Regarding Game Delays

Originally I had no plans of talking about this, but I woke up this morning with some thoughts. Also I have to go into the office today and I had hoped this would be a relatively fast discussion. There are a lot of different opinions about the slipping of the Cyberpunk 2077 release date. First let me state that after having devoured the Witcher 2 and 3 along with all of the DLC content… I was absolutely looking forward to this game. The folks that are pissed about the game date slipping once again have a right to be, especially considering the track record of this title. Here is a brief run down of the announced release dates so far.

  • April 16th
  • September 17th
  • November 19th
  • December 10th

So I can absolutely see getting pissed about the constantly siding date range. Truthfully I would not be terribly shocked if we see another delay that pushes the game into the first quarter of 2021. There is obviously something going on behind the scenes that we are not entirely privy to that is making the release strained. My pocket theory is that this game originally targeted the 8th Generation consoles, but as time went on the scope of the game outgrew them and it is now something more proper for the 9th Generation of consoles and beyond. However preorders have been taken and commitments have been made to make this thing work on the original Xbox One and the original PlayStation 4… which are significant downgrades to where we are currently in console gaming.

This isn’t even the only high profile delay in the release of a game that is impacting me. I should have been playing the Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft right now as I was happily grinding my way to the next level cap and hunting for gear. I am not however doing that thing and in the case of both games I am more or less fine with that. How many games have been released over the last several years that we have commented could have used another six months to a year of time baking? How many times are games salvaged by a Hail Mary patch or expansion after months of a frustrated fan base? For me at least it is far better to launch later with a game that represents the best ability of that studio than to push something out the door that the fans are going to hate at worst and at best be disillusioned by. You can only do that so many times before you lose the benefit of the doubt.

Let us think back to what should be known as “The Parable of Anthem”, a game that was frankly brilliant in the type of gameplay that it was delivering but released in such an incomplete state that I legitimately don’t know anyone still playing it. Even the most hardcore of Anthem Zealots have long since set the game aside and moved on to greener pastures. I for one loved a lot of what was there from the moment to moment gameplay and the story being told… but the game as it released felt like the opening chapter of something larger and not a finished product. No one has really nailed the games as a service model if I am going to be completely honest about it. You need to hit the ground running with four or five rapid releases waiting in the wings in order to keep the player base engaged.

Anthem struggled from a lack of content on all levels. There weren’t enough activities to complete and there wasn’t enough different ways to obtain gear. The end result was that they just made it damned near impossible to get the highest rewards or that when you did get them they were mostly useless. I am deeply concerned by the level of redesign that is happening as they work on Anthem 2.0, because for me… the fundamentals were fairly strong. Significant work was needed on the itemization system and other than that… they just needed about five times the content that they launched with and a pipeline of future updates to keep the players going. If they had another year or two of development time I think Anthem would have launched as a highly successful product, and instead it is a game that becomes the horror story that we apply to every single launch since.

Another game that launched in a completely incomplete state was Fallout 76. Effectively this game was a tech demo that legitimately was built for fun within Bethesda… that got “productized” and felt just about as polished as that sounds. While subsequent content releases and patches have turned this into an extremely enjoyable experience, the damage is done. Bethesda burned players early and many will not be likely to ever return to the experience, even though they have already spent the cost of entry. The old adage of only getting one chance to make a first impression is true. You will forever be judged by the first moments of gameplay that you give your players and if that is a buggy mess then your game will always be broken and horrible in their eyes.

No Man’s Sky for example should be heralded as the comeback story that all games deserve. The amount of love and care that has gone into the later phases of this game is significant. The game that exists today resembles almost nothing of the game that launched back in 2016. To the credit of Hello Games, every single one of these broad content updates has been delivered to the players completely free. All one has to do is patch the game up and they can be playing this revolutionary experience, but for many players that is still a bridge too far. There are folks that hold a grudge about this game and the fact that it did not deliver on the promises on day one and nothing that this studio can do will ever fix that core problem. Do I think that stance is unrealistic? Absolutely, but it doesn’t change the fact that bridges were burned that can never be mended.

Basically I am always going to be fine with a video game delay because the alternative is so much worse. I often wonder what my beloved Destiny would have been like had they the time to really have built the franchise into what it could have been from day one. It took until The Taken King expansion to turn Destiny 1 into the game that we have come to cherish, and the same story played out with Destiny 2 and The Forsaken turning a mess of a launch into an exceptionally enjoyable experience. While I don’t love the direction that the game has gone in recently with season fatigue and expiring content, the game that came out of the two rough starts has been something I have fallen in love with. Yet there will always be a group of players that were burnt by the releases not being finished at launch and will likely never give Destiny another chance.

Essentially I am fine with these game delays pending it actually improves the product that is being released. If you delay a game and still release a buggy and unfinished mess, then I guess there is nothing I can say to stop the avalanche of anger that will be dropped upon that studio. I am hoping that Cyberpunk 2077 will truly be game of the year material and I am hoping that the Shadowlands expansion ranks high on my list of favorites. I have to say that in both cases I am a little concerned, and I hope the delays give both studios the time to apply that layer of polish so we can just boot that game up and lose ourselves in the experience. This is a year when escapism is a critical survival mechanism, so please stick that landing.

2 thoughts on “Regarding Game Delays”

  1. While I agree that a delay to get the game into the best state for launch is wise – in theory – I strongly suspect that in practice if most companies were to take an extra six months or a year, what we’d get at the end of that time would be the same unfinished product. only even more sprawling than before. Very few companies seem to take the time to polish what they have – they seem to take it to to make changes to the fundemental structure or to add yet more systems and features they don’t have the capacity to complete.

    At the moment there’s a lot of player symapthy with the idea of delaying launches but that’s reliant on the games actually feeling polished and complete when they finally do go live. If Shadowlands or Cyberpunk 2077 are still judged to be buggy and unfinished after all the delay, I would expect sympathy to evaporate for any future delays by other companies.

    What I’d really like to see, rather than a change in the release cadence, is a change of atitude among consumers, whereby people don’t expect too much and instead react just as you do, by seeing the potential and having the patience to wait for it to be fulfilled. Sadly, I don’t see that happening, either.

  2. My main worry with Cyberpunk is not so much about the delay but about how much… shift?… there has been in content and features combined with the overall problem of bringing a 1980s game with a lot of social commentary baked into that decade to a modern audience. There are a lot of issues here; as we have seen with the complaints about asian fetishism in the game. Something that made perfect sense in the 80’s (when we were sure, as futurists, that Japan was going to come to dominate the world) just doesn’t track as well today. Combine that with the typical promise the sky game mechanics that slowly dwindle to… nothing ground breaking… at launch and we have a recipe for disaster. I’m just worried the pushing back of the game is tied into that.

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