Last Sunday, a trailer that aired during an online Xbox event showed Valor Mortis, an upcoming action game that re-imagines the age of Napoleonic wars as a conflict with the plague-ridden undead.
It’s a first-person game that mixes Dark Souls-style combat with parkour—it’s from the developers of the acclaimed, fast-paced cyberpunk wall-running Ghostrunner games—and a setting like nothing else that’s out there.
Valor Mortis’ trailer concluded with a release date: September 24.
But by the time it aired, the teams behind the game knew that was no longer Valor Mortis’ release date. Days ago, they’d learned the hard way that September 24 would be untenable and that they’d have to change it.
Today, they’ve announced a new one, October 13, after speaking to Game File about getting out of the bind they recently found themselves in.
“When we picked September 24th, it looked like a very, very clear date,” Blake Rochkind, head of publisher Lyrical Games, told me during an impromptu interview on Monday in Los Angeles.
“Very quickly it became not such a clear date.”
Lyrical and development studio One More Level had a feeling the deate might need to change, Rochkind recalled. But they had to lock in September 24 “many, many weeks” ago.
Really, though, who could know if that was the right call when they made it?
“There were so many unknowns,” Rochkind said. “This was before Sony State of Play, before Xbox Showcase, before Nintendo Direct, before Summer Games Fest.”
Then on Tuesday, June 2, during a PlayStation showcase held just five days before their planned release date reveal, things changed.
“As soon as Control announced September 24th, we knew we were moving the date.”
It wasn’t just the PlayStation showcase reveal of the release date for Remedy’s upcoming third-person thriller. There were others. And changing their own trailer this close to its airing, Rochkind would later tell me, wasn’t possible.
