Life is Strange 2
Episode 3 Keyart
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 3 Teaser
Click the thumbnail above to view the teaser!
#LifeisStrange2 Episode 3 'Wastelands' will release May 9th. Catch a glimpse of what's coming up in the episode with this teaser.
Episode 2, 'Rules', is now available to purchase separately from the Season Pass bundle. Episodes 3, 4 and 5 will also be available to purchase individually from the Season Pass bundle on their respective release dates.
Sean and Daniel Diaz’s journey to Mexico continues in Episode 3, a few months after the events in Episode 2 and the boys’ escape from Beaver Creek. The brothers experience life on the fringes of society, as they befriend a close-knit community of drifters and runaways, and become embroiled in the illegal cannabis trade among the towering redwood forests of California.
Sean and Daniel’s resolve is put to the test once again, as new relationships create friction between them and they both learn much about who they are as individuals. Uncertain about their once united purpose, can they stay together, or will their journey together end here?
Episode 3: Wastelands Release Date
Episode 3: Wastelands will release May 9th.
Episode 4 will release August 22nd and Episode 5 December 3rd, 2019.
Episode 3, ‘Wastelands’, continues Sean and Daniel Diaz’s journey to Mexico, as they reach the towering redwood forests of California. Falling in with a community of drifters on the fringes of society, the brothers are exposed to new experiences, encounter new friends and challenges, and must confront much about themselves in the process. New relationships cause friction between the brothers and raise doubts about their unity. Can they stay together, or will their journey together end here?
Developer Update - March 15
Hi all,
We wanted to give you all an update regarding our progress on Life is Strange 2, as the question of when Episode 3 will be releasing is on everyone's lips. As we remain committed to keeping you up to date with the latest, we are currently considering ways to share Episode 3 content and release specifics earlier than we did for previous episodes. As an episode only comes together visually towards the very end of development, we'll be getting creative with how we present that content! We are also looking at the best ways to share more behind the scenes information in both video and picture format through our social channels, so stay tuned for that in the near future. These written developer updates will continue to provide development phase information as before. We hope that all these new pieces of exclusive content will make the wait in-between episodes feel a little shorter. As always, we appreciate your patience and continued support!
In a previous developer update for Episode 2 we shared some details around our internal playtests. We have reached a similar stage for Episode 3, having completed the internal and external playtests last week. Feedback gathered during these tests will help us push episode through the final stages of development. It is always intimidating to see players play an unfinished episode, as many things do still look rough, but these tests continue to be a great source of information!
The final voice-over (VO) recording session for Episode 3 also took place this week. We always plan this final VO recording session after having received the playtests report, because in addition to the lines that might be missing or that need to be changed, the players' feedback can well lead to extra VO lines. As an example, if we see that some players are lost for too long without knowing what to do next, we can add extra internal voice lines for Sean that give hints about how to progress.
Speaking of voice-overs, we wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate Roman George, the voice actor for Daniel for his "Best Young Actor ¦ Voice Over Role" nomination!
While he is already working on Episode 4 concept art (you can see a bit of this process for Episode 1 here), our Lead Artist Edouard Caplain has started to work on the Episode 3 Key Art. This is a very important piece of art that has the huge responsibility of not only setting the tone of an episode when it is revealed, but which also will have to represent this episode on your favorite stores for the rest of its life. No pressure Edouard...!
Here are some internal key art explorations that Square Enix' Jan-Wah Li did before Edouard got to work on the final artwork.
Similar to the first Life is Strange, even if the full LIS2 story has already been written entirely before working on the individual episodes, we give ourselves the opportunity to adapt the content and make changes during the production of an episode when it feels right creatively. It's the same with the key art: the general idea for the whole season has already been discussed before creating the first one, but individual key arts are usually the last piece of art produced for an episode. We do this for production reasons, but it does also feel like the perfect time to do it because the artist can more accurately convey the mood of an episode and its characters. We cannot wait to share it with you when it’s ready!
Episode 3 is coming along nicely and we hope to be back soon with more news and behind the scenes information for you. The full team continue to be hard at work and we appreciate every positive thought you send our way!
The Life is Strange team
Patch Notes - 26 February 2019
Hello everyone!
It's been a little while since we released Episode 2: Rules and we are still hard at work on Episode 3 and 4. We hope to provide an update about Episode 3's progress soon.
Taking a step back for a moment to refocus on Episode 2, we have just released a patch which will address a number of issues that some of you may have encountered while playing Episode 2. All fixes noted as RESOLVED in our post here are now included in today's patch.
But how did we get here? Should you be interested in finding out a bit more about what exactly the process of bug tracking and patching is, read on!
