We hope you all enjoyed Chapter 6: The Prisoner.
Monday marks our third anniversary of being on Steam! We’ve come a very long way since we initially launched A Place in the West and we’re proud of what we’ve produced, and more than that, incredibly grateful to all of you who have stuck by us and followed us on this journey. We’re here because of you, and that means so very much to us.
We have been very quiet this summer regarding what is coming next for us, and I imagine many of you are expecting the next interlude, or even some indication of when you might see Chapter 7: The Dark Between The Stars. We wish we had dates to give you for those, but we have some rather different news. I’ll just get this out of the way:
We’re remaking Chapter 1: Following Portents and Chapter 2: A Very Modern Major-General. And with those remakes, introducing new interludes for them: 1.5 and 2.5, respectively.
We understand that may not be the news you wanted to hear, but it’s something we’ve wanted to do for over two years now. We consider it to be of paramount importance that we remake them now rather than later. For a comprehensive explanation as to the whys and wherefores, I humbly point you in the direction of the latest blog post, where Ross has gone very in depth on a lot of our feelings.
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The short version is simply this: The first two chapters are something we wrote 6 years ago, and were the first thing we ever wrote and produced. We’re hugely grateful to the efforts of Heath Heil and Rachel Deering for bringing our vision to life, but the writing and composition of those chapters no longer represents the quality we’ve come to expect from our work.
And I know you might be thinking, “Won’t you feel the same way about 3-5 in a few years?” And, well, no. There are always going to be things we want to improve upon and change, it’s true, but Chapters 1 and 2 fall far beyond what we find acceptable. Chapter 3 is when we began to hit our stride, to settle into our world and characters, (both tonally and thematically) and to really get a handle on things like dialogue and pacing. As we get further in, the alienation and disconnection from Chapters 1 and 2 to everything else is only growing wider, and we can’t ignore it any more. You all deserve better, and so do feature readers.
The new chapters & interludes, totaling some 80 pages, will be released in the Spring of 2020. The first chapter and both interludes will continue to be free. As for Chapter 2, if you have already bought it, you’ll get the remake for free. If you haven’t bought it yet, you’ll still get both. The older versions of Chapters 1 and 2 and The Charnel House interlude will all continue to be available in the app, under the “Extras” section. We obviously don’t want to take them away from people who have read them, and believe that there is probably some educational value. I expect some of you will find it interesting to compare them side by side.
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To give you a sense of what we’re aiming to accomplish with the remade chapters, we’re releasing a new prologue today! It’s ten pages in length (as compared to the original, which is only three pages!) and is designed to better introduce readers unfamiliar with Half-Life to Valve’s world. It comes courtesy of the amazingly talented Kristian Rossi, Ester Salguero, and Javier Puga. It’s free. It’ll be in your Steam directory. It’s on the app. Or you can just go read it and download it here. Your call.
But whatever format you choose, do let us know what you think. We’re always aiming to be as transparent as possible about production, and your feedback is essential. It helps us to improve and hopefully make better comics for you to enjoy.
On that note, we apologise for not having spoken about this sooner. It’s not always easy to know what the right balance is between “making the thing” and “talking about making the thing”. But we know this will likely come with some push back. After all, we’re taking nearly a year out to remake chapters you’ve already seen, delaying the continuation of the story for some time. We know it’s something you might not all be interested in, and that’s why we wanted to wait until we had more things ready, such as the blog post, such as the prologue. We want you to be able to see the difference, and hear why we think it is important. We are incredibly excited by this, and hope you’ll be on board for it.
We’ll be listening very closely to what you all have to say, but we also hope you can trust us to do the best thing for A Place in the West. We’re all feeling really energized by the new scripts for 1 and 2, and we’ll be sharing as much of the production process with you as we can (hopefully more than we have done in the past). We hope that when you do finally get your hands on these chapters, you’ll feel like we do:
That this is the best thing for the story. That it strengthens the narrative we’ve constructed. That it adds to, rather than detracts, from what comes after it. And that it does these characters we have become so very fond of justice. That we’re creating the story they deserve.
Thanks for reading – in every sense.
Mike and Ross
