PSO2 Delayed; Second Alpha Test Announced

The official Japanese Phantasy Star Online 2 Web site announced today that the game will be delayed until 2012 in order to make improvements.

In addition, a second alpha test was announced. The test is scheduled to take place in early 2012, and translations of the announcement indicate that there will be "no restrictions" on who can apply for that test. I assume that this means "no restrictions within the Japanese community" but you never know.

Of course, this means that Sega's timeline leading up to a late 2011 release is out the window. The beta tests that had been planned will likely not take place while the developers fix bugs and make improvements.

A list of suggestions made by the Japanese PSO2 community have been posted on the official Web site, along with responses from the developers. It seems like there were a lot of legitimate concerns shared by the Japanese players and international community in general, so it's good to see that Sega is willing to push back the game's release to deal with them.

Unfortunately, "get rid of GameGuard" and "international servers plz" were not on the list of suggestions. Of course, it's probably not an exhaustive list, so who knows what else Sega has in store (though I have a feeling removing GameGuard is not a change Sega is willing to make).

The newly announced delay could make the last few months of 2011 a little quiet on the PSO2 news front, but Sega says that an official blog is coming. A little more insight into the game's development would be nice so that potential players wouldn't have to resort to other methods of getting information.