Nowadays, it’s unfortunately quite often the case that videogames launch with bugs, seeing day one patches roll out or numerous updates in the following weeks. The virtual reality (VR) industry is no different, yet sometimes developers hold off launching all together if things are really bad. And that seems to be the case with Neat Corporation’s Budget Cuts, scheduled for arrival tomorrow, it has now been put on hold.
In a Reddit posting today, Neat Corporation outlined why its taken this last minute step, a day before launch: “Long story short – we were pretty late in properly optimizing Budget Cuts, thinking we wouldn’t need as much time as we actually did. The optimizations we implemented in this final stretch, while useful, ended up not helping as much as we had hoped. We thought our initial delay of two weeks would be enough, but even throughout these last few days, working into the night and firing on all cylinders to get performance up, we’re still not hitting an acceptable and consistent framerate. We were too optimistic, and we’re very sorry about that.”
The post goes into greater detail about various facets of Budget Cuts which need imporvement, including Occlusion Culling, audio performance, rare progression-blocking bugs, a weird screen glitch when framerate drops on the Oculus Native build, and other framerate issues unique to Oculus Native.
Due to the various issues Neat Corporation has to deal with there’s no longer a confirmed launch date. “The honest answer is that we don’t know,” the studio states. The post mentions several time lines, from “we have to delay the release again for a few days” to “approximately 1-2 weeks.” So at present even the team isn’t sure how long these bugs will take to address.
It was only a couple of days ago that Neat Corporation released the final launch trailer for Budget Cuts, after previously delaying the launch by two weeks from earlier in May.
Budget Cuts is a stealth experience set in a world full of robots. You play an employee at mega conglomerate TransCorp who finds out their job is in danger. After a mysterious package arrives you must then head out and save your job. To do this you need to sneak around the facilities, using whatever vents, ceiling crawl spaces and more to remain hidden. Should you be spotted then it’s time for some knife throwing action.
As further details continue to emerge regarding the delay and new launch date, VRFocus will keep you posted.