'Two different possibilities' for brand new Oddworld content, says Lanning
Oddworld Inhabitants' return to the gaming scene has been limited so far to remastering and porting old content to new systems, content like Munch's Oddyssee and Stranger's Wrath. Although, as the name suggests, the upcoming New 'n' Tasty is more than a HD remake of Abe's Oddysee, featuring 3D visuals to provide 2.5D platformer gameplay. With all that in mind, I asked Oddworld co-founder and president Lorne Lanning about when totally brand new content will feature in the series' future.
"[There are] two different possibilities," Lanning told me. "I don't want to say what they are, because we've talked way too many times and not actually delivered a title. Now, we've talked about Hand of Odd in the past, we've talked about Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot; we started production then we stopped it. Those were the two that got out there and people didn't really see anything new."
Lanning, who also told me about his hopes for co-creating Oddworld content with fans, said he's considering crowdfunding options like Kickstarter, but he'd prefer not to have to do that. He noted crowdfunding allows developers to engage with their communities early and involve them in the development process. Oddworld Inhabitants asked fans to come up with a name for the now-christened New 'n' Tasty, a step Lanning says has provided names that could be used for future Oddworld games.
"Most of my time today is going into designing new product," Lanning added, "But our bandwidth is stretched. So I'm designing a lot of things - two major things. Now I'm not sure which will get started first. If we have the success of New 'n' Tasty ... let's say if we can do a million units of New 'n' Tasty - I don't know if that's completely unrealistic or not because we don't have advertising money, we don't have a big publisher pushing it. I think Sony will help us expose it. I think it will be a quality game, but it's not trying to be Destiny, right?
"But if there's enough of those people out there to support it, then we'll be able to fund the next big thing for us."
As for New 'n' Tasty, that's coming to PlayStation 4 via PSN sometime next year, with release windows for PS3, Vita, Wii U, Windows PC, Mac, and Linux versions yet to be announced.
