I’ve always been firmly in the camp that the decision to delay a game is a good thing. After all, as a developer, you only get once chance to impress audiences for the first time. Sure, all games, no matter how bad or good they are, come with patches, but if you’ve released a game with problems, people are going to know. Case in point, Uncharted 4 was delayed twice but nobody is talking about that now. Instead, the conversation is always around how amazing it turned out and that ‘Naughty Dog did it again.’

Speaking with GameSpot, game director Mathijs de Jonge on why they decided to delay Horizon: Zero Dawn till February 2017:

 It’s all polish. We have this open world. It’s very big. We have a lot of quests; we have a lot of different regions as well. We have a lot of different Machines. Just playtesting this, it’s very, very time-consuming. We have so many components. We just want to raise the quality on the different areas. 

Over the past two decades, Sony’s internal studios have had a knack for turning out some very stellar titles. Guerrilla Games is no exception and has played a huge role in PlayStation’s history with the Killzone franchise. Now with an entirely new title that’s vastly different than what they’ve ever done before, it’s no surprise that they want to fine tune everything.

 The delay was mainly because it’s such a big game. We are a team of 200 people now, but there’s just a lot of content we need to look at and evaluate and keep improving. 

Having had a chance to see the game first hand at E3, I can tell you that we’re all in for a treat. So as far as I’m concerned, come February, if the team still feels like they need more time, they should take because I for one cannot wait to play it.

Discuss:

Does the delay bug you?