A new report indicates a potential reason as to why Bayonetta 3 had a long and protracted development cycle was that it at one point considered becoming a semi-open world game. Bayonetta 3 was first announced back in 2017, which was then followed by lengthy five-year development cycle that had left fans incredibly weary and worried about its release. While there were some bumps and controversies days up to its release, Bayonetta 3 was a smash hit for PlatinumGames, getting rave reviews on the Nintendo Switch, proving that it was worth the wait.
Some fans may wonder why and how Bayonetta 3's development ended up this messy and lengthy, with a potential reason being stated in a recent report from Imran Khan. Khan recently started a gaming newsletter on his Patreon known as "Everything Everywhere Once A Week" which covers a number of games, including Bayonetta 3. He notes that one of the less-known reasons as how the game had a lengthy development was due to it being potentially conceived with a semi-open world setting at first.
While Nier: Automata is an open-world game from PlatinumGames, this premise initially drew on another Switch exclusive action game by the developer, Astral Chain. Reportedly, this would involve a big hub world, similar to Super Mario 64, that would see Bayonetta or potentially other characters going into different worlds that would also have some openness to them. This then resulted in quite a bit of experimentation for this idea, but also reportedly fell apart in terms of its pacing.
Nintendo itself intervened and asked the developers to scale things back, as the Switch was also buckling under the pressure in terms of performance. While Bayonetta 3 ended up being structured by Chapters, Khan notes there are still some remnants of this original idea in the game. For example, Thule was going to be the hub world, which has been broken up into smaller pieces for Bayonetta and Viola to access in the final release.
Other tidbits include how the chests were redesigned to fit in a larger area, and would have provided a lot of unique environments. The weapon transformations would have also played a role in how players would have moved around the game as well. Despite this idea being tossed, Khan speculates that since PlatinumGames likes to reuse scrapped ideas, he posits that this semi-open world idea might be utilized in a completely different game down the line.
Bayonetta 3 is available now on the Nintendo Switch.
Source: Patreon (via Nintendo Everything)
