The State of Pathologic 2
Hey, so, let’s talk about the current state and future release of
Pathologic 2.
To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with bullet points:
- We’ve made the tough decision to release the game in parts
- The first part—the Haruspex’s storyline—will be available in Q2 2019
- The Bachelor’s and the Changeling’s stories will be released later
- After it’s released on PC, the Haruspex’s story will also become available on XBox Game Pass
- All eligible backers will (obviously) receive all three stories as they get released, no additional payment or fuss
- For now, we’re unsure how exactly we’ll release the other two stories technically—whether as DLCs or something else. What matters is, they remain as crucial to the overall concept and as content-complete as before, no matter how delivered to you
- Polishing changes a game a lot
Now, to those of you who have been following our progress, the delay probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise. You’ve seen the alpha; your feedback was very kind to us regarding the mood, story, visuals, and overall concept of the game, but it also made it abundantly clear that the game’s level of polish was still quite far from the goal we’re aiming at. Thus, the delay.
Now, let’s talk about the “only Haruspex first” a bit.
Like,
talk talk. Please watch this subtitled video from Nikolay, the head of our studio.
To sum it up, this decision did not come easy to us, but it had to be made for the following reasons:
- We want to watch you play the Haruspex’s story just as much as you want to play it—and it will also help us fine-tune the other two.
- It would just be wrong to prolong the wait even further.
- Your feedback to the Marble Nest and the alpha confirmed some of our suspicions, but also gave us new food for thought. We realized that we need to tweak the game—not its core ideas, but the presentation—some more. Some of our ideas are not what you would call extremely accessible; but that only means that we need to put extra work into making sure only those parts of the game that we want to be confusing, are.
- The economic crisis in Russia, that happened just around our KS campaign, seriously hindered the early development. It came out of the blue for many people, and, looking back, we still can’t see how we could have avoided it. We invested our personal savings into the game, worked for free sometimes, and in the end, overcame the issues. But it came at a cost—namely, of development speed.
- In this era of soft launches and Early Accesses releasing a game in parts does not have to come as a shock. Some projects choose it do this deliberately. It was not our original intent, but we do think it works fine with the game’s concept.
By the way, we suspect that some of you were planning to play the Bachelor first or were most interested in the renewed Changeling and thus might be frustrated with our choice for the first story. We can only hope that you’ll give the Haruspex a chance and will like him no less than our beloved snakeskin-wearing fop or cryptic thief girl by the end of the game.
Thank you very much for the kindness, understanding and patience.
