Here's a fun PR trick for anyone out there with some bad news to drop on the unsuspecting public: wait until the end of the day on a Friday to let it out. You're way less likely to get follow-up emails from pesky journalists, and you can always say "Sorry! I'd already gone home for the day!" if any writers who did send inquiries complain about not getting a response.
Nintendo just employed this super fun method in announcing (via Facebook, of all places) that The Legend of Zelda for Wii U, arguably the biggest game currently slated for release on the platform, will likely not arrive this year as originally promised.
Series producer Eiji Aonuma delivers the bad news in a short video, explaining that in the last few months, the team has "experienced firsthand the freedom of exploration that hasn't existed in any Zelda game to date," and that they have discovered "several new possibilities" for the game. In an effort to fully realize these ideas, the team has decided that they are "no longer making a 2015 release our number one priority."
You could read into this and conceive that there's a chance that Zelda still might hit this year, but it's also wholly unlikely that Nintendo would even bother to drop a video message like this if they believed there was still a solid shot of that happening. Why rile up the fanbase unnecessarily, you know?
Delays are delays and a game with more work put into it almost always trumps a game shoved out to meet a specific release window. Still, that's likely cold comfort to anyone who was hoping to play the game this year, especially given the paucity of Nintendo's remaining Wii U lineup for 2015.
- The Legend of Zelda Wii U (Working Title)