Bayonetta 3 took so long because it was originally conceived as semi-open world
Which is part of why development took so long.
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Bayonetta 3 took quite a while to come out as we all know, and that's partially because the game was originally scoped as a semi-open world game.
The third entry in the action series was revealed back at The Game Awards in 2017, and we basically didn't hear much about it for a number of years after. According to games journalist Imran Khan, as shared on his Patreon, that's because the game was planned to be semi-open world, something that would have been quite the change from the previous entries in the series.
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Explaining the various reasons as to why the game took so long, Khan wrote, "The answers are mostly not shocking — it was announced very early, there was a pandemic that really slowed things down, the initial director left fairly early on in the project, etc. But another reasons that most people don’t know is that, at one point in development, Bayonetta 3 was scoped as a semi-open world game."
Khan explained that the game's design would be based more off Astral Chain than Nier Automata, "but the idea was that a large hub world would send Bayonetta (or whoever else) to different worlds which would themselves be fairly open." Apparently there was "a lot of work and experimentation on this idea," but pacing was the main issue, eventually resulting in Nintendo asking PlatinumGames to scale it back. Khan also heard that this iteration didn't perform well on the Switch's hardware either.
Bayonetta 3 was also the subject of some controversy recently, with the titular character's original voice actress making claims of low pay for the role, with later reports clarifying how much she was actually offered, with the whole thing just being one huge, unfortunate mess.
In VG247's Bayonetta 3 review, we gave the game full marks, saying, "PlatinumGames has misfired a little lately, but with this fitting conclusion to the original Bayonetta trilogy, the studio proves it can still fire on all cylinders and then some. This might just be one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch."