Hello inmates,
Our team here at the studio has a big update on what to expect from Darwin Project in the coming months.
In the last Behind the Scenes video, Creative Director Simon Darveau described the areas we would be focusing on to improve Darwin Project this summer. With summer well underway, we felt it was time for another video. This time, we broke down the upcoming content into a schedule that should give you a better idea of the amount of content coming in each new patch.
Watch Behind the Scenes 3 with Simon Darveau: The Road to Release by clicking the image below:
One of the biggest changes you’ll notice is that, in order to make deeper and more substantial updates, we are switching to a monthly patch schedule. For July, we tried focusing on a single content update, and the result was one of the highest quality patches we’ve delivered (it’s available on PC and Xbox One right now, by the way; you might want to download the new version while you watch the Behind the Scenes video).
More time to iterate, test, and apply your feedback made a big difference while we built the July patch. (The Tile Mapping system would not have been possible in a weekly patch). To maintain this level of quality moving forward, we’ll now drop major content updates on the third Tuesday of each month.
Note: The Show Director Power and new tile release schedule will begin in August, as some of you have correctly pointed out that the July patch did not contain a Show Director Power. The August content update will include both the Duo leaderboards and quest system.
As you can see, each monthly content update will contain at least the following:
- 1 new Crafting Wheel item
- 1 new Show Director Power or map tile
- New cosmetics
- Fixes, balance, and polish
Something else that we learned from our July patch is that early feedback from you on these larger changes is essential. As we continue adding more Tools and Powers that will keep gameplay fresh, we’ll be checking in with you regularly, offering you chances to playtest new features before they are officially added, and making sure to look at all your feedback so that the features we introduce are the best they can be.
If you haven’t heard much from us in the last few weeks, it’s because we’ve been taking a step back to get a better sense of where Darwin Project is at, where we want it to be at launch, and how we can best get there. We’ve said that we would launch Darwin Project out of Early Access when its systems meet our quality targets for fun factor, balancing, and polish. With that in mind, it’s time to talk about the estimated release window we shared last year.
It’s clear to us right now that there is a lot of new content that we still want to add before launching out of Early Access. Simon mentions a lot of it in the video above. But more generally, we think that a lot of what players do in Darwin Project can feel better. Our team has lots of great ideas to enhance the overall Darwin Project experience, both by improving existing features and adding new ones, and it’s important for us to make those improvements before we’re comfortable removing the Early Access tag. So we won’t be launching Darwin Project out of Early Access this summer as we originally estimated. While we don’t have a new release window to share immediately, we’re confident that our new content schedule will allow us to make regular, substantial updates that will take Darwin Project to full launch before long.
As always, we’re building this game with you, the Darwin Project inmates, and we want to hear all your feedback during our road to release and beyond.
See you all in the arena!