Crackdown 3 has had one of the most protracted and tormented development cycles of any game in recent memory. The title was teased all the way back in 2013, announced properly in 2014, and has since been delayed multiple times, with the most recent delay being last month, from later this year into February 2019.

It’s been a long, frustrating road for fans of the franchise, and for Xbox gamers- but even more so for the developers, who feel disheartened at the development troubles with the game, the skepticism surrounding the game online, and the fact that they have not been properly credited for their role in the game’s development, a new tell-all report from Eurogamer states.

That sense of disenchantment is also pervading the repeated delays the game has suffered. However, it looks like Microsoft itself may have reached the end of its patience with Crackdown 3. According to Eurogamer’s sources, this most recent delay for the game is the final time that Microsoft was willing to delay it. It’s unclear what that necessarily means- will Microsoft cancel it if the game is still not in a shippable state by its February release date? Or will they just throw it out as is?

The other question is, will the game actually end up living up to the almost five years of wait and anticipation it will have been subjected to by the time it does end up launching next year? Questions like these can’t be good for morale at Sumo Digital, who for now continue to work on the game, due out on Xbox One and Windows 10 in February.

Crackdown 3‘s development has been very troubled, with no fewer than three studios having worked on it over the course of the last four years- Sumo Digital, who are working on the single player portion, Cloudgine, who are powering the cloud tech that will constitute the multiplayer portion of the game, and Reagant, who were a small bunch of developers who also included David Jones, who was the original creator of Crackdown to begin with.

With Reagant having been closed, and Cloudgine having been acquired by Epic resulting in Jones’ departure from the development of the game, you would imagine that he’s not necessarily feeling all that kindly towards the upcoming Crackown 3, or any party involved with its protracted development- however, speaking to GamesIndustry, Jones exhibited a more philosophical stance towards his departure from the development of the title, noting that it was just the right thing to do at the right time.

“In an ideal world it could have been finished faster and I would have been able to see it through to the end,” he said.

“But to be honest, I look back at other gaming franchises I’ve worked on and they’ve done really well without me being there as well, as long as the DNA is there and the right foundations are there.”

It’s good to see that Jones doesn’t seem to be harboring grudges over the split, even though it presumably has to have hurt him to not be involved with his baby anymore- nonetheless, wth Crackdown 3 (allegedly) due out next February, it is close enough to completing development that most of the influence that Jones was going to have on its development, he presumably has already had.