Capybara's Below is due for release this year on PC and Xbox One, five years after the game was originally announced and two years after Below's development was put on hiatus as Capybara focused on OK K.O.! Let's Play Heroes.
The developers were silent about it for a very long time, but now that they have committed to launching Below in 2018 (albeit with no concrete release date yet) we're also starting to get more information about the lengthy development time.
In the latest games™ magazine (issue 200), Creative Director Kris Piotrowski shed some light on the team's struggles.
Well, we made a classic mistake, which I guess everybody has to do once before they really learn it. Back in 2013, we had parts of the game in place – core elements of its design and the art style – and we were super excited about what we had. Microsoft asked us if we wanted to show it at this giant event. We were just like, ‘Fuck yeah! There’s no way this could go wrong!’
Yeah. So, we did it; We got our demo together, we put together our trailer, showed it at this big event, and then went home and it was like, ‘Right, time to make the game. This will be a piece of cake’. It turns out that the game was very difficult to make.
It’s a classic case of announcing your game too early. I think we could have easily just kept Below to ourselves for at least a couple of years and then announced it. And, in hindsight, that’s what we would’ve done. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once it’s out.
At the same time, Piotrowski said canceling the game was never even considered as a possibility by the team.
No, throughout this whole thing we’ve never talked about that being a possibility. We’ve always, from the beginning, treated it as a project that we wanted to release when it was done. We’ve never really had an opportunity, as a studio, to do that before. But this time around we were actually in that position, and I felt like we had something kind of unique and interesting on our hands. The whole studio got behind the idea of holding it back until it was done.
Hopefully we'll learn more about Below at E3, including a final release date for this great looking action/adventure roguelike.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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