Here's an early bad news for gamers who are awaiting the fate of the highly-anticipated refresh of the top-notch action role-playing game "Kingdom Hearts III." The title won't be coming anytime soon due to some alleged setbacks (certainly not a great way to start the gaming year). Game director Tetsuya Nomura revealed that optimization in Unreal Engine 4 is the culprit, Motoring Crunch reported. 

Initially pitted for release in May this year, rumor mills have begun whipping up news that "Kingdom Hearts III" will instead roll out in December. The speculations came from an Amazon listing, where the upcoming installment is scheduled to come to PlayStation 4 by the end of the year instead of May. Motoring Crunch, however, broached on developer Square Enix's pre-ordering schemes already up and running, and added that the date stated in the Amazon listing is only be a "placeholder." Furthermore, game creator Tai Yasue along with Nomura mentioned that the game is almost set to see the gaming realm and that everything is going great and normal as far as the team is concerned. 

"Nomura has always been working on Kingdom Hearts III full-time, so nothing's really changed there. Nomura is really the visionary, so he doesn't work on the nitty gritty details. That's something we do in Osaka; alongside development, we do the technology," Yasue told IGN.

"That hasn't really changed. We get Nomura's input but it's not a day-to-day thing, he just has these big ideas sometimes he tells us about. The pace really depends on how our team's doing and that was never affected," he added. 

The game has also been the focus of speculations on which characters from other universes would either join or perturb Sora and Disney icons King Mickey, Donald Duck, Goofy and Riku in their adventures. Iron Man is rumored to join the party and Elsa from "Frozen" could stretch her popularity to a full-scale video game. Even Marvel hero creator Stan Lee had many thinking that he has a place in the game, but it is Darth Vader's inclusion bringing in the loudest blare in the rumor field. 

"I can't really go into any specifics or say anything about 'Star Wars,' but when we come up with worlds we really want variety and to make sure that there's a lot of different types of worlds. Any world that looks special is definitely a consideration; everything from the characters, to how they look and the differences between them," Yasue explained.

He then added, "We think Star Wars is great but I'm not going to relate that to Kingdom Hearts III yet! We want a wide variety of worlds and when we come up with ideas, it's the differences and the originality of each that's really important."