Liang pushed back on the idea that the team shifted away from September for marketing reasons or to dodge a November crush tied to GTA 6. He framed the call as almost entirely development driven.
We don't think about any of this. We only think of the quality of the product itself. I don't think competition can influence, much, the success of a work. Only the product itself matters. So I would say 99% of the decision [was about] development.
Asked whether launching near Grand Theft Auto was intimidating, Liang said competition ahead or behind the game was not on the studio's radar. Extra time, he said, went toward bug fixes and optimization so Phantom Blade: Zero would not need a massive day one patch.
We don't even think of the competition, what's launching ahead or after. What matters is how polished the game is, and if we have one or two extra months, we can fix more bugs, do more optimizations, so that we don't need a huge day one patch.
While GTA 6 was not a planning concern, Liang said the team did care about running well on lower end hardware amid rising PC component prices. Phantom Blade: Zero is built on Unreal Engine 5, and the studio is trying to get it running on Steam Deck while polishing performance with ray tracing turned off.
This year the hardware price is going up, and people who want to replace their hardware may postpone their plan to upgrade their equipment, so we think we need to let the game be played by as many players as possible without reducing the quality.
