Dreamfall Chapters Leaps To Unity 5, Book 4 'Due Soon'
The episodic adventure Dreamfall Chapters from developer Red Thread and Ragnar Tørnquist still remains unfinished and it's been noticeably absent from the news. Now there's an explanation as to why and it's Unity 5.
Red Thread have been working since June to drag the game kicking and screaming to the latest Unity 5 engine release, which has seen an explosion in performance for the often bogged down adventure game, despite powerful hardware fuelling it. However this major overhaul was close to knocking out the studio.
"Part of me believed this was the end of the road for us, forever stuck in a muddy ditch, hood propped open, engine smoking, as we watched our finances run down and our players vanish in a cloud of dust up ahead,” said Tørnquist. The port to the newer engine cost $100,000 in production and hogged a lot of the development staff's time.
However the jump to Unity 5 has seen performance improvements of between 50-200% in framerates, doubled the distance of shadows and allowed many more players to enjoy the highest graphical fidelity. “Knowing what we know today, the decision to upgrade would have been a lot harder,” he added. “We’d still have done it, though. Fuck it, it was worth it.”
Dreamfall Chapters Book 4 still has no concrete date from Red Thread. The big engine update is available to play now through Steam.