Bandai Namco Delay Blue Protocol’s January Japanese Closed Beta

This is not news I wanted to wake up to hear, as I’m sure you can all relate.
Blue Protocol has been delayed.

Bandai Namco confirmed late in 2022 that Blue Protocol would be releasing initially in Japan – at some point in early Spring 2023, with a final Closed Beta test slated to begin on January 14th through 16th.
Amazon Game Studios confirmed shortly after that Blue Protocol would be releasing Globally in the 2nd half of 2023, with an unconfirmed Closed Beta test period.

But as of the 11th of January – just yesterday, Bandai Namco confirmed that the Japanese Closed Beta test would be delayed for a yet undisclosed amount of time. This could ultimately affect its Japanese release – potentially pushing the game back further.
But the news isn’t as dire as you might expect.

The Tweet goes on to read:

We were preparing for the test on January 14th, but we have confirmed a new bug that affects the purpose of the test. Since early improvement is difficult, we will postpone the test implementation. We apologize for the inconvenience. We will let you know the progress again on January 25th.

Players are – as expected – quite upset with the delay – as happens whenever a game gets delayed, but this Closed Beta test was always going to be severely limited for us as Western players – this Beta test was exclusively for Japanese players located within – you guessed it, Japan.
There were a number of creators and players that got accepted through the clever use of VPNs, but the vast majority of players were always going to be Japanese, with many of us not being able to participate at all.

Bandai Namco have elaborated on why specifically the Beta was delayed a little bit via a Blog post on their website.

We have been preparing for the network test from January 14, 2023 (Saturday), but it will affect and avoid the test purpose of “confirming functions related to servers and networks”. We have confirmed a new problem that is difficult. We are working to fix this problem, but we have determined that it will take time to resolve the issue, so we have decided to postpone the network test. We apologize to everyone who was looking forward to participating in the network test, but we ask for your understanding in order to provide a comfortable gaming environment for everyone when the official service starts. In addition, we would like to apologize again for the fact that the announcement was made just before the issue due to the investigation of the status of the problem and the scope of its impact. We are still working on fixing the bug, so it is difficult to inform you about the test schedule after the change at this time. We will inform you again on January 25, 2023 (Wednesday) about the progress of bug fixes and test preparations.

Evidently the issue they’ve encountered must be pretty severe if they believe it’ll take time to resolve it. So long in fact, that the Beta will be delayed over a month, they’ve re-opened friend invites for Beta applicants.
I will state with utmost certainty, however, that if Bamco rush this release, we will have another Tower of Fantasy on our hands. A game that launched with game-breaking bugs, exploits, and hackers abusing both of them.
A rushed game will remain forever bad – ultimately until it completely shuts down. A delayed game that remedies their issues has the potential to be much better, and weather the test of time.

We’ll have a new Beta test period announcement soon. It will likely take place at some point next month. But as long as they fix this – and it remains fixed when Amazon publish the game we should have nothing to worry about.
They need to get this right. Otherwise this game has no future.