I didn't expect myself to be posting here again so soon, but -- hello everyone, C-zom here to bring you bilateral news of pure excellence. Though, I should begin by stipulating that, indeed, the Developer Commentary was cancelled officially and will not return due to poor reception and low view counts. What was begged of us practically by the community for almost a year straight landed to ice cold reception, and there won't be another crack at it. Now, onto the important bits:
What is first and foremost is the discussion of a hotfix patch upcoming for The Worry of Newport, to be released by March 1st or earlier (guaranteed this time, no if's ends or buts.) Hotfix-#1 will address the following issues,
Hotfix #1
- Book reading system has been recoded to be sturdier and more weighted, akin to the Triptch book reading engine. This should solve all complaints on the logs once and for all.
- All glitchy narrations have been recoded to not overlap or loop, and a narration change has made it so... you can walk while listening! No more standing and waiting for every painstaking line.
- Option to skip Aoife's logs will be given after 30 seconds.
- Glitchy swamp section in Part 2 has been reworked to gel easier in the storyboard.
- For real this time, for the billionth time we've tried, we can FINALLY get the ambient music to cooperate with us. Expect the soundtrack on almost constant loop.
Tales from Afar
The Worry of Newport is going to get a AAA prequel at long last. I will be writing it once again, I am unsure if Jason Daysh will return to direct our cutscenes, but I hope to secure the original cast and crew entirely. Preliminary talks have not gone into motion. Rather, I've secured the confidence in Cryengine3 to begin private build development and conceptual solidification. I have also begun the screenplay and storyboard.
The prequel is designed to deal with the explorations of Aoife Hall in Europe, the Middle East, and eventually to Newport itself, before culminating in a visitation to an ancient city housing a cosmic horror -- Tygras. Fans of The Worry of Newport will be familiar with this all by playing it and reading the journals and logs. The context, and hook, of the game is a first person adventure (I stress adventure) in Lovecraftian Mystery, whereupon she delves deep into a profound mystery surrounding that city, as well as the whereabouts and identity of a cosmic horror named Hadad. She meets Edgar Gray at a focal point of the story and each character is dedicated to leap-frog patterned chapters in the game.
It is going to ramp down on the dreadful, horror, and misanthropic atmosphere of the first and present itself as an actual spanning adventure with quests, npc's, and the like. But it won't be without it's Lovecraftian influences or horrifying atmosphere, of course. Promising a full suite of characters, locations, DX11 graphics, and custom assets and top grade voice acting and composing, it should be the prequel Newport deserves. Expect a Moddb page to be opened up shortly after Summer begins. Tell the living, tell the dead; The Worry of Newport's long awaited "successor" has begun development.
bout goddamned time, wohoo! cant wait
Oh wow! I really didn't expect to read that an upcoming prequel for TWON was already in development! I remember you talked about it in a previous article but I didn't think the team was going to work on another full adventure so soon, well, at least before the development of Triptych was over. Anyway, that's really awesome news and I'm looking forward to it!
And that's a shame for the Developer Commentary, as I really wanted to see the next episodes. I love to see how the development goes, the different iterations of a feature, how a particular area or scene was created, etc. That's too bad it was poorly received...
Proof of concept finished and writing has begun, which tells me "I can do it." Development, as in, full blown pre-alpha builds or level drafting, will not begin until Triptych is shipped and gold. But by the time Triptych is out, I honestly expect at least 30-40% of the entire Tales screenplay to be finished too. It won't be a hurried or forced project, but yes, it's definitely happening in due time.
It's a shame. Given Cryengine3's commentary features in the engine, I might just include my commentary IN the mod as a tickable box (like amnesia did) though.
Well, including a dev commentary in the game itself would add a good replay value for those interested in the development. I remember the devs included a similar feature in Amnesia or Half-Life 2 Ep. 1/2 and it' was really enjoyable.
I guess it must be time consuming to add a dev commentary feature and it may be quite disappointing to know that most players won't even take a look at it but I still hope you'll consider that idea in the future. ;)
Excellent. This will motivate me to get back to the game and explore it further.
The Newport engine is not handling the advanced book reading code or lighting engine too well ported over from Triptych. We're struggling to get it to work, so that we can ship it as soon as possible. The programming is being rejected, as Newport Engine 2.0 is a very strict sub-engine of flowgraphs, ToD lighting, optimization and trigger-scripts. To gut it and put in the Triptych elements is turning into a nightmare of coding.