Dramfall Chapters: Book Two is set for release on March 10th, 2015. That's next month. The game will be available for Steam, Good Old Games and the Humble Bundle for PC. Fans of the adventure series will likely want to keep an eye out for the title.
Over on the Kickstarter page for Dreamfall Chapters, an update was made explaining when the latest game in the series would be releasing for backers and to the general public.
The update explains that originally backers were expecting the latest Dreamfall release to drop sometime in February. This was hinted at during a Twitter post a few weeks back. However, the team had to make the hard decision of delaying the title for a couple of reasons.
As explained in the update by Red Thread Games, bug squashing and gameplay testing was mandatory before letting the product out into the wild...
“The wait between the first two episodes has been longer than expected. This is due to a number of factors, including the massive scope of the second episode — up to 50% bigger than Book One, which took an average of four hours to play through — the technical challenges in building (and bug fixing) a functioning framework for an episodic game, and the very, very long test cycle involved in a choice-and-consequence based game that's now approaching ten hours in length after only two episodes.“It was the (lack of) testing and bug fixing that triggered our decision to delay release a couple of weeks. Book Two is officially done, and the team is working on Book Three, but we haven't been able to test it thoroughly enough to be comfortable with releasing it just yet. With another two weeks of testing, bug fixing and polishing, we will be able to deliver a much more stable and enjoyable experience.”
Now here's an update and a delay I can get behind.
Too often we've seen rushed and hurried releases from studios looking to cash in on a quarterly time-frame or to appease investors within the fiscal window. This just recently happened with Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed Unity, where the game was far from ready but somehow managed to pass certification and get and the green light for release. After numerous patches and lots, and lots, and lots of feedback and some free DLC as means of apologizing to the community, Assassin's Creed Unity eventually evolved into what some would consider to be a good game.
If Red Thread Games wants to completely avoid the kind of controversy that Ubisoft suffered in the last half of 2014 by doing right with their release of Dreamfall Chapters, then I'm definitely not going to knock them for delaying the game by a few weeks to polish up the core mechanics, squash as many bugs as possible and ensure the quality of the game's multiple choices and alternate play-routes are functioning properly. It's a nice exercise to see developers having this level of transparency with the community, but that's all because Dreamfall Chapters was Kickstarted. So transparency comes with the territory.
You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the Kickstarter page, or look for it to release on PC starting March 10th.
