What specifically has changed since the Xbox Game Preview version of the game?
The way that we looked at this... we were always going to be building a story around it. We launched in Early Access and people said, “This is great! But where’s my story? I’ve got this survival sandbox.” And we were like, “Okay, well, we were building that in the background,” because Early Access is not particularly well-suited to story-based games.
But the early reception we got – everyone was so enthusiastic and we started getting comparisons to games like BioShock. We were 15 people at the time. So that’s an order of magnitude different from the team that built BioShock. We sort of looked at that and thought we had two options: we can keep building the small game we were thinking of. Or we can say, why don’t we give it a go? Why don’t we build the game we think people are expecting. That’s been the story of the last two years. [...] We basically said, “Okay. You want this big old game with this big story? Then we’ll build it.”
When I played the initial Game Preview version of the game, it played like a typical survival game. I was in an open world, trying to stay alive for as long as I could, and when I died, I had to start over. Is that no longer the main structure of the game? What happens when you die? Do you start over, or pick up where you left off?
That’s your choice. There is a permadeath option for the brave, but most of the time you just play through and reload back to where you were. We’ve changed our whole save system so you’ve got multiple slots like an average, normal story-based game, I guess you could say. It’s there if you want, but otherwise it is now a pretty standard action adventure game.
Likewise, you can have encounters and sidequests that may spawn in one game, but may not spawn necessarily in another game. Although, we’ve dialed that back a lot because we were like, “We’ve really moved away from a highly repeatable one-hour game to a 20-hour experience. Maybe, we should just put it all in there.”
So, there will be a separate mode that will focus on survival, procedural generation, and playing it over and over?
Yeah, it will go back to the roots of what it originally was, because while we built this story we still want to make sure we provide the experience people were initially interested in.
https://www.gameinformer.com/interv...cuss-how-and-why-the-game-has-changed-so-much