Long-in-development wrestling video game AEW: Fight Forever was recently announced as finished, and ready for the public. This was revealed by the owner and co-founder of AEW, Tony Khan, during a media scrum following the AEW Revolution pay-per-view. But according to a senior THQ Nordic community manager, Khan was mistaken – and the game is not ready at all.
In response to a prompt on Twitter, THQ Nordic’s Per Hollenbo, known as Zyddie, said, ‘I mean if you want an unfinished game sure we could release now. The game is doing really well and is getting there, but not 100% yet, so yea just another rumour on twitter I fear.’
‘There is tons of things to take into consideration when developing a game, submission, QA, loca, ratings, optimisation, polish, coding and much more. So even if a game looks finished to some people, if it miss[es] one of those steps it isn’t finished or ready to release.’
Read: AEW: Fight Forever gets ‘Teen’ ESRB rating for exposed buttocks
According to Zyddie’s analysis, it’s likely Khan was not across the scope of AEW: Fight Forever, and simply made a judgement call about the status of the game based on limited knowledge.
Intriguingly, this firsthand information does oppose recent reports that claimed the upcoming game was in its final stages of development, and only awaiting word from official classification bodies around the world. According to Wrestle Zone, insider sources believed nabbing a United States ESRB rating was one of the final hurdles developers needed to clear to launch the game.
Now, it appears this is not the case at all. Instead, AEW: Fight Forever may be suffering a truncated delay for alternate, unknown reasons. At first, many assumed the issue was to do with the need to remove CM Punk from the game’s cover, following an internal company dispute. Then, it was alleged that ratings issues required censorship and other changes to allow the game to launch.
AEW: Fight Forever missed its initially reported ‘late 2022’ launch window, and then subsequently disappeared. We know that it’s a real game – and that it’s actually rather solid, based on our time playing it – but it appears development remains ongoing, despite claims to the contrary.
For now, AEW: Fight Forever is stuck in limbo, as THQ Nordic and Yuke’s continue to work on the game.
