The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me, is the fourth entry in SuperMassive Games and Bandai-Namco’s growing horror anthology. With each passing entry, a host of changes and improvements have been made to the formula, much of it, as it turns out has been informed by player feedback. With The Devil In Me coming out on November 18, 2022, and it marking the end of the series’ first season, Will Doyle, SuperMassive Games’ Creative Director of The Dark Pictures Anthology sat down with our friends over at The Gamer to discuss how the game’s focus on narrative is only one small part of the refinement process, despite the story being one of the primary pillars of the anthology franchise.
We are always getting feedback for every new game — [we listen] to the community and the critical responses we get. After each game comes out, we do this massive process where we go through and get all of the reviews together, compile all the points, trawl social media, and get as many opinions as we can. We use that to analyse our games and think about how we can improve them.
We also learned that we can’t just release a new story. Even though it’s an anthology we can’t just go, ‘this is purely about the story.’ There has to be some sort of improvement. It’s also a game series, and our fans and critics expect some form of progression. So we’ll see that in The Devil in Me. We’re focusing quite a lot on exploration, and we’re saying, ‘what can we do here with exploration to make this more immersive, more exciting, to make you feel more engaged with it?’ We’ll be carrying all of that over into season two. We’ll do the same thing, and we’ll look at the responses to that. What people liked, what people are asking for, and adjust our course based on that.
For fans, it’s likely music to the ears that the team has recognised some of the flaws in their early designs of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan, and The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, which were identified internally and with the aid of fan feedback post-launch. The first major sign of change was in how players could explore the environments of the third title, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes, and these same changes will presumably transfer across to The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me along with a few more additions as well.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me is scheduled to arrive on November 18, 2022, and will be available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.