Whenever we launch an episode, we have a large multi-disciplinary team on standby carefully watching and monitoring all aspects of the launch. Our community team as well as some elements of the QA team will monitor the hotspots of player chatter - Steam forums, Reddit, Youtube, Twitch and Resetera all provide really valuable touchpoints of information for any issues that are being reported. In the hours following a launch, we then triage reported issues according to the amount of people encountering them and whether a reported issue is code-related (i.e. "a bug") or whether it might be user related (such as running the game on below spec hardware or with outdated drivers). We generally try to refer the latter type of cases to our customer support team, who can work with each user individually to investigate their specific hardware and who are most of the time able to resolve those issues by themselves.
When we see a certain number of users encountering code-related bugs, we report these bugs via a unified communications space. It is here that the community team will provide the rest of the team with as much detail as they are able to glean from user reports. Our QA team in Montreal will then set to trying to reproduce that same bug with the steps provided by the community team. Should they be able to successfully reproduce an issue, the development team are provided with a full bug-list entry which includes all information to allow them to experience the bug themselves and thereafter investigate what might be causing an issue with that part of the code in particular. This cycle needs to be completed for each individual bug that gets reported online.
Here's one of the shorter threads in action, right around the launch period of Episode 2!
Some issues are able to be re-produced (and consequentially resolved) quite quickly, however, some others will prove very difficult to trigger, but that's where you as our community really come in strong!
One example of this would be an issue that caused certain players save game files to delete themselves after the player had completed Episode 2 on PlayStation 4. This is what we would class as a Priority 1 - MUST FIX - issue as it is so detrimental to the gameplay experience and something that we commit a lot of time and effort to. Patches for Priority 1 will be released as soon as possible, while Priority 2 and 3 issues will usually be bundled together en-mass with the closest Priority 1 patch (this is to help reduce the number of patches - the more patches a game has, the more complicated it becomes to analyse). With this issue in particular, we really struggled to reproduce it on our side despite all of our best efforts. Every day we gathered more information from players who had encountered this issue and who might be able to provide clues as to what was going wrong somewhere. Eventually we were able to secure a handful of affected save files thanks to some very helpful community members. Up until this point, we were effectively trying to "break the game" in the same manner that affected players had in order to try and reproduce the bug. By being given the save files, we essentially had the "broken state" game in our hands and could much better understand what the trigger for the issue was. It turned out to be quite a mishmash of unfortunate things all happening at once under very specific circumstances rather than a cut and dried problem! Knowing what the triggers were, however, has ultimately allowed us to resolve the problem. We were able to resolve the root cause and have tested the fix to prevent further PS4 save file losses, which has been approved by Sony for release. The next steps regarding this matter are that we investigate potential solutions that would help players who have lost their save file, and fast track their progress through Episode 1 and Episode 2. However, this is a very complex proposition and we can't at this time provide any details or guarantees that it will be possible to do.
Please note that the above is not an issue that was found to be present on PC.
Today's patch will incorporate the fixes all issues marked as RESOLVED here. We'd like to once again thank you for all your patience and your support in helping us fix such issues - we would have struggled to resolve it without you!
We'll be back again soon with another developer update on the progress of Episode 3!
The Life is Strange team
Patch Notes - 01 February 2019
Hello everyone,
We've just released a patch for Life is Strange 2 that fixes a small number of issues that we observed with the launch of Episode 2. We have additionally already managed to apply hotfixes for some issues related to systems outside the game (such as the end-of-episode comparison stats). Thank you so much to everyone for your patience as we continue to track and resolve reported bugs.
Life is Strange 2 Episode 2 is the most complex episode we've released to date. The amount of choice & consequence branches and the different world states that each player experiences individually means that tracking down and reproducing glitches or bugs can be tricky without a great deal of supporting information.
The keystone to finding and fixing a bug lies in being able to reproduce it. This will allow us to understand what might be triggering the abnormal behaviour and resolve the issue. With that in mind, we have listed below a number of bugs for which we require additional information in order to be able to reproduce them on our systems. If you have encountered any of these bugs, please do share your experience with us in the designated threads.
Here is a truncated list of bugs that we have been able to resolve internally and that we are currently testing the fixes for. Should these fixes be approved by our QA team, they will be combined into a single patch in the near future, and we’ll have more information on a firm release date soon.
Bugs marked RESOLVED here have been fixed internally but are not yet live in today’s patch.
