The Outlast Trials developers Red Barrels has announced its plans for the end of the year and the first part of 2025, even after a "cyber incident" that initially set the team back.
"We wanted to share our Roadmap to showcase what the rest of 2024 has in store for The Outlast Trials," Red Barrels shares. "Geister will once again come to the Sinyala facility next week with a new, unexpected twist!" Geister's a program that puts a spin on challenges, and some of the variations here include no player names (you can't tell who is real and who is a fake who'll kill you), enraged enemies, and hallucinations that deplete your health. Features that we can expect to see in the game soon include a catalog featuring old and new Geister items, a new lobby mini-game, and a new MK-Challenge.
After this, the next major content that players can expect is the release of Season 2. New content that'll be released alongside that includes an event called Winter Kills, a map, a catalog, MK-Challenges, a rig, enemy NPCs, a storyline, and more. It definitely looks like this will be the biggest chunk of new content since The Outlast Trials 1.0 was released earlier this year.
"Following the recent cyber incident, our team has been focused on developing Season 2, the new features that will come with it, as well as some new aspects of the game coming next year," Red Barrels says, and players have wasted no time in telling the devs just how impressed they are.
"This is genuinely an amazing list and very much positively surprising considering the recent incident," one player says, "I'm looking forward to all the great additions, and thank you!" While everyone else just seems to be really excited about Program Geister coming back: "Geister, my beloved returns!" This is a program consisting of various MK-Challenges with variators that focus on the effects of hallucinations, so it's unnerving, creepy, fun, and exactly the kind of content I like to see around Halloween.
As for the "cyber incident," at the beginning of this October, Red Barrels posted an important message revealing that the studio had been hit in a cyber attack: "The Red Barrels team regrets to announce that its internal IT systems were recently impacted by a cybersecurity event involving access to some of its data. As soon as the event was detected, measures were deployed to secure the system and the information contained therein.
"A group of leading external cybersecurity experts has been mandated to conduct an in-depth investigation into the incident. We also notified stakeholders potentially affected by the event and the relevant authorities. With the investigation now complete and the security event contained, we want to reassure you that our players have not been impacted by the event. The hit on our production timeline has been significant. We will do our best to follow our roadmap, but unfortunately, some things will have to be delayed."
Thankfully, after the recent roadmap release, it doesn't seem like many things did actually end up getting pushed back. And it's great to see everything getting back on track for the devs, who have also made a big deal of how understanding The Outlast Trials community has been. "We genuinely appreciate our community's patience and understanding during this challenging time," Red Barrels says. "We’re working hard to deliver fresh content for everyone to enjoy throughout the holidays!"
