Deus Ex - Mankind Divided Delayed Until August

Everything looked rosy when I traveled to Montreal to take a look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site] earlier this year. The areas I played improved on Human Revolution in every way that matters and Adam Jensen controlled better than ever. All was well and I was looking forward to playing the game in February, right around my birthday. Moments ago, word arrived of a six month delay - the game will now be coming out on August 23rd.

Eidos Montreal studio head David Anfossi, quoted in a statement on the Deus Ex website, says teh delay will help the game to exceed expectations:

"As you may have already seen by reading and watching the many previews for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, our aim is for it to be a worthy successor to Human Revolution, and to improve upon that game in every way possible. I know that expectations are extremely high, and we not only want to meet those expectations, but exceed them. We’re confident and proud of the game so far. However, as we are now playing through the game in full we can see that it will require more time in post-production for tuning, iterations, and refinement to meet our high standards. In order to achieve this, we need to move the release of the game to August 23rd, 2016."

It's entirely possible that those previews, mine included, were based on the only good areas in the game, but that's very unlikely. Given the quality of what I've already seen, I'm optimistic that this is the right decision - if the entire game can be as, or more, polished and well-crafted as what I've already seen, it'll be a belter. I say we just give up on release dates until a couple of weeks before launch. That way there'd be fun surprises around every corner.

February was already looking like a busy month, based on Deus Ex, XCOM 2 and Mirror's Edge alone. Now there'll just be XCOM of those three, as Mirror's Edge already slipped to May.