For those of you that might not be aware, Space Hulk: Deathwing recently had a closed beta featuring a couple of hours of alien-obliterating gameplay. Unfortunately things didn't end up working out quite as amazingly as people expected, mostly due to numerous bugs, performance issues, and some rather... questionable design choices.
Even after playing for a couple of hours it was obvious that Space Hulk: Deathwing is not yet ready for its official launch, which is why I'm very glad to say that its release date has now been postponed to December 14. The reason behind this decision, as you would expect, is the wish to fix most of the annoying issues that plagued the closed beta version. But rather than simply repeat what the developers themselves have said, here's the full quote from the announcement:
"Greetings Librarians,
Last week's Beta saw tens of thousands of you donning Terminator armour and answering the call to fight Genestealers in the Space Hulk Olethros!
We'd like to thank you once again for having taken the time to post your feedback on our official forum in large numbers, helping us to exterminate a wide range of Heretical bugs.
In order to ensure Space Hulk: Deathwing is in the best state possible for launch, we've taken the decision to delay the launch of the full game to December 14th, 19:00 CET.
While some of you may be disappointed, others have expressed support for allowing time to fix the remaining bugs.
Most of the issues from the Beta have been addressed, including drastic improvement of the loading times, optimisation of the general performances, improvement of certain interface and menu elements, sound-design changes (character voices), and fix of numerous bugs and nearly all occurrences of crashes.
We know you are eagerly waiting to purge Xenos, but we want to ensure all players can enjoy the game optimally on launch by continuing to work on the massive amount of feedback for an extra week.
Our tech-priests are preparing for the task, and no sacrifice is too great to gain the Emperor's blessing!
The Emperor Protects!
Streum On & Focus Home Interactive"
While its obviously great that the developers are willing to delay the launch in order to fix what is broken, I'm worried if they are going to have enough time to do so. A week might sound like a lot of time, but as someone with a background in programming I can tell you that a week is practically nothing when you have to deal with numerous massive issues. As such, I'm not sure if Space Hulk: Deathwing's launch is going to be as pristine as many of us are wishing for.
But whatever the case may be, I really do hope the developers manage to pull through, even if it means with post-launch patches. Warhammer 40k has so much potential for great shooters, and Space Hulk: Deathwing is so close to becoming one, that any other result would be a massive shame. Whether it will actually manage to do so, I honestly have no idea, but at least we won't have to wait for very long in order to find out as Space Hulk: Deathwing is releasing next week.