Hey stalkers!
It’s been a long week. Likely the most busy and the most fruitful time in the whole project’s history. We’ve finally released the Early Access of Chernobylite on Steam and GOG and it was just the beginning of the next big stage for the project. Now we’re pushing hard to keep improving the game after the feedback gathered from all of you. And because the game became popular with so many players buying it and joining our communities, we’re both extremely happy and quite overwhelmed because of that much of the data to process nowadays.
Please keep playing the game and reporting us any suggestions, issues and ideas – we can’t always answer all of them in real-time, but we’re definitely reading all of them and trying to sort out for the execution of our work plan.
Last few days we’ve prepared and released 3 big patches with several additions, modifications, optimizations and improvements over the existing content. All according to your requests, bug reports, discussions on forums, and the reviews we’ve received. Among others, we’ve added many language localizations as this was one of the main requests: now you can play Chernobylite with English voices (at top of Russian that was already in game) and subtitles/interface in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian and Polish. The next localizations are on their way soon. We’ve improved a lot the optimization thanks to your feedback and hardware reports, removed many crash-related issues (thanks to your bug-reports, again).
The key question now would be – what next?
The most important: we plan to regularly update the project with three types of content packs:
- Monthly content updates: every month we want to deliver a huge content update, like a new weapon, location, gameplay feature, mission pack and so on.
- Weekly updates: every week we plan to release a smaller patch with the fixes and improvements for the most important aspects of the project that deserve to be delivered as soon as possible (like yesterdays weekly patch with English dialogue voice-overs).
- Minor updates: without any time obligations, if we’ll see there’s something worth of throwing update just-in-time, we’ll do it (like it happened twice during last week with optimization and bug-fixes updates).
Please take a look on the preliminary roadmap here once more if you missed it yesterday.
The plans that we’ve originally had are a bit adjusted regarding the order of delivering you different content packs, but the overall game idea shaped earlier together with our Kickstarter backers remains intact. We definitely need to better address few fields of the project that was mostly reported as requiring more attention: AI, combat balance, technical issues, language implementation quality, save and progression system. We plan do add possibility to access different game areas more easily without need to restart the whole game. We’ll keep working on optimization and animations quality, as well as on soundtrack and overall gameplay balance. Basically, almost all of what we’ve done already makes us proud considering the time and budget we had, but personally none of us is 100% happy with the idea to stop fixing, improving and polishing the stuff. So expect small, but noticeable changes to keep popping-up all the time.
Stay irradiated!