The developer duo behind million-seller Mewgenics are already cooking up the plans for its first DLC. Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new strategy roguelike is the talk of the town, delivering a deep and replayable test of tactics layered with a bizarre menagerie of feisty felines. But as the pair drop a new set of Mewgenics patch notes and begin work towards the first proper expansion, Glaiel says they are being “pretty careful” about how they respond to community calls for more clarity and detail in its menus.
“Edmund and I have been discussing and mapping out what we want to do for DLC 1 and I’ve got to say I’m getting a little bit excited about it,” Mewgenics programmer Glaiel writes via X. With the project racing to a million sales and exceeding its creators’ expectations, it’s not surprising that there already plans for more, presumably in a similar fashion to what the pair did with The Binding of Isaac. Before you get too hyped up, don’t expect anything soon; the base game took 14 years from announcement to release, after all.
Asked roughly when it might arrive, Glaiel responds, “DLC 1 is supposed to be a ‘small’ one so ideally, like, end of next year maybe. But who knows.” He explains, “I probably need a couple of months to just focus on bugfixes and support for the base game, and deal with, like, accounting nonsense and house hunting and stuff, before we can really get into work on a DLC. But the planning begins now at least.” He even teases that he thinks he has “at least two” Mewgenics expansions in him over the course of its life.
Coming back to the present day, a new Mewgenics update has just been released, with a focus on “major bug fixes and ‘easy’ changes that are unlikely to cause secondary issues”. Among them are some helpful quality-of-life adjustments, such as animations no longer preventing you from opening the backpack, ‘tall’ tiles turning semi-transparent in tactical view, and a fix for the way items are sorted upon returning from an adventure. There’s also the ability to manually cap your framerate.
As good as Mewgenics is, there’s definitely room for improvement. One of the biggest discussions among the community is the amount of information the game shows you (or, more importantly, withholds). Skills typically only describe what they do in basic terms, often leaving out specific values such as ranges. There’s no easy way to toggle everyone’s health bar on with a button press, you must hover over them one by one. Likewise, you can’t access a simple list of your cats’ stats to quickly compare them all. Boss mechanics are rarely explained, requiring lots of trial and error.
Some of those design decisions aren’t out of line with the inherent discovery process of roguelikes, but the longer runs and more strategic focus of Mewgenics compared to The Binding of Isaac can make the newcomer’s lack of clarity more immediately frustrating. For many years it became near-standard practice as an Isaac player to have a wiki permanently open to check exactly what its hundreds of pickups would do. Nowadays, there’s even an advanced stats menu built right into the game itself. Should Mewgenics follow suit?
Responding to a query about how much information Mewgenics does and doesn’t display to players, Glaiel errs on the side of caution for now. “We’re going to be pretty careful about stuff like that because a lot of the requests are people not understanding the tradeoffs we had to make during development regarding complexity,” he writes. “Some stuff is in the works, though.”
Whether it’s item stats in an ARPG or the buffs you get in Zenless Zone Zero, I will always toggle on any ‘advanced’ setting that lets me know exactly how big the numbers are. There’s a lot happening at any one time in Mewgenics, and I can understand why there’s a reluctance to overload the player, but I would certainly appreciate the option to be shown more explicit values if it was added.
