Resident Evil Village was meant to launch with a multiplayer mode, Resident Evil Re:Verse. In April this year, after some not great open betas, Capcom announced it would be delayed until July. It’s July now, but look around you. Nope. Indeed, minutes ago the developers announced it has now slipped to some point in space year 2022.
So what’s gone wrong? Well, from the wooliness of the tweet, my guess would be: lots.
“Resident Evil Re:Verse is being moved to 2022,” the franchise’s official Twitter announces, “so that the team can continue working to deliver a smooth gameplay experience.” Which, when accompanied by such an ambiguously distant new date, is usually industry code for, “Shit, shit, the framerate doesn’t go over 3!”
They add, “We will share updated launch details at a later time. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
They go on to say in a further tweet that current Village owners should either keep their Re:Verse download code somewhere safe, or add it to their account now, “so that you are ready to play when the game launches next year.”
Delays like this are absolutely normal for games development in the 2020s, and since this has always been a freebie that was supposed to come with this year’s enormously popular Resident Evil: Village, it’d be a silly sausage who got too up in arms about it. What’s strange here, however, is the eleventh hour nature of the delay.
They must have known it wasn’t going to be ready for July, given that they’ve just added on at least another six months of development time, so why wait until halfway through the promised month before admitting it’s nowhere near done? One explanation could be that as far as the team working on it felt, it was on track, but then others higher up at Capcom threw their arms in the air/chairs out the window, and demanded it be a whole other thing.
It’s not clear how many Resievil fans were clawing at the walls for a multiplayer mode of Village, but they’ve now got lots more time to devote to looking forward to it.