The fans who desperately need to find some sailors will have to wait a little longer for their seaman, as Shenmue III has delayed until November.
The official Shenmue III Kickstarter page has been updated with a new post by Yu Suzuki and Deep Silver, which explains that the game will no longer be hitting its August 27 release date and has now been pushed back to November 19. The post states that the delay is due to the game needing a little more fine-tuning and that it's necessary for the game to be as good as it can be.
Shenmue III has been delayed several times since it reached its crowdfunding goal. The original release date for Shenmue III was December 2017, though most believed that was a tentative date at best. The game was then pushed back to the latter half of 2018, as the developers believed that Shenmue III had expanded beyond their original vision and they needed more time to realize it.
The game was delayed once more to 2019, with a brief comment on the Deep Silver website stating that the game needed more time in order to be further polished and brought up to the best standard it could be.
Shenmue III has made over seven million dollars on crowdfunding platforms and has received further support from both Deep Silver and Sony, so the game has more than enough cash to see its development through to the end. The fans of Shenmue III shouldn't be worried about the game being canceled, as the delay is a relatively small one compared to the earlier delays.
The Shenmue fans who have waited nearly twenty years for a new installment will likely be frustrated by this delay, but they can stand to wait a few more months for the sake of the game being more polished at launch. It's times like this where the famous Shigeru Miyamoto quote is in order - "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."
Shenmue III will now be released for the PlayStation 4 and Windows on November 19, 2019.