Live service games and games in early access generally have an obligation to let their players know about what new content they can expect to see in the game in future updates. The popular cooperative horror game, Phasmophobia, is in early access on PC, and while many players have enjoyed the thrills of its unique ghost hunting premise together, developer Kinetic Games is far from done with it. Kinetic Games has now released a new roadmap to let Phasmophobia players know about what is planned for the rest of this year and beyond.
The update page on Steam first goes over the previous roadmap that players had seen for Phasmophobia. Kinetic Games notes that it didn’t reach all the milestones set out by its earlier plans, including the fact that VR functionality was originally intended to release earlier than April this year. This in turn delayed the development of the new custom difficulty feature, but the studio made sure to give players three smaller updates of content to make up for the delay.
Kinetic Games claims that it wishes to be more transparent with its new roadmap, and it has left extra time between updates to plan for any potential delays. Firstly, custom difficulty options are arriving in an update with other unannounced new features later in September. A trailer for this will be released soon according to the developer.
Some of the previously announced new updates have been moved into a singular large update which is scheduled for Q4 this year. This update should include a “huge weather effects overhaul,” upgraded volumetric lighting, new equipment, upgradable equipment, new player models and animations, and a new leveling system.
Moving on to 2023, the team has scheduled some progression updates. Kinetic Games promises that these will be the “biggest programming and art overhaul that Phasmophobia will ever receive.” These updates will completely rework or create from scratch various models, systems, and animations. However, instead of doing this all at once, the developer plans to dole these out slowly with various smaller updates so that players don’t have to wait excessively long for a single large patch.
The final part of the new roadmap is Horror 2.0. The developer plans to replace all of the current ghost models in the game and add many new sound effects, events, and interactions with the creatures to up the ante in the scares department. Alongside this, there will also be new locations and reworked older locations to play, and these will be released as soon as they are ready. Kinetic Games ends the new roadmap update by apologizing for missing some of its goals on the previous roadmap.
Phasmophobia is available on PC and it can be played with or without a VR headset.
