The Outlast Trials' initial playtests went poorly: Designer says 6-year development took 'a f**king long time' and 'a s**t-ton of prototypes'

Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.