By Jim Rossignol on December 16th, 2010 at 10:04 am.
Oh no! Square Enix have announced that the third Deus Ex game will be pushed back to April. The news came as part of an announcement to investors. Here’s what the investors were told: “With weak sales performance of console game titles that have been newly released during the current fiscal year as well as harsh market feedback regarding a key title, the Group recognizes the reinforcement of development capability in our Digital Entertainment segment as our most critical managerial issue.” I’m not sure how criticism of (presumably) the Final Fantasy MMO’s dodgy launch has implications for DX, but oh well. More time could mean a better game come April.
“Digital Entertainment segment”
Do they have another segment?
report
Sephiroth Merchandise segment.
report
^^ This is probably more spot on than we’d like to think.
report
Terry’s Chocolate Orange Segment? They are critical managerial issues too.
report
I tolerate delays better than I tolerate failures anyway.
report
Agreed.
report
It may be later than April, they’ve pushed it back to the delightfully generic “next fiscal year”.
report
It will launch within six months.
report
In two weeks?
report
No. Within six months. OH GOD NOW I’M DOING IT TOO.
report
What a shame.
report
What a shame.
report
What a shame.
(Damn ninjas)
report
A shame, what?
report
If they drop a ‘what a shame’ into the new game I am going to kill every last one of you.
report
And people will hear of our deaths on the evening news, and they will say ‘What a shame’. There’s no winning this one.
report
I hope when it eventually comes out the game isn’t…
A bomb!
report
@ Andrew C: With a bomb?
report
Not a “buh”, a BOMB.
report
What a shame.
report
What a shame.
report
I…I…(*sighs*) i spill my drink.
report
Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end they’ll beg us to save them.
Ahem.
Frankly, I’d rather they delay the game than turn out a flawed release. It sure didn’t do Alpha Protocol any favors.
report
…you don’t say?!
Anyway, more time to finish this year’s leftovers. Which is always a good thing.
report
Yeah, I’ve got that weird sense of relief too.
report
So they first launch some shitty game that sells poorly, then they choose that because of that it’s better to delay the good stuff.
Seems like they really hate money…
report
I don’t know why you’re annoyed by this news. How can more development time be a bad thing?
report
Ask Duke Nukem.
report
Its not going to be more development time though is it, genrally these delays are not used for more development time but trying to get more sales. So if its finished by now it will just be on a shelf for a few months before it comes out.
report
@Xercies
Are those facts of the business or just random stuff you’re saying?
report
Just look at Alpha Protocol. That got delayed how many times? And yet they never bothered to polish it more.
He’s not just making up stuff. It’s what people inside the industry say, too. If you listen to podcasts that have insiders on, either as hosts or guests (like, say the Giant Bombcast), you hear about it alot.
report
Have to say their press releases aren’t as good as Valve’s
report
Huh?
“We’re not selling well and people don’t like an unrelated game, so we’re delaying a highly anticipated title that is bound to make money.”
Does this really make sense to them? Is it actually in need of more development time? It sounds like they may have been planning to rush this out for a quick cash-grab, but the FF MMO has shown them people don’t appreciate rush jobs. At least that’s the explanation that springs to mind…
report
You have to remember this particular piece of literature was aimed at shareholders, so it’s dressed up in corporate-speak. There could be a number of reasons why they have delayed it a bit. Overall, I’m hoping this results in a better game and not a train wreck that is already coming off the rails.
“…harsh market feedback regarding a key title” could also be Deus Ex, and not Final Fantasy. Maybe, in this tough market, they are concerned about feedback from Deus Ex fans who have snatched at every little tidbit they could find out about this game. With a bit of a wait, we could perhaps have a more authentic Deus Ex experience.
report
If it makes them get rid of the stupid third person cover I’m happy if it is Deus Ex that has received the “harsh market feedback regarding a key title”
report
@ Reefpirate
I don’t think so. So far, the reaction from was fans was pretty much great, if not a bit cautious.
I guess they were talking about FF XIV which as players leaving in masses and it’s probably costing them a lot.
report
televizor, you clearly haven’t been to the Human Revolution forums.
report
Why would he want to go on those forums? They’re awful.
Though if people are losing it over an optional third-person cover system, then that’s more encouraging than anything.
report
I’m just curious – how many of the third-person-cover haters have actually played a game with a well-implemented third-person-cover system? I know they’re still somewhat of a rarity on PC.
