Back in August, Luis Cano (L) and I (D) had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Ironwood Studios CEO & Creative Director, Cassandra Dracott (C), about Pacific Drive‘s brand new expansion, Whispers in the Woods. We got to chat about our burning questions regarding both the base and the DLC after getting a sneak peek at the trailer. Before we get into our interview with Ironwood Studios, here are a few details regarding the new expansion. Also, check out our review of Pacific Drive‘s base game ahead of the expansion.
What is Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods?
Witness the rise of a group of Anomaly-obsessed fanatics in this terrifying expansion to Pacific Drive. Whispers in the Woods is a brand new story for you and your trusty station wagon. Available at any point after the first few hours of the game, this expansion takes you deep within a strange and mysterious part of the Olympic Exclusion Zone’s forests. Marked with strange symbols and effigies, these woods are filled with new dangers and mysteries to uncover. With hours of additional gameplay and story content, Whispers in the Woods is close to one-third of the size of the base game and marks a major addition to Pacific Drive for both new and returning fans to discover.
We’re very excited about this. We’re shaking things up, I think that’s the other part of the expansion, we wanted to take a look at what people see when they play Pacific Drive, and for those that are familiar, we wanted to kind of change things around a little bit and see if we can make things a little bit fresh, change some of the rules.
Since its launch in February 2024, Pacific Drive has sold over one million units across both PlayStation 5 and PC globally. In the past 18 months, Ironwood Studios has supported Pacific Drive with regular large free content updates like April’s Endless Expeditions update, which featured endless trips into the Zone and a Suspend Run feature. Pacific Drive: Whispers in the Woods DLC will launch later this year for PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. To find out more, visit Ironwood Studio’s official website for everything Pacific Drive.
An Interview with Ironwood Studio’s Cassandra Dracott
D: After playing Pacific Drive, I noticed a lot of players donning the title as a Horror game. I personally never felt this. I saw Pacific Drive as a somewhat relaxing driving adventure game filled with weird Sci-Fi elements. However, after watching the new expansion trailer, it seems that you’ll be giving us a more horror-focused experience. What made you choose to change direction?
C: I’m in the same camp as you are. I grew up driving through the Northwest, and I’m very comfortable on the roads at night, but that’s not the case for everyone. We got a lot of feedback that Pacific Drive was kinda spooky. It makes sense since there are weird things in the woods that can make people uncomfortable. A Shell In The Pit has absolutely killed it with the audio in the base game and when we were looking at what we wanted to do with Pacific Drive for a proper expansion pack, being able to lean into “Oh Pacific Drive is kinda scary” and say, what if we really did make it quite a bit scarier, that was one of the major parts of Whispers In The Woods.
D: From watching the trailer, you reveal that someone has been watching us as we play through Pacific Drive throughout our runs and back at the garage. Is this revealed presence some sort of new adversary for players to take on that aren’t just your typical anomalies?
C: That’s definitely something we wanted to look at, was this idea that in Pacific Drive, it’s a very isolated game, there’s just you and your car, and of course, an amazing voice cast. While we’re not changing how the base game works, the expansion does dive into this anomaly-obsessed group of fanatics that are out in the zone. Who are they? What are they up to? Adversary or whatever you may end up calling them, I think that’s what I want to leave up to people when diving into this expansion, but they’re out there, and it’s definitely the focal point of the expansion.
What’s been going on back at the garage?
D: Can we expect any new features with Whispers In The Woods?
C: The biggest thing we’re adding to the expansion is a system we’re calling Artefacts. Artefacts are these mysterious objects that have been made by this group, and they have weird powers. They all come with their own causes and effects inspired by the storytelling that came from the Quirks system with the base car. What we wanted to do was expand it, so every artefact can do pretty strange things.
One may be when you hop your car horn honks, and at any time you’ve got it on your person or in your car, then that rule is true. However, you may find another one where when your car horn honks, damage is done to your car and that’s a pretty innocuous little combination of two that seem pretty silly on their own, but they actually make especially for someone like me who forgets to stop bunny hopping around in games all the time, makes for an interesting combination.
There are definitely more dangerous versions out there, and it’s been incredible since we don’t obscure what they do; unlike Quirks, we tell you immediately how they work, because you need to choose which ones you want to bring. They’re needed for progression in the expansion, but the more you carry, the more dangerous it becomes for you.
This has been a very fun addition to the base game. You can take artefacts wherever you want, but for the expansion content, they are absolutely required for you to engage with them, carry in your car and try to push your luck and make these tough calls on which ones you wanna bring.
