Game Director on Bayonetta 3 Hideki Kamiya dove into the details of the controversial ending earlier this week, hinting at the same time that a sequel, Bayonetta 4, could be on the horizon. Kamiya is known as a legendary game designer, having worked on several famous franchises in addition to Bayonetta including Devil May Cry and Resident Evil.The news comes from a series of rather lengthy posts on Twitter. “I thought it was nothing unexpected, but the last part of Bayonetta 3 doesn't seem to have been conveyed to anyone correctly, so I think Bayonetta 4 will be unexpected for everyone,” Kamiya said on the social media platform. The reference to Bayonetta 4 has been largely interpreted to mean that a sequel to the recently released Bayonetta 3 is already in the works.“I'm sure that when Bayonetta 4 comes out, there will be those people who say you added that after the game, didn't you,” Kamiya rhetorically asked. “I'll say this now because I'm sure that when Bayonetta 4 comes out, there will be a lot of you added that after the fact, didn't you?”This comes in the wake of news that Bayonetta 3 was originally planned to be “semi-open world,” but slowly turned into an action adventure game. “A question that got asked a lot since Bayonetta 3’s announcement was a fair one, what on Earth took so long? We’re accustomed to games coming out usually within a few years of their announcement, but Bayonetta 3 ended up sliding just under the five year door,” industry insider Imran Khan remarked.“The answers are mostly not shocking,” Khan explained. “It was announced very early, there was a pandemic that really slowed things down, the initial director left fairly early on in the project. But another reason that most people don’t know is that at one point in development, Bayonetta 3 was scoped as a semi-open world game.”
“The design was going to draw 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,” Khan remarked. “There was a lot of work and experimentation on this idea, but it kept falling apart when it came to pacing and eventually Nintendo wanted them to scale back.”