeatedly taking 1 step forward over and over.

I think both Shenmue games need a more extensive datamine and file dump because there's clearly a lot of unused/early assets in these games. If anyone has documentation onhand I emplore you add it to tcrf.net/Shenmue so we have a place to keep it organized (not an ad for TCRF, its just a great resource for this stuff)