Platinum Games director accepts PlayStation 3 port of Bayonetta as their biggest failure

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   September 27th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

It is not every day that you find a developer candidly speaking about the shortcomings of his own project.

Atsushi Inaba of Platinum Games, however, made an exception by coming out to bluntly call the PlayStation 3 version of the 2010 action game Bayonetta “our biggest failure.”

During an interview with EDGE Online, the studio director conceded that when failed with the task of developing a PlayStation 3 port of the sexy action-thriller, the studio found itself in a bit of dilemma as it was not adept at developing games for Sony’s current-generation console at that time.

In the end, it was decided to let an internal team at SEGA, the game’s publisher, handle the PlayStation 3 port. A move that was made with the intention of avoiding a risk of messing up the Bayonetta experience ended up being a nail in the coffin and resulting in the detriment of the game.

“The biggest failure for Platinum so far, the one that really sticks in my mind, is that port,” Inaba said. “At the time we didn’t really know how to develop on PS3 all that well, and whether we could have done it… is irrelevant: we made the decision that we couldn’t. But looking back on the result, and especially what ended up being released to users, I regard that as our biggest failure.”

Inaba acknowledged the fact that the PlayStation 3 version of Bayonetta was nothing close to the Xbox 360 version, with the game getting plagued by long and frequent loading and dropping of frame-rate. Both the issues had a significant impact on the overall experience of the game that was intended to feature fast action and smooth gameplay.

Doubting their own capabilities and entrusting the porting duties of Bayonetta for the PlayStation 3 to someone else may come back to hit Platinum Games in the face, but the failure ended up giving the studio an important lesson.

Inaba explained that the studio learnt that instead of relying on other studios and keeping their fingers crossed, they needed to step up and take the responsibility for everything related to their projects.

This realisation drove them to carry out an in-house development of both the Xbox 360 as well as the PlayStation 3 version of their next project Vanquish, a game that was met with a positive response by gamers of both the consoles.

“We learned, so it wasn’t a pointless failure, but it was a failure nonetheless,” he said.

It was indeed refreshing to see a developer admit that they had made a mistake and learned from it.

Currently working on the sequel of Bayonetta that has been announced exclusively for Nintendo’s upcoming console Wii U, Platinum Games is facing a lot of criticism by the fans, who are accusing the developer of alienating them by not taking the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games into consideration.