Neat Corporation today announced that Budget Cuts, their upcoming VR stealth game, now has an official launch date after difficulties with framerate stability and other bugs encountered in the game delayed the game’s May 31st launch. And there’s not much time left to wait, as the game is set to launch tomorrow, June 14th at 10 AM PT (local time here).
Update (06/13/18): Neat Corp sent out a surprise tweet this morning saying the delay is coming to end.
The original article detailing the delay follows below:
Original article (06/30/18): The studio announced the news via a Reddit post, saying that the long-awaited Budget Cuts still suffers optimization issues. The studio says they’ll be taking the time to improve the game’s stability and framerate until it’s “consistent and acceptable,” delaying Budget Cuts launch until further notice.
The latest delay comes after a two-week delay earlier this month, which Neat Corp says they thought would be enough to fix the outlying issues with the game.
With the review embargo up since May 28th, we’ve already had a chance to dive in, giving it a solid [9.2/10]. In my playthrough, the bugs I encountered weren’t grave enough to consider the game unreviewable, or even remotely unplayable. In retrospect, I may have just been lucky to have seen acceptable frame rates on my admittedly higher-spec test rig and HTC Vive, and didn’t encounter anything more than what I would consider minor bugs that weren’t gamebreaking in the least, something Neat Corp said would be ironed out for launch, then scheduled for May 31st.
We did note bad optimization on Rift, but went ahead with the review on Vive anyway, giving the studio the benefit of the doubt that the press version wasn’t ready for Rift users in the first place, citing the lack of 180-degree sensor support on the press build on Steam.
“So, when will the game release? The honest answer is that we don’t know, but it’s going to be as soon as the game is as performant and stable as it should be,” says Neat Corp’s Freya Holmer. “I’d like to say we’re releasing soon, but that meant 2.5 years last time we used that term, so I’m going to say “in 5 minutes” which should mean approximately 1-2 weeks. Will it take longer? Maybe, maybe not. It’s very hard to predict when the issues we’re facing have many unknown variables and moving parts, which is why we’re not ready with a specific release date. Maybe we’ll time it perfectly with E3, to make sure our game will be drowned out by all of the other announcements.”
On the docket of items to address: occlusion culling, audio performance, eliminating rare progression-blocking bugs, and fixing screen glitches when framerate drops on Oculus Native build.
“On behalf of the Budget Cuts team,” says Holmer “we’re truly sorry, and hope you’re all okay with waiting just a little bit more.”
While disheartening to hear, we stick by our review score, and look forward to the day when users can see for themselves why we rated Budget Cuts so highly; hopefully sooner rather than later.
