Watch Dogs’ delay sent an important message to the creators of Tom Clancy’s The Division, its creators at Ubisoft Massive stated last year. They said that the delay of Watch Dogs was “tremendously important” for them as a developer studio to know that the owner and publisher, Ubisoft, was willing to take a hit on time and resources to release a polished product.
Despite the fact that Watch Dogs wasn’t anywhere as great as fans were hoping it would be, it would have been a much worse game had they released it on time when it was originally due for release.
It would seem that the creators of The Division are taking that lesson to heart, as they’ve delayed the game, which was slated for release during Fall 2015, by yet another year–to 2016.
Despite putting out a few very good games on the market, Ubisoft has developed a reputation of releasing buggy products like Assassin’s Creed Unity and The Crew, and it would seem that they are intent on seeing that The Division does not suffer the same fate as the two aforementioned titles.
So what do the delays for the game mean, exactly?
For starters, the game they are promising is absolutely massive–an open-world, massively multiplayer third person shooter with role-playing elements. The delays would mean being able to deliver on what they have promised, and adding a fine coat of polish to the game.
I think all fans of the title can agree that it would be better for us to wait another year for them to release the game than to get something they slapped together to meet a deadline just for the sake of playing it.
If anything, it doesn’t seem that the delays mean that the game has run into some major, unfixable problems that cannot be resolved. On the contrary, I think it means that they are simply developing the title the way it ought to be made–with time, effort, and care. After all, rushing hardly helped Ubisoft’s previous titles.
As Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto once said, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
