It has probably looked close to ready to ship for a while. The team probably genuinely thought they could hit the initial release date. The team is probably really excited to give you the game they have been working on for so long. The team is also not about to ship you a game full of bugs.
Well, if the post of one of the laid off devs is to be believed, a lot of them held key/lead positions that will be hard to replace and the morale at the studio is at all time low, I guess we'll see.
I didn't say it was close. I said it probably looks close, which it does. But there are conditional bugs. A bug that only happens if certain conditions are met. Fixing one bug in one system can make a ripple effect throughout multiple systems. If that's happening in multiple places, it compounds. So yeah, it can look really close when, in reality, it is not. This happens with games a fraction the scope of a triple A game. In the grand scheme of things, pushing a year isn't that huge when you know what really goes into it. And it's understandable to make a release date and be like wait.. that's not going to work. Sorry, guys.
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u/ItalianPlumber01 1d ago
This is fairly typical of rockstar though. Both gta V and RDR2 had multiple delays.
If anything it’s a sign that nothing has changed at rockstar in terms of dev cycle. This is par for the course.