Tales Of Arise has been delayed beyond 2020
Don't go telling tales, y'hear?
Tales Of Arise, the latest in a long line of Bandai Namco's Tales Of JRPGs (Berseria, Symphonia, Legendia, etcetera), isn't coming out this year. Revealed last year and in development since before the announcement of Tales Of Vesperia: Definitive Edition, the Japanese firm's fantastical tale of two warring planets needs a little more time to tell properly, postponing the game's release indefinitely.
Announced at E3 last year, the latest Tales Of centres on two high-fantasy worlds - Rena and Dahna - in conflict, and features a giant flaming man and a masked bloke who pulls a magic sword out of his girlfriend's chest. JRPGs, man.
While Tales Of Arise was meant to pop out sometime this year, producer Yusuke Tomizawa this week announced that it'll take Tales a little longer to arise (sorry) over on the Bandai Namco site. Development is still going strong, he reckons, but the process of adapting to the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed things down somewhat.
"While COVID-19 has affected some aspects of development, we’ve done our best to adapt to the situation and have implemented remote development capabilities for our team," Toziwama explained. "However, we will need more time to achieve the quality and provide the gorgeous experience we envision for our players, and therefore we decided to delay the launch timing for Tales of Arise."
How long that'll be isn't mentioned, only that a new release window will be revealed "once we have more details to share". Of course, Bamco are hardly alone in adapting to remote working during the global pandemic - and with developers across the industry making seismic changes to their working practices, we've seen a fair few delays hit already, whether it's Death Stranding's PC port or The Dark Pictures Anthology's second chapter.