This is incredibly said news.
Here I was replaying Vampyr trying to get a “bad” ending (which I recommend) and I was thinking how much cooler that game would be if it was injected with anime. “Hey”, I thought, “not to worry, we’re merely several months away from Code Vein, then I can get my fix”. And then Namco Bandai had to go ahead and crush my dreams.
Code Vein’s release has been pushed into 2019. What’s more, it looks like it’s being heavily revised in the process and Namco stated that they will not be showing anything new at GamesCon 2018. They cite “desire to exceed player expectations” as a reason for this decision.
Code Vein has received an enormous amount of positive feedback from eager fans who have received hands-on time with in-development versions of the game over the past nine months. Armed with knowledge of how well the game has already been received, we made the decision to postpone the release of Code Vein to further refine its gameplay in an effort to exceed the expectations fans already have of the title. It was a difficult decision to make, but we feel it is the correct one.
This sounds like a very… Odd rationale. What we’ve seen thus far showed the game to be pretty playable and I don’t think I remember a single developer ever citing positive feedback for the reason to push back a release of something. If the players who had it seemed impressed then… What’s the problem exactly?
I want to stay positive, but this just stinks of double-talk. Nobody postpones the launch of a game because people like it and nobody undertakes work so extensive that no new material can be shown at the second biggest gaming convention there is. These kinds of scenarios usually follow a sudden shift in management and rarely end well.
What happened Namco?