Hello all! A lot has happened since our lead producer, Brynley, last spoke to you back in May 2020, when we had just revealed our Dino-guts stuffed shooter, Second Extinction, during the Xbox Series X First Look event. An event that saw us all at Systemic Reaction virtually huddled around our home-bound workstations watching live in excitement.
After working in secrecy for so long, being able to announce your work to the world is always a highlight. A moment made all the more meaningful, having shared it with all those other great-looking titles premiering as part of the Xbox Series X reveal. It only feels right to finally say how excited we are that Second Extinction is coming to the Xbox Game Preview program this Spring!
It was pretty early on in the development of the game that we managed to confirm something that we all suspected; shooting dinosaurs and watching them pop was fun. Crafting the moment to moment gameplay is one of the most important things to get right for a game. It’s the core set of actions that we’re asking players to do time and time again after all, and nailing that so early on was a massive win for the game and gave us a huge confidence boost that we were on to something special.
Equally as important is how to keep the game alive and fresh for an extended period. From our progression systems to the kinds of additional content we want to add, longer-form elements of the game are based on our best guesses as to what players will respond to and how. The War Effort, our dynamic content and difficulty system, is entirely determined by the whole player base, which would (hopefully) be bigger than that of our tiny team here in Malmö. All this presented us with an opportunity; To bring players in and be a part of the process to help shape where we take Second Extinction next.
When Systemic Reaction was formed as a separate division of Avalanche Studios, it was to create games for and with the community in mind. It’s right there in the “Reaction” part of the name. We listen to what players are responding to, and we react. As a studio, we value collaboration and openness within our team, and releasing into Early Access on PC back in October felt like a natural extension of this. We simply made that team bigger to include our players.
As a creator, having that immediacy of feedback to your game is an incredibly empowering process made all the more rewarding by the warmth and passion that our community has displayed. Since the Early Access launch, we have been able to add new features and tweak old ones with greater confidence that we were building something better with each update.
I can’t wait to welcome Xbox players to the team in Spring, and if you can’t wait that long to get in on the dino-slaying action, join us on our Discord channel.
