Post-Quarantine FAQ

The release of Quarantine was a new experience for the studio. We’ve made demos before (The Marble Nest for example) but we’ve never gathered feedback this systematically. Hundreds of thousands of players tried the prologue, and we got to hear their thoughts: via the Steam community, on social media, and of course, in the survey. Quarantine helped us test new mechanics that will appear in Pathologic 3 and draw some valuable conclusions.

Even Quarantine itself, which we don’t plan to update further, received rebalanced difficulty, QoL improvements, and several HUD variants after launch. But our main goal, of course, was to figure out what and how to calibrate in the main game.

Oh, and by the way, add Pathologic 3 to your wishlist! It’s the easiest way to stay updated on development news.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3199650/Pathologic_3/

Hospital gameplay

The medical detective gameplay (examining patients and diagnosing them) is clearly the highlight of the prologue. That’s obvious from both the feedback and the survey ratings. Good news: there will be a lot more of it in the main game! Of course, getting to know eccentric townsfolk and grappling with the existential drama of human boundaries won’t go anywhere, but you’ll also have to engage deeply with the tragedies and illnesses of ordinary people. We can’t even say “way more than before,” because, well, this mechanic simply didn’t exist before.

In the full game, these diagnostic stories will be more freeform than in the demo (where we were teaching the player, so mistakes were practically not allowed). We’re already experimenting with ways to make symptom logging (and therefore diagnosis) more convenient and engaging.

Localization

Our plans haven’t changed: we hope to include English, Russian, German, Simplified Chinese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese at launch.

This is the first time a Pathologic game will launch with localization beyond Russian and English. The script had a lot of words, and writing quality matters deeply to us. That makes localization hard, but we’re committed to making the game more accessible for a broader audience. If we manage to expand it further, we’ll let you know!

City traversal

The main question after Quarantine: what’s up with the city? Why couldn’t you move through it without loading screens? And how will that change in the full game?

…Why change a game where everything “worked”? Why not just write a new story in the same setting? We know some players would’ve liked that just fine. But for us that wouldn’t be enough. Not creatively (there’s already a game about digging through Gorkhon’s trash cans), and not commercially: sequels to indie games statistically sell much worse than the originals, and we’re making a sequel to a sequel. Just repeating ourselves? That’s a dead end.

But trying new things is in the studio’s DNA. And that led us to the idea of a new kind of game — about a person lost in time, with narrative structure and space-time torn to shreds. That presentation will stay. It’s a core part of the concept — it can’t be changed. (And technically, it can’t be reversed at this point.)

What will change in the full game, however, is the feel of the city. More specifically:

• Route choice — this already exists, but was limited in Quarantine. Navigating the city should always feel like a small puzzle for Dankovsky.

• Non-linearity — don’t forget, events will continue to occur simultaneously in different parts of the map. Even within one district, multiple things can happen — sometimes even conflicting ones.

• Location