Bad news for those hoping to play CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt this year, as the company has announced, via an open letter, that the game will be delayed until February 2015.

The open letter, which was sent out via email and placed on The Witcher website, states the following:

Ever since we started working on the third installment in The Witcher franchise, it has been our aim to produce a title that would take our 11 years of experience in creating RPGS and distill them into a quintessence, into a game that would effectively crown those years. At the same time, we have wanted The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to expand creative boundaries, set new benchmarks, develop the genre as a whole. Ultimately, you, the players, must get an unforgettable adventure to experience in a vast, open world – and that’s most important. We’ve created a story that flows naturally, cinematically, rendered it in amazing sound and visuals, while preserving full freedom of choice – all for you. We knew this to be an ambitious plan, but believed we could achieve it by bringing together our team with its creative energies and current gaming platforms with their technical capabilities. A project this vast and complex would inevitably require special care in its final stages, manual fine-tuning of many details, thorough testing time and again.

We recently reexamined what we had achieved thus far, and faced a choice about the game’s final release date. The decision we made was difficult, thoroughly considered, and ultimately clear and obvious. We could have released the game towards the end of this year as we had initially planned. Yet we concluded that a few additional months will let us achieve the quality that will satisfy us, the quality gamers expect from us. Consequently, we have set the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for February 2015.

Dear gamers – we know many of you would have liked to play The Witcher 3 sooner, as soon as possible, even. We’re sorry to make you wait longer than you, or we, initially assumed you would. At the same time, we believe the game will prove to be worth the wait and meet the expectations you have of us. We believe The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be an exceptional RPG, one of the best, providing many hours of wonderful entertainment.

Dear shareholders – we are aware of the responsibility that rests with us and thank you for the trust you have granted us thus far. We firmly believe that quality – more than any other factor – determines a game’s success, and that the decision we have made is thus equally valid in business terms.

The Board of CD PROJEKT S.A.

While hearing a game delayed can be disappointing to hear at first, but once you think about it a delay is usually never a bad sign. As the company stated in the above letter, the team working on The Witcher 3 will be using the extra time to create a game that matches their fans expectations. To use a famous quote from one of Nintendo’s most famous developers Shigeru Miyamoto, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

The Witcher 3 is the third is a series of popular RPG based of The Witcher book series by Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski. The series takes place in a medieval world where you play as Geralt, a Witcher – a person who kills monsters for hire and possesses unnatural powers. So far The Witcher series has been well received with the first game receiving an average metacritic of 81/100 and the second receiving an average metacritic score of 88/100.

The Witcher 3 will be released on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

For more information on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and previous Witcher games, visit http://thewitcher.com/.