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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night will arrive in 2019, it’s been announced. The game was Kickstarted in 2015, and originally set for a 2017 launch. One other major change to its release schedule is that it won’t be coming to PS Vita at all, one of its originally planned platforms.
The news came via an update on Bloodstained’s campaign page, in which producer Koji “Iga” Igarashi wrote:
“The second announcement is that the game will no longer launch on PlayStation Vita. This decision is largely due to Sony’s plans to discontinue the Vita console, ending production of physical copies and stopping certain online store support features.
“It is extremely unfortunate, but as a result, we won’t be releasing the game on Vita. For the backers who have ordered the PS Vita version of the game, you will be able to choose another platform or request a refund.”
Sony has been winding down support for the Vita over the past year or so, announcing earlier this year it would be abandoning physical copies of games on the handheld, and cutting the system out of its free games offering via PlayStation Plus.
Things as they currently are for the Vita, Bloodstained – a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series – was set to be one of the machine’s biggest releases. A loss like this just puts another nail in the coffin of Sony’s [warning: editorialising] overlooked handheld.
Bloodstained wasn’t delayed just because of the Vita version – raising the game’s quality is top of the list, and when it arrives in 2019 it will launch on PS4, Xbox One, Switch and PC. So hey, at least there’ll still be a portable version.
