A Kickstarter game delayed? Shocking, but true folks. On Tuesday, Cyan announced that Obduction, its spiritual successor to Myst, is delayed to early 2016. It’s something the company had been going back and forth on for a bit, but is now confirmed—due to some extraneous circumstances.
It’s even less surprising in the case of Obduction, considering Miller hinted at me last year that the game was bigger than Cyan anticipated and might be pushed back. That future has come to pass. Here’s the note that Miller and Cyan just sent to Kickstarter backers:
“First, Obduction is amazing. We couldn’t be happier with how it’s progressing.
About six months ago we realized that Obduction had evolved with enough content to be a bit larger than the Kickstarter-sized experience we had planned. With that in mind we decided to see if we could raise some small additional funding to move Obduction to that larger vision—instead of moving the scope back down.
We had serious interest from several sources including a small publisher…Long story short, we were expecting yesterday we would finally sign and move forward, but instead we found out that, in spite of all the good faith negotiating, early assurances (that we based some rather important production decisions on), and even gestures on our part to sweeten the terms of the contract (if that was the problem)—the publisher did a 180 and reneged for what were apparently financial reasons.”
And the upshot:
“Obduction production continues at full speed while we reassess. We will determine the adjustments required to move Obduction back to the original plan—reducing the scope in an intelligent way, so we can complete it, polish it, and test it.
We’ve used a few months of our schedule for work on the larger vision, so we’re a few months behind. We’ll be reworking our production schedule based on what we figure out in the next week. Obduction is definitely still coming, and it will amaze you, but it will be delayed by a few months.”
Sounds like a bit of a mess, but as always I’d rather a delayed game than a broken one. And what I’ve played of the game so far has indeed been impressive—you can read our exclusive hands-on preview with Obduction here.