In a turn of events that should surprise nobody, but is still disappointing nonetheless, Deep Silver has announced that Shenmue 3’s release window has been pushed back to 2019.

As stated before, this is hardly surprising. Shenmue 3, as you might recall, started off as a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign back during E3 2015 and while the prospect of a threequel for Yu Suzuki’s beloved series is exciting, there’s no denying that Kickstarter projects often leave participants with broken dreams and lighter wallets. That isn’t the say the same will happen here, especially with it shattering Kickstarter records, but we haven’t seen a great deal related to the game, so it was pretty easy to see a delay of this nature coming.

In any event, here is the official statement from publisher Deep Silver:

“Deep Silver today announce that their upcoming release Shenmue III has been moved and will now release in 2019.”

“The extra time will be used to polish the quality of the game even further, to the high standards it deserves and release the product in the best possible timeframe.”

In addition, Yu Suzuki issued a statement to fans on the game’s Kickstarter page:

“To all of our backers, we are very sorry for the delay. 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.”

“We cannot thank you enough for your enduring support.”

Even if we did see the delay coming from a mile away, it’s still a disappointing turn of events. But hopefully the team will be able to use this extra time to meet both their standards and the expectations of its fans.

That said, it’s not all bad: Sega announced last month that HD versions of Shenmue I and II are due out for modern consoles in 2018, so that should give us some time to get caught up before Shenmue 3 arrives.

Shenmue 3 is due out for the PlayStation 4 and PC in 2019.