Phoenix Point delayed until summer next year

Delay time, gang. The sci-fi shellfish of XCOM bodysnatcher Phoenix Point won’t be scuttling out of the development ocean in December, as developer Snapshot Games once estimated. Instead, the crab-killing strategy game will now emerge in June 2019, says studio head Julian Gollop. This is so Snapshot can “expand the team and maintain our focus on quality”, as he explains in an announcement and in the video below.

“People’s expectations are higher,” he says, “our team is growing, and Phoenix Point has become a bigger game. In order to realise this potential we need to push back the target release date to June 2019.”

He also takes the chance to humblebrag about the large numbers of pre-orders the game has garnered (remember gang, if someone offers you a pre-order, just say no) and cites all the goo-goo eyes it has been getting from the press. I count at least one of my eyes among these, but the other will remain squinting until it sees the management side of the crabpocalypse.

As for growing the team at the studio, Gollop admits that they’ve been sluggish to expand but still wants to hire more.

To be honest, this has been a slower process than I wanted, but I felt that we needed the best talent that we could find. I am glad to say that we now have 35 great developers in our Sofia studio, and as a consequence of our recent, excellent exposure we are attracting offers of help from game developers around the world.

There’s also a new preview build, he points out, which will be emailed to anyone who has backed the project. If that's you, you'll be glad to learn that they've “Fixed an issue causing the first person targeted shots to be fired in the wrong direction.”

No more backwards bullets. That's progress.