The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Trilogy Structure Blog Article

A new blog article on the Neocore Games website features a discussion about the importance of a trilogy from a historical sense and across various mediums, with commentary from The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing producer Zoltán “Pozs” Pozsonyi on how this pertains to the upcoming three installments to the action RPG series. An excerpt:

Trilogies are everywhere since the ancient times. They are sometimes a set of three works that are only loosely connected, sometimes the three parts are necessary to get the whole story. It’s the triptych of narrative. It has enough space for one bigger story to develop, but it can tell three tight little stories as well.

Since the beginning of the development of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing it was conceived as an episodic trilogy, with each title sold for a fragment of a full game price.

Our Producer, Pozs explains, why:

(The Van Helsing series was supposed to follow a special trilogy structure at the time it was conceived, we have planned for a 8-10 months of development for the main games, maybe 2-3 smaller story campaign DLCs in between. We wanted to mix up the classic serial and trilogy models. This plan was eventually discarded at the moment the first game was released, it turned out that our players wanted different things.

The fate of the series was ultimately decided by a paradigm shift. We used to work on big, static projects. We made plans, and in 2-3 years the project was finished. Only our publisher had a saying if anything needed to be changed.

At the beginning of the development of Van Helsing we made a promise to ourselves that we’ll listen to the players, we’ll try a much more dynamic, open development. Early access wasn’t a thing yet, the Kickstarter successes weren’t ready, so a longer, but fragmented development process seemed to be the way.