14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Fullbright is announcing that it is delaying the launch of its new Tacoma project to 2017 in order to give the game the extra time it needs to reach its full potential and to make sure that fans get the quality that they are expecting.
The announcement explains more details and gameplay taken from the title will be revealed in the coming months and that some core elements have been re-evaluated and reworked based on the feedback that was generated by a playtest build that was created after the original reveal.
Fullbright states, "How would gravity really work on a deep-space facility like Tacoma? What are we trying to say about the function and implications of Augmented Reality– and how does the player interact meaningfully with the story content in the game, in a fundamentally different way than anything we’ve worked on before?"
According to the team, the result of the soul-searching has been a new build that was much better received and implementing the new vision for Tacoma requires new time, which means that there's no way to bring the game out earlier than spring 2017.
The new title from the team that created Gone Home is expected to arrive on the PC as well as on the Xbox One home console from Microsoft.
Tacoma will offer a narrative driven experience
The game was revealed via a short trailer that features a short exchange between a man and a woman, taking place in the Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma, which is situated quite far away from Earth.
Protagonist Amy Ferrier is one her first day on the job and has to deal with the fact that the rest of the crew seems to have disappeared, with no clear sign about a cause or a way to reach the missing persons.
It's unclear whether the premise of Tacoma is changed in any way or if Fullbright is only tweaking the core features of the title, like the augmented reality elements or the way gravity allows for extra exploration options.
The original aesthetic of the title brought to mind the underwater city of Rapture from BioShock but that's another element of the game that might now be different.
The development team has been widely praised for the emotional impact of Gone Home, and it will be interesting to see whether they can once again impress with the narrative of the title despite the move to a science fiction setting.