Rezzed 2017
We just got back from showing The Occupation for the first time at Rezzed in London’s Tobacco Dock. It was an incredible event, and more than anything, a great way for the team to take a break from working on the game to get some feedback from people. It was great to chat to everyone interested in the game and to meet friends we’ve not seen since showcasing Ether One at different events.
We’ve been working hard on The Occupation for the last 18 months since releasing Ether One on the PS4 (It’s crazy to think it’s been that long!). We wanted to stay quiet with this game instead of talking about it too early on as we learnt a lot of lessons from going through the process with Ether One. When you talk about a game too early on, especially something narrative focused, details can & will change. When these are talked about publicly, it sends a slightly confusing message when the game’s released and people can use old information. We feel as though we’re in a strong position with The Occupation now and it’s more about refining the narrative arcs and the game’s design. Visually, we’re pretty happy with where we’re at so you should be hearing much more from us over the coming months – apologies for the radio silence!
We gained a lot of really valuable feedback from people playing the game at Rezzed and it also identified some needed design changes we’re able to make moving forward. We’ll most likely not attend any shows over the summer, and instead work hard on the game and then attending more shows towards the end of the summer.
The two most frequent questions we got, and rightly so, are; what platforms are you releasing on and when it released? To be honest – we’re not entirely sure the answer to either of those questions! Platform wise, we’re very open to all platforms. We’ve had some good discussions with the main console holders and they all seem interested. A similar case on PC, but nothing is yet confirmed. Since we use the Unreal Engine it makes multiple platforms very accessible to us so we’ll do our best to get it to everyone that wants it.
A release date is also a hard question thing to answer as things invariably get delayed. We’re pretty confident we can get the game completed before Christmas 2017. That being said, if we’re shipping on consoles, it makes things slightly more tricky. A good estimation the team feels confident about is shipping around the End of Q1 / start of Q2 in 2018 – around March time.
If you’d like to know more about The Occupation here are a few interviews we’ve done over the past week:
God Is A Geek:http://www.godisageek.com/2017/03/interview-with-pete-bottomley-game-designer-and-narrative-on-the-occupation/
GameReactor: http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/525323/The+Occupation+sets+out+to+marry+the+walking+sim+with+Deus+Ex/
Thank you all for the incredible support you’ve shown over the past couple of weeks, we were very nervous about the reception of our new game. It’s been incredible hearing everyone’s kind words about what we’re working on and we’ll be sure to keep everyone updated as development progresses.
From the WPG team.