Bloodstained: 505 Games partnership announced, 2018 delay explained, Wii U version

Yesterday, the developers of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night made a major announcement. 505 Games has signed onto the project, and will help bring the whole thing to fruition. Naturally, they also explain that nothing would have been possible without the support of fans: without the successful Kickstarter campaign, there would be no game to begin with.

Here’s a video created for this announcement, with Koji Igarashi and Ian Howe (President of 505 Games) talking about this partnership, and even showcasing some gameplay footage from the game:

Also, IGN published an interview with Koji Igarashi, where he explains why Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was delayed to 2018. There’s several reasons for that:

• the first one is pretty simple: once your Kickstarter campaign has been launched, you cannot change the estimated release date. Therefore, when stretchgoals are reached, more money collected, and more content planned, you can adjust the scope of the project, but not the release date… which is downright silly. After all, more content means more development time (and more developers);
• the second one is that the development team had the choice between lowering the bar (when it comes to quality) and release the game on time/earlier, or delay it and make sure it’s of the best quality possible. Naturally, Koji Igarashi chose the latter.

In the interview, Koji Igarashi also talks about the Wii U version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and explains that it’s a very complicated a problem. After all, releasing a Wii U game was already risky enough in 2017, but it’s even worse in 2018. And yet, people pledged for a Wii U version during the Kickstarter campaign, so they can’t really abandon them: there need to be some sort of dialogue.

Here’s what he said:

Yeah, it’s a very complicated problem. The reality is this: As timelines move on, certain pieces of hardware become irrelevant. Sometimes new pieces of hardware come out that make you think about what is the right strategy. And as a creator, usually you want to make stuff for the new hardware. That’s the reality.

 

However, this was a game that was backed by people, and we made promises to listen to them. They’re the people that gave us life so to speak. Any sort of change that we do or are considering that goes outside the scope of the promises we’ve made must be done with lots of explanation, must be done with lots of care, and must be done with lots of back and forth with them to see what options we have. We must listen to them at the end of the day, and we have made promises.

 

Unfortunately, some of those don’t make as much sense anymore as they did before, and that’s also reality. So you’re in a very difficult position, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to go in one certain direction, you want to make sure that you have support from them.

 

But so far we’ve, I think, been incredibly transparent through all the things that have happened with our backers, and they have been very supportive. So I’m hoping that if there is going to be a difficult decision some day, and we don’t know, that we’re able to have that conversation. If they say they don’t get it, well that’s where we’re at. And if they say they do get it, well then, we’ll be able to do things that are maybe more interesting. We’ll see.

Click here to check out the full interview, with even more details about Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night!

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Wii U) comes out in 2018.