We have some good news and some news that are less exciting. Would you like to sit down and grab a cup of coffee first?
(This is what PR people tell to the attendees if they can’t show them the game straight away, e.g. if the rig is already occupied. We’ve been told that coffee works wonders.)
The release of Pathologic will be postponed until Autumn, 2017.
What? How?
Is this a fake FAQ now? Okay.
The original plans for the release date were set with the basic scope of the game in mind. It seems a bit immodest to admit, but we did include our first stretch goal, the Town Expanded, into that; but not the rest of them. The game has grown in scope now, so developing it properly requires additional time.
Also, the vision for this version of Pathologic has shifted during the development. What started as a humble rejuvenation of a classic beloved by the studio turned into a full-fledged reimagining rather quickly, but it took us time to realize what that truly entails. The corners that we were planning to cut turned into diamond quickly. However faithful to the original vision, this Pathologic is a new game in many aspects, from the engine to the concept art.
Oh come on. You just bit more than you can chew. Admit it.
While we are—and always will be—vehemently defending our chewing abilities, there’s no denying the fact that we are facing technical challenges. Creating an open-world game in Unity is trying. We are solving the riddles the game’s code throws at us valiantly, but then again, there’s no point in releasing a pretty, but stuttering thing, right? And teaching it proper enunciation turned to require a bit more man-hours than we were hoping.
I dunno. It all sounds kind of fishy.
Look. Pathologic is the thing for most people in the studio. It is the game that gave Ice-Pick Lodge its identity; it’s like both a beloved parent and a firstborn to us.
Our miscalculation was embarrassing, and we are fully prepared to accept the thoroughly-deserved stones you may be willing to throw in our general direction, but we want to do it right. If nothing else, the game itself deserves it.
It’s not your intentions that I doubt, it’s your abilities.
In all this time, there wasn’t a single issue we weren’t able to overcome (or work around). In a painfully postmodern turn of events, he only thing that failed to bend to our almighty collective will is time itself.
Look at it this way: we can either mar our conscience by missing the deadline in a rather spectacular fashion, or by releasing a game that falls short on its promises. But only one of these outcomes leaves everybody with a good game in their library in the end.
And now it’s time for us to bathe you in trinkets and goodies that are supposed to distract you and calm your understandable outrage.
First of all, we have a first playable… thing that will in a couple of months go to the backers of the QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS tier and higher (basically, the alpha backers). This is not an alpha though, but rather a short spin-off story that we used to showcase the mood and setting of Pathologic at Gamescom. It doesn’t feature every in-game mechanic and offers the content that won’t be present in the final game. But first we’ll need this couple of months to polish it so that it would run better and wouldn’t require developers’ hints to play properly.
We actually made this small thing for the purposes of Gamescom, but it’s so self-sufficient that it can work as a separate small game. If the feedback from the alpha backers is good, we may release is a a free Pathologic demo at some point down the line.
Secondly, the new Pathologic has a Steam page now, that you can subscribe to.
Thirdly, on said page you are welcome to behold the splendor of our semi-new screenshots. Including the current dialogue UI!
And it will be. Later rather than sooner, sadly.
On the bright side, now you can probably tell why we made a game that features time as one of the main foes of the protagonist.
There has to be a bright side, right…?