Year of the Delayed Release.

A couple weeks ago I had come to the conclusion that my time in World of Warcraft had to come to an end. Whilst I had enjoyed rediscovering the game with a bunch of my close friends I started to become the angsty, late night hardcore raiding nut that I was throughout university and that didn’t sit well with me. Still I can always look back on the last 6 months of my foray back into the World of Warcraft with fond memories but giving it up has left me with a fair bit of free time. Part of it has been dedicated to Geon but of course part of it has gone back into gaming. Knowing there were a few titles scheduled to be released soon I thought I’d check up on them, boy was I surprised.

If you cast your mind back to long ago when the PS3 was still the giddy dream of the dominating powerhouse console that every man, woman and child on earth would want you’d probably be familiar with a game called White Knight Chronicles. It was a beautiful looking game that promised battles between massively scaled foes and showed of an interface that was by all accounts one of the smoothest I’d seen for a game like this. My heart ached as every year afterwards I found that the game was slated for next year until finally it saw a release in Japan on Christmas day last year, I knew it couldn’t be far away. It is now slated for Q1 2010 with the promise of not just a translated release. It seems my heart will ache for another year.

Probably the most devastating delay that I found coming out of my World of Warcraft stupor was that Heavy Rain had also been hit by the delay bug. After my initial gush about this game I was hoping to do a full review of it this year, but it seems that I will have to settle for it at the start of next year. It’s almost as if they want me to go back to WoW, although I really can’t bring myself to do it right now.

These aren’t the only ones to suffer the delay stick with other games like Bioshock 2, Mafia II, Red Dead Redemption, Tiberium all getting the same treatment. Having a dig around to see why all these games were suffering the same fate I couldn’t find a common thread, so it just seems like they’re all dealing with their own problems at the moment.

As a long time gamer I should be used to this kind of thing now. After Blizzard started taking the stance of  “done when it’s done” game delays seem to become the norm with few making their initially scheduled release dates. This isn’t a bad thing as it typically leads to a much more polished game. However it’s never easy to get funding to develop a game and the only way to get attention and therefore dollars is to showcase what you have long before you have a releasable product. The only people who really suffer for this are the anxious customers like myself but I guess it’s better then the alternative.

Maybe I’m just too impatient. I still have a backlog of last year’s blockbuster releases to play through. 🙂