I’m not trying to be a complete arsehole, just hoping to gauge why my perception of them is so different from so many on RPS.
report
It has to be said that they’re influenced by Rainbow Six: Vegas on that one, which has one of the better if not the best kind of cover system for a PC game.
Still, the amount of controversy such an inclusion is artificially stirring up is amusing. They seem to have gotten most everything else right, considering it’s an update of game design principles that the original game had some problems living up to too (still waiting on seeing just how large and emergent the playing fields are and whether the overall writing lives up to its potential), but this is the thing that sticks in people’s craw?
People tend to throw the immersion argument a lot when this one is brought up, as if third-person cut-aways destroyed that. Let’s not forget how the original game did this whenever you talked with a character, sometimes to hilarious effect (pausing the action around you, even when being hunted down by angry AIs whose only combat strategy boiled down to sometimes crouching and strafing a nudge).
Frankly, I think what would be more damaging to immersion is the lack of feet.
report
@ Reefpirate – if you honestly believe that Square-Enix would push back a game for the sake of a rabid minority of a minority of Deus Ex fans who complain on obscure internet message boards, you’re living in a goddamn fantasy land.
report
but if its aimed at the shareholders, are they basically bullshitting them? I mean I cant imagine everyone who owns stock in SE is a gamer thus understands why 1 games failure or success does not directly affect anothers in unrelated genres. Square Enix is scurred, yea I said it. And if theyre scurred, then this game is not shaping up to be a masterpiece.
report
I booked time off work, I more or less took the last week fo Feb and the first 2 weeks of March. So I’m going to be changing that then.
report
Nice, pushed back to around my birthday. Doesn’t bother me much. More dev time is always good, especially for an rpg.
report
1. Release two flops.
2. Delay highly-lucrative title.
3. ???
4. Profit.
report
@El Chi
I don’t think you ever played the first game mate, it’s still better then 97% of all games ever released.
report
@nadeus: he means that Square Enix has released two flops this year, and for that reason decided to pospone Deus Ex 3, not that Deus Ex was bad ;)
report
What was the ‘other’ flop? The only 2 games of Squeenix’s that even registered on my radar this year were Just Cause 2 and Guardian of Light, and they were essentially EIDOS properties, like Human Revolution.
report
Square Enix own Eidos; who launched Kane and Lynch 2.
Bwaahahaahaa!! What a rotten sequel! The developers learned nothing!
report
Says you, Dog Days was an amazing “fuck you” to the industry, just like the first game was. Even more so, in fact. Good stuff.
At the very least, it wasn’t as insulting a piece of garbage as Black Ops.
report
The problem was that it said “fuck you” to the player just as much.
report
I actually really liked the concept of the first Kane and Lynch. It was the first shooter I’ve ever played in which the plot basically was about how shooting lots of dudes can’t solve the main character’s problems.
Good anti-heroes are pretty rare, and that game hit the nail on the head.
report
BRB, adding more black and gold.
report
I think they’re adding the “non-shootemup” methods of completing the game, after an intern played Deus Ex.
report
As far as I’m aware they’ve pulled resources off of other projects in an attempt to “fix” Final Fantasy XIV. That means funding and even some key staff who were involved in other games.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-12-10-ps3-final-fantasy-xiv-delayed
That won’t just mean programming staff and budgets, but presumably things like a lot of marketing as well as they try to relaunch the game.
FFXIV was one of their most important projects (financially) since it was meant to be bringing in profits for quite a while. It’s pretty much tanked and Squeenix are in a bind now because they NEED to fix it, it’s an MMO that’s going to be running for years. The only other alternative is to can the entire project, APB style, and suffer a huge financial loss. So as it stands they have to pull funding and personnel that had previously been allocated to other things in order to try and get the game into shape for the PS3 launch, which they’ve had to push back in order to try and sort the mess out. They can’t afford to have the same disaster happen on the PS3 as well.
report
This is largely conjecture on my part though. It could just be that the failure of FFXIV made them a bit more willing to give the team more time to polish the game instead of forcing it out sooner than the dev team would like.
report
“With weak sales performance of console game titles”
Console gaming is dying! You heard it here first!
