Heyho everyone,
It's been some time since you heard from us and the questions are becoming louder and louder again - here we are to deliver at least some of the answers! Surviving Deponia's development process is thriving more and more and even though we soon-ish would be at the point of being able to start the Early Access period, our gathered feedback and planning of the development process led to the revelation that this is not the path that we want to go. Let us elaborate a bit more:
One of the most pressing reasons there could ever be, is, that you, the community, voiced relatively frequently that you would prefer a 1.0 Full Release rather than an Early Access - but this is not the only reason: On the more technical side, when generating the story for Surviving Deponia the outline and plot were easy to finalize, but getting more and more in depth with the individual corner points of storytelling and dialogs it has turned out to be - excuse my french - “unhelpful” to try and slice up the story progression into separate pieces that are delivered periodically, weeks/months apart from each other.
If you want to dive even deeper into the practical reasons, another one of them would be that voice acting (or cutscenes) are usually produced "in bulk" and are all added at once towards a full release.
The players that progressed through the Early Access period would basically be forced to replay the game completely once it is finalized, if they would want to enjoy the "real" final version - We have tried to find an efficient way of tackling this hurdle, but in the end it makes more sense to prevent you from experiencing it this way, all together.
… As you can see, there are multiple reasons why we think focussing on the 1.0 Release is the right choice. For some of you this change of direction is directly answering your wishes - and we hope that those who wanted to get their hands on the game this year can at least understand our reasoning.
You might be interested to know where we are at right now in production. Surely, we don't want to spoil any plot-heavy details - there are a few things we can share, though:
Alongside the first city (screenshots on the storepage) that already was more or less finalized early last summer when we revealed the game, we worked on the basic design (still work in progress) of the second big biome with its various critters - Adding individual landmarks and other assets to make it more "life-ly" looking, is next on the list.
This scary mushroom jungle’s origins are a misled project of the area's leader, the Waterlord, when he decided to shift all biodegradable trash onto one spot …during a heatwave, of all times.
Additionally to various NPCs (both OC and new), monsters and cool gameplay features (pet system) which we have already finalized, we are now working on the second city as well as the boss-fights you will be able to dive into. And yes, you have read correctly - you will be able to run around with platypuses (and other cute beasts) as your pet.
Thank you again for your interest and decade long hype for Deponia!
For a direct contact, feel free to join our Discord
Best Regards,
Daniel "Penta" Fahrtmann - Executive Producer,
Daedalic Entertainment & AtomicTorch Studio