14 DAY TRIAL // When the PlayStation 4 home console was first announced, one of the big surprises of the event was that indie game veteran Jonathan Blow was set to make his new title, The Witness, one of the major titles for the new device.
The developer is now ready to offer more details on the experience and on its current status, saying that a lot of progress has been made, although he does not yet have an official launch date to announce for the game that has been more than five years in the works.
In an official PlayStation blog, Blow explains that, "We don’t know the release date yet; it’s still officially 'when it’s done', but these days 'when it’s done' is getting closer and closer. The Witness is an ambitious game with a lot of things for us to get right, and getting it right takes time; I don’t want to rush the game out at the cost of quality."
The Witness is content complete when it comes to the core narrative, but the team continues to add some extra things for those players who want to focus on exploration and side quests.
Jonathan Blow also says that some areas of the island on which the title takes place need some more work in order to make sure that they all deliver the same quality to the player, while a few important locations are still in the draft stage.
He adds, "Frame rate optimizations. At launch on PS4, we’re planning to render at 1080p and 60 frames per second. Right now we meet this target in many areas of the game, but not everywhere. But with more old-fashioned hard work, we should be."
The blog also goes into more technical details about the way content for the title is streamed and about the size of various elements of the game.
Blow reveals that audio is very important to The Witness and that the entire sound files are bigger than almost any other individual part of the title.
Sony has said that it wants to support indie games on the PlayStation 4 and that it wants to give Jonathan Blow the resources to create an amazing experience with his new title.
The publisher has suggested that The Witness should be out before the end of the year and the game is also set to be delivered on the PC around the same time.