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Discussions Rules and Guidelines
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Q: What’s new in the Director’s Cut?
A: There’s plenty of new exciting content and features!
- Extended storyline with a prolonged ending, hundreds of lines of additional dialogue, and multiple new areas to explore.
- Added several new major puzzle chains along with many small additions and tweaks of existing puzzles.
- Enlarged all game environments to fill up the entire screen in widescreen resolutions without any black bars on the sides.
- Made countless visual improvements, such as more character animations, better lighting/shadows and extra weather effects.
- Streamlined the mouse controls with an intuitive single click interface.
- Controller support done right. Lean back in your chair and take smooth direct control of Kathy, with no messy cursor getting in the way.
- Expanded and remixed soundtrack by the original composer, Daniel Kobylarz.
- Five brand new motorcycle designs to unlock and customize the Katmobile with.
Q: Which platforms will Director’s Cut be available for?A: Windows, Mac and Linux, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch!
Q: What languages will the Director's Cut be available for?
German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Polish will be available on launch. Russian, and Chinese are planned but will be released at a later point.
Q: Do you have plans for future Kathy Rain games?
A: Director's Cut is a huge undertaking which involves painstakingly recreating the experience of Kathy Rain from the ground up in a new, more flexible and powerful game engine. This opens many doors for the future of Kathy Rain.
Q: I own the original Kathy Rain, will I get a discount on the Director’s Cut?
A: First of all, thank you! There will indeed be a permanent -50% discount on the Director’s Cut for any owners of the original game. This discount also combines with any other active offers on the Director's Cut.
Q: Is Kathy Rain: Director’s Cut the mysterious “Project III”?
A: No, Project III is a totally different game! Both titles are being developed in parallel at Clifftop Games.
So no verbs? :/
Please tell me you're at least keeping examine/do separate.
Indeed, no verbs. Kathy will perform a context-sensitive action and there is no distinction between examining an object and performing other interactions. This system worked great in Whispers of a Machine and according to the data we have, this kind of control scheme is preferred over a two-button interface overall.
You'd be surprised how little dialogue we actually had to cut to adapt the interface for this as well. Multiple examine actions, such as "think" and "look" could easily be combined by splicing together the dialogue from both interactions, and in the cases where we had both observations and some of "use", usually the observation would just be a totally obvious description that could either be spoken by Kathy when the player interacts with the thing: "A thick book about math." *Picks up the book* or skipped altogether because it was a totally obvious and unnecessary line: "It's a phone. This should come in handy if I need to make calls."
Oh dear, that's very disappointing. While I agree that there's no need for an early 90s LucasArts array of verbs, I do like to have some agency over the character's actions. At the very least knowing whether I will examine something or interact with it is good (although I liked the 'verb coin' interface you used in the original release).
You're far from the only example of the general dumbing down of adventure games - 90s games were fairly criticised for some fairly outlandish solutions but I feel things have swung too far the other way at this point.
The original release of KR was hardly a difficult game, I'm not sure what benefit there is by essentially removing the requirement for the player to decide on the most appropriate thing to do.
I have yet to play Whispers of a Machine, so I guess I will see how it feels. I haven't liked single click interfaces in anything else I've played. I guess I can live without the DC of KR, but this doesn't bode well for the sequel I was hoping for.
It's interesting you mentioned having done market research. I thought of making a poll in some adventure game groups, but I looked to see if anyone had done something similar already. I found this:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/230349270493876/permalink/1504570343071756
This suggests that amongst fans of the genre at least, single click is not popular. However I assume that you are trying to extend your appeal to those who are not fans of the genre, which is completely understandable. I hope you get the desired outcome.
I guess this is a reply to me. Of course it's possible to make challenging puzzles with a single click interface, it just restricts the ways in which the puzzles can be challenging. Having a few verbs means you can have puzzles involving less obvious ways of interacting with objects.
It's fine if a game has been designed around a single "do" button (although I still prefer to be able to examine things separately).
Simplifying a game that had multiple verbs and made use of them is the definition of dumbing down though, because the game is changed so that Kathy automatically does the correct thing instead of requiring the player to think about it.
I think making a "final final directors cut" where you improve the sound a little bit would be a great idea!
Edit: just to make this post a bit more serious.
What exactly are your marketing spin here? I mean I get it, you need to make a living and work should be paid. BUT selling(!) us customers of the original version a little improved version with some small extras is dumb. Concepts that worked for others in the past doesn't seem to be an option for you. You know ... like making a sequel which is a standalone story-wise to get new customers on board and backporting the tech to the old game later (or more likely porting the old scripts and strings to the improved engine) providing a free upgrade to loyal customers and getting new influx from the players you got activated by the new game. But what's your point here? You make a niche product where you likely got most of the potential customers anyway to SELL them the same game again with better tech and some extensions to the story so it doesn't look as shady as it feels.
Good luck with that.
If you think this is a "little improved version with some small extras", by all means give the game a pass, but I'd respectfully disagree with that assessment of the additions in the Director's Cut. On release, we will have spent roughly two years on developing this product, with a larger team than any of our previous games — it's not something haphazardly whipped together. We have to charge for it, especially since over a million copies of the original game were given out for free in 2019.
However, as you may know, we've opted for a -50% loyalty discount for existing customers that multiplies with any other discount on the game, including a launch discount.