Watch Dogs: Legion, new Rainbow Six delayed to ‘increase development time’

Watch Dogs: Legion has been delayed, Ubisoft said in a note to investors this morning. Originally given a March 3, 2020, launch, the game will now show up in Ubisoft’s 2020-21 fiscal year, which begins in April.

Ubisoft billed the delay as a “decision to increase development time.” Also delayed into the next fiscal year are Rainbow Six Quarantine, the follow-up to the tactical multiplayer series also announced at E3 2019, and Gods & Monsters, a new, open-world role-playing game that seems to be aimed at a younger audience.

“While each of these games already has a strong identity and high potential, we want our teams to have more development time to ensure that their respective innovations are perfectly implemented so as to deliver optimal experiences for players,” Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot said in the statement.

The delay leads a note of overall bad news, which mentions “a sharp downward revision” in the money Ubisoft expects to make from Ghost Recon Breakpoint, whose aggregate critical scores were well south of mediocre. Breakpoint is stuffed with microtransactions, and Guillemot noted the game “has been strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community.”

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, another open-world, live-service third-person shooter with microtransactions that launched back in March, has similarly come in under revenue expectations, Ubisoft said, although to “a lesser degree” than Breakpoint.