The First Quarter of 2020 Is Looking Cleaner for Video Game Releases
Video game releases for the first quarter of 2020 looked like a bloodbath in the making one week ago. The period was packed with titles of the AAA and niche varieties, enough to put the fall season we’re currently in to shame. A few games originally intended to arrive in this period were delayed until early next year to receive extra polish. It’s far, far from the first time this has happened, but was enough to show how the final big year of software releases for current-generation gaming consoles would start with a bang.
Not anymore. There was always potential for titles intended for early next year to also be delayed, but who could have guessed that three big ones would be pushed back? And that all the delays would be announced on the same day, within hours of each other? No one, of course, perhaps outside a select few people with inside info. This is happened on Thursday, which could have also been referred to as “Delay Day” or “Thursdelay Day.” I won’t torture you with any further names.
This started with news that The Last of Us Part II has been delayed from February 20th to May 29th, just over a three-month delay. AAA games get delayed all the time, and the last big Naughty Dog release, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, received several of them — the biggest of which occurred due to massive staff departures and story rewrites. But TLOU Part II’s is a surprise because it just received a date a month ago, which Sony made a big deal out of by announcing it though a trailer and a preview event for the press.
Director Neil Druckmann explained in the PlayStation Blog post that the team realized in the last few weeks that they wouldn’t be able to deliver the proper level of polish they felt the game needed before its release. So, they delayed it instead of having to “compromise parts of the game.” It’s better to release a complete product that represents the best of a developers’ abilities than one with unpolished aspects that could perhaps be patched down the line. There’s speculation from some fans thinking this is being done to implement multiplayer, but unless a good portion of it was completed before scrapping plans, three months isn’t enough time for that.
Ubisoft also announced through a statement from CEO Yves Guillemot that Gods and Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Watch Dogs Legion have all been delayed until the next fiscal year, which begins on April 1st, 2020. Quarantine was presumably planned for the first quarter, though it hadn’t previously received a release date, but the other two games will leave significant gaps in the lineup early next year.
It’s no surprise that Gods and Monsters has been delayed from its original February 25th release date. Ubisoft has yet to show a second of gameplay, despite announcing it at their E3 2019 conference over four months ago. The game is being developed by the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey team, and will reportedly take inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Watch Dogs Legion’s delay from March 6th is the bigger surprise, since we’ve actually seen significant portions of it. But this isn’t an entirely surprising, since, you know, delays never are. They happen.
Quarantine is now coming at an unspecified time in the next fiscal year, while both Gods and Monsters and Legion are due in the second half of 2020, making the delays quite lengthy. They’ll be joined by two other Ubisoft AAA games in the next fiscal year, one of which is likely a new Assassin’s Creed game. Ubisoft clarified that one of them is not Skull & Bones, which is now due in fiscal year after the next one. Either it’s massively in development hell, or it’s being pushed back until next-generation consoles arrive — or both.
The first quarter will actually be manageable for AAA releases now, with the biggest release being Final Fantasy VII Remake. (I’m not saying any more about it so as not to jinx it.) It will also have Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, both of which were originally planned for this fall season, but were delayed to this quarter. They also both release on March 20th, though the Switch version of Eternal is now coming at a later date so both games don’t release on Switch simultaneously. There will also be comparatively smaller games like Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, Granblue Fantasy: Versus, and potentially Persona 5 Royal. It’s not like the period will be empty.
The delays should mean good things for the quality of these titles, and the developers will have the benefit of fixing these up without resorting to crunch time — something that’s been a big issue within Naughty Dog. There’s little to be disappointed about here, and even those who were seriously looking forward to the games above (especially TLOU Part II) are over it thanks to the number of software choices that still exist. Let’s hope those don’t get delayed too.
Oh crap, I didn’t jinx anything there, right?
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
