Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant Jan ’24 & Delay

We have another update as we begin to kick off the year with a plethora of video game news. This update for Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant focuses on the delayed game and explains why there is a delay. So let’s get right into it!

 The team decided to start plain and simple with this:

Hello everyone. First of all, we wish you a happy New Year 2024! We have an update on the release schedule of the game.

Sadly, this is to announce a delay.

Delaying The Game

Something a team never wants to do is disappoint their fans. Unfortunately, with all the good news sometimes there is bad news too. The team started talking about the delay for Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant by saying this:

We’ve been having problems that we tried to work around. It’s just impossible for us to meet the June deadline we had as a goal. We are very sorry and we understand this is a letdown; we owe you an explanation, so here it is.

Before having the Kickstarter campaign for Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant in February last year, we were in talks with a publisher (and a pretty good one). We had a “pre-deal” in which they told us they would fund the base game (the minimum viable product) if we had a successful Kickstarter campaign. Said campaign would be to fund the features we had to remove (the stretch goals) and a limited physical edition. Which the publisher didn’t cover.

The Kickstarter campaign was released and thanks to the backers it was a success, and the publisher was happy with the vertical slice (demo) we showed them, but the actual signing of the deal was being constantly delayed.

Publisher Stalled

The team continued to explain how this issue with the publisher affected the game and said this:

The publisher stalled for several months until they finally said it was not a good time to make that deal, leaving us alone. Their reasoning was that the game industry as a whole was not in a good place and that they had to prioritize “minimum risk projects”, i.e. an already finished product (so, already funded) with over 20000 wishlists on Steam that is 100% ready to port to consoles and launch. We were obviously not at that point yet, and to be honest, we wouldn’t have needed a publisher if we were, other than for the promotion and marketing.

As these “pre-deals” operate in good faith and are not really legally binding, we can’t do anything (and we don’t want to go to court). Also, similar situations have happened to other friend studios during 2023, it was just not a good year. So, we were left with roughly half the budget to make the base game. Thanks to the Kickstarter money and a grant we got from our country’s government we could keep working on Revenant, but we still needed a publisher or an investor to finish it.

Looking For Solutions

Grimorio of Games continued diving into the details of the situation and their plans to correct it. So they went into more detail for Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant solutions and said this:

This is the reason we have been going to events like Gamescom and Paris Game Connection. We want to try to close a deal with a publisher that is up to fund the rest of the development. While we have several publishers interested in the game, we haven’t signed a deal with anyone yet. It looks like it will take some time. 

This means that, unfortunately, we will need to extend Revenant’s development, as we currently do not have enough people to finish it before the milestone we set (June 2024). The publisher’s funding would have been invested in hiring more professionals to hasten the development. So without that money, we can’t reach that pace. On top of that, several members of the team have been dealing with personal problems (health-related and others) that haven’t precisely helped with the project.

On the other hand, and to have a closer release of a product that can help us gain some money to inject into Revenant’s development, we have decided to shift focus to the remake of the first Sword of the Necromancer we announced as a stretch goal that was never reached, Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection.

This project has a way smaller scope. It’s something that we can finish in a relatively short time with the team we currently have. Also, if this remake is at least as successful as the original game, that means that there will be more people waiting to play the sequel.

We know this would not be the best-received news ever, but we have tried everything to be able to finish Revenant, and 6 months away from the alleged release date, it’s clear that we won’t be able to. That’s why we want to be transparent with you and share the state of the project.

Compensation

The team finished by trying to compensate backers some for the delay. This is what they offered to backers as compensation for the game’s delay:

To compensate for this delay, we want to offer all backers a free copy of Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection for Steam once it’s ready. This way you can try the new combat and summon mechanics. As well as revisit the original game’s story or discover it in case you haven’t played it yet. We can’t currently promise console versions, as those have an extra cost for us that we can’t assume now.

Also, shifting focus from the sequel to this remake doesn’t mean we have halted Revenant’s development. As both games share engines, mechanics, models, and animations, we can work on both simultaneously, but our current priority is having the remake ready as soon as possible to be able to get more funds for Revenant. We will keep sharing updates about Revenant‘s development as we have been doing.

Again, we are very sorry we couldn’t deliver in the time we promised. We don’t want to half-ass Revenant and our purpose is to give you the game you pledged for, but these are difficult times for game development indeed (and for anything actually). Let’s just hope things go a bit better this new year. 

Thank you very much for your support

Wrap Up

Now while delays are disappointing for fans, sometimes it can’t be helped. There can be any reasons for a delay. From this update, it seems like it’s not really due to the team’s fault. I do appreciate their transparency with everything going on. It’s not very often a developer shares this much information. Also not often do they share the process for how they are trying to correct things. Regardless of the delay, I’m sure fans just want the best possible final product. So with that said I am still looking forward to the day Sword of the Necromancer: Revenant releases. Stay tuned as I’ll continue to cover all the monthly updates for this game.