Mighty No. 9 Delayed, again

[BumblebeeCody*]

Being fully aware of all this, I have to say, none of that is my concern. What is my concern are the following things about the delays. The first delay wasn't announced until the end of the month it was supposed to come out, the second delay was clearly waiting until the end of the Red Ash kickstarter, this most recent delay, came about two weeks before the game was supposed to release, and also, the last two delays have been made over network issues most fans do not care about, without having an effect on the single player.

But at the same time, whether fans care about it or not, we're still at a point within gaming where day-1 patches are normal. It's now considered standard to sell a game with "known shippables" (a game with known bugs but will be fixing in the day 1 patch). The same can be said for this. It doesn't matter if the percentage of people who care about online is 5%, at the end of the day, people put their money into a project only to find they didn't even test the network capabilities correctly.
Now let's say that the game did in fact come out as it was supposed in February, then we find out an issue with the online has been found in the game, then the obviously backlash would be "Well they delayed the game and it's still buggy". We know gamers bitch like babies, so there is no real winning. Even the famous "delaying a game" quote by Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't even seem relevant anymore. Even A Hat in Time, a game that was kickstarted in 2013, is still in Beta and much like A Hat in Time you can actually play MM9 in it's current build to those who backed.

That problem being, the game is being made on an engine that doesn't get updated anymore, meaning every problem that they have, they have to go in manually, find the problem, and fix it, which is why this is taking so long. An engine outdated enough to not be getting regular updates concerns me enough, but the lack of a release date, and the fact that this is literally just Mega Man with updated graphics, all point to the programmers possibly not being able to keep up with today's standards.

The fact that the game is being created on an engine that isn't used as much anymore isn't even true. UE3 is still one of the most widly used engines out there with no signs of support stopping, especially since the SDK is now free to use. Not to mention, it has a large amount of support for it. Much like Windows 7, it might be "outdated" but there isn't any issue you can't fix for that due to how long it's been out.

This thing is basically an Indie, yet another delay, and it's bordering Duke Nukem Forever, FFXV, The Witness and other long delayed games for being delayed. This game is an indie though, with someone who used to be one of the top programmers heading the whole thing. The fact that it's taking this long, no matter how far deep the bug(s) go(es) is just sad. I understand that you can delay a game for several months or even a year or more, if when you think a game is almost done, you find a bug that you end up having to trace to near the start of the programming process and fix every issue from then to the end, but this is just getting stupid.

1) Keiji Inafune is and never was a programmer. He has not background in programming. He's a video game producer and illustrator but coding isn't his area.

2) It's hard to get this point across, but if anyone on this forum can be me up on this they'll agree, but programming never ends. If you fix one issue, it can result in a change somewhere else which results in the entire program having another issue that you need to fix. It's not rare and is to be expected. You fix one thing and then it results in a new issue.

An indie game should not take this much work, especially when they have a team like the one they have, and the creators of the Dead Island games helping them publish it. I just feel like there is more that can be done, but given how Infaune has already started with Red Ash and Re Core, it's not happening. None of is anything that can make anyone happy, probably Comcept's team as much as us, but this just seems all kinds of wrong. Unless the game ends up being Witcher complex, it all comes off as bad business practice being the main problem.

We could make a discussion about whether this is an indie game or not, but from a veteran producer, I wouldn't really call this is an indie game as it's clearly being lead by industry veterans who know how to make a game. Compared to other games which are dudes in their basement living with each other with little to no budget like Hotline Miami.
It's worth noting that if you backed MM9, you are given newsletter updates which explains how the whole creation process is going and what the intentions behind their games are. Comcept are pretty transparent about how they work but the only thing that ever gets reported on is the delays but not what they do right.

I'm not completely defending this. I backed the game for around £80 and while I'm a lot more sympathetic and understanding as someone who works in the same area, it is pretty mishandled with some of the updates. I still didn't back Yooka-Layle, Shenmue 3 or Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night since I'm still waiting on MM9 to see if Kickstarting is worth it, but I'm still in the camp that I'd rather they make the best game they can rather than the broken buggy mess we get on such a level that we don't even notice the day 1 updates. I already expect MM9 to have a day-1 update.