We Are Sorry To Announce That This Game is Suffering Minor Delays

Star Wars: Episode VIII will be delayed by seven months, until the end of 2017, and there has not been as much wailing and gnashing of teeth in response as I was expecting. This may be because I compare things to video games by default, which is a subculture where announcements of delays can cause people to lose their s*** and then advertise the lamentable fact of their s***lessness on internet forums. I, on the other hand, welcome news of delays, especially for video games. Delays usually mean people are trying to make something not terrible, or at least less terrible than it was.

Delays are often a much worse sign for a film, signalling either post production woes, disinterest from the studio, or several different writers taking a crack at the script in turn. You then end up with something like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which is two different films that happen to be united by Andrew Garfield in skintight lycra, and is what experts refer to as a hot mess (Spidey is now to be rebooted for a third time as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, his film rights having been wrestled from Sony as if from a child who keeps clumsily breaking toys that only sort of belong to them).

Video game delays, however, tend to be much more useful, given that if you find out your film is f***ed once it’s already in the can it’s much harder to unf*** it – games have a bit more flexibility to their production. 2016 will, like most years, see the release of a lot of video games, several of which will inevitably have delays announced – my smart money is on all or some out of Mass Effect Andromeda, Dishonored 2, South Park the Fractured but Whole, and Gears of War 4 being bumped, all of which have release dates either suspiciously unconfirmed or in a suspiciously late month of the year.

Counterbalancing that are the games that were supposed to come out before 2016 but got pushed into it with their own delays. We’ve got stuff like The Division arriving almost two years after when it was supposed to be, Uncharted 4 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (both sequels that received a bump) and The Last Guardian, which has been in development for almost a literal decade. If it actually comes out now people will be pleasantly surprised.

It’s a yearly cycle, beautiful and comforting in its familiarity, as natural as the huge murmurations of starlings over Somerset that rise and fall in the evening sky, before coming to down to roost when they’re ready. Delays are such a regular occurrence now that it’s baffling how some people manage to get annoyed by it, especially because they’re usually to make the game better. It’s like the birdwatchers yelling at the starlings to hurry up. “Get a shift on, you shower of feathery little bastards, you’ve had long enough now!”

Take Valve. Valve has been responsible for some of the most beloved games out there (with a correspondingly huge user base), and basically all of them had delays to their release. It’s kind of Valve’s signature move. Yet every so often fans will pop up complaining about the huge wait for Half Life 2: Episode 3, which was supposedly being developed as far back as 2007, as well as the continued non-existence of Half Life 3. They’re angry because a company, under no obligation to do so, released some games they really liked and hasn’t followed up.

A couple of years ago some of them started sending crowbars to Valve as a protest. Imagine having so little of actual consequence to worry about that you have the time, money, and inclination to post weighty pieces of metal to a company. They’ve asked for more communication from Valve because waiting for a game to come out – literally not having to do a single f***ing thing themselves – is a “daunting task”. That’s entitlement dense enough to form a black hole and destroy the entire solar system.

On the bright side that black hole may lead to a universe where a game you like getting delayed is worse than it coming out on time but a bit s***, because that is not currently a reality. There are of course games which are delayed and still come out of a quality approximate to say, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and you can be annoyed at that, but not at the delay because in that situation it’s a consequence of f*** ups rather than the cause of them. You can’t polish a turd, as they say, and if you try you’re really just attempting to disguise that it was a turd in the first place. We must always remember the words of Miyamoto-san, even if they’re not always true: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

In the meantime you can comfort yourself with the roster of Delayed But Turned Out Alright Games, which has a lot of great stuff, possibly even your favourite stuff: The Last of Us; Mass Effect 3; The Witcher 3; Batman: Arkham Knight. All were delayed to have bugs fixed, to ensure they weren’t released unpolished to a demanding audience (which, incidentally, is a factor that pushes developers into overpromising when and what they can deliver in the first place), and to make sure they were the best games they could be. And not all of those had a s*** ending, right?

In the case of Star Wars Episode VIII, there’s hasn’t even been an officially confirmed reason for the delay yet, but people have responded by tweeting jaunty reaction gifs and putting the new date in their calendars, not adding director Rian Johnson to their s***list and sending him Kylo Ren lightsaber toys. There are rumours the push is to adjust the script to fit the fan reaction to characters in Episode VII. My cherished hope – that it’s to make the obviously brewing Poe Dameron and Finn gay romance into a canonical event – is also not yet officially endorsed by Disney, but my confirmation bias has a lot to latch on to. Episode VIII is code named Space Bears. Space Bears. Wake up, sheeple.