Considered one of 2024’s weirder tales could have come to a wierd conclusion, as a developer from Recreation Science has posted about Black Fantasy Wukong‘s absence from Xbox on Chinese language social media platform Weibo. It appears as if rumours surrounding technical limitations being a significant offender behind the sport’s lack of an Xbox port have some advantage in spite of everything.
Yongar Feng-Ji, Recreation Science CEO, posted the next on Weibo: “Though there have been no massive surprises, I nonetheless felt somewhat emotional after getting all of them. Everybody’s combating energy is so terrifying, however the one factor lacking is the XBOX gown… It appears a bit mistaken (however that is 10G shared reminiscence, it is actually inconceivable to get it with out a number of years of optimization expertise”. That is machine-translated, so take it with a pinch of salt, and it is value noting that the Xbox Sequence S has 10GB of reminiscence, which actually implies that console is the primary barrier to an Xbox model.
Let’s take a short journey by the saga. Again in 2024, Black Fantasy Wukong proved an extremely widespread motion sport for a lot of, doing nicely on PlayStation and PC. Nevertheless, with no phrase on an Xbox model of the sport, many have been curious as to why the sport skipped one of many main consoles. No official phrase was given initially, although two main theories circulated: some type of PlayStation exclusivity deal was stopping it, or the Xbox Sequence S was proving to be a hurdle for the event group.
On the Black Fantasy Wukong’s pre-order FAQ web page, the next is written: “PC and PS5 customers can benefit from the full sport beginning August 20, 2024. We’re at the moment optimizing the Xbox Sequence X|S model to satisfy our high quality requirements, so it will not launch concurrently with the opposite platforms. We apologize for the delay and intention to attenuate the look forward to Xbox customers. We’ll announce the discharge date as quickly because it meets our high quality requirements.” This factors to extra work being carried out on an Xbox model, however with the sport releasing in August and nonetheless no Xbox model it appeared that this was proving troublesome.
Nevertheless, an actual spanner on this concept got here through a Microsoft assertion to Forbes. In an article written by Paul Tassi, a Microsoft consultant supplied this assertion: “As we’ve mentioned earlier than, we’re excited for the launch of Black Fantasy Wukong on Xbox Sequence X|S and are working with Recreation Science to carry the sport to our platforms. We would favor to not touch upon the offers made by our companions with different platform holders however we will affirm that the delay shouldn’t be resulting from Xbox platform limitations which were raised to us.”
Tassi would additionally put up on Twitter {that a} supply knowledgeable him that as of August 2024, Black Fantasy Wukong was not on Xbox resulting from an exclusivity deal. IGN would later corroborate this report with its personal seperate supply.
Nevertheless, different journalists would say in any other case. Take Jeff Grubb, who on an August episode of the Recreation Mess podcast mentioned that he heard that there was no “cash advertising and marketing deal” that might result in exclusivity, although he did not cross out another collaboration resulting in PlayStation’s lenghty headstart.
So there was this era of he-said, she-said, with very credible voices listening to various things from totally different individuals within the know, deepening the thriller. Quick ahead to at the moment, and the CEO has seemingly put the inquiries to relaxation. Actually, Recreation Science wouldn’t be the one developer which has struggled with the Xbox Sequence S. The CPO of Dune Awakening studio Funcom, Scott Junior, informed us final yr that making the Sequence S port can be a “problem”, whereas the Stalker devs have said that making the Sequence S port felt “inconceivable”, although adopted up this assertion with an optimistic tackle how any developer may determine it out finally.
Now, there are only some questions. Why did Microsoft say outright that technical issues weren’t the reason for the delay? Was it only a PR transfer, or on condition that credible journalists have echoed that an exclusivity deal did exist, was there some confusion or miscommunication behind the scenes? Then there’s the plain query: when will Black Fantasy Wukong come to Xbox? Will it ever? This story, whereas largely wrapped up, would possibly nonetheless have some twists and turns in it but.