Mighty No. 9 had a hugely successful Kickstarter, but it seems like Keiji Inafune’s spiritual successor to the Mega Man series is having more problems. Last year Inafune announced a delay for the game ahead of Gamescom, sparking the ire of many who felt like the studio was using the hustle and bustle of Gamescom to try and shield themselves from gaining too much coverage.
The delay last year involved network code and the update on the official Mighty No. 9 website seems to confirm that the problem is still related to network code on various platforms. Inafune’s update states that his team needs more time in order to fix these bugs as they were more critical than expected.
Unfortunately, we have an announcement that will be very disappointing to all of you. In preparation for the February release of Mighty No. 9 we have been working hard with our partners to resolve any network issues and porting work necessary to publish Mighty No. 9 on the various platforms.
However, the issues relating to the network modes were more critical than expected, and it has become apparent that we will need to delay the game from its February 9th release date. We have been working up until the very last moment to resolve these issues in order to make the February release, but it has become clear that we no longer have enough time to fix the issues and have everything prepared for release.
The reason for the delay is rooted in bugs inside the network modes, and specifically problems with matchmaking. There are two large reasons for this problem, one of them being the large number of platforms supported (the solution for each platform is slightly different) and the other stems from the fact that the engine we are using is no longer being updated which means adjustments for matchmaking and online code are being made manually (actually reprogramming parts of the engine by the dev team themselves).
Unfortunately, this is all a result of miscalculations on the part of us, the development staff. As a result, our fans who have been looking forward to Mighty No. 9 have been forced to wait for over half a year longer than expected, and for that we are sincerely sorry. I want to take this chance to apologize personally, and on the behalf of the development staff.
Inafune apologizes directly for the delays later on in his statement, which you can read here if you’re interested in seeing the full thing. The project is now more than a year and a half behind schedule, with many backers waiting to receive their copies of the game.
