Hey, dope fiends!  Today is a good day for talking about the upcoming The Dope Game Remaster and The Dope Game 2.

As you can see from this image, from The Dope Game Remaster, the graphics have been redone on the locations and pretty much everything else.  The title itself has been altered to match the sequel’s title too.  Characters, avatars, and interfaces are also getting a touch-up.  Everything getting scaled up to 1440p as opposed to the original 1080p and, of course, done in the art style being used for our games currently.

The Dope Game Remaster will also have an upgraded engine which fixes a bunch of minor pains under the hood, though most of this is invisible to players.  What isn’t is a new multiplayer mode that serves as a test to some functionality in The Dope Game 2.

Multiplayer will allow up to 4 players to run around and compete against each other to sell the most drugs in the given time frame.  Killing NPCs will cut off other players from being able to use their services.  Player will also be able to fight each other or trade drugs and money.

The Dope Game Remaster will also have some minor additional features suggested by the community as well as polish to existing features including things like body armor and price tracking.

There isn’t a solid date yet but it should be out before Spring hits.  While this rather huge update is free to all existing players, we are considering a small price bump for new players and are looking to the community for feedback on this.

While we slog away at getting Haulin’ Oats up to beta, The Dope Game 2 prototype is being slowly built.  Built with graphical placeholders, the prototype is coming along nicely given it gets only one day a week.  There are a lot of suggestions from the community on what to add so we will talk a bit about what is all going in there.

All of the regular things from The Dope Game will be in the sequel but getting expanded over six different cities across the fictional state of Blannington.  Depending on a few things, players will start in different locations with different bonuses / penalties.  Transit will consider of buses, planes, and private cars; each having different travel times and mini-events.

Single-player will have a story mode that takes the player through a main campaign across all the cities while dealing and making money but also taking on quests.  Of course the standard timed mode will make a return.

Multiplayer will come in three flavors: timed mode, Drug Wars mode, and The Cartels.  Time mode in multiplayer is much like what The Dope Game is getting with the remaster update.  However, Drug Wars mode will allow some players to join the opposing team and fight against the dealers.  The Cartels mode is more of a persistent world, backed on our servers, that will allow players create empires and team up or fight each other.  They can even tap into a lot more of the end-game functionality.

All of the original NPCs make a comeback along with a pretty large roster of new characters, including ones you can hire for your gang.  Casting calls will start once we get Haulin’ Oats released and we’ll make more announcements about that when the time comes.

Lastly, players will be able to buy and sell more than just drugs, branching their empire out in various ways; even dipping into politics.  With end-game levels finally allowing players to spend their millions or billions on things that have more of an effect on the game world.

That’s it for the details we have now but there will be another post soon-ish with more details as we get closer to the Remaster release and The Dope Game 2′s first alpha test.  Stay tuned!