Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has been delayed into 2018. This is probably already a bummer for fans of Castlevania, who were looking forward to it- but for a certain sub section of fans, it may be even worse news. In an interview with IGN, director Koji Igarashi admitted that the Wii U version of Bloodstained may end up being canned in favor of a Nintendo NX one.
“Yeah, it’s a very complicated problem,” Iga said. “The reality is this: As timelines move on, certain pieces of hardware become irrelevant. Sometimes new pieces of hardware come out that make you think about what is the right strategy. And as a creator, usually you want to make stuff for the new hardware. That’s the reality.”
“However, this was a game that was backed by people, and we made promises to listen to them. They’re the people that gave us life so to speak. Any sort of change that we do or are considering that goes outside the scope of the promises we’ve made must be done with lots of explanation, must be done with lots of care, and must be done with lots of back and forth with them to see what options we have. We must listen to them at the end of the day, and we have made promises.”
“Unfortunately, some of those don’t make as much sense anymore as they did before, and that’s also reality. So you’re in a very difficult position, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to go in one certain direction, you want to make sure that you have support from them,” he explained.
“But so far we’ve, I think, been incredibly transparent through all the things that have happened with our backers, and they have been very supportive. So I’m hoping that if there is going to be a difficult decision some day, and we don’t know, that we’re able to have that conversation. If they say they don’t get it, well that’s where we’re at. And if they say they do get it, well then, we’ll be able to do things that are maybe more interesting. We’ll see.
I think that it definitely is a tricky situation to be in- Wii U owners did back the game on Kickstarter, and so they would deserve to see the gme on their platform. But the Wii U is already dead, and in 2018, it would have been officially retired in favor of its successor for a year. It will be interesting to see how Igarashi sorts this problem out- but I have a feeling someone is going to end up displeased with the resolution, no matter what it is.