Pathologic 3 devs defend choice to cut the plague town's open world to bits
Making an incision
Surreal first-person medical sim Pathologic 3 will be different from its plague-ridden predecessor in a lot of ways. In Pathologic 2 you played a roaming surgeon rooting around in bins for sustenance, and this time you play as the Bachelor, a well-fed doctor who diagnoses patients by inspecting their bodies and investigating their homes for signs of disease. But one of the biggest changes regards the open world. You won't freely explore the remote steppe town this time, but instead dander through isolated pockets, with lots of loading screens, map plotting, and fast travel. That's made a few fans grumpy, but developers Ice-Pick Lodge are sticking to their plans, as they've stated in a development update.
You'll know how town traversal works if you've played the demo for this sequel, Pathologic 3: Quarantine (or if you've read our hands-on impressions of the demo). Basically, you walk through particular archways and get confronted with a map screen. From here, you select a route and watch as your little dot makes its way through the city. In certain dangerous neighbourhoods, you're kicked out of this map screen and forced to make your way through the streets in the usual first-person mode once more, a handy revolver at your side to keep desperate muggers at bay. Once you get clear of that zone and find the exit arch, it's back to the map screen.
This is obviously very different from the freestyle wandering of Pathologic and its recent spiritual successor Pathologic 2. Enough players of the demo left negative or skeptical feedback about it to prompt Ice-Pick Lodge to respond with a post that explains their reasoning.
"The main question after Quarantine: what’s up with the city?" said the devs in the post on Steam. "Why couldn’t you move through it without loading screens? And how will that change in the full game? Why change a game where everything 'worked'?
"We know some players would’ve liked that just fine. But for us that wouldn’t be enough. Not creatively (there’s already a game about digging through Gorkhon’s trash cans), and not commercially: sequels to indie games statistically sell much worse than the originals, and we’re making a sequel to a sequel. Just repeating ourselves? That’s a dead end.
"But trying new things is in the studio’s DNA. And that led us to the idea of a new kind of game — about a person lost in time, with narrative structure and space-time torn to shreds. That presentation will stay. It’s a core part of the concept — it can’t be changed. (And technically, it can’t be reversed at this point.)"
Essentially, they didn't want to simply make the same game again, and it'd be too much work to change direction now from a technical perspective. The studio also asked players of the prologue to remember it was just a demo, and that this railroaded tutorialised journey was only a "parade alley". The street-stalking segments will have more to them, they promise. For example, the player will see the effects of decrees and laws they make during the quarantine at street level. Ordering everyone to wash regularly will mean you really see some NPCs washing their hands as you pass by.
Although the studio isn't budging on the splintering of that open world, they are looking into other changes. They admit that the survival meter of the hero's mental state is not well-balanced or well-explained (it's a meter that runs from apathy to mania and must be balanced by slurping drugs). And when it comes to some choppy performance issues, they're "planning for things to get much better".
The demo will be taken down at some point shortly before release, they say, with the team now moving all their attention to the full game. It's due to come out some time this year.