Undertale developer Toby Fox has confirmed that work on the next chapter of his new game, Deltarune, is going smoothly. While there's no confirmed release date yet for chapters 3 and 4, he does confirm that the dev team is making great progress.
"Chapter 4 development is going better than ever," Fox says in a newsletter. "We are on track to meet our internal deadline. The new hires are already making a great difference to improve the atmosphere and feel of the chapter. I feel really good about this, champ."
After hiring a new producer and inviting new talent to work on the project, things seem to be going great for Deltarune. Fox even outlined the current progress, which included most of the cutscenes being finished, with only a few of the tougher ones left and a couple of others that need a bit of polish. The work on all the attacks and battles is also mostly done, but there's still some tweaking needed "to improve the flow of the bosses," Fox says.
The overworld also only needs 10 more maps and some polish: "A kind of complicated gimmick nearly has all of its iterations made," Fox says. "Then there's whatever needs to go in those 10 maps and one more thing. (A gimmick is something like the teacup ride from Chapter 2.)"
However, just because the groundwork is almost done, doesn't mean that Chapter 4 will be ready anytime soon. Fox points out that tweaking the game's pacing and adjusting its difficulty can take an "unknown amount of time," so it's best not to get your hopes up for a round-the-corner release.
"Even if Chapter 4 is completed smoothly, there may be surprise factors, so we're not at the point where we can make a solid promise," Fox continues. "That being said, we will let you guys know as soon as we can! I can't wait for you guys to see more of the moments and characters I've had in my head for the past eight years."
Chapters 3 and 4 will be released together, and the last time we heard anything about Chapter 3's progress was October 2023, as Fox said in another newsletter that it was "pretty much content complete." Considering that the first two chapters were released separately and were three years apart, it seems like Fox and the rest of the team have picked up the pace since the surprise release of Chapter 1 in 2018
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
FF14 is finally fixing the fact my carefully-constructed portraits keep reverting to a goddamn driver's licence photo whenever I change my goddamn gear
