The Witcher 3 delay was due to ‘badly polished next-gen games’

There’s a new trend in gaming these days. Announce a game, build up hype, let the journalists steal all your energy bars from your E3 booth (Sorry CDP, Zoe and I really needed them) and then delay that that game a month or two before its meant to hit. Just about every big-name game this year has suffered a delay or two. But in the case of The Witcher, you can blame that release date slip on the current industry attitude towards giving their games proper polish.

Speaking to financial journalists in Poland (via a Eurogamer transcription), CDP president and board member Adam Kicinski explained the game delay was due to a need to give the game even more polish thanks to its open-world design creating a more challenging development process. “There’s a lot of small errors because the game is huge,” Kicinski said.

It’s the only reason behind the delay. We didn’t assume it will be this big. Only after putting all the pieces together it turned out it’s bigger than the two first put together. Let me remind you: it’s open and not linear. We are just learning how to play it and we have to catch the little pieces. We know what to do, we just have to do it.

We don’t want to release the game with bugs that undermine the gameplay.

Part of the delay might also be because the original February 2014 release date was announced “too early”, something that the developer is learning about the hard way. “Gamers took our decision very well, Kicinski explained further. “[The] market is afraid of badly polished games on next-gen platforms. We want to put our names under this game [so]it has to be fun.”

Instead of February, the game will now be out in May. And after a clusterf*** of a year, I’ll gladly take a complete game a few months later instead of a half-baked title that needs endless patches.

Last Updated: December 11, 2014