Hello everyone!
This is Alexander Souslov, producer at Ice-Pick Lodge and game designer of Pathologic 3.
The studio has been quiet for a while. We needed a moment to catch our breath. The team had no New Year holidays, and frankly, no vacations at all while working on the game's updates. But we weren't silent because we were lounging on a beach, eating watermelons and baursaks (if you've never encountered baursaks before, you have my deepest sympathies). We were working on a major update that not only fixes bugs, but also adds a few new things to the game itself (hopefully not new bugs).
Today I'd like to tell you about what we've been working on for the last three months.
Before that, though, I need to say thank you. To those who left positive reviews, and to those who left negative ones. To everyone who waited with us for the game's announcement (we were definitely reading the comments). To those who praised us, criticized us, defended us, or argued with us.
Developing Pathologic 3 involved a great deal of pain. At times it was genuinely difficult. But we don't regret it. Pain is the fuel our studio runs on, and a videogame is our way of giving that pain an artistic form. You can strip away what is unnecessary and allow someone else to feel it.
For example, you.
Perhaps we should talk to you more often. Ice-Pick Lodge has never been particularly good at that. There is never enough time.
Which, incidentally, is what the game is about.
So, let's talk about the update we're preparing.
There were quite a lot of bugs. Quite a lot.
I'd dare say most of them had already been fixed by the March update, but we've continued polishing the game. Performance has been significantly improved. Our engineer Kolya optimized everything he could get his hands on. Various remaining absurdities, such as certain characters unexpectedly entering a T-pose, have been fixed. Typos have been corrected. Overall, we believe we've largely won the war against bugs.
That said, we may still need the help of volunteer testers to make absolutely sure.
We'll return to that subject soon.
Balancing the game is the game designer's responsibility, which means it's my responsibility, and therefore I owe you an explanation.
In its late testing phase, the game was difficult. Finding the right combinations of Dankovsky's decrees was a sweaty exercise. Supplies were scarce. The Shabnak killed very quickly. Running away from bandits was nearly impossible.
Tomonobu Itagaki, the game designer of Ninja Gaiden, once said:
"At first it was easier, but when the testers said 'this is too difficult', I made it even more difficult."
That is a man with a unified sense of self.
My own game designer self is somewhat fragmented, and the question of difficulty has always been a cursed one for me.
Should Sekiro have difficulty levels? Absolutely not. It would destroy the game.
What about Cuphead? Probably not.
But what if I simply want to experience the story and look at the beautiful moving pictures?
Is a game primarily a system of rules, or is it a story?
If I sit down to read a difficult novel like The Brothers Karamazov, but the book keeps trying to jump away from me, suddenly snap shut, or break my fingers, does that make the experience richer or poorer?
This is that partly imaginary debate between narratology and ludology, a debate that becomes especially sharp in the case of Pathologic. After all, this isn't a system about stabbing things with a samurai sword.
There is quite a lot of reading involved.
Before release, my decision was to pull the lever toward accessibility and prioritize the narrative over the mechanical systems.
As a result, most of the pressure currently comes from the Amalgam. The difficulty approaches from that direction, and it arrives gradually. Yes, I know it starts running out toward the end of the game, and it runs out in a rather terrifying way.
But that's what fear of death is, isn't it?
The stress of running out of time.
That stress has to be real and serious. Otherwise it simply stops being stressful.
That said, I think now is a good moment to introduce multiple difficulty levels.
There is a separate dilemma here. If a game has several difficulty settings, which one is the "real" difficulty? If I'm playing on a different one, am I receiving an incomplete version? The equivalent of Marcus Aurelius in 90 Minutes?
But let's stop that train of thought before it inevitably leads us into a discussion of authorship, canon, authenticity, and whether one version is somehow more genuine than another.
We can have that conversation another day.
For now, I'll simply say that we're adding a harder difficulty for those who wish to suffer properly, keeping the current difficulty as it is, and introducing a very easy mode as well.
I'm afraid this could easily turn into yet another essay about the nature of difficulty in games and the strange beauty of exploits.
So I'll keep it brief.
Yes, we know about it.
We've known about it the whole time.
And yes, we're going to do something about it, taking into account everything I just said above.
During development, we considered all sorts of possibilities.
There was spinning Dankovsky around on a special carousel.
There was launching Dankovsky on an Enormous Swing.
I'll put it this way: Roger Caillois identified four fundamental forms of play, and I think videogames make surprisingly little use of ilinx - the pleasure of losing control, dizziness, disorientation, and the sensation of your neurons quietly giving up.
At one point there was even an idea involving transferring Dankovsky's consciousness into a jerboa, who would then deal with his enemy in a very particular way.
Although that admittedly starts looking suspiciously like Dishonored.
In short, there were many ideas, some of them even prototyped. In the upcoming update we'll likely make some adjustments to one of the existing ways of dealing with the Shabnak and add a completely new one.
The carousel probably deserves its own game.
I'm not entirely convinced that you need a photo mode, considering the screenshots you've already been taking.
They are FANTASTIC.
Besides, the dataminers have already found everything there was to find, including several things they probably weren't supposed to find.
Still, life is more comfortable with a photo mode.
So we're adding one in this update. Our tech lead Albert is incredibly proud of it.
I suppose this is a good place to stop and talk about timing.
I'd rather not promise an exact release date just yet, but we're already conducting internal testing and should soon be ready to begin working with volunteer testers.
Thank you all once again.
We'll try to talk to you more often.