This doesn’t guarantee of course that the game will come out at the end of March, as there has been no news from Square either way and there are no listings on other sites to that effect. It may be that following the January screw-up, someone has bumped it forward a couple of months to prevent Ubisoft throwing its toys out of the pram.
Until the actual release date is confirmed, we just don’t know. It is a good sign that there are no indications that it’s coming out later than originally announced, though, given that Rise of the Tomb Raider didn’t even break the top 10 last month in terms of games sales despite receiving almost unanimously strong reviews from major publications.
It did however release on the same date as Fallout 4, arguably one of the biggest launches of the year — which seems like a poor choice (as per PCGamer) and the decision to restrict itself to the less popular of the two major console systems was always going to limit sales.
Although this might be sad news for anyone who was excited by the prospect of exploring new tombs with the ever-raiding Lara, it’s good to see that the PC port isn’t being rushed through. All we need to do is look at any of the big PC ports from console games in recent years – Assassin’s Creed Unity and Batman: Arkham Knight being two of the worst — to see that if you don’t give PC ports enough time and care, they look and play terribly.
And in some cases they don’t work at all, for months, which is awful PR for that game and the developer. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate sales were down this year, partly because of the poor performance of Unity the year before.
