Back in ought-13, fans of Mega Man were full of hope. Excitement. Anticipation. Lighter wallets, because many of them ponied up when Keiji Inafune announced his spiritual successor to the Mega Man franchise in the form of a new IP called Mighty No. 9. T-shirts were handed out. Early codes were given. The Kickstarter was funded at lightning speed.
And then everything seemed to slow…right…down…
Delay after delay after delay. And then another Kickstarter asking for more money. A Kickstarter also asking for money for a different game, when this one wasn’t even finished! Fans became noticeably more agitated and were feeling a little betrayed.
But then, last Fall, Comcept and the publisher Deep Silver confirmed the game would be released in February 2016. Huzzah! Hooray! Callooh-callay!
Hold on.
Hold waaaay on.
February is almost here. Right around the corner, in fact. We can see it poking its little head out, waving to us as we approach…and there’s Inafune right behind it, hanging his head. Oh no. What is he saying?
“Unfortunately, we have an announcement that will be very disappointing to all of you. In preparation for the February release of Mighty No. 9 we have been working hard with our partners to resolve any network issues and porting work necessary to publish Mighty No. 9 on the various platforms. However, the issues relating to the network modes were more critical than expected, and it has become apparent that we will need to delay the game from its February 9th release date. We have been working up until the very last moment to resolve these issues in order to make the February release, but it has become clear that we no longer have enough time to fix the issues and have everything prepared for release.
The reason for the delay is rooted in bugs inside the network modes, and specifically problems with matchmaking. There are two large reasons for this problem, one of them being the large number of platforms supported (the solution for each platform is slightly different) and the other stems from the fact that the engine we are using is no longer being updated which means adjustments for matchmaking and online code are being made manually (actually reprogramming parts of the engine by the dev team themselves). Unfortunately, this is all a result of miscalculations on the part of us, the development staff. As a result, our fans who have been looking forward to Mighty No. 9 have been forced to wait for over half a year longer than expected, and for that we are sincerely sorry. I want to take this chance to apologize personally, and on the behalf of the development staff.
…Because we are constantly working on it in cooperation with all our partners, we want to wait and make sure that everything is confirmed to be ready before giving a new specific release date. But we expect it to realistically be in Spring 2016.
For this 3rd delay of the game, we have no excuses for disappointing our fans and especially our backers once more. We want to take this chance to express our sincerest apologies to everyone who has looked forward to the release.”
Well, then.
We’ll just be over here. Waiting. Or not. *sigh*
