Backers!

The brand new Dreamfall Chapters trailer is finally here, and along with a bunch of scenes from Book One, the trailer also contains teaser footage from Book Two — and that's not all: the trailer reveals the title of our next episode!

(One clue: it shares the first two letters with the title of Book One. Do we see a pattern emerging?)

Check it out on YouTube now!

And please let us know your thoughts over on the official forum.

Team RTG

Hello all,

With Book One behind us, the team is now focusing on Book Two – in parallel with the ongoing bug fixes and optimisations – and while we don't have a teaser trailer or release date for our second episode quite yet, we do have some new information to share with you today.

Leading up to Book Two, we will be releasing character profiles for both new and old characters, revealing – but never spoiling! – more details about their history, personality and role in the story.

(As always, if you're trying to stay completely spoiler free, you may want to skip these profiles.)

First up is Hanna Roth, a character only briefly mentioned in Book One, who plays a much bigger role in Book Two.

The second character is Enu; one of the rebels that Kian meets as he joins the magical resistance in Marcuria:

Look out for more character profiles soon!

Next week, we're releasing the third patch – version 1.1.2 – for the game, fixing some remaining memory related bugs and optimisations. You can read more about that patch here.

Together with next week's patch we will also reveal a new trailer, containing the first teaser footage from Book Two...along with the title of our second episode. When that happens, you'll be the first to know!

As always, we encourage everyone to take the discussion to our official forums. How do you feel about the new characters? What roles do you think they'll be playing in the story?

Thanks for reading!

Team RTG

Dreamfall Chapters has now been out for over one week, and most of you have probably played the game. If you haven't, here's a reminder about how to claim your game key.

We hope you like it and that you're already looking forward to Book Two! It's great to see the ongoing discussions on our forum and elsewhere regarding the story, the characters and the universe. We love lurking and reading all your comments! There are so many things going on in Book One, we're sure the theory-crafting will continue until Book Two arrives.

We are completely overwhelmed by the response so far. Players seem to be very happy — the user scores on Steam and Metacritic are high, and both Twitter and our forum are full of positive feedback and happy vibes.

We are aware that some of you have had technical issues (more on that below) and we also know that not everyone is completely satisfied with Book One. That's not unexpected: it's not possible to make a game that appeals to absolutely everyone. But, hopefully, your experience will improve with forthcoming episodes!

The reviews from critics have so far ranged from 'cautiously optimistic' to very positive, with few outright negative reviews. The most common criticisms may be that Book One is a slow-ish start to a bigger and potentially intriguing story, and that some players may feel lost.

The pacing is intentional but obviously divisive: we wanted to establish Zoë's life in Europolis before kicking the plot into high gear, and to celebrate the mundane — something that's rare in games.

As for feeling lost: that's expected! And not just with new players. We introduce a lot of new characters and a brand new setting. Even long-term fans will feel hopefully lost at times. Don't worry: it will get clearer with time.

To help new players get up to scratch, we have released a Dreamfall: The Longest Journey recap video. This video is also included in the game with version 1.1.

In general, it seems like the critics who are most apprehensive about the game are still looking forward to seeing where the story goes in Book Two — and we think they are going to be very, very happy.

Regarding performance, we do know that some players have experienced technical issues — poor frame-rate, crashes — in version 1.0 and we apologise for that. We saw none of these issues on our own hardware, but the excellent feedback from players has helped us narrow things down.

Despite their obvious exhaustion from months of crunching, the team has hunkered down and worked really hard to deliver version 1.1. Last night we uploaded a patch to Steam that fixes a large number of performance related issues. You can read more about version 1.1 here.

The response to this patch has been positive. Most players are seeing moderate to huge increases in performance, and fewer memory related crashes on all platforms.

We are releasing another patch (v1.1.1) to fix some new (and some still-lingering) bugs. This latest version will hopefully go live on Steam today, and will also make its way to GOG and the Humble Store. Humble should have their version live before end-of-day in San Francisco (if we deliver it in time) while GOG might not have it up until Monday.

We apologise for the staggered releases. Steam is the only store where we have direct access to publish patches and new versions on our own. With GOG and Humble, we have to go through a longer process, which can result in delays. This is not their fault, of course: it simply takes more time, and we didn't want to push 1.1 out to GOG and Humble before we had some immediate feedback from our Steam guinea-pigs!

Thanks again for all your support and patience these past few weeks. It's been a stressful and exhausting time for the team, but seeing your comments and feedback is very motivating for us. And we really appreciate you guys taking the time to tell us how you feel. After all, you are the reason we made this game in the first place!

