Very shortly after we heard the bad news about Watch Dogs being delayed into 2014, Sony gave us even more bad news that DriveClub from Evolution Studios would also be missing PS4 launch and we’d have to wait until early 2014 to play it.
With just under a month to go before the PS4 launch, it seemed odd how Sony would wait until the last minute to announce a delay for the game, so Shuhei Yoshida revealed why that was to GI.Biz:
It’s almost an amazing achievement for any studio to set a release date and achieve it, especially for the launch of a new system because the hardware and software tools are always getting updated. So you always have to work with the moving target, so to speak. That said, PS4 has been praised for the ease of development and the stability of the dev kit by everyone – not just our teams but other developers and publishers. And it’s true that Evolution was also heavily in discussions about PS4 hardware features and network service features. Where the team missed the date and miscalculated the tasks was when they tried to do something they have not done before.
A launch title is especially tricky if you aim too high. When you try new things, you definitely have to prepare for multiple iterations… In order for a title to come out at launch, the ambition level has to kind of be kept in check; the team has to rely on tried and true mechanisms. That I think is the main reason for missing the launch date. DriveClub is exciting because it really goes aggressive into the integration of social features and the second-screen experience, and that’s a new addition for Evolution. The team has been making racing games for a long time, so they’re veterans when it comes to core racing…
Shuhei was probed further on whether this meant the social features were the cause of the delay:
They always planned the game to have these social features, but because these features are new, they found some technical matters or flaws in play testing, and that’s the reason we waited until the very end to announce the delay. They might have been able to hit the date, but in terms of both getting technical matters down and getting the game polished enough… we decided we wanted the team to go back to some of the features and spend some more time to get it done.
So, you can blame the ambitious nature of DriveClub and its social features for the game being pushed until next year.
Do you think we’ll hear anything about DriveClub at PS4 All Access tonight? Let us know in the comments below.
