Greetings everyone!
Look! I made the devblog title relevant to its content! See? Not completely hopeless! Anyway, let’s get to it.
Moving to Wrap Update 4.2
The release of Update 4.2 is finally on the horizon with two of the three major events having been completed and work now starting on the big Christmas dinner sequence. While I’m shooting for a release next Thursday, there’s always a fair chance that the holiday season will potentially have some kind of impact on that. One way or another, the update is releasing this year!
In terms of what to expect, Update 4.2 will be introducing a revamped conversation system, a few events retooled to work around said revamped conversation system, the introduction (or rather the reveal) of a new character, new dosing opportunities for Sophie, the ability to text Sophie along with new images to accompany that, a new sidequest featuring your drivers, new story content, a great big Christmas event, and a whole slew of bug fixes!
There’s a lot of cool stuff in this next update that I’m excited to get out to everyone, and I can’t wait to get everyone’s impressions on it!
Looking Forward to Next Year
With the release of Update 4.2, we’ll also be wrapping up 2021! Anyone who attending last month’s Discord AMA should already have a pretty good idea of what’s coming around the corner, but for everyone else, here’s a basic idea of what expect! We’re looking to hit the ground running in 2022, and obviously, that means taking a break! I’m kidding, kind of. Once Update 4.2 is out and stabilized, we’ll be taking a short break from development in order to put together and manage our next community event: Random Event Submissions! Yes, yes, everyone plays The Company for “the s3ggs”, but there’s something to be said for the more mundane aspects of the world. Taking Tasha out for coffee, spending time with Penny, taking John out to race go-karts… Okay that last one isn’t actually in the game, but the point is that it COULD BE!
This event will ask the community to submit ideas and short synopses for their own random events! Like in the past, we’ll be collecting these submissions and allowing the community to vote on their favorites with the winning entrees being added to the game in Update 4.3 with credit to the creators! I expect this event to start in early January and will have many more details around that time. I think this will be a lot of fun, and it’s been way too long since we’ve had an event like this. So long, in fact, that I might even have to drag Haseo out of bed to cohost with me and go over the submissions live on Discord before opening up the votes. Either way, it should be a good time!
Once that’s all wrapped up, it’s full force into Update 4.3, which will see the conclusion of Chapter 4! The game’s penultimate chapter is going to end with a doozy, making the necessity for Free Play mode all the more evident. This will also be the point in the development where we look at going back and doing everyone’s sidequests, getting ultimate weapons and whatever broken materia we missed so that when Chapter 5 finally rolls around we can W.Summon KotR/BZ + Mime the fuck out of it and… I think I might have deviated from my initial train of thought…
The sentiment is still there, though. Basically, once Chapter 4 is finished we’ll be taking some time, possibly a lot of time, to “build the rest of the game” before finally ending the main story. What this means is that, if you’ve ever asked “When is X going to be added to the game?” the answer is now officially during the Update 5 development cycle. All serum routes will be completed, all extra events and interactions will be added, The Pit will be fleshed out, shopkeeper content will finally be added, MCS-X content will all be added and just about everything we’ve talking about along the way will be touched on over the course of this intermediary update! Honestly, there’s so much to do that I don’t even know where to start… Maybe I should ask the community?
That’ll conclude this week’s development update! Lot’s of fun and exciting things on the horizon, as well as a feedback survey that should be out pretty soon here. As always, thanks to everyone for their continued feedback and support, and I hope you all have a great holiday season!
