November Update: What We’re Up To

We’re going to get the hardest part of this update out of the way first: We’re delaying the release of our Tales of Destiny 2 patch to 2023.

This might seem obvious to those who have been following the updates closely and how we haven’t had a lot to say as of late with regard to our progress. And that’s because there simply hasn’t been a lot to report! So we’re going to take a minute to talk about that and what the future holds for Tales of Destiny 2‘s patch release.

When we first announced this project to the public in the spring of 2021, we had a loose goal in mind: to try to release the patch by Tales of Destiny 2‘s 20th anniversary on November 28th, 2022. At the time, we felt very confident in our progress—and rightfully so, as up until very recently, we had still been on track to do so! We pored over the text for months until we felt confident that the entire script was up to our standards and that every line of text we translated for menus would be clear and concise.

And then life happened. Nearly everyone on the team has gone through some very major life changes over just the last few months. Some of us have made major career shifts, some have gotten sick, and others have had their living situations suddenly and entirely changed, among other personal situations that simply affected quality of life too much to devote the same amount of time and energy into the work on this patch that we’ve had for the last year and a half. One of our internal founding principles has always been that our lives away from this project come first.

This patch is a labor of love in every sense of the word, and that means ensuring that we’re working on it when we’re at our best. We don’t believe in crunch or in putting pressure on members of our team to meet hard deadlines, especially when their situation can’t properly accommodate that. We’re a team, and we do our best to support each other as we work in order to ensure the final result is the best it can possibly be.

So where does that leave us?

We can say with certainty that nobody is more disappointed than us to have to announce any sort of delays. We can also say with certainty that while things are moving slower, they are still moving forward! There are still quite a few kinks to work out with the programming to make sure everything is running with no bugs or crashes and none of the issues that will impede the quality of anyone’s playthrough.

Once we’re sure all the text and quality-of-life features are fully implemented, our team will continue as we have previously stated by doing thorough playtesting of the game to try to catch any remaining issues. Whether that’s something sizable like crashes or just pesky typos that our eyes missed on our countless spreadsheet pages, we intend to bring this patch to you in the best possible state! Once we’re moving at full speed again, things should go much quicker. So close, yet so far!

In the meanwhile, we do still have plenty to talk about. You can look forward to learning about the roadblocks, other finer points of the programming, and more about the localization editing process. We still have some neat posts planned, so stay tuned for those!

For now, what we want to do more than anything is thank those of you who have been patiently waiting for this patch. It’s frustrating that we can’t just have enough time in the day to get this done faster, so we really appreciate all of the kindness and support we’ve seen in the wake of our slow updates. With any luck, our schedules will ease in the coming weeks after the holiday and into the new year so we can share this patch sooner rather than later. Please look forward to it!