Pathologic 2 splinters into a trio of episodic releases
The sickness isn't down yet, thankfully
Pathologic 2 - Ice-Pick Lodge's grim plague survival adventure - is to be released in parts. Originally just Kickstarted as 'Pathologic', implying a remake, as with the original game you play as three different characters, each with their own stories, abilities and vast swathes of dialogue. Thanks to a multitude of pressures detailed in their dev blog here, they'll be releasing the Haruspex's story first in the second quarter of 2019, with the other two characters coming later, although the exact method is yet undecided. Below, developer Nikolay Dybowski explains the situation in a (subtitled) video.
Unsurprisingly, money is a large part of why they've made this decision. Russia went through its own economic crisis just around the time they ran the Kickstarter, which took a bite out of their budget. To compensate, studio members invested personal savings, sometimes worked free and kept the project going but at the cost of time, which is also money. Secondly, feedback to The Marble Nest (the standalone demo) and the public alpha made them slow down and re-think accessibility. They still want parts of it to be opaque and confusing, but some parts that should have been simple, weren't.
As is the case for so many games, they need more time, and in order to buy that, they're focusing on releasing one character at a time. Those who backed the Kickstarter will get all three characters as they're released, but those buying the game at launch will start with just the Haruspex's story. Whether the other two will be launched as separate games, DLC or something even more esoteric is still unknown. I'm just glad that they're going to be polishing this one up. I doubt we'll see anything else like Pathologic 2 for a while, so it may as well be as good as it could be. Fingers crossed.
Pathologic 2, or at least its first chapter, should be launching in the second quarter of 2019, and will also be part of the Xbox Game Pass subscription. The game is published by TinyBuild.