Rain World is getting a new DLC in the form of The Watcher, and it's poised to be a major affair. Rain World's next expansion is set to be even bigger than the base game.
Set to release March 28, The Watcher DLC will be the game's biggest expansion to date. Hot off the heels of Rain World's Downpour DLC, The Watcher will expand the game with a variety of new locales, creatures, and a new way to play—with the title throwing players into the role of the eponymous Watcher (also known to fans as Nightcat). In an interview with The Best War Games, VIDEOCULT co-founder James Therrien went into some detail about just how big The Watcher DLC will be.
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Rain World's Watcher DLC Is Looking To Be Bigger Than The Original Game
The Scope of The Watcher DLC
Rain World is known for its incredibly immersive worlds, incorporating unique techniques in creature AI and animation. When considering how feature-intense even the most pedestrian Rain World creature is, Therrien's assertion that the game's next DLC will be "significantly larger" than the base game is impressive. While Therrien doesn't outright say how much playtime fans can expect, he does point to its scale:
"That's a bit hard to know until we see how fans actually play it, but in terms of the physical size, it's significantly larger than the original Rain World. The amount of new creatures, art, and assets is staggering. Like I'm going through the audio now and there's like 180+ new music files, 500+ new sfx. In terms of new content, it's BIG."
Therrien was originally brought onto Rain World as the game's composer, so an explanation in terms of audio only makes sense here. While this comparison makes it hard to parse precisely how big fans can expect Rain World's next expansion to be, there is grounds for comparison. The original Rain World had over 140 music tracks, so the inexact line of "significantly larger" seems apt (assuming that the rest of the DLC's content is proportional to this example).
The Watcher Could Have Been Even Bigger
Therrien goes further on the subject of how The Watcher expands the scale of Rain World. In particular, he asserts that the biggest challenge encountered when working on the DLC was the team's inability to include everything they wanted, implying that the expansion could have been even bigger.
"The Watcher was an absolute joy to work on. The biggest challenge was cramming all the ideas and content we had in before some sort of reasonable deadline, and we only SORTA accomplished that. It looks like there's going to be a few post-release updates and some final reveals when it releases on console."
With post-release updates for The Watcher on the table, it seems the DLC may eventually reach the true scope that the team originally set out to achieve.
Rain World
-
OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 66 /100 Critics Rec: 43%
- Released
- March 28, 2017
- ESRB
- E10+ For Everyone 10+ Due To Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Tobacco Reference
- Developer(s)
- Videocult
- Publisher(s)
- Akupara Games, Adult Swim Games
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Adventure