When we were working on it, we looked at players’ experiences and saw them doing these incredible things, like one got this positive quirk where every time their wiper blades went left and right, the car went really fast. But there wasn’t a lot of agency there; there wasn’t really a lot of ability for players to choose what they were doing. With Artefacts, we’ve absolutely leaned into letting players have the agency, let them see what they can do.
Things are getting a bit spookier in the zone
D: Was there anything from both the base game and the new expansion that didn’t make the cut?
Whether its adding more items, more anomalies, new systems, new ways to tell stories
C: I don’t think there’s anything particularly jumping to mind. It’s one of those things, like Pacific Drive is a game that lends itself to more, the more stuff the more you put in it, and so we always wanted to do more, and now we got the chance to do more. The game at its core helped become popular through the kind of storytelling that comes from these emergent moments with your car and new situation you put the car and the player in your gonna get these new stories and so for us we’re just excited to bring additional things whether its new artefacts, new items, new car parts, new anomalies, which are definitely a thing. We’re pretty happy.
L: How do you choose what type of music gets put in the game, and will there be any new additions?
C: So the radio is a big part of the game, and for Whispers in the Woods, we’re doing a whole new voice cast with a new narrative, and so there is a whole new series of chapters and stories for people to hear. When it comes to the music process, as the Creative Director this is something that tends to fall onto my shoulders. I listen to a lot of music, which is the short version, and then I get to come up with a shorter list than that, but still a pretty long list. Then we reach out to the artists and see if they’re interested in collaborating.
For Whispers in the Woods, we are not adding in any new music, and there’s a good reason for it. We talked about it, but for us it doesn’t really feel right to charge for additional music, especially something that feels so integral to the game. Back in our one-year anniversary for the Endless Expeditions update, we almost doubled the size of the radio soundtrack, and that was a big thing we wanted to do for the community. We didn’t want to take a piece of the atmosphere and put it behind a paywall; that felt very strange to us.
So instead, we’re working with Wilbert Roget again, who’s composing an amazing score for the expansion, and that’s not to say we won’t play with the radio in some fun ways, but we won’t be adding any new sets of expansion-only music, which didn’t feel right.
Enjoying the spooky vibes while listening to some 80s road trip music, nothing better
L: What would you call the genre of the collected music in Pacific Drive?
C: That’s a funny question. If you asked me one year into development back in 2020 or something like that, I would have said, “Oh, it’s emotional singer-songwriter stuff”. But what we found when working on the game is that just like you can’t predict what situation the players are gonna be in, whether they’re running from the storm, vibing in their garage, working on their car, we couldn’t predict what kind of soundtrack would go with that. So I ended up diversifying the list a bit to include a bit of synthwave and a little bit more rock. Ultimately, what I would describe it as is the sound that would be appropriate in an ’80s road trip.
That tended to be a broad enough range of tracks that was inclusive; we didn’t go very modern with some of the sounds, we avoided stuff like autotunes and things like that, but we still wanted it to feel appropriate for something you’d listen to on the road. Sometimes that could be old R&B, a little bit of blues, singer-songwriter, some rock songs, we tried to keep a relatively fast beats per minute so that they could feel decently appropriate in different settings, but yeah, no, there’s no single genre, it’s actually hard to put a flat finger on it.
D: What inspirations did you use for creating all the different anomalies? What was the most bothersome to implement?
C: So anomalies usually come in a couple of different forms, either purely narrative or have to fit a design need. A lot of our gameplay anomalies come from an iterative cycle that usually starts from a design need. We brainstorm a lot, we add some art, and maybe that art then informs the design a little bit more, and then we can add some unique characteristics, like with The Tourists, who like to move around when you’re not looking.
Those came from the need to have a landmine in the game, but we needed something really tall that can bend, and you can see it bend when you hit it with your car. Then we got the art of the creepy crash test dummies, and then from there we started adding more interesting behaviours to them.
With new systems like Artefacts and with this new fanatical group out there, it gave us more inspiration in the design end to come up with new anomalies, and from then on just to play with them artistically. I think a good example of one of our new anomalies is the Harvestmen. It wasn’t in the trailer, but I’m sure we’ll be posting about it soon.
Harvestmen are both a strange anomaly out in the zone but they’re a good example for a new type of anomaly for us, since most anomalies in the base game you’d want to avoid. However, this one you have to engage with since it’s part of the resource economy, and so we want to drive more players to these anomalies because they help engage players with that storytelling, but yeah, we’re definitely excited.
Is this the Harvestman or some other terrifying anomaly
D: What was the most bothersome anomaly to implement?
C: I’ll answer your question a little differently. I can tell you about the most bothersome part of the game that showed up and was an issue for almost every single discipline at one point or another, and that was the fuel pump. We had fuel pump bugs that were just, it’s a complicated thing, right?
