The Sinking City - Frogwares Interview on Whats Next

@Wccftech Frogwares was interviewed about what they are working on now after the success of The Sinking City.

Let's talk about the game for a while. Your 'City Generator' tech demo was quite famous ahead of the release. With the benefit of hindsight, are you satisfied with this approach used for The Sinking City? Do you plan to use it again in the future and if so, are there any specific improvements you're looking to make? 

We are happy with the approach, for several reasons, mainly because we simply wouldn’t have been able to create the atmosphere of a Lovecraftian town on this scale without the tool. It’s just not the same if your world only had 10 streets. It was a technical achievement for us, a small team being able to make a full-scale city. This was a very clear example of needing to innovate in order to actually get the job done.
However, we’ve realized the tool’s shortcomings too and we’re now working to improve it to create much more varied surroundings in future games. To give you an example, we’ve really altered our approach to how we create street environments, interiors, etc compared to what we did for The Sinking City. We looked closely at the players’ feedback and as a result, this is one of the areas we want to focus on. We’re now aiming to make each street and building feel more unique, and as a result, to make the city feel more authentic. All while still being able to benefit from some of the time saving the tool initially gave us.

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Are you planning to keep your next project open world or perhaps you'd rather go back to the segmented level structure seen in your Sherlock games?

With the tools that we have, and more importantly, with the experience that we have gained, we do want to continue to explore this concept. Our goal is to create the ultimate open world detective experience, or the best detective experience possible.
Now, when it comes to the size of the open world relative to its content, this is of course something we will continue to work on and optimize, based on the feedback that we received. In an age where you regularly see players complain about “open- word fatigue” we’re now more accepting of the idea of quality vs quantity.

On that note, Frogwares fans want to know whether you're going back to Sherlock Holmes (as teased in a recent tweet) or perhaps continuing with your intriguing Lovecraft-inspired setting. Is there anything you can share yet?

I can confirm we are working on something, but we are not ready to reveal what it is. What I can tell you is that fans best know us for our detective games, and this new game will fit the Frogwares profile - a story-focused detective adventure with minimum hand-holding. But is it going to be Sherlock, The Sinking City 2 or a new IP - that I, unfortunately, cannot say just yet.