Well, one can hope, not?
report
There’s been a lot of griping recently about how “sick” the games industry is today, but really a large part of that is simply that we’re just seeing the knock-on effects of something that’s been affecting the PC market for a while.
Namely, that everyone freaking well goes with the NPD numbers as if they’re the whole picture, when they’re fundamentally estimates and are in fact becoming more inaccurate as time goes by.
THQ’s CEO had this to say on it:
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/42123/THQ-Industry-healthier-than-NPD-says
It affects the PC market the most since it’s been the one to shift to DD and alternate revenue streams (as opposed to simply boxed sales off of store shelves) the most. He even said this:
Which is important to note, because like I said, people always point to how the PC games industry has somehow collapsed in recent years, and yet they’re always pointing at the NPD stats to do so. Stats which even the NPD says are fundamentally a bad indicator for the PC market, because leaving aside Digital revenue streams, the NPD only estimates for the US to begin with when the largest PC markets are based elsewhere.
There was a really good commentary piece from a dev posting on MCV recently about why the DD stream is so important for the PC market these days, well worth a read, if only for the quote on just how massive the profit margin differences really are between DD and Brick-and-Mortar retail.
http://www.mcvuk.com/features/808/OPINION-Retail-vs-Steam
report
Well, it’s a up-and-down oscillation. When consoles are new, they get full attention, because they are more powerful than PCs. Then when they grow old and stale, and PCs can do so incredibly much better, it goes back to PCs.
It has happened before, and it will happen again.
I’m just surprised this isn’t common knowledge around here.
P.S.: DRM is not an excuse. Console DRM being cracked is a wonderful indication for them being old and stale. And since Vista, Windows is practically a jail inside a dictatorship to the user anyway. I mean have you seen that kernel? Every channel of communication, CPU to graphics card, graphics card to display, hard disk to CPU, even IPC, are encrypted over TCPA, which is sitting there like a control chip in the brain, being said what to do from the media industry, relayed trough MS.
report
Well, it’s a up-and-down oscillation. When consoles are new, they get full attention, because they are more powerful than PCs. Then when they grow old and stale, and PCs can do so incredibly much better, it goes back to PCs.
It has happened before, and it will happen again.
I’m just surprised this isn’t common knowledge around here.
P.S.: DRM is not an excuse. Console DRM being cracked is a wonderful indication for them being old and stale. And since Vista, Windows is practically a jail inside a dictatorship to the user anyway. I mean have you seen that kernel? Every channel of communication, CPU to graphics card, graphics card to display, hard disk to CPU, even IPC, are encrypted over TCPA, which is sitting there like a control chip in the brain, being said what to do from the media industry, relayed trough MS.
P.P.S.: Sorry if this becomes a double-post. It did not go trough the first time, as far as I can tell. But maybe it’s just held up somewhere.
report
Erm, when has a console been more powerful than a pc? I’m fairly sure that at the release of both the ps3 and xbox 360, that my pc was significantly more powerful….
report
When Xbox360 was launched, you and I had PCs that were more powerful, but most people didn’t, so that market was tiny. But now there’s a significant market of people with PC’s that are much more powerful than the Xbox360.
report
This seems win-win to me. The devs get more time to polish and the early year crush (Brink, Dragon Age, The Witcher, Shogun, Portal) gets a bit of relief.
report
Reading comprehension fail; it’s delayed to April, not from April.
Aw, bugger.
report
Its gonna suck, you all know it
report
It’s a possibility I’m braced for, not yet a certainty. Keep the faith, man.
report
if the game sucks, the empire ( newly formed then by me…( btw who will be with me ?)) will suck back… filthy assistants
and now my their fellowers go out and get some lifes!
report
I wanted orange.
report
What’d it give you?
report
I’d rather they take their time and produce something decent rather than the same old crap
report
“With weak sales performance of console game titles that have been newly released during the current fiscal year as well as harsh market feedback regarding a key title, the Group recognizes the reinforcement of development capability in our Digital Entertainment segment as our most critical managerial issue.”
