Stalled: Project CARS' Latest Delay
Back when I used to write about console games I remember covering racing game Driveclub's repeated delays - how the game slipped from a launch title for PS4 to an early 2014 title to a slightly later 2014 title and eventually came out in October of that year.
Great times.
It's nice, then, that Project CARS [official site] is trying to fill that delayed console game void in my heart with another delay of its own.
The Slightly Mad Studios racer is a multiplatform effort, originally set to come out in 2014. The first delay pushed the release back to March 2015 to allow for polishing. Early April was the next target and studio head, Ian Bell, noted that "these extra days will allow us to provide the best game experience that our fans deserve".
It's now being billed for a mid-May launch. Here's Ian Bell again:
"Despite our long heritage and pedigree in making critically-acclaimed racing games, Project CARS is by far the grandest and most intricately detailed of them all. Despite therefore the game being 99.9% complete, the remaining 0.1% attending to small issues and bugs has been tricky to anticipate. We’re absolutely dedicated to delivering a ground-breaking experience and by targeting mid-May fans can be assured that’s what they’ll receive."
The thing is, all the delays have that same reasoning - the game is basically finished, we're just polishing it and fixing little things. At this point Project CARS feels like a loading screen that's frozen on 99.9% complete.
As compensation for the delay there will be some free content available from day one. What exactly the gift is hasn't been announced but is billed as "going to excite fans" and will be "revealed shortly". I'm currently wondering whether the gift will also be subject to several delays and will maybe spawn a secondary compensation gift which also gets delayed.
More on this story as it gets delayed develops.