The developer of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has ditched a Kickstarter stretch goal four years after it was reached.

In a post on the Bloodstained Kickstarter page, chief developer Koji Igarashi said the Roguelike stretch goal, promised when the Castlevania spiritual successor's crowdfunding drive hit $5m, won't happen.

Roguelike was meant to add procedurally generated dungeons to the game. Here's how it was pitched when it was announced on 11th June 2015, just after the Bloodstained Kickstarter hit $4m:

"In this mode you'll face a new castle every time, braving its treacherous (and massive) halls for loot, glory, and the simple, satisfying feeling of going where no Miriam has gone before.

"Once you've explored its passages and defeated its boss, you'll get a code that will enable you to share your randomly generated dungeon with a friend. (If you find a particularly hard one, you can even share it with an enemy! IGA isn't picky.)"

The Bloodstained Kickstarter hit this $5m stretch goal a day after it was announced, opening up a final stretch goal set at $5.5m.

Now, nearly five years later, Roguelike is no more. Explaining the decision, Igarashi said the game's code wasn't built to support a Roguelike mode in the first place.

"Unfortunately, the code that was created early in the game's development is not currently compatible with this type of gameplay (especially a procedurally generated castle)," Igarashi said.

"Due to this, we regret to announce that we will not be developing Roguelike as part of the project's planned stretch goals.

"We know this is a mode that many of you were eagerly anticipating and we apologise that we will not be able to make it happen as planned."

As a filip, Bloodstained will now get a new game mode called Randomizer, which will be released for free. This is the standard story campaign, but before you start you can choose up to eight different parameters to be randomised during the playthrough. For example, Items - Retain Method means items will be found in the same spawn method (chest, mob drop, etc.) as normal. Items found in chests will still be found in chests, they will just get mixed around. Total Random means anything can drop anywhere. Here's how it looks:

"The mode will ensure safeguards to ensure that items needed to complete the game will be obtainable, so you can't softlock your progress," Igarashi stressed.

Usefully, once you make your selections you can generate a seed you can use for reference or to share with someone else. There's also a timer that tracks your progress through the game and displays your completion time at the end of a run.

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Bloodstained saw 64,867 backers pledge an impressive $5.5m on Kickstarter back in June 2015. The game came out four years later and, according to our reviewer Vikki Blake, "the wait was worth it."