There is a saying. You don’t change horses in midstream. Meaning that you shouldn’t decide to make changes in the middle of development. Which is exactly what Red Thread Games is doing with Dreamfall Chapters. In this case, though, they didn’t have a whole lot of choice. From my understanding, and I’m far from knowledgeable about it, support for Unity 4 is going to be suspended soon. Which is the engine that the game has been built upon. So, Ragnar Tornquist made the executive decision to move everything over to Unity 5. And this has caused delays for the release of Book Four, Revelations.
October 21 was the planned internal release date. Obviously, it’s come and gone already. It appears that the port to Unity 5 has taken a lot longer, and has been filled with more headaches, than planned. In fact, they’re still working hard to squash every bug that creeps up. Which is why the release of Dreamfall Chapters Book Four has been put on hold until they can stabilize builds for the first three books. Once everything looks good they’ll continue work on Revelations. Until then, we just have to wait a little bit longer. And I’m a patient person so what’s a couple more months or so?
Another reason for doing the move now rather than later is that Dreamfall Chapters is a cohesive story and they either all have to work with the same code or it all falls apart. Ragnar said this in the update: “Our episodes don’t stand alone: they’re part of one growing and evolving game, sharing assets and code.” Which makes sense from a programming point of view. That said, they plan on releasing beta builds of the already released chapters for those willing to test and help hammer out any remaining bugs. There’s no official release date planned for Book Four but since the majority of assets are already done for it and working fine in Unity 5 we should be able to see it soon after Book 1-3 are published with the new code.
Be sure to read out previous Dreamfall Chapters coverage while you wait for book 4.
