Last weekend, the visitors of Poznań Game Arena 2016, a gaming expo taking place in the beautiful Polish city, had a unique chance to enjoy the very first gameplay of our upcoming Euro Truck Simulator 2 DLC - Vive La France!
SCS was represented there as well, Eryk and Piotr were there to face the crowd. The whole showcase and the visit of two of our employees was possible thanks to kind invitation of our licensing partner IMGN.PRO. We were truly amazed with the number of people who visited the IMGN.PRO booth to see and try out this upcoming ETS2 map expansion. There was just so much positive feedback and observations that they were sharing with us! There were even some people from abroad who came to PGA 2016 specifically to check out the new DLC, we recall chatting with people for example from Austria or Russia. It's always a great motivation whenever we meet our beloved community in person. The booth was also visited by Polish Youtubers/streamers including lArturlPL, Janusz0821, and Wujek Bohun. We guess that they will share their impressions of Vive La France with you very soon.
We had prepared five different scenarios located in various parts of the new region of France included in Vive La France DLC, but the visitors had a chance to get off these prepared scenarios and freely explore the whole map of France - we had the full DLC content accessible during the presentation. While all of you who came to try out our latest and upcoming content were enjoying brand new roads of France, our employees were doing their best to answer all of your questions. Many of the questions were smart and tricky, always trying to extract more information from us than we may have been allowed to reveal yet, luckily we were prepared for this. The most popular question, as we expected, was the release date of Vive La France DLC. The current state of the project was openly discussed at PGA 2016, so now we would like to share this information with the rest of our great community too.
As the PGA visitors has already seen with their own eyes, the world construction process is pretty much content-complete. We are now in the early stage of optimization and bugfixing. Most of you may already have heard from us that our motto is not to ever compromise quality. We only release a new piece of content "when it's done." And then we hurry to get it out to you. This means that we are not ready to announce the final release date until very close to the finish line. Our publishing and distribution partners do not actually like this approach very much, they would prefer a guaranteed release date set in stone a couple of months before the new title is supposed to appear on the store shelves. But they have mostly learned to deal with us being stubborn about this.
One of the most respected video game developers, Shigeru Miyamoto, once said: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is bad forever." We never want to "rush" our work to meet a particular date, and we do not like disappointing people by delaying the release after announcing a release date too. At this moment, our best estimate is that the final testing and polishing may take us anything between 6-10 weeks. So we may be able bring you the DLC still ahead of Christmas, but we may also miss it by a couple of weeks. We work really hard to wrap up the work as soon as possible, but there is still quite some uncertainly we have to deal with during the beta test loop. In any case, you can start practicing your French accent, because you will need it soon at the tollgates of France!