Winter & Halloween: Limited-Time Events vs. Permanent DLCs
We’re nearing the end of a long road of development with turning the 2022 Halloween and Winter limited-time events into permanent House Party seasonal DLCs!
Soon, we’ll share an official roadmap with the exciting news that both of our seasonal DLCs should (fingers crossed!) be releasing by the end of May to all players! These are free DLCs made to enrich the base game experience with holiday themes, so we hope you pick them up and enjoy the seasonal aesthetics!
We want to thank everybody for being so patient. These took longer than expected to get ready, but, thanks to moving a bit slower on getting them ready, we’ve actually been able to work on them these past few months without sacrificing too much time on our regular development schedule – which is awesome for those of you who are excited about the big things (like Liz Katz) coming soon to the party!
So, what took so long, anyway, Eek? Weren’t these events pretty much done already?
To really answer this question, we have to look back at last year. We decided, right before Halloween, to drop a couple of fun things into the game with the intention that they would be removed after the event. They weren’t built to stay in the game long-term, both because of base game bloat and because there was no framework in place to actually support their existence.
When you doods loved the Halloween event, we decided to try to squeeze in some Winter content, too. Winter was even bigger, since we tried to fit in more of your feedback from the Holiday Feedback Form, and it also wasn’t built to be in the game long-term. Instead of just cosmetics, we added in a snowball throwing mechanic, voice line reactions for characters being hit by snowballs, new shirts, new headbands, falling snow, new decorations, an achievement, and an entire Frank side-quest.
And that was awesome! So awesome that a bunch of you wanted both the Halloween and Winter holiday content to be permanent, which we definitely weren’t prepared for. But we thought that was a great idea, and we really wanted to make that happen for everyone – but we wanted to make sure we were doing that the right way.
What IS the right way? And will these events look any different?
Both the Halloween and Winter permanent DLCs will look exactly like the seasonal events you remember from 2022, but they are actually very different on the inside.
We know this isn’t super exciting from a player standpoint, but we hope that you’re excited for the future: Since we built these events properly for permanent use as DLCs, we’ll be able to add more content to them easier, and it’ll bring you a better gameplay experience long-term!
So, what’s been restructured, exactly?
- We made it so the event won’t bloat your base game if you don’t want it added!
- We made it so you can toggle the DLC on and off if you don’t feel like seeing the Halloween (or Winter) aesthetic during a certain play session!
- We made it so the content won’t cause any foreseeable major bugs/issues with the base game long-term by being added!
- And, best of all, we future-proofed this baby! 🤘
What does “future-proofed” mean?
First, it means we made it so we can add extra content (cosmetics, decorations, side-quests, achievements, etc.) to the Halloween (or Winter) Holiday Pack as time permits!
They’re built to support more content updates, brahs! But, even better, it means we can add some exciting new features to the DLCs in the future.
While we don’t want to spoil everything, we’ve also started running an invisible framework beneath this DLC for something really exciting.
You shouldn’t see a difference, but it’s there. We’ll share more info on this soon!
In the meantime, remember, the permanent seasonal DLCs won’t “look” much different from the original limited time 2022 events (besides a toggle on/off DLC button)!
Still, we hope those of you who have been waiting for them to return again! Thanks a ton for your patience. You won’t have to wait much longer, partiers!
