Mighty No. 9 has suffered yet another delay according to an update on the game’s Kickstarter page. For the third time since the game’s successful campaign on the crowdfunding website, creator and director Keiji Inafune has had to break the frustrating news to fans who’ve been waiting now for over a year longer than they first expected to.
To be fair to the man that created Mega Man, he’s published a sincere – and lengthy – apology to fans for making them wait just a little longer, and provides some more insight into why both he and his team have had to delay the release date yet again.
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solution for each platform is slightly different) and the other stems from the fact that the engine we are using is no longer being updated which means adjustments for matchmaking and online code are being made manually (actually reprogramming parts of the engine by the dev team themselves).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 apologise personally, and on the behalf of the development staff.
Like we said, lengthy. However, you can’t put a word limit on transparency, and Inafune deserves to be commended for not shying away from the problem and keeping his fans in the dark. Problems in development can arise at any time due to a huge amount of different – and sometimes difficult to discern – reasons, so we can only hope that developer Deep Silver can get on top of the bugs and hammer them out sooner rather than later.
We want to hear from you guys, though. Have you been waiting since day one for Mighty No. 9 to release? While delays can (and always will) happen, has this third one put the final nail in the coffin in your hype and desire to play it, or are you not particularly bothered by the extra wait?