- Gameplay stat issues, including some stats not tracking properly - RESOLVED
- Various clipping issues - RESOLVED
- Chris and Charles are invisible during the final sequence of the Christmas Market - RESOLVED
- Charles reappears in an unexpected location during the Christmas Market scene - RESOLVED
- Stephen is invisible in his office under certain conditions - RESOLVED
- Certain character animations break if player reloaded the last checkpoint - RESOLVED
- Certain props and objects do not behave as intended - RESOLVED
- Certain animations or options fire twice under specific circumstances - RESOLVED
- SFX do not trigger properly in certain locations/world states - RESOLVED
- SFX loop continuously in certain locations/world states (such as the running water in the breakfast scene) - RESOLVED
- Incorrect text is displayed after Episode 2 is completed - RESOLVED
- Missing text localisations on certain screens - RESOLVED
- Camera can become locked when triggering "look" and "look for Daniel" features simultaneously - RESOLVED
- Laundry floats out of Sean's hands when opening the pantry door - RESOLVED
- Choosing an option during the cougar scene is not possible if certain buttons are held during a previous interaction - RESOLVED
Here is a list of issues that we are attempting to reproduce, but for which we require additional information:
- BUG MC-37: Sketches from Episode 1 disappear in Episode 2
- If you have been affected by this issue, please help us by responding in this thread - BUG MC-43: Daniel falls through the floor at the grandparents house
- If you have been affected by this issue, please help us by responding in this thread
Please note that we are tracking and have reproduced a number of other bugs not listed here and are investigating fixes for them too. We would like to thank you once more for your patience and helpful reports and hope to provide you with news regarding the upcoming patch soon.
The Life is Strange team
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 2 OUT NOW!
Life is Strange 2 - Episode 2 Launch Trailer
Watch the Life is Strange 2 Launch Trailer by clicking the thumbnail below!
Episode 2 Release Timings
Here are the release timings for Episode 2 of #LifeisStrange2!
Countdown in your local time.
Developer Update - January 16th
Hello everyone,
We are proud to say that Episode 2 of Life is Strange 2 is gold! But what does that actually mean? That the episode has been approved by Sony and Microsoft to be released on their platforms for January 24th.
Being “Gold” is an old (or "legacy") term going back to the CD-era when the master version of a game, usually on a golden CD (or similar), was final and ready to be duplicated in order to create all purchaseable copies of the game. In the video game industry this is only possible after passing the final step before a game can be published: the submission phase, also known as certification. Even a digital-only game like ours has to go through submission phases, so we still use this term nowadays.
Every console game published has to meet quality requirements specific to the platform holders (Sony and Microsoft in our case). Developers usually have access to those requirements through specification documents (and sometimes even private support) that indicate how applications must behave in various situations. One example of this would be what exactly needs to happen when your controller runs out of battery during gameplay. Such requirements help platform holders ensure that the user experience is as good as it can be on their platform and that it remains consistent across a wide variety of titles. Spec documents cover many things ranging from big features (like the fact that a game must remain stable after the console has been put into and turned on from sleep mode), to the use of small terminology details (such as what terms we're allowed to use for XYZ controller buttons).
A division of a publisher's QA team (Square Enix Montreal in our case) is often dedicated to running tests (that we call Compliance tests) for us so that by the time the platform holders receive our "submission", all the things they look out for should be resolved and the game should, in theory, be able to pass certification on it's first go. Should the platform holders fail a submission, similar to an exam, you must re-submit your entire game… So, much like many people anxiously wait for exam results, developer teams wait for submission results. It's always a great moment for the teams when their game or episode passes submission!
For an episodic game like Life is Strange 2, we need to go through many "exam" submission phases: 5 episodes and 2 consoles... If you ever wonder why release dates of episodes are usually only announced a few weeks in advance, it is most often because we want to make absolutely sure that the game will be out at the announced date. That’s why we prefer to communicate the date not when an episode has completed development on DONTNOD’s side, but rather when we have successfully passed certification (the submission phase)!
But what about PC? Due to the constantly evolving nature of PC gaming and the multitude of device configurations compared to consoles, specific requirement checks across all games are harder to maintain and test against. However, to ensure that the game adheres to their standards of quality, Square Enix employs another QA division (called TQA), which specializes in testing the performance and the technical specifications of the PC versions. This team has to test hundreds of compatibilities between various hard- and software configurations and make sure that the experience on PC is as good as it is on console while also providing PC specific functionality like dedicated display options.
QA is serious business.
The Enzyme Compat QA team
So while the majority of the team had already fully switched to the development of Episode 3 (and very early stages of Episode 4!), the QA teams in Montreal and at DONTNOD as well as the submissions teams were still closely following the certification process. These groups will also maintain a sort of surveillance unit and work with the community and customer support team after Episode 2 is released in order to identify bugs that may have not been found during the test phases and work on fixes for a later patch (which by the way also requires a submission for each platform!).
That brings us to today - Press previews of Episode 2 should be releasing in the very near future. ahead of next week's Episode 2 launch on January 24th. We can’t wait for you to play this Episode 2 and look forward to hearing what you think of it!
The Life is Strange Team