The Alters Q&A – Creating a Game About the Roads Not Taken

Polish developer 11 bit studios is mostly known to gamers for This War of Mine and Frostpunk, but with The Alters, they are doing something very different. It's a sci-fi survival game where you play as miner Jan Dolski, who is stranded on an alien planet and must find a way to repair his mobile base and get the hell out of the planet before the local sun's lethal radiation kills him.

This is not a one-person job, to say the least. Thankfully, Jan has technology at his disposal that allows him to create the titular Alters, alternate copies of himself who made different decisions at key points in Jan's life. It's an intriguing premise, and we dig into it throughout the hands-on preview that just went live.

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We also got the chance to interview Lead Designer Rafał Włosek to learn more about the making of The Alters and its feature set. Keep scrolling after the embedded video to read the full transcript

The game is slated to launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X sometime this year.

I think the first question, just from playing it, is, what was the inspiration behind creating The Alters? It's quite unique, at least in the actual thematic nature of just creating multiple versions of yourself to get yourself out of that jam.

Well, the process is always very complicated, not only creating the prototype but also trying to figure out what game we're going to make. At 11 bit, it always starts more from the idea of the topic we would like to talk about. Not from the idea of the gameplay. It was the same this time as well.

There was a lot of brainstorming in general, but we always had this idea about creating a game about how our lives could go if we made different decisions. This was slowly getting more and more concrete when we were talking about it and finally figured out that we wanted to have a game where the player could actually experience meeting a different version of himself who made this different