To start with, if anyone has any updates on the allegations against IPL's founder and CEO Nikolai Dybowski, please update us. I wasn't able to find anything, even on the somewhat active subreddit.
In any case, he's still acting in his role and has signed, alongside the major figures of the studio, an open letter against the Ukrainian war, for what it's worth.
View: https://twitter.com/icepicklodge/status/1498269141404463107?s=61&t=epZBr-k9FEHAgU76XzSl3g
For the ten or so of us who know of and have any interest in Pathologic, there was an update several months ago that I did not see mentioned anywhere on era.
What were you actually doing all this time?
teletype.in
In short, they are actively working on another Pathologic installment for the Bachelor, using a different engine/gameplay throughline, with support from a "major well-known investor"
Some interesting snippets:
Why the new Pathologic will not be a clone of 'the same game "with different dialogues"':
I fundamentally did not want to make a clone of an existing game, where the core gameplay of the Haruspex would migrate with the individual characteristics of this hero and, most importantly, with his former shortcomings. That includes the combat system, controversial economy, and the attempt to imitate a small-scale open world under the limited technical capabilities. The problem of streaming a large city on consoles, which rose to its full growth during a porting, also did not go away. All this had to be taken into account.
Their new process after learning from the rocky development of P2:
Even developing a "low-key Bachelor" we had to create not a piece of old game, a full-fledged gameplay. We'd taken in account mistakes of developments, and this time started without pernicious arrogance, trying to do it the right way: with creating a bunch of gray box prototypes.
The first prototype:
The first version of pure cabinet gameplay we prototyped in a really low-key way: in fact, the whole story there should have been taking place in one location we called the Stillwater. During the episodes of strolls through the city players could receive impression phrases. It would appear when some urban detail fell into the player's scope, scattering in a cloud of phrases, as in the BBC Sherlock. Players had to catch them like mosquitoes with the further haul result appearing in the mind map.
All in all, we barely created a Fruit-ninja with thoughts and phrases that players had to immediately evaluate and find the necessary ones were playing a role of fruits. If the phrases didn't fit, players would have to go hunting it again. This kind of gameplay still seems beautiful: maybe some kind of it would be presented in a current version of the game.
As a joke, I called it the combination of Her Story and IT'S WINTER. We wanted to show the intellectual hero and display the process of critical thinking through the game interface. In essence, it was a puzzle that tests memory, attentiveness and the skill of combination impressions.
The second prototype:
The second prototype was a story with a non-linear narrative, where 12 days were deliberately placed not in chronological order, but mixed up, as in Pulp Fiction. The subconscious desire to create a convincing imitation of the sensations of an exhausted person had its effect. The player could move between different days, as if "remembering" what happened on the eleventh day and what happened on the sixth one. Bachelor's had its own timeline, so did the player and the town with its citizens. And all of those three conditions sometimes had "go visiting" each other by the way.
For example, a volunteer hired by Dankovsky on the seventh day, when returning on the third day, had also appeared there. Sounds okay. But how should they act, when this meeting proves to be the first one chronologically, the second one for the player and obviously the third one for the hero. Dialogues have been written from the author's reality, where the same volunteer on the third day could know what would happen to the Bachelor on the seventh day, and the Bachelor could not react to it. And so the idea of changing the active hero in the process of dialogue arose. It remains in the final version. But, in general, this kind of approach was too confusing. Both players and us were totally flipping out.
The third and ongoing prototype—its thematic focus on immortality and time:
It's not the city or even the plague that matters to the Bachelor, but Simon and, more precisely, the question of how he technically achieved immortality. And this question is directly related to the different types of time that I wanted to show through the gameplay. It has been only during the playtests of the second prototype that it's become clear that in the concept with a "jump cut" the player's experience of the time's flow had completely gone! Totally! Time had been so complicated the players have stopped noticing it. And we wanted them to be able to compare various types of perception of a time within a short interval. Therefore, we focused on what techniques and activities make players experience time within a short interval, like in Nolan's film "Memento".
At the same time, a game with a different time course had to be combined with a tactical "street" gameplay. The interaction with infected zones, particles and objects should affect the flow of time.
How the Bachelor (Dankovsky) will differ from the Haruspex (Artemy):
Daniil Dankovsky works with the technology of mortality. He is interested in how a person naturally "ends" and what can be done about it. Immortality and death are problems that primarily rely on how time works. The aging processes of the body are associated with its irreversible and irresistible flow. But time works way more complicated in the modern scientific picture of the world. Its foundations were laid by Einstein, Planck and Mechnikov. They all are conditional contemporaries of Dankovsky, and he, as an intellectual, should know about their work.
Therefore Dankovsky should perceive time not mundenly, but differently. Changing his concerns about the time, he would start to use it as a tool to understand not the not the physiological immortality of the cell, but the immortality of man as a thinking unit.
There are precisely a number of philosophical questions that we want to focus on while working on the plot of the Bachelor. Firstly, that includes the dilemma of death and immortality. Secondly, it's about time and being lost in it, as well as managing time itself or changing its perception. That is what gameplay changes are connected with. We have to decide on what the hero can do in our world model, what he can influence, and what, on the contrary, is not so important for him.
There will be no open world, no looting and fighting random NPCs, and the survival system will be quite different. The Bachelor will no longer contend with material resources but with time, people, and facts. The plague will be a more active and interesting foe, the story will not be chronological, and the player will rely on volunteers to do footwork the player can't afford to do themselves.
m.dw.com
www.critical-distance.com
qawerian.tumblr.com
www.reddit.com
www.resetera.com
