South Park: The Fractured But Whole was on schedule to be released on December 6, as of the 2016 E3 show in June. A mere three months later, Ubisoft announced that the game had been pushed back to the first quarter of 2017. On Thursday, the publisher announced another delay.
According to Polygon, The Fractured But Whole won’t be released until Ubisoft’s next fiscal year. This gives the role-playing game a new release window that stretches from April 2017 through March 2018.
With the previous delay, Ubisoft stated, “The development team wants to make sure the game experience meets the high expectations of fans, and the additional time will help them achieve this goal.”
There are a number of reasons a game like this could be delayed. For one, the March release calendar is already full of big titles that South Park would have competed against. Series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone also supply their voices to almost every character, so any audio capture would take a lot of time. Or maybe the game just needed additional tweaks and fixes before it met Ubisoft’s expectations.
Due to this delay, the company has revised its sales forecast for the current fiscal year that ends March 31. Sales now run from 1.61 billion euros ($1.72 billion U.S.) to 1.67 billion euros ($1.78 billion). That’s a decrease of between 155 million and 175 million euros.
Delays aren’t new to the South Park game franchise. South Park: The Stick of Truth suffered a number of delays as well. Originally, the game was being published by THQ with a release schedule for the second half of 2012. Later, THQ pushed the game into early 2013, then again to later that year. During THQ’s collapse, Ubisoft picked up the title and gave it a December 2013 release window. The Stick of Truth would get one final delay before it’s official release in March 2014.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC.
