11 bit studios’ upcoming “emotional sci-fi” game The Alters has officially been delayed to next year, with the studio citing a need to “optimize all mission-critical systems and ensure that every aspect of your journey is as seamless as possible”.
In an announcement post on Steam (which is, rather amusingly, written as though it’s a message from the in-game company Ally Corp Communications), 11 bit pledges to “polish each phase of the project” with the additional development time.
The studio says that the initial demo phase of “Project Dolly” (referring to The Alters) has “already exceeded expectations”, but that “good is never enough” for Ally Corp, and so the delay has been put into effect in order to deliver “results that surpass our prior projections”.
While 11 bit doesn’t go into any further detail regarding the delay to The Alters, we can, perhaps, find a little more context in a message released to the studio’s investors recently.
In the message (for which we’re using machine translation), 11 bit says it wants to give Frostpunk 2 a little room to breathe, and that the negative reception from some Frostpunk fans blindsided the studio, so it wants to make sure that doesn’t happen again for The Alters.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that 11 bit’s stock plummeted recently, with analysts suggesting that Frostpunk 2‘s Steam numbers had come in under expectations.
For what it’s worth, 11 bit itself appears to disagree with this assessment; the company announced recently that Frostpunk 2 has already sold 350,000 copies and has already made back its development and marketing costs.
If you’re unfamiliar with The Alters, it’s a sci-fi adventure game that contains elements of survival, base-building, and “confronting your own multiverse life choices”, per 11 bit.
The game casts you as worker Jan Dolski, who becomes trapped on a distant planet and who must confront alternate versions of himself (the “alters” of the title), each of whom “has a different personality and background”.
The Alters is due to launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S next year. You can check out our early preview of the game here, and if you want to know more about the game’s behind-the-scenes processes, make sure you don’t miss our interview with lead designer Rafał Włosek.
