After its release in March, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow—Mirror of Fate may make the same transition from handhelds to home consoles that Capcom’s Resident Evil: Revelations, the Nintendo 3DS game, is planning on making. Konami producer and Castlevania evangelist David Cox said on Monday that not only could Mirror of Fate HD be released, it technically already exists.
“We created everything in high definition,” Cox explained to Computer and Video Games, “All the textures, all the levels, high-poly models, everything—and we kind of shrunk it down into the 3DS. Then we lost bones from characters, you know, we dropped the resolution of the textures and everything to make it fit. At Mercury Steam we have an HD version of the game sitting there in a computer somewhere.”
If it does make the leap to an HD console, it will have to either be a new version of the game completely, or a Nintendo Wii U exclusive. Nintendo has exclusive rights to the version as it exists now. “We want as many people to play it as possible. Obviously we have an exclusivity deal with Nintendo right now though and they’ve been very supportive of the product.”
Other developers have worked around restrictions like these before, though. Tecmo Koei for example published Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2 for the Xbox and Xbox 360 in a partnership with Microsoft, making both games exclusive to those respective consoles. It ultimately worked around that deal by slightly altering both games with new content and releasing them on PlayStation 3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1 and 2.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow—Mirror of Fate was originally planned for release in the fall of 2012 but Konami delayed the game in August without giving a specific reason. It’s possible the game was simply not of sufficient quality at that point. Digital Trends’ early look at the game at E3 2012 found it to be in rough shape for a game purportedly close to release.
