Keep On Trucking: Spintires Development Back On Track

Ooh you could hardly hear yourself think in the RPS treehouse around when Spintires [official site] came out last year, what with Adam thundering around pretending to be a honking great lorry stuck in mud. But development slowed then by the end of the year, a nasty rift had formed between publishers Oovee and maker Pavel Zagrebelny, as The Flare Path reported. It sounded like Pavel might give up, and Oovee clamming up didn't help players' concerns either.

Thankfully, it seems they're now on better terms, talking of public "experimental" builds and plans to bring mod support with a large update in early April.

Oovee said in a statement today:

"We openly admit that communications between Oovee and our customers have been weak over the last few months. Our customer base grew far beyond what we initially expected and we needed to cater for that quickly – the development plans became sketchy and before we knew it we had a runaway train. Please accept our apologies ...

"In the past there has been speculation regarding the relationship between Oovee and our programming god, Pavel. Yes - no relationship goes without its problems, however, we have settled the communication issues that we have had in the past."

They also laid out plans for how development will continue. Each month is to bring an update - mod support in early April, a cockpit camera view in early May - plus bug fixes in-between. They're planning DLC for summer too, and, curiously, muttering about intentions for a new Spintires game.

"How can we possibly talk about the next iteration of Spintires when we still haven't finished improving the current version of Spintires? Well to be fair, software is never finished and we understand that. But with the huge success of the Spintires release, it's kind of a no-brainer but to continue the franchise and create an even better game with a larger team and a larger budget."

That might make sense, but it seems a bit of a blunder to start talking about a sequel in the same breath as assuring fans the game isn't dead. But! Mud! Mud will continue! Glorious mud!