The reveal of Rematch came as a surprise to most of its developer's fans, but its director wishes that hadn't been the case.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, creative director Pierre Tarno says that "some Sifu fans were disappointed when the game was revealed and we're sorry to say that." But he also thinks that much of that disappointment could have been diverted with better marketing: "Because the reveal trailer had a cold open, like 'from the team behind Sifu', they were like 'alright, Sifu 2 incoming.'"
"I'm sorry about that misunderstanding because I think we should have probably, early on, let the Sifu community know that we were about to announce a title and that it would not be Sifu 2, and they shouldn't be expecting it, just so they didn't have this disappointment."
Even if the messaging could have been better, however, Tarno says that Sifu was never going to be Sloclap's forever-game. "We did a year and a half of post-launch support for Sifu," he says, pointing to updates, new content, a full expansion – enough that "we felt that we'd really provided and kind of given everything we had on Sifu." That's not to say that the game will never make a return, but Sloclap decided that "for the moment it was better to let it rest."
It's a problem that he admits can be industry-wide, with players who "expect studios to be doing the exact same genre over and over again." The martial arts focus of Sifu and its predecessor Absolver might have encouraged a third entry in that space, but Tarno says that "that's not the way we approach things."
"We have a huge opportunity to pursue the creative projects that we are passionate about, and not many developers have that chance. It's really very rare as developers to be able to do that. And then I think players and also media realized that although it was not exactly the same, [the games are] both third-person action games. Both grounded, credible, still epic, with bodies and movement, it's physicality. There is a lineage between the titles, from Absolver to Sifu to Rematch, and our experience making the two previous games is what allowed us to make this one."
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