The COVID-19 pandemic, and the many teams now going near-entirely work-from-home in response, presents an interesting challenge for those working on live games like Ubisoft’s For Honor.
In the case of that particular team, Ubisoft says that developers were able to quickly adapt to their new remote roles and are working to keep things running as usual for For Honor’s online battles.
But even a quick adjustment can’t stave off delays. In this case, Ubisoft says that the initial disruption of the sudden work-from-home shift has had some effects on how it’ll be able to deliver content in the near-term, including the launch of this year’s second season.
“On our side, the team is still hard at work to keep For Honor fully operational even though we are doing so from home,” reads a statement from the team. “We are proud of how quickly everyone on the For Honor development team has adapted to the situation. However, even with all our efforts during these times, the disruption over the past weeks is having an impact on our ability to deliver our near term content updates. For this reason, we have taken the decision to delay the release of Year 4 Season 2 to June 11, 2020.”
It’s a tough call to delay a major content drop, and one more and more developers (including Square Enix around the same time) are having to face. On Ubisoft’s part, the team notes that it wasn’t an easy call to make but that “we are confident this was the right decision for us to be able to launch the content as we intended.”