For months now, I’ve been saying that the long-promised Vita version of Axiom Verge is just around the corner and apologizing for the delays. My hope was that I would be able to get it out to everyone and not need to bore everyone with a lot of technical details as to why the port has been taking so long. But as we come within a month of the 1-year anniversary of the PS4 launch, I felt I owed the community a more detailed look at the issues we’re struggling with, where we are in the process, and how much further we have to go. The tl;dr version is this: we have a list of mostly known issues that we are working through and we really, really are getting quite close.
Since you’ve heard me say that we’re getting very close before, though, let me go into more detail about why I think that’s the case. For people who already paid for the PS4 version with the expectation that the Vita version was right around the corner, this isn’t meant to serve as an excuse for the delays. As a consumer, you shouldn’t have to care about what’s going on in behind the scenes. All you should have to know is that you’ve paid for something that included a promise for a Vita version, and you still haven’t gotten it yet. Many of you are upset about that, and that feeling is 100% justified.
So here’s the good news: the game is ported. It runs and is playable! Anyone who has worked on a porting project can tell you that that represents the biggest hurdle. Going from ported game to polished and shippable ported game is much easier than going from non-ported game to ported game. In fact, one of the reasons I couldn’t give a status update on the port before was that there was nothing to show. It was all plumbing and wiring. It’s only when you get everything hooked up and hit the switch that it goes from 0-100 pretty much overnight.
[video=youtube;Nv1aECmb6A4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv1aECmb6A4[/video]
So from here on out, our focus is on cleanup, polish, and bug fixing. Here is the current list of known issues with the game. Some of these sound like major issues, but in most cases, it’s just a question of going down the list and implementing each feature or isolating a few bugs. For the most part, this list is not necessarily in the order of which these issues will be tackled; rather, it’s primarily in the order of ease of understanding. Any feature listed as critical is something we feel we cannot ship without.
The proper way to read this is not to add up all of the different timeframes to come up with the total time. Many of these things will happen in parallel. For example, fixing the graphics glitches is part of general QA. Fixing the memory issues will also help with load times. And so on. In fact, when I first started drafting this update, the list was quite a bit longer. In the time it took me to record the video, the to do list had shrunk by about a third.
I am extremely tempted to share our internal target dates for completion, but I am going to restrain myself from doing so, since I don’t want to fail to meet expectations and continue to disappoint those of you who have been so patient and supportive. However, I am very comfortable in announcing that we’re in the home stretch. It’s everyone’s top priority, and we’re getting closer every day. Thank you all for your continued patience and support.
http://www.axiomverge.com/blog/vita-status-update
und alles was ein gutes Metroidvania ausmacht. Kanns auch jetzt noch jedem empfehlen. Vielleicht werde ich wenn ich Zeit habe mal die Speedrun-Challenge angehen. Ne sehr gute Zeit liegt in etwa um 1-1,5h, was ich vorhin kurz gesehen habe.
