At a major Final Fantasy XV promotional event earlier this year, the game's developers announced its release date by having a slot-machine spin of months and days whiz by before briefly locking into "November 30," only to then slide into the "official" date: September 30, 2016.

Yeah, about that joke.

Early Monday morning, FFXV Director Hajime Tabata took to YouTube to announce an official delay for the long-awaited RPG, now slated to launch on November 29 of this year (meaning, one day off from the joke date). Tabata-san explained that the game's "master disc" (typically called the "gold" copy) had been completed "the other day," but its content would not be "the highest possible quality" without a downloadable patch, which he said would be completed by September 30.

Then the director changed course and said that the game would eventually require another patch, as the day-one patch's content would still be "one step away from that truly ultimate quality we are striving for." Tabata-san insists that this delay means FFXV will not require any day-one patch downloads—a fact that he stated multiple times, almost as if to pour salt in the wound of No Man's Sky in light of its recent day-one patch brouhaha. The announcement also mentioned separate plans for paid DLC, which had already been reported days earlier in the form of a $25 "season pass."

Based on Ars' experience with a preview build in May , Final Fantasy XV seemed both impressive and disconcerting, with many rough edges still visible in a game that, even at that moment, representatives insisted would absolutely make its September release date. Frequent crashes and glitches were somewhat understandable in a pre-release game, but the game's floaty, hard-to-parse battle system was a little tougher to swallow. (At the time, the combined troubles made me so confident, I threw down a bet that I would eat something gross if the game launched on time in a minimal-bug state. Guess I'm off the hook!)

Tabata-san's Monday statement included a promise that his final game will "send other games running in panic." Now we'll have to wait a little longer to see if that bold claim plays out, but he did promise a 30-minute playthrough video launching on Tuesday ahead of the game's public gameplay debut at this week's Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany.

Monday's news confirms the veracity of a weekend report from gaming news site Gamnesia, which credited an unnamed GameStop executive with the scoop—and later with photo proof of instructions for GameStop employees to stick a date-change sticker on promotional cardboard stand-ups for the game.