Three months after that gameplay trailer, and we still don’t have a release date for Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic 2. It turns out that development has been hitting snags, according to a video posted by the devs, in which developer Nikolay Dybowski explains the issues.
From the result of the economic crisis in Russia that in turn caused an investment deal to collapse, player feedback from a recent alpha, to making the game more accessible to players instead of being “back-breakingly hard”, the team has had to pivot. Pathologic 2 will instead be released like its predecessor in separate parts (one for each character), with the first part, The Haruspex, being released in Q2 2019.
However, Dybowski states that the team isn’t abandoning their vision of the game, despite the changes. “It’s still an experiment, still novel. We really hope you’ll appreciate it when you play it and learn the underlying ideas. But we need to modify our approach to presentation a bit.” Furthermore, by releasing the first chapter of the game by itself, the team can gauge what changes need to be made to subsequent chapters, based on how people react to and play the first chapter.