Publishers shouldn’t hire spambots to write their press releases.
report
At least spambots make some kind of sense
report
Notice how this is a wonderful example of how big business has gone wrong when dealing with works of art. They can’t tell a Final Fantasy from a Deus Ex. To them it’s just a product. Could be steel, could be drugs, could be information, and it could even be humans (“human resources” and “temporary employment companies”). Whether information is not a physical object but a structural property,… whether you shouldn’t treat humans (and in fact life, depending on how alive it is) like things… doesn’t matter to them. Buy things here, sell things there. It’s a game of math. And they don’t even know what they are doing it for. Visions of how to change the world… goals of making life better for those involved in the company… those are all gone. Money making for the purpose of making money. And everything in its way has to go, when the own power allows that. Growing until all space is filled. And then?
Reminds me of diseases spreading… Except that even diseases have a purpose and goals. (Even when they are not our ideals.)
report
But there is a purpose, you said it yourself :p “making money”
report
You have to remember that this is a statement to shareholders, not a media release to gamers – specifying game titles wouldn’t really add value to the target audience.
report
(Portal 2 and DSX3 are thus, again, going to be released the same month :p)
report
Damn I hate corporate-speak.
report
You know how in the past certain classes in society used to speak different languages, like latin or french? These days it’s corporate speak.
report
Slightly disappointing, but if it gives the devs a chance to make the game we all hope for, then it’ll be worth it in my opinion.
report
I hope they’ll use the extra time to make the PC version “PC gaming friendly”, ie replacing TPV in gunfight and sneaking by a more interesting FPV (like in Deux Ex 1, Thief…. etc.)
report
And that there is the problem. Deus Ex was a native PC game later ported to consoles. Deus Ex: IW was a non-port but was clearly not a PC native just by looking at the horrible textures and small environments.
Human Revolution is still not a PC native game and is not being developed as a PC native game. Deus Ex relied a lot on what the PC was capable of at the time that couldn’t be done on the Sega Saturn, N64 or Playstation. These developers are making a console native game and shoe-horning it onto PC when it should be the other way around. They’re making the same mistake that was made on Invisible War meaning even if it is actually quite good on the consoles; it is almost certainly not going to be up to scratch on the platform that spawned the series.
report
Precisely right, ChiefOfBeef, which is why it’s important to support games like The Witcher that aren’t crippled by design.
It’s understandable that developers want a piece of the console market. But when I think about what the past decade of games could have been had they exploited (and further extended) the capabilities of the PC….
report
You are, of course, aware that for the longest time there was no news of a console version, right?
report
All right. I get the picture. You want a piece of the pie, or you’re going to toss the whole pie out the window.
report
Have they actually said April, or just sometime in their next fiscal year? I could see it being a good fit for the dark horse slot around late August.
report
This is obviously an attempt to write off this FY as a failure & push anything likely to sell (whether it’s good or not) into the next FY making it look like a recovery rather than a series of mediocre years, it happens all the time & isn’t much to worry about.
report
Yup. Otherwise known as keeping the share price stable.
report
That’s some mighty mean corporate parsing there, pardner!
report
Actually, I am surprised that the big uns had the smarts to actually do this. Because:
1 – Investors not used to gaming investment (as in, their knowledge of the medium is pretty much crap) get some guarantee that the next big product will have more time in development to NOT suck – thus ensuring that them monies keep coming their way.
Or, to put it simply, although they are two completely different products, the bad momentum generated by the FF disaster can be harmful to Deus Ex simply due to bad market expectations due to speculation.
2 – More development time is always good, and particularly for a group that needs to bounce back with a strong title, this is a really good idea.
3 – “Better a delay than a failure”, amirite?
report
Maybe they’ll bring back ATMs since they said they had to cut them due to lack of time
report
ATM’s are cut? WHAT!
report
By the time this game is released, we’ll all be a bunch of old men.
report
Surely you mean a bunch of pretentious old men
report
Old men… are the future.
report
Which means the PC version will be out in late May or June, of course.
report
What a shame
report
This notice surprise me so much that I speel my drink!
report
“…reinforcement of development capability…”
This just means “try a bit harder” or “bring back the people we moved to another project”, right?
report
BINGO!
report
Let’s hope it means a better game and not that they’re finding more ways to give an advantage to those who already have a monopoly in the retail market.
report
“More time could mean a better game come April.”
I’m sorry, but reworking a masterful freeform game into a “current generation” interactive shooty bang bang movie will never be a good game, no matter how much time and money you throw at it.
report
I’ve always wanted to feel like a warm.
report