Frictional Games made quite the return with Soma in 2015 but it seems the developer has quite a bit in the works. In a recent blog post, studio founder Thomas Grip revealed that there were not one but two projects in development. You can expect to see one of those revealed next year.
Grip noted that these new games wouldn’t be possible if Soma wasn’t the success it turned out to be. “We were lucky that SOMA was a hit, and that the money is easily able to sustain us for the time we need to complete our next project. Had SOMA been a flop, the situation would have been a lot worse now.”
It’s this turn of fortune that inspired the studio to focus on two projects at a time as opposed to one. “That’s why we are focusing on becoming a two project studio, and the goal is to be able to release a game every two years. Had we managed to set that up prior to SOMA, we would be in the process of releasing a game right now. Needless to say, it would makes us a lot more financially stable, and able to handle a less successful release. In turn this should allow us to take greater risks, which I think is a key element in being able to create great games.”
Unfortunately, we won’t see any mention of the first project until at least the first half of 2018. Grip noted that this project is in full production and that 80 percent of the team was busy with it.
“The focus for most of this year has been on creating the first few maps of the game to create a solid vertical slice based on our experiments last year. However, we recently came up with some new avenues that we wanted to explore. The stuff that has come out of this recent detour is feeling really great and I am certain it’ll make the game feel very special. All of this came out of what I just discussed: our focus on making games that leaves a mark on the player.”
As for the second project, you won’t hear about that until some advances in technology have been made. Grip revealed that the studio is creating a new version of its proprietary HPL engine so that’s resulting in more pre-production for this than previous games. All in all, it’s just good to see that Frictional has so much in the works and that its games continue to do well.
