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My Gamescom excitement comes crashing down as my most-wanted open-world game is delayed to 2025: Hyper Light Breaker devs need more time to get it 'polished'

Open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker from Heart Machine has delayed its Early Access launch from late 2024 to early 2025 to polish the gameplay experience and ensure a sustainable development pace.

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Open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker, the latest from Solar Ash and Hyper Light Drifter dev Heart Machine, has pushed its early access launch from late 2024 to early 2025, and if you need me I'll be in The Sad Corner. 

The news broke smack in the middle of Gamescom Opening Night Live, just not at the show itself. Founder and creative director Alx Preston of Heart Machine says in a Steam blog post that, "After much evaluation and many conversations with our publisher Arc Games, we’ve decided that we need just a little more time to get the gameplay experience polished to our standards.

"Therefore, we’re now looking at an Early Access launch date of very early next year. We don’t want to ship a project, even in Early Access, that we’re not satisfied with on a number of fronts. Especially in the current state of the industry, we need to put as good a foot forward as we can." 

Preston stresses that "we believe in maintaining a sustainable pace of development for our team, which means taking care of the mental and physical health needs of everyone first, rather than burning the team out trying to hit a specific set launch date." Beyond being the right thing to do, Preston says this also sets the team up for "better, more responsive" development later as the game evolves in early access. 

Heart Machine is still planning to host more Hyper Light Breaker demos at various shows and conventions in the months ahead, and Preston maintains that "we REALLY want to put Breaker out there, and see people engage with a game that we’ve all worked so hard on." 

I finally got to try Hyper Light Breaker earlier this year, and even in a sub-par venue demo setup which all but pressed a TV directly to my eyeballs, it showed enormous promise. This delay has been a real monkey's paw moment; what a fool I was to hope for an update on the release date. 

Gamescom proper turned up news on Infinity Nikki, the cozy open-world dress-up adventure game headed by a Breath of the Wild dev, with a new trailer and an incredible soundtrack brain-worm.