Bandai Namco had the sad announcement today that Tales of Arise will be getting hit with an indefinite delay. Due to complications that have cropped up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the team has suffered development delays that have pushed the latest Tales of game out of its original 2020 window. For now, no future date has been specified.
In a post on Bandai Namco’s website, an update reads, “While COVID-19 has affected some aspects of development, we’ve done our best to adapt to the situation and have implemented remote development capabilities for our team. However, we will need more time to achieve the quality and provide the gorgeous experience we envision for our players, and therefore we decided to delay the launch timing for Tales of Arise.”
It may not be much consolation, but Bandai Namco shared some new key art for Arise. It has a very vibrant color scheme and should make an excellent desktop background. The update even mentions it as such, also noting you could use it for Zoom meetings as a backdrop.
I haven’t actively been following the development of Tales of Arise, but I remember seeing a trailer a year back. It looked like a massive step up over previous iterations of the series. This delay post even mentions that the team’s goal was “pushing the technical envelope to deliver a high level of graphical quality.”
Whether or not that extra fidelity is the primary culprit for this delay, I’m happy the team is willing to push the game back rather than ship a shoddy product. Too often with titles, we see sloppy games as a result of encroaching deadlines where the team either had to cut things to ship or leave bugs on the table.
None of the previous Tales of games have had any major bugs, so I don’t think Arise will break that trend. At any rate, those anticipating the game this year will have to be patient. Bandai Namco will be talking about it more as new developments happen, so we aren’t going to be left in the dark about the status of the game.
Source: Bandai Namco
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