It’s in the world, it’s a resource provider, you can hold it, but you can’t go too far; you can stick it in your car and drive away. We’ve had fuel pump bugs since inception to post-launch patches. Almost every person, from engineers to tech artists, designers, and everyone, got involved with bugs around the fuel pump at some point. It was, for some reason, a really problematic bit of game, but that’s the one that always jumps to my mind. If there was a bug that was gonna come up that made everyone groan, it’s that one.
D: Considering all the different types of anomalies throwing you and the car around, I’m surprised there haven’t been worse things than the fuel pump.
C: I would put that as a testament to the skill of a really talented team; they’re amazing when it comes to just accounting for different issues and trying to solve the big ones like falling through the world and getting flipped out of it. It still happens, we try our best, meanwhile, the fuel pump just exists, and when someone puts it in their trunk and drives off and causes a problem, then we get to fix it.
L: A while back, Polygon put out an article stating that a Pacific Drive TV Show was announced. Is there any more news regarding this?
C: Unfortunately, nothing I can talk about.
D: Outside of anomalies, would we be getting any humanoid character encounters, whether friend or foe?
C: I think when it comes to how we’ve chosen to handle our main voiced characters, it’s with intention, and I don’t see that changing. It’s always trade-offs and cost, that’s game development, and for us, we wanted to focus on an amazing voice cast that has a story told asymmetrically over the radio. I think as a developer, characters are amazing, and some teams do phenomenal things with 3D animation and mocap, and I would love to explore that in the future, but for Pacific Drive, we’re not looking to change up the formula with Whispers in the Woods.
What could be on the other side of that gateway?
L: Have you and the rest of Ironwood Studios used AI/LMS during the development of Pacific Drive and the upcoming expansion?
For us at Ironwood, no, no AI, everything you are seeing is made by us, we’re proud of it.
C: We do not use AI at all. I can especially speak for myself on this front; we have major concerns over the ethics of any kind of generative AI. I have literal friends in the industry who have been affected first-hand. In some cases, their availability for work being affected by AI literally taking their work and getting it used in base generative algorithms. Even though there’ve been advances in that tech, there’s still a lack of legislation to account for accountability.
L: Is there any feedback from the community you’ve used in regards to the expansion?
C: I think it’s hard to pick out anything specific. We love our community, we look at Reddit, Discord, and on social platforms, we’re definitely paying attention. We do regular AMAs, we do live streams, and so there’s no doubt feedback and notes from them, whether it’s bug fixes or hey, we would love to see this thing in the game, it’s always heard.
I think some of the things, I don’t know about pointing to expansion specifically, but it’s definitely a thing that’s ingrained in the game, we’re a small team, and there are hundreds of thousands of players taking their own station wagons to the zone. It’s humbling, but it’s also really appreciative to see all the notes and thoughts from everyone. Personally, there’s a lot of alignment; the garage door button is a great example of community feedback, and we were very excited to put it in.
What could all these symbols mean?
L: So Pacific Drive was my indie game of the year, and as someone from Latin America, I did boot up the game in Spanish and noticed a few translation issues with some items having the same name, like two of the different tires in the game. I know people who would see this as a deal breaker, so I wondered if there would be any updates to translations in general?
C: Interesting, we’d definitely take a look at that. With regards to your question about localising different areas, that’s always something we’re looking at. I know we’ve added different languages post-launch, we’re always taking a peek, but I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
L: Is there any one game you wish you could have worked on as creative director?
C: I think the game’s perfect, but I love the Half-Life/Portal universe. It’s what I grew up on, it’s that type of mystery that’s inspired me a lot, it’s led me to explore real places with my real station wagon. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for some of those conversations, like what Aperture’s basement of a basement of a basement looks like. I love that stuff so much.
L: Is the station wagon we use in Pacific Drive based on your own car?
C: Not 100%, the idea for Pacific Drive did come around before I bought my station wagon, and honestly, the original idea didn’t include a station wagon.
D: At the end of the trailer, it’s stated that the release will be sometime this year. Is there any precise release date other than that?
C: So unfortunately, I can’t give any more details past that, it’ll be sometime between now and the end of the year. However, it will be playable at any point during the story after the first couple of hours. So whether you’ve beaten the game and pick it up with your save, halfway through the game or quickstart a new game, you can play it. This was something that was very important to us, that it was as accessible as possible.
This concluded our interview, we thanked Cassandra for their time and began to feel the anticipation of returning to Pacific Drive when Whispers in the Woods releases this year.
What did you think of the trailer? Are you as hyped as we are? If so, then feel free to leave a comment.
