Black Myth: Wukong, the highly anticipated game from Chinese developer and publisher Game Science, made an appearance at yesterday’s Summer Game Fest, showing off another gorgeous trailer before revealing that the game is open for pre-orders.
It wasn’t all good news though, because the company also out out a statement saying that the Xbox version of the game has been delayed. No new release date was announced.
“We are currently optimizing the Xbox Series X|S version to meet our quality standards, so it won’t release simultaneously with the other platforms,” the company said.
“We apologize for the delay and aim to minimize the wait for Xbox users. We will announce the release date as soon as it meets our quality standards.”
The PS5 and PC versions of the game remain unaffected and will launch on August 20, 2024. No less four versions are available to pre-order, ranging in price from the standard $59.99 all the way up to a $399 Collector’s Edition which includes a steel, necklace and statue.
It’s also worth noting that the standard and deluxe editions are digital only, so if you want a physical copy of the game you’ll need to pay out a minimum of $169 for the Deluxe Edition.
While Game Science’s statement doesn’t provide a specific reason for the delay, reading between the lines strongly suggests that it’s the Xbox Series S likely posing the problem. Part of launching a game on Xbox is that said game must be available on both the weaker Series S and the much more powerful Series X with feature parity between them. This has proven tricky for developers in the past, most notably for Larian Studios and their game Baldur’s Gate 3. In Larian’s case, they couldn’t get split-screen co-op to work on the Series S, delaying the Xbox version of the game. Eventually, Larian persuaded Microsoft to make an exception and allow them to cut out the split-screen mode from the Series S version.
As for Black Myth: Wukong, which is loosely based on the classic 16th century Chinese nove Journey to the West, it has been a somewhat controversial game. It debuted in 2020 with a visually stunning trailer that immediately catapulted it into the public attention, drawing millions of views. However, people also began to wonder if it was too good to be true, as the developer had previously only worked on mobile games and the quality leap between those and Black Myth was massive. These days, of course, it’s surprisingly easy to create an amazing trailer and even bullshit your way to a game becoming massively popular ahead of its release, as shown by the Day Before saga.
But thankfully, we have seen a good amount of gameplay over the past few years that seems to indicate its a real, playable game. It still looks unbelievably good, so some part of me will likely be suspicious right up until I’m actually playing it on August 20. But not on Xbox.