Lucas Pope has no particular interest in revisiting Papers, Please with sequels or DLC expansions, despite the enormous success of the game.
By this point, everybody’s aware that Papers, Please was the indie smash-hit of 2013, something that became exceedingly clear when it was nine votes away from our Reader’s Choice Game of the Year award. Even though indie success-stories are increasingly common in our post-Minecraft world, that’s an incredible achievement, and left us wondering what creator Lucas Pope will do next. According to a recent interview, Pope’s next project probably won’t have much to do with Papers, Please, because he’s become rather fed up with the amount of time he’s spent focused on a single game.
“Leaving Naughty Dog was like, ‘I want to work on small experimental games’,” Pope told VG247. “I’ve already worked on it for a year and four months, so it’s already to me like I’m kind of sick to death of Papers, Please.
“My plan is to make a quick, short, free game. And then once I’ve gotten a little distance from Papers, Please, come back to it and do the iPad port, but I don’t have any plans for a sequel or DLC or anything like that, at least not right now.”
I’d say Pope’s decision is for the best; even if Papers, Please practically created a never-before-considered genre, the game is essentially a complete experience already. There’s really no need to rework the forumula as is, so Pope will move on to new projects instead. It’s also worth noting that this is a similar approach Notch took after Minecraft‘s success, which is why we have games like Scrolls instead of Minecraft 2.
Even though Pope has no plans to make Papers, Thank You, that doesn’t mean that the universe itself will be off-limits. “There’s always a chance I could reuse some of the setting like I did with Papers, Please and Republia Times,” Pope continued, “but the interesting part is the new concepts where I have a lot of challenge in trying to figure out what to do. If I was going to do a sequel or DLC, those challenges have been met and the problems have already been solved, so it’s not that interesting to me anymore.”
Source: VG247