We will return next week with more thoughts about launch and the past few weeks of production, a fresh look at what the team is currently working on, and perhaps some exciting news about Book Two!

Until then:

Happy Halloween!

Hello everyone,

DEEP BREATH

Yesterday was a crazy-mad day for everyone at Red Thread, and by the end of the night we were all exhausted. We're sorry for not following up on all customer support questions and concerns and forum threads and emails right away, but shipping a game is a hard work and we had to sleep at some point.

We're back in force (well, back) today, however, and here are a few key points:

• The DRM-free Humble Windows and Mac versions are both broken. We know. We don't know how or why that happened, but until the U.S. West Coast wakes up, we can't fix it. The problem is on the other side of the ocean, and as soon as they're online, it will be taken care of. Our sincerest apologies.
• We have had some issues with getting a version to GOG.com as well (our sometimes subpar internet hasn't helped, resulting in corrupted file bundles) but that's very close now. We do expect the GOG version to go live this afternoon (Oslo time).
• As we've stated multiple times, all backers who have requested GOG keys will get GOG keys. Since we've been so delayed with this (for reasons outlined in the previous Kickstarter update) those same backers will ALSO get Steam keys: in fact, you should already have your Steam key, in addition to the DRM-free Humble build.
• If you did not yet request a GOG key, please send an email to support@redthreadgames.com and you will receive your key. Our system does not support automatically choosing and distributing keys, but our peoples will work hard to answer everyone as quickly as possible.
• We are fixing a number of other bugs as we speak, and we will decide on what's going to be in patch 1.1 before the end of the day. We can't promise when the patch will be out, but obviously as soon as possible.
• Performance is an issue for some, and we know that this is frustrating. First off, make sure you're running the very latest drivers. This is incredibly important. Secondly, if you are experiencing bad frame-rate or crashes, please reduce your visual settings. Running on 'High' or 'Awesome' does require a good GPU, CPU and lots of RAM. And 'Medium' still looks very good!
• And yes, we will keep optimising the game as much as possible. We are pushing Unity quite far, and it's not the most optimisable engine around, but if there are improvements to be made, our awesome artists and coders will make them. But it won't happen today or tomorrow: this stuff is complex, so if you can't run the game at all, you'll need a tiny bit of patience.

Thanks for all the wonderful feedback and comments! We are really happy to see such a positive response. We apologise again to those of you who haven't been able to play the game yet: hopefully you will get to do so today.

If you have any technical issues or questions, there are two avenues available. The first is to visit our official support forum at:

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/forum/15-general-support/

We will try to address as many questions as we can there, and you can also get help from other players and community members. It's definitely the best place to start looking and asking.

If your question is of a more private nature, or if you can't find the answers you're looking for, you can send an email to

support@redthreadgames.com

and we will get back to you as soon as humanly possible. Please have a bit of patience, these are incredibly busy days for a small bunch of exhausted developers, but we do want to help you and we will!

Thanks again for your patience and support. As soon as we know more about Humble and GOG, we will send out another update!

Team RTG

Good news, everyone!

The game is now LIVE on Steam for all backers!

We are uploading the DRM-free Windows, Mac and Linux versions to the Humble Store now, and those should be live soonish. Non-Steam users rejoice!

As for GOG.com, due to the unfortunate delays on our end, they will not be able to publish the game to their store today, but that will of course happen tomorrow morning. We apologise for this, but those last-minute bugs had to be fixed, and that put us severely off-schedule today.

If you don't have your Steam key yet, you can go to the Humble Store account page to get it. That's also where the DRM-free version will be available as soon as humanly possible. Here are instructions, if you need them:

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/topic/319-how-to-claim-a-humble-page-forum-badge/

We do want to remind everyone that we have sent out instructions about how to redeem your rewards via Humble and how to set up a BackerKit account on multiple occasions in the past. If your email addresses are outdated and you are unable to access either of those pages, please go back and read previous updates. If you're still stuck, visit our official forum where there are lots of resources and helpful peoples, or contact us via support@redthreadgames.com and we will try our best to help you out.

Do also remember that the team is on Oslo time, it's past midnight, and everyone's exhausted. We will stay and help as long as we can, but at some point we will pass out! We'll be back, freshly showered, in the morning, ready to help, support and counsel!

In the meantime: enjoy the game! And may the Balance be with you!

Team RTG