Frontier's Warhammer Age of Sigmar RTS pushed back to second half of 2023
God's sake.
Frontier has pushed back its Warhammer Age of Sigmar real-time strategy game to the second half of 2023.
It was set for launch during "calendar 2023", but is now slated for release "later in that calendar year, falling in FY24", Frontier said in a trading update.
The original plan was for the game to come out during the first half of 2023 so money made from sales would count towards its FY23, which runs until 31st May 2023. But it will now release later in 2023 - so, at some point during the second half of 2023, if it doesn't end up delayed further.
Frontier's Warhammer Age of Sigmar RTS is shrouded in mystery nearly two years after it was quietly announced. Clearly it still has some way to go, and from Games Workshop's point of view, it's got Creative Assembly's hotly-anticipated Total War: Warhammer 3 to fuss over anyway.
(The Age of Sigmar tabletop game first released in 2015, and is the successor to the discontinued game Warhammer. Frontier's game will be the first RTS set in the Age of Sigmar. Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer games are based on the "Old World", which is now replaced by the Age of Sigmar.)
"This change will further improve the quality and longevity of the game, and overall make it more successful," Frontier said of the delay, which has had a knock-on effect on the company's FY23 revenue outlook.
Elsewhere at Frontier, the first of its new annual Formula 1 management games comes out during the 2022 F1 season and during the company's FY23. Frontier said the recently-released Jurassic World Evolution 2, which has sold nearly 1m copies since it came out in November, "is expected to benefit" from the release of the Jurassic World Dominion film in June 2022 "and all the promotional awareness that this film release will bring to the game, with multiple exciting PDLC packs planned through the year".
New premium DLC packs will be released for Planet Zoo, too. Frontier's third-party publishing label, Frontier Foundry, has a number of new games slated for release, including FAR: Changing Tides on 1st March 2022, and Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters.
As Frontier has already discussed, Elite Dangerous had a rough 2021 following the disastrous launch of the Odyssey expansion in May. In today's trading update, the company said it will continue to support the game with development updates, "and we have seen an upturn in player sentiment as a result".