If you were planning on yelling at your son until he killed an animal in some kind of “bad dad simulator,” you’re going to want a seat. God Of War 2, one of the upcoming flagship titles for the PlayStation 5, will be delayed until next year. Earlier today, on the PlayStation Blog, Herman Hulst, the head of PlayStation Studios, announced that the games God Of War 2 and Horizon Forbidden West faced significant delays.
“So we have, currently, two very big, very narrative-driven games in development: Horizon Forbidden West and the next God of War,” Hulst told PlayStation Blog. “And for both of those, they’re frankly affected by access to performance capture and talent. For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can. And for God of War, the project started a little later. So we’ve made the decision to push that game out to next year, to ensure that Santa Monica Studio can deliver the amazing God of War game that we all want to play.”
Thankfully, Hulst acknowledged the arduous labor that goes into putting these titles together, stating that the game’s release wouldn’t come at the cost of his employees. “With these things, something’s gotta give. It cannot be the quality of our titles, and it surely won’t be the health or the wellbeing of our amazing team.”
God Of Wars 2's developer, Santa Monica Studios, also confirmed the delay in a tweet. “Since the release of the next God Of War teaser last year, we’ve been humbled by the amount of love our community has shown us,” the statement reads. “We remain focused on delivering a top-quality game while maintaining the safety and wellbeing of our team, creative partners, and families. With this in mind, we’ve made the decision to shift our release window to 2022.”
It would appear as though the backlash against game studios crunching their employees to meet tight deadlines is making waves. Last year, after another round of delays to Cyberpunk 2077, a series of reports alleged that CD Projekt Red, the makers of Cyberpunk, required employees to work longer hours, including six-day weeks, for more than a year to meet the release date. It looks like the makers of God Of War are trying to avoid those mistakes.
6 Comments
This is fine, it’s not like you can get a PS5 in 2021. And I’m not playing this on my jet-engine-loud PS4.
Same.
Yeah ideally I’d want it PS5 only to take advantage of the SSD and some sweet sweet realm jumping so I’m more disappointed it going to be made with a base PS4 in mind even in a 2022 release but the delay itself is really no big deal.
Oh good, that gives me more time to finally play the first one when I get a PS5.
This is fine.
I think it is a very big stretch to attach this delay to the important conversation around crunch in the video games industry. Most who had been following this knew that God of War 2 was not going to be released in 2021 the second that was announced, and this delay has been widely expected. There was just no way that game was going to be ready that quickly.I think the real issue in this case is whether Sony and others should be building hype through an unrealistic release window rather than announcing the game closer to release. I obviously have no inside knowledge, but my opinion is that Sony announced the completely unrealistic from the start “God of War 2021″ only to hype the then upcoming PS5. There are lots of good reasons to discuss the significant problems with crunch, but I don’t think this is one of them. Almost no one thought we were going to see this game this year. I think the more interesting discussion here is whether companies should continue to build hype around release dates/windows before announcing the inevitable delay. Because in this case you could see it coming from a mile off and it was kind of a ridiculous move by Sony (and I say this as a proud owner of PS1-5).