Hi everyone!

We finally know the release date for The Witness: it’s January 26, 2016. That’s about four months from now, and it will be a very busy four months as we work hard to make the game the absolute best we can.

We’ve also got a new trailer, which you can watch here:

We’ll be very happy to get the game out into the world, because we’ve been working on it a long time! We originally thought The Witness would be coming out toward the end of the PS4 launch window, but … there’s just been a lot to do. I think when the game is in your hands, you’ll find it to be intricate and deep, and also unlike anything else you have played.

There’s a lot here. When we started making this game, I figured it would have between 8 and 12 hours of playtime. As it happens, the game we’ve finally built is around 10 times as big as that: if you are a completionist who wants to wring every last drop out of the game, you might expect to play for 80 hours, or possibly 100. For people who don’t want to go quite that far, the game’s still got plenty for you.

Last time I posted to this blog was in May 2014. In that post, just for fun, I gave some stats about how many assets were in the game (3D meshes, animations, sounds, etc). Today I went back and took new measurements of all these things; here’s what we have:

# of files, May 2014 # of files, Today Texture Maps: 1196 1606 Meshes: 4588 6224 Sounds: 2435 3117 Animations: 197 247 Entities: 1 1 Lightmaps: 17916 31821 Total files: 38387 57068

As you can see, we have not been idle!

But those numbers will only increase a tiny bit between now and release. For the most part we are fixing bugs, refining the feel of play, and making sure everything is just right for January.

That’s all from me for now — back to working on the game! — but your fine PS.Blog host Justin has been playing the preview version of The Witness and will be sharing his impressions soon.