The original game took 7 years to develop, and they explicitly said they did not want to crunch staff for DLC:
Two new bosses are shown off in the new gameplay trailer.
www.ign.com
COVID caused further delays too. As for not releasing it as a stand-alone game, I imagine they probably felt it would be too iterative to stand on its own (no major gameplay changes outside of a new character as far as I'm aware). Given the success of the Cuphead brand in general, I imagine the DLC will sell just fine.
Yeah, but it was with developing the techniques, technickal background, etc. And they have way more financial room now that the first one was a financial success.
It feels more lik they did not want to expand their studio (and thats fair, if you feel like you either could not support it in the long run or that it would make managing it less fun for your core team).
Its not about crunch. and im aware of the phrase "9 women cant deliver a baby in 1 month". but even with covid, since it is so iterative, uses the same technical base, artstyle, music style, and they have the success of the base game and the finances, i would have expected some streamlining in the development.
But here its probably where artistry and engineering diverge. Presumably if they just wanted to make solid DLC it would have been done way faster, but they probably finetuned and reworked it often.
Lots of DLC gets released standalone these days.
Just look at Doom Eternal.
I would recommend noone to buy the DLC without having played the original game, but you are still able to.
The DLC picks up right where the game ended difficultywise and you would be lost regarding the lore too(not like thats that important).
If they had released this standalone people could have picked up Delicious Last Course on another platform than they played the original on.
I mean it's been quite some time and another console generation is out now.
Maybe someone would have prefered to play the game portably now after playing it on Xbox.
Maybe they sell a couple of copies more of the original like this, but I think a standalone release would have made sense.
It will sell fine, I just don't think iterativeness is an argument against standalone releases.
100% that. Torna (Xenoblade 2) is an example, Doom Eternal, Superhot, ...
What i could see it that it is so intertwoven with the original content (like the replaying of bosses with the new character) that they felt like it does not make sense without the base game?
Then again, i would see that as a bonus for those that have the base game.