Multiple reasons make Halo Infinite’s delay the biggest in Xbox history, especially for selling Xbox Series X as an important launch title. As gamers, we are pretty used to game delays, and in Fable Legends and Scalebound cases, even complete game cancels. The impact from COVID-19 is soaring in every entertainment industry, some other high profile game delays this year include Tales of Arise, Mafia: Definitive Edition, or Wasteland 3. It remains to be seen how this will impact 2021 game titles but game developers are having a hard time right now.
Halo’s delay to 2021 is a remarkable choice from Microsoft, it shows that they care and only want the best for the franchise. Here are five other examples from Xbox games that had some massive delays!
Alan Wake and Quantum Break
Remedy, in general, isn’t great with meeting release dates, Alan Wake was delayed multi times and Quantum Break was delayed to avoid too much competition with other Xbox exclusives: Halo 5, Forza 6 and Rise of the Tomb Raider. As a big Remedy fan, both delays hurt but both games turned out to be fun and well-received by critics.
Battletoads
We finally know the release date, August 20 but the nostalgic revival of Battletoads was normally planned for 2019. Despite the exciting return from a beloved Rare franchise, the gameplay was rather lackluster. Thankfully Microsoft allowed for more development time and the game is in a much better state now.
Kingdom Hearts 3
Finally, Xbox players could enjoy Kingdom Hearts! Gamers had to wait 14 years to get their hands on a new mainline Kingdom Hearts, It got delayed several times because the game struggled with engine difficulties. Sometime in 2014, the team decided to switch over to Unreal Engine 4 and not Square Enix’s in-house Luminous Engine and this caused some adjustment issues and unforeseen troubles.
Crackdown 3
Crackdown 3 is quite an example of how many times a game can be delayed. Announced as a 2016 release it got delayed to November 2017, another delay was announced and brought the game release to Q2 2018, and this still wasn’t the final delay! As the game came out in February 2019. Development studios changed along the way and sadly it didn’t really set the world on fire and stranded with a Metacritic of 60% and empty online modes.
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