Highlights
- Nacon delays Terminator: Survivor to 2025, fans applaud decision.
- Nacon’s delay signals a commitment to quality over rushing release for Terminator: Survivors.
- Positive fan response represents a change in fortunes for movie-based video games.
Terminator: Survivors developer Nacon recently pushed back the game’s early access release to an unspecified 2025 date on consoles and PC.
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In their statement on X, the studio told fans they want to take their time to “deliver the game that fits your expectations,” emphasizing their focus on quality, not speed:
Fan reactions to Nacon’s statement have been exceedingly positive, with many commending them for not releasing an unfinished game and patching it along the way; something that has become a feature of modern gaming.
Nacon’s first Terminator game, Terminator: Resistance, is widely regarded as an average shooter with a gripping atmosphere that captures the feel of the original movies. Despite its subpar gameplay, the story and tone earned Nacon a lot of goodwill with the Terminator fanbase.
The follow-up, Terminator: Survivors, is set a couple of years after Judgment Day as an open-world survival game where players forage, fight, and build bases around the Skynet-caused wasteland while being hunted by a Resident EvilNemsis-like T-800.
Movie-based Video Games Are Good Now, Sometimes
There was a time when the delay of a Terminator game would have had fans wishing for a cancelation instead of a concrete release date, but not anymore.
Between the frantic late-night sessions of Friday the 13th, the claustrophobic hallways of Alien Isolation, or the admittedly average Australian experience of Mad Max, it isn’t impossible to create a great movie-based video game anymore, if the developers don’t try to shoehorn in a canon and stick to telling their own story.
In fact, for the first time since 2008, the best-selling game of the year in 2023 wasn’t a Call of Duty, FIFA, or Madden entry, but Hogwarts Legacy, with 22 million copies sold.
Although the game faced delays and a fair bit of controversy on release, it still managed to outsell its competitors.
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Recent success doesn’t mean studios have cracked some code for movie-based games. For every Alien Isolation you have a Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and while one brought in millions, the other dropped Warner Bros’ game revenue by 41%.
Nacon has shown Terminator fans that they understand the source material and are willing to delay sales if it means more development is needed. It remains to be seen if the delay will improve the game or end up being a letdown anyway.
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