Bad news, folks! CD Projekt just announced that their long-anticipated RPG Cyberpunk 2077, the team's first major release since the universally-acclaimed The Witcher 3, has been delayed by five months. That means we'll have to wait until September to get out hands on one of the year's most hyped titles.
It also gives us some time to ruminate on some other games to have been delayed over the years. Usually, delays indicate that a game will release with a higher level of polish—or Polish, in CDPR's case—but that isn't always true. Here are 10 titles which received some infamously long delays.
10 Mighty No. 9
Perhaps the most infamous Kickstarter disaster of all time, Might No. 9 was first announced in 2013 via the crowdfunding site and quickly earned far in excess of its initial funding goal. While that may sound like a blessing, the extra budget swiftly became a burden as the development team—helmed by OG Mega Man dev Keiji Inafune—worked to build a game more complex than they could handle.
Releasing three years later after multiple delays, Might No. 9 crashed and burned. Backers demanded their money refunded, and Inafune himself was quoted as saying the game was "better than nothing." Ouch.
9 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl
Originally announced all the way back in 2001 and slated for a 2003 release, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl was the first of three post-apocalyptic RPG FPS titles which would, despite the delays and development hiccups, go on to develop a healthy cult following.
Unfortunately, things didn't start off well for the franchise. In 2003, a buggy, extremely rough alpha build of the game was leaked, forcing the developers to make some major revisions. Ultimately, it took four more years for the game to see a full release, finally dropping in March of 2007.
8 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Initially launched as a Kickstarter project by ex-Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi in 2015, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was slated to be an unofficial spiritual successor to Konami's age-old platforming franchise. Though the game would eventually see release in early 2019, it would suffer from a fairly tumultuous development cycle.
Slated to land on both the Wii U and PlayStation Vita, the game's development was sidetracked due to the difficulty of porting titles to those consoles, and focus was eventually shifted to the Switch once both of those consoles went defunct. Though it was highly praised upon release, the Switch port was notoriously buggy at launch.
7 Too Human
Once slated for release all the way back in 1999 and subsequently shifted toward a GameCube release sometime later, Silicon Knights' eventually release the action-adventure title Too Human in 2008 to a lukewarm reception.
Panned for its laggy framerate and plethora of bugs and gameplay oversights, Too Human was seemingly doomed from the start, and, ironically, it dealt a fatal blow to its development team. Epic Games, the creators of the Unreal 3 engine, sued Silicon Knights for using an illegally-obtained version of the engine. Epic eventually won the case, and Silicon Knights failed to recover from the financial burden.
6 Team Fortress 2
Beginning life as a Quake mod in 1996, the first Team Fortress would eventually release in 1999 as a fully-fledged new IP when Valve on-boarded the pair of programmers behind the amateur PvP experience. That same year, a demo of Team Fortress 2 would make its way to E3, though the final product wouldn't be released for some time.
The multiplayer followup to Team Fortress would go through several redesigns, and a cartoony, character-driven Team Fortress 2 would see release as part of Valve's The Orange Box bundle in 2007. It was well worth the wait and is still enjoyed more than thirteen years after release, but the game's development was less than smooth.
5 Diablo III
Development for Diablo III began shortly after Diablo II released in 2000 and was first announced to release in 2008. That's already a lengthy development time, but further delays would push the game's launch all the way back to 2012, a full twelve years after the trilogy's second title.
Even after it released, Diablo III would be fraught with issues, as gamers frequently had to contend with server errors and the notoriously difficult Diablo Auction House. While these problems were eventually taken care of, Diablo III remains one of the most infamous delays in gaming history.
4 Prey (2017)
Initially announced shortly after the first game's 2006 release, Prey 2 was going to be an open-world RPG title developed by Human Head Studios. However, Bethesda bought the IP in 2011, and, in 2013, news broke that the new rights holders had scrapped all previous work and started fresh, hoping to get the game out by 2016.
Prey, as it would come to be known, was officially released in 2017 to genuinely favorable reviews, though it had little to nothing to do with the initial rumors and pieces of concept art that had been passed around when Human Head still held the rights to the title.
3 Duke Nukem Forever
Announced all the way back in 1997, Duke Nukem Forever would go on to experience one of the most tormented development cycles of all time. Suffering countless delays and seeing numerous builds scraped to keep pace with the evolution of gaming technology, it would eventually release in 2011. However, by that time, the gaming populace had outgrown the crude humor of the title's protagonist.
The concept may have done well enough had it actually come out in the late 90s, but, more than a decade later, FPS games had morphed into ultra-serious military-minded affairs, and Forever more or less never stood a chance.
2 Cyberpunk 2077
With reports now suggesting that a delay was inevitable, we're wondering what exactly the future will bring when it comes to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher 3 also experienced delays to ensure that it was as optimized as possible when it launched, and that may also be the case for this upcoming title.
Still, it's disheartening to have been teased by an overly-ambitious release date. We know that this won't go down as one of history's most infamous video game delays, but it holds an important spot on the 2020 release schedule, and, should further delays be in store, panic may just ensue.
1 Dead Island 2
Dead Island 2 may not be the most infamous case of vaporware of all time, but, originally announced in 2014 and bouncing between more developers than almost any title before, we're really beginning to doubt that this long-delayed game will ever see the light of day.
The Dead Island series has yet to really get off the ground, the 2011 original having been mostly forgotten by gamers at this point. Though publisher Deep Silver still insists that the game is in development, the rough development cycle and near Half-Life 3 levels of vaguery don't bode well for remaining fans of the franchise.