It's been a big year for Phasmophobia, not only did the ghost-hunting multiplayer horror game celebrate its fifth anniversary last month but the dev team are also gearing up for its highly anticipated 1.0 launch.
"So we're heading towards our 1.0 release, still in early access," creator Daniel Knight tells me. "We've got quite a lot of plans up until then to add a lot more realism and immersion to the game. Probably one of the closest updates for that is the player character coming out, basically reworking all the character models and all the animations. It's not very immersive at the moment."
I would say that Phasmo is far more immersive now compared to what it was like on launch. But I do miss some of the bugs, like being able to hold doors shut to shield yourself from the angry ghost trying to catch you, or being able to climb onto the kitchen counters to hide from ghosts.
But now Phasmo is going for more serious vibes, stripping all of the comedic bugs away. There's been map overhauls, a huge update called Chronicle that revamped how players can record evidence like photos and videos, and heaps of new ghosts for players to try and figure out. It's certainly not the same beast we all played five years ago.
"We're trying not to go into this live service route that other games do, but at the same time, we do try and add more things," Knight says."We're going to keep adding more like playing the game offline—you don't need an internet connection to play the game. So we don't need to go down that route of restricting players and relying on an internet connection to play."
There's also been a ton of events, mostly to celebrate Phasmo's fifth anniversary. The lobby was dressed up with balloons and players were greeted with a double XP challenge. But beyond this there's also the Halloween event to look forward to, currently ongoing until October 31. The annual event tasks ghost hunters to work together to complete goals to unlock in-game rewards.
"We want to basically get the game into its best state possible," Knight says. "This is what the 1.0 race is, but that doesn't mean we're going to just stop. We want to add a lot more to the game on top of that. So now it feels like actually going in doing a ghost investigation. We're still going to be doing regular content updates afterwards, but we don't want players necessarily to expect us to keep going forever and ever."
But Phasmo has been seeing success for much longer than just this year. Exploding in popularity upon release five years ago this co-op horror game not only went on to spur a whole new co-op horror genre but has also since sold 20 million copies (as of October last year), a success that creator Daniel Knight didn't always bank on.
"It's hard to say the reason why I released it at that time," Knight tells me. "Even though it had all those bugs and issues when it was released, I was on my own, so it was the best I could do with what I had. At that point, I'd already been working on the game for five years, so it did kind of get to a point where I actually needed to just get it out."
I'm just happy that Knight did get it out. Because for me Phasmo has always been in a fantastic place, bugs or no bugs it was and continues to be the standard that many co-op horror games compare themselves to, so I can't wait to see the 1.0 release and whatever comes after it.
"It doesn't feel like five years, that's gone by pretty quickly," Knight says. "I worked on the game for five years before that, so it's now my tenth year. So yeah, it's been a long time, but I love all of it. If players are still there, we'll still be there. We do have ideas for other games, but we're purely focusing on Phasmophobia for now."
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