The Vanishing of Ethan Carter might get a free roam mode
As one of the most successful adventure games, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will get a free roaming mode. What does that mean? That means you will be able to play the game without any puzzle solving. But this news is bot h good news and bad news.
We know that the mode is on its way for Xbox One users. It will be available later this month. Well, let’s hear it from the co-founder of The Astronauts, Adrian Chmielarz.
“Many people agree this is one of the most beautiful games on the market, and some expressed a desire to explore the environment without any darkness in it, and by darkness we mean bloodies corpses and locked doors. They wanted to just have a nice relaxing walk down the Red Creek Valley.
That option now exists, and it’s called the Free Roam mode. Everything that was gameplay and everything that was evil is removed from the game in that mode.”
This explains the reasoning behind this move. And also, here is an example:
As you can see, many adventure elements are removed from the game like options and inspectable features. This mode will be available for Xbox One users at first. For PC and PS4 users, we have some bad news:
“The Free Roam needs to stay an exclusive feature on Xbox One for a while, but later on we are free to bring the feature to PC and PS4. However, it’s not a quick snap of two fingers and voila, done. For example, as we have mentioned it already, the Xbox version uses the latest version of Unreal Engine 4, meaning that adding the Free Roam to the PS4 version is not just the full rebuild, fresh integration with the latest PS4 SDK, and certification, but also some serious testing and possible code updates. We would also need to purchase new dev kits (because if we were to do it, why not enhance the resolution for the PS4 Pro?) and that’s extra cost and extra work.”
That’s some bad news indeed. And Adrian Chmielarz continues:
“I am saying all this just to explain it’s not like the Free Roam-enhanced PS4 (plus 4K on Pro) and PC versions (well, 4K is already there) are locked behind a key, just waiting to be released one day. Some serious work needs to be put in first in order to make them happen.
For now, we’ll just wait and see if there’s any demand for the feature to come to PS4 and PC one day. It does seem like it, since this section of the post exists exactly because you are already asking. So we will probably do it, but the “probably” is a key word here. We cannot guarantee the feature happening 100%, because, again, it’s not as easy as we are sure some people believe it is.”
We will keep an eye on this new mode and let you know if something positive or negative happens.
Until then, stay tuned for more news.
