Bandai Namco Entertainment have announced that Tales of Arise has been delayed, with no new release date, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic.
Producer Yusuke Tomizawa explains in a statement that despite the best efforts to counter-act the remote working orders due to the coronavirus pandemic, it “affected some aspects of development.” The game will need to be delayed, with no new launch window revealed until a later date.
“As you may have already seen in media stories and on our social media channels, we have made the decision to delay the launch timing of ‘Tales of Arise’, the latest title in the ‘Tales of’ series.
The goal for Tales of Arise is to provide a familiar but innovative gameplay experience to fans of the series, while pushing the technical envelope to deliver a high level of graphical quality to impress both long-time players and those who have never played a Tales Of game. Development on the title has moved steadily forward in 2020 as we overcame challenges along the way.
While COVID-19 has affected some aspects of development, we’ve done our best to adapt to the situation and have implemented remote development capabilities for our team.
However, we will need more time to achieve the quality and provide the gorgeous experience we envision for our players, and therefore we decided to delay the launch timing for Tales of Arise.
A new launch window update will be provided once we have more details to share.
In the meantime, the determination of our development team has not weakened. It is always darkest before the dawn, as illustrated in the image below. We hope you will join us as a bring a new Tales Of adventure to light.”
A wallpaper was also shared (seen above). You can download it in higher quality here.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic (also known as COVID-19 officially, or Chinese Flu to others) has affected many worldwide, from businesses to public gatherings and events.
This includes postponements of GDC, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the physical events for EVO 2020 and Tokyo Game Show 2020, and cancellations E3 2020 (including digital events), BlizzCon 2020, the physical event for Gamescom 2020, Comiket 98, and MAGStock 2020.
We also reported the second Seitokai Yakuindomo (Student Council Staff Members) movie and Log Horizon: Roundtable Collapse being delayed on our sister anime, manga, and Japanese culture news website Nicchiban.
The Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering are mapping the virus’ spread [1, 2]. As of this time of writing, there are over over 4.209 million active cases worldwide. There have been over 483,000 deaths; however over 4.775 million people have made a “total recovery.” There have been over 9.467 million total confirmed cases.
Japan has 955 active cases (18,037 total cases), 969 deaths, and 16,113 recoveries.
Tales of Arise is coming soon to Windows PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One
