Hydrophobia Pure Unveiled

We warned you that something like this was happening. Today the veil is lifted on what sounds like it might be the most comprehensive title update ever envisioned.

Dark Energy Digital have fired round their press release letting us know that the new update for Hydrophobia on the Xbox Live Arcade will be available from tomorrow. As well as a raft of improvements (which I’ll get to) there is also a very timely price drop to 800MSP. If you already own the game (and you really should give it a go) then the update will be prompted next time you fire it up (after Tuesday). For new owners taking advantage of the price drop the update will be applied as part of the standard download and first-boot process.

I spoke with Rob Hewson at DED last week and he outlined the process that led to this update. Amid some varied reviews and a pantomime of excited coverage that was eagerly pressed by certain outlets Dark Energy settled down to do some listening.

They analysed data from around two hundred and fifty different reviews, good and bad, assigning values to certain phrases and rating them as positive or negative. Using that data they compiled swing charts that showed them what the general game-playing populace thought of each aspect of their game.

With this information in hand, Dark Energy set about tuning and tinkering to add the features that people wanted and tweak the parts that people had complained about. This has led to a large-scale update which was made possible, even with Microsoft’s title update file limits, thanks to the Infinite Worlds engine powering the game.

The update includes improved graphics, tweaks to the combat and traversal system, dialogue pruning, more traditional control layout… The list goes on and can be found, in full, on the website we mentioned at the end of last week.