Streets of Rouge 2 needs a bit more time in the oven.

Revealed today, the game will no longer hit Steam Early Access on October 22 in order to continue working on it. A new release date will be announced soon. Despite the delay, a new demo is available on Steam right now here.

A statement from developer Matt Dabrowski about the delay and new demo reads:

We had previously announced a large-scale playtest of the game. The demo release will essentially be replacing that since it includes the same content that I was planning for the playtest.

So first off, why the delays? Well, the TL;DR is “Big Open-Ended Game + Solo Programmer = Unpredictable Timeline.” October 22 seemed like a viable date back in July, but ultimately despite my best efforts, I felt the game needed a bit more time in the oven. My sincere apologies for the delays, I fully understand how annoying it can be to look forward to something only to have the rug pulled. That’s why we won’t be announcing any more specific dates until it’s a 100% lock.

Prior to the Early Access launch of the original Streets of Rogue, the game had been available for free, which allowed me to take in community feedback and launch the game in a state that I felt very confident about. I’ve long felt the absence of this back-and-forth during SOR2’s development, but given how much larger and more complex of a game SOR2 is, I feel like much of the feedback would have been something to the effect of “I launched the game and was immediately sucked into a black void where I was eaten by Cannibals who are missing their eyeball textures. Then my graphics card blew up, and you owe me for my ER visit.” In essence, it wouldn’t have been much fun for anybody.

At this point in development, I’d consider the game to be a lot closer to being Early Access-ready, as the game’s foundations are pretty solid. However, polish is still needed in order to bring the core game loop and progression system to where they need to be, and bugs are still a little too prevalent for my liking. For me, that’s a very exciting place to be. There are just enough not-super-well-defined elements in the game that I feel like pre-release community feedback would be very beneficial.

So basically, consider this demo to be a fairly rough (but hopefully pretty fun) taste of what’s to come that will give you a sense of the systemic/gameplay possibilities of SOR2. But also, don’t be surprised if the initial questgiver gets mauled by a bear before you can get your bearings (no pun intended) because they decided to spawn on the beach where you start the game for some reason. (To be fair, I fixed that one last night, but you get the idea!)

Thanks again for your patience, and stay tuned!

Released in 2019, the original Streets of Rogue sold over million copies worldwide across multiple platforms.