"Of the new jokers being added to Balatro, which is your favorite?"
This was my incredibly lame attempt to extract a little classified information about the upcoming Balatro 1.1 update while talking to Wout van Halderen, the communications director at Balatro's publisher, Playstack, when we talked at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week.
My dumb little gambit didn't work (of course it didn't) but that's not the only reason van Halderen wouldn't tell me about the new jokers coming to Balatro. From what I gather, the notoriously private developer LocalThunk goes off and works on the game and doesn't necessarily share all the details with Playstack every step of the way.
"I don't think he'll let us know when [Balatro 1.1] is gonna drop. He's just gonna show up one day and say, here's 100 new jokers," van Halderen said. "He plays his cards super close to his chest. Ha ha, card joke."
He was kidding about those 100 jokers, but on the other hand, it's not entirely impossible we'll get more new jokers than we expect. van Halderen shared a story we've heard before, though it's still a good one: Balatro was originally supposed to have 120 jokers, but in a meeting someone from Playstack mistakenly said there would be 150 jokers. Instead of correcting them, LocalThunk just went off and whipped up 30 new jokers.
"So maybe I should whisper in his ear, like, 'So how's those 200 new jokers coming?" van Halderen said. "And then see where that goes. But I am gonna be surprised, probably just as much [as you]. I may hear it a couple days before everyone else," he admitted.
Balatro 1.1 is still planned for this year, he said, though "I know that for [LocalThunk] it's important that it's 'good' over 'fast.' "I think we're going to be very excited when he gives us a sneak peek at what he's doing."
