Devil May Cry 5 almost didn’t see the light of day. A sequel to DmC, the Ninja Theory game based on the iconic Capcom franchise, was supposed to be the next installment in the series. That’s according to series director Hideaki Itsuno, who explained that Devil May Cry 5 was only given the greenlight after plans for DmC 2 fell apart.
“I really wanted to make a DmC: Devil May Cry 2, after the first one,” he told VG247. “I was really pumped up to do it, and then that didn’t happen. So… when it came time to make a new game, we said, alright, let’s make Devil May Cry 5. We had these people that didn’t work on DmC and people that did. Because we had these two sides mixing, it was like alright, we’re going to make Devil May Cry 5 – it’s not going to be a sequel to DmC, but we definitely want to do what we can to take what we learned from that game too.”
Itsuno also commented on why the development team at Capcom wanted to eclipse the work that the collaborating teams had conducted on DmC. He stated that the Ninja Theory team, who had worked on DmC back in 2013, would have missed out if Capcom had produced DmC 2 single handedly.
“One thing, if you think about it… it probably wouldn’t make sense to have these guys make a DmC 2,” he said. “That’s something that Ninja Theory should collaborate with Capcom on, y’know? It would be different – it would lose something if we tried to do that only in Osaka. So it really made sense that we’d go to a sequel to DMC4. It’s something that the people in Osaka have more of a frame of reference for.”
Devil May Cry 5 will be released on March 8, 2019, on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
