So - the long awaited “What’s the next Studio Archcraft project?” post…
First, a word of warning: any information found here is subject to change - we’re not committing to anything just yet, as there’s still a few things to sort out first. Also - this is strictly Studio Archcraft stuff. Graffiti is, so far, not involved in anything found below.
Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, let’s have a look at future projects Studio Archcraft might do:
1-A Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled prequel or sequel
While Black Sigil’s story stands on its own fairly well, there are still stories to be told in Artania. At some point, we’d like to revisit that world and tell some of those stories. Whether we’ll be able to depends mostly on Black Sigil’s sales. On the other hand, if Black Sigil performs very well (hey, maybe, like Spinal Tap, we’ll be really big in Japan!) this may very well be bumped to priority one.
2-Black Sigil 2 - Unrelated story
We’re also planning on taking what we’ve got, improving it, and telling an entirely new story. We’re planning on basically improving everything from Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. Better visuals, better monster AI, tweaks to the various game mechanics, etc. We’ve also taken good notes of the various criticisms given to us by the general public - while the encounter rate seemed fine to me, it apparently wasn’t for most people. So that’ll go back to the drawing board.
This project is probably the one most likely to hit shelves next. We’ve got an initial storyline down, we’ve got fairly final specs for many art assets, we’ve got a solid design doc… Basically, we’re putting our ducks in a row to develop it as fast as possible.
3-Action RPG unrelated to Black Sigil
Well, Black Sigil is nice, but we do want to branch out a bit as well. This is our other path. So far, we’ve only put down some ideas for that project, so don’t expect any screenshots or videos. On the other hand, the concepts we have written down would require us to work quite a bit less than we did for Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, which is really interesting from a business perspective.
So - there you go. That’s what we’ll be working on for the next few months. We’d love to hear your thoughts on that!