Twisted Metal designer, David Jaffe, had recently confirmed a delay for the forthcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive to ensure more polish is put into the Eat, Sleep, Play-developed title. Jaffe has now further explained the reasons behind the pushed back date for Twisted Metal.
Speaking via Twitter, Jaffe explained:
No real way to ship Twisted Metal sooner than the date we are currently shooting for (early 2012)…Sorry for the delay. But the extra months are really needed for polish and we feel we need more than 4-6 weeks (which would see us hitting shelves in your suggested November time frame) of polish/tuning. Also hitting smack dab in mid Nov/Mid Dec is a bad time to release this game (although that was not the reason we delayed AT ALL…we WANTED to be out in Oct)…but the extra time gives us more time to balance weapons, tune vehicle handling, tune the EXP progression for levelling up, etc…
I assure you, better to be a LITTLE ANNOYED in the short term versus hate us forever for shipping a game that's not up to your understandably high expectations. ANY money is a lot to ask from someone for entertainment. 60 bucks is a S**TE TON to ask for so if we are going to charge that, you deserve our best…even if it takes a little longer than we anticipated.
So imagine about 250 of those sorts of things. Could we ship without change a single one? Totally and it would still be a really fun game. But it would not be good enough for us. And certainly not for you."
Jaffe gave a few specific details on what the studio needs to improve:
- Iron Maiden has a few boss attacks that don't have strong enough telegraphs (aka- the player isn't able to clearly, consistently tell when she is going to launch the attack)
- Iron Maiden has an attack that- even if you can see it coming- the player is not really sure how to avoid it besides using a shield (and we want the player to always have another defensive ability beyond a shield)
- We are not 100% happy with the XP rank up tuning….we don't want you to be able to hit the level cap too soon but we also don't want the level cap to be so hard to reach that only super amazing hard core can reach it
- There are 1-2 online trophies that will motivate players to take actions that go against the more team oriented aspects of some of the modes and thus will piss off other players so we need to rethink and replace those
- Pick up placements for split screen local gaming needs more attention
- Pick up regen timing needs some tuning…
A part of the statement from Jaffe which needs to be emphasized is indeed "60 bucks is a S**TE TON to ask for so if we are going to charge that, you deserve our best". Developers usually don't explain their delays and when they do it's practically a very brief explanation; Jaffe, however, has hit the nail on the head perfectly by further explaining the delay for his game and apologizing in a unique way which won't displease fans too much.
Twisted Metal launches in early 2012. The game was initially due to release on October 4th, 2011.
