Jaffe Defends Twisted Metal 2012 Delay, Gamers “Deserve our Best”
Last week, Eat Sleep Play’s David Jaffe broke gamers’ hearts when he announced that the latest installment in the Twisted Metal franchise wouldn’t be making it to store shelves in time for its originally planned October release. Instead, the title has been pushed to sometime in early 2012, forcing anxious gamers to wait several extra months before they can get their car-combat fix.
Naturally, gamers all over the web have voiced their disappointment and in response, Jaffe has spoken out to reassure fans that the studio has their best interests at heart. According to Jaffe, a number of gameplay elements need to be tweaked, setting them outside the October release window, and considering the onslaught of high-profile titles launching in November, the team deemed it best to launch early next year.
You can read Jaffe’s official statement concerning the game’s delay below:
No real way to ship Twisted Metal sooner than the date we are currently shooting for (early 2012)…Sorry for the delay. But the extra months are really needed for polish and we feel we need more than 4-6 weeks (which would see us hitting shelves in your suggested November time frame) of polish/tuning. Also hitting smack dab in mid Nov/Mid Dec is a bad time to release this game (although that was not the reason we delayed AT ALL…we WANTED to be out in Oct)…but the extra time gives us more time to balance weapons, tune vehicle handling, tune the EXP progression for levelling up, etc…I assure you, better to be a LITTLE ANNOYED in the short term versus hate us forever for shipping a game that’s not up to your understandably high expectations. ANY money is a lot to ask from someone for entertainment. 60 bucks is a S**TE TON to ask for so if we are going to charge that, you deserve our best…even if it takes a little longer than we anticipated.
Some examples of stuff we’re not happy with yet- which should allow you and others to really peek behind the scenes at the kind of stuff this kind of extra time will allow:
- Iron Maiden has a few boss attacks that don’t have strong enough telegraphs (aka- the player isn’t able to clearly, consistently tell when she is going to launch the attack)
- Iron Maiden has an attack that- even if you can see it coming- the player is not really sure how to avoid it besides using a shield (and we want the player to always have another defensive ability beyond a shield)
- We are not 100% happy with the XP rank up tuning….we don’t want you to be able to hit the level cap too soon but we also don’t want the level cap to be so hard to reach that only super amazing hard core can reach it
- There are 1-2 online trophies that will motivate players to take actions that go against the more team oriented aspects of some of the modes and thus will piss off other players so we need to rethink and replace those
- Pick up placements for split screen local gaming needs more attention
- Pick up regen timing needs some tuning…
So imagine about 250 of those sorts of things. Could we ship without change a single one? Totally and it would still be a really fun game. But it would not be good enough for us. And certainly not for you.
It’s hard to be upset considering all the improvements that will be made over the course of this delay. Let’s just hope that when the game does launch next year, it will be worth the wait.
[Via]
3 Responses to “Jaffe Defends Twisted Metal 2012 Delay, Gamers “Deserve our Best””
Sadly the delay time won’t be used to include all the original cast of characters and their stories…fingers crossed, though. Also, I remember Jaffe being very vocal against first-day patches, so I think this delay is consistent with that commitment, and hopefully he won’t look bad patching the game on release date after a long delay….
Not mad in the slightest, at least he isn’t lying and shipping us a half assed online game like about 85% of devs do now; people can bitch all they want but in the end you shouldn’t shoot down a dev that is about as legit as you’re going to find in the industry now. Take your time buddy and thanks for looking out for the gamer.
Nice, This delay just turned this game from a “sadly I have to skip” to a “can get”.
Being in October/November, I would have skipped it for franchises I knew well and loved, but this delay lets it be one of my early 2012 buys.