You’re going to have to wait a bit before playing the hotly-anticipated role-playing game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Once planned for a late 2014 release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, it will now be out in February of next year.
The game simply wasn’t going to be good enough if it came out this year, according to the heads of Witcher development studio CD Projekt. Here’s an open letter from the men in charge:
Release Date of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — An Open Letter
Ever since we started working on the third instalment in The Witcher franchise, it has been our aim to produce a title that would take our 11 years of experience in creating RPGS and distill them into a quintessence, into a game that would effectively crown those years. At the same time, we have wanted The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to expand creative boundaries, set new benchmarks, develop the genre as a whole. Ultimately, you, the players, must get an unforgettable adventure to experience in a vast, open world — and that’s most important. We’ve created a story that flows naturally, cinematically, rendered it in amazing sound and visuals, while preserving full freedom of choice — all for you. We knew this to be an ambitious plan, but believed we could achieve it by bringing together our team with its creative energies and current gaming platforms with their technical capabilities. A project this vast and complex would inevitably require special care in its final stages, manual fine-tuning of many details, thorough testing time and again.
We recently reexamined what we had achieved thus far, and faced a choice about the game’s final release date. The decision we made was difficult, thoroughly considered, and ultimately clear and obvious. We could have released the game towards the end of this year as we had initially planned. Yet we concluded that a few additional months will let us achieve the quality that will satisfy us, the quality gamers expect from us. Consequently, we have set the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for February 2015.
Dear gamers – we know many of you would have liked to play The Witcher 3 sooner, as soon as possible, even. We’re sorry to make you wait longer than you, or we, initially assumed you would. At the same time, we believe the game will prove to be worth the wait and meet the expectations you have of us. We believe The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be an exceptional RPG, one of the best, providing many hours of wonderful entertainment.
Dear shareholders — we are aware of the responsibility that rests with us and thank you for the trust you have granted us thus far. We firmly believe that quality — more than any other factor — determines a game’s success, and that the decision we have made is thus equally valid in business terms.
The Board of CD PROJEKT S.A.
Adam Kiciński, Martcin Iwiński, Piotr Nielubowicz, Adam Badowski, Michael Nowakowski
Time to fire up the old Miyamoto quote, everyone:
Comments
19 responses to “The Witcher 3 Delayed Until February 2015”
Fair enough, but I still can’t hide my disappointment…..
I’m with you dude. But at the same time I believe in the integrity of this developer and know that they’re delaying it for the right reasons.
I agree, in fact I wish more developers wouldn’t be scared to delay their releases to make sure the game is fully complete and tested and optimized etc.
Though I have a feeling the ‘deadline, must be out by this date, no ifs or buts’ is set more often by the publisher than the developer.
You only get one chance at a game release, so why not make it as good as possible, even if it means a couple of months delay, rather than relying on post-release patches to fix glaring problems. (glances surreptitiously at Rome 2 and its current log of 10 post release patches, and still numerous glaring problems)
Day one patches are to me crazy. If there is a bug/problem so critical that it needs patching before you can even play the game once, then I can’t see how it could have made it though a proper testing environment.
I’m disappointed, sure, but CDProjekt has shown from their history that they can make excellent games so I know it will be worth the wait to have the game as bug-free and complete as possible on release.
Personally I would much rather wait a couple more months before getting a game (any game), than getting it earlier and having numerous issues for a couple of months until the problems are fixed.
Totally agree dude.
I wish Dice had delayed BF4 for 6 months, but I would bet good money to say EA forced them to have a launch title. I’m dissapointed, but not angry. I’d rather a delayed good game than a rushed bad game, 100 percent of the time.
Thats depressing. Not the delay part the fact that I immediately thought 2015 was a 1-2 year delay only to realise that Feb 2015 is now 11 months away. Where does the time go etc.
fine by me. plenty of games coming out this year that have my interest to get through in the next 12 months
I wonder if this pushes Cyberpunk back as well? IIRC they were aiming to release it in 2015
Reading this, it’s almost as if they don’t care about getting to market before this year’s edition of Call Of Duty. Are these people crazy?!?
Different target audience I guess. I’d be more inclined to say the COD developers should be wary of Bungie’s Destiny.
Good. Hopefully we have more info on the Intel Broadwell by then, that way I know whether to upgrade to a i7 Haswell or Broadwell for my planned “Witcher 3 is coming PC upgrade”.
This will give me time to finish Witcher 2. And start Witcher 2.
2 is fine, its just the first game. Can’t get over that meh combat in 1
Yeah, I started 1 and I liked the ideas/design/exploration but I found it frustrating and dull after a few hours.
I hear 2 is way better, enough that I expect 3 (as well as Cyberpunk) to be extremely good.
2 gets really good after you get the hang of the combat. I really hope 3 is just as good or better, same with Cyberpunk
with their player friendly stance on DRM (ie: they dont like it, so its entirely optional) & after release support (Witcher 1 & 2 both got massive free updates), CD Pojekt Red have earned my trust as a developer.
I’m ok with a delay, coz it probably means the end result will be even better.
What…damn Polak’s
Fine…I’m still playing the first one.
I almost forgot to make the obvious pun: It’s better to have a Polish(ed) product! *boomtish*