Ahead of tomorrow’s global launch of PS5 exclusive Returnal, Housemarque CEO and co-founder Ilari Kuittinen has released a statement about the game and its development.
Returnal releases tomorrow for PlayStation 5 (our review goes online later today), and in a new blog post on the official website of the developer, Kuittinen shared a few thoughts and also deeply thanked publisher Sony for allowing the studio to create something new and unique as Returnal.
“We have just wrapped up development and are taking a deep breath here at Housemarque”, the CEO writes. “Even though we announced that Returnal went gold a few weeks back, our team has not stopped working on the game to further balance and polish. This might probably be hard to believe if you aren’t the insider in the game development scene and haven’t been part of shipping a game yourself. There is always something you think you could improve, add, or polish. I think it is not even possible to develop a “perfect” game with everyone in the team thinking that we have now accomplished everything we ever dreamed of, when finally setting the game free out to the world. And therefore, we’ve worked on the first day patch trying to make the game even a little bit better up until the last moment.”
“When we started our pre-production of the game almost exactly four years ago in March 2017, we never would have imagined how big a production we eventually would be making. Looking back, it’s almost incomprehensive to think that we were working on four (!) different projects and we only had 50 people in-house at the time! We were finalizing two different projects, Nex Machina and Matterfall, prototyping and experimenting with a multiplayer project we later named Stormdivers and were starting a small pre-production of a totally new game.”
Kuittinen adds, “In the age when game publishers are taking less and less creative risks, we are truly thankful to our publishing partner Sony, who has given us an opportunity to work on something very risky and has given fantastic support during the whole project. We are forever grateful for having this opportunity.”
We highly suggest reading the full article on the studio’s official website.
Returnal releases tomorrow globally for PlayStation 5.
