Chances are, if you played Banjo-Kazooie or its sequel back in the heyday of the Nintendo 64, you're excited for Yooka-Laylee. The game, developed by a team of ex-Rare developers over at Playtonic Games, quickly became one of the biggest Kickstarter stories of 2015 — and it's easy to see why.
The team has promised that Yooka-Laylee would mark the return of the "mascot platformer," created by the same people that made the genre so popular all those years ago.
Unfortunately, it looks like gamers will have to wait a bit longer to play through the second coming of platformers: while Yooka-Laylee was originally scheduled for an October 2016 launch, Playtonic Games announced today that the game's release has been pushed back to Q1 2017.
Given the scale of the game and the size of the team working on it (Playtonic is a relatively tiny studio), a delay isn't all that big a surprise. Given how many other crowdfunded games have become the source of controversy over the past few years, the fact that Playtonic still maintains consistent contact with its backers is a nice change of pace.
Also, at the very least, fans got a new gameplay trailer out of the delay:
In an email sent to Kickstarter backers, the team reassured fans that the delay is for the best, and that the few extra months will be used for extra polish:
"... after long consideration and knowing through dialogue with our fans that they value quality and polish above all, we've made the difficult decision to lock the release of Yooka-Laylee to Q1 2017.
While we felt confident we could ship the game in October as originally projected in our Kickstarter, the Playtonic team has decided that it would prefer to add a few extra months' polish to the game schedule. Ultimately, this will allow us to deliver a better game to the tens-of-thousands of you who've supported us throughout development. And that's what we all want, right?"
Yes, the delay still stings — the game looks like it'll be a blast to play — but the extra development time should end up paying off in the long run. Yooka-Laylee has quite a bit of weight on its shoulders, and fans are expecting a lot from Playtonic: it's not every day that the team behind some of the best platformers ever gets to make a new game.
Long story short, if a few extra months of work mean that Yooka-Laylee is up to snuff, then most fans will happily wait a little longer to play the game.
Expect to see more of Yooka-Laylee when E3 2016 kicks off next week.
