It’s already known that the Wii U version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is in doubt, and in a recent interview with IGN, creator Koji Igarashi it is stated that additional resource is being sought to ensure the title is completed on time.
Bloodstained is currently in development at Artplay – Igarashi’s own studio – and Inti Creates, the firm behind Azure Striker Gunvolt and Mighty No. 9, the latter of which was released to lukewarm reviews after a massive crowdfunding campaign.It now seems that Inti Creates needs extra assistance:
If you look at what you saw here, that’s some of Inti, and some of us. But if you looked at the demo that out at E3 that everybody liked, that was Inti’s quality bar that they put forward and made. They are able to come out with high quality. However, to your point, one of the issues is that their style of building on a game, while it does tend to come up with high quality when they spend the time on it, they don’t necessarily have the true understanding of how to procedurally use the best tools in Unreal. Without being able to use those, you can’t create the game in the most efficient manner that you need to.
While we were working together to make sure it had everything in it, it was quite clear that we needed to bring in another team that is able to take that procedural know-how to be able to take something, copy it, use some random generation to populate an area in a more computer-driven way rather than people doing it all by hand. Without doing that, just the sheer size of what we’re trying to create would never be done on time. So bringing in someone to help like that is definitely necessary to make sure that we’re going to make the game at the right quality, but also hitting this new timeline.
Igarashi confirmed that with a new team involved – the identity of which hasn’t been determined yet – Inti Creates’ role in development will be reduced because it won’t be working on procedurally-generated content:
We’re trying to be modern, and if there’s an official way to do something better than you should probably do it. Just thinking about the sheer size of what this game is, trying to go in and do everything by hand would obviously create – it would be beautiful, but it would create lots of delays and things like that.
Finding the right balance between using some technology to help you but also still making sure you’re also controlling the art side of it, that’s sort of what we, through our studying and evaluations, come to realize. We need to do that to get to the goal.
Igarashi also confirmed that 505 Games will be publishing the game in physical form.
