This winter, there are plenty of exciting new decorations around the house! You'll find pine garlands, hanging lights, glowing candy canes, star-shaped lights, ornaments, a snowman, and snowflake window decals all around Madison's house.
The partygoers are dressed with holiday spirit, too; several of House Party's characters are wearing Santa hats, elf hats, and even a festive sweater!
In this cheery update, it will be snowing lightly outside, you'll be able to throw snowballs at other party guests, and Frank will be getting into the spirit of the holidays in a short new themed side-quest! It's a little bigger than our Halloween update was, so we hope you enjoy it!
Will the winter holiday update be a limited-time update like Halloween? Yes and no.
For now, the winter event will be a temporary base game patch. However, because we received such a positive response to our Halloween update, a permanent DLC version of both events will drop sometime early next year - and will be completely free to play! Halloween will be ready first and Winter will follow sometime after that.
Even better, they will also include a much-requested toggle on/off feature, so you will be able to activate or deactivate the seasonal content without uninstalling and reinstalling it!
Keep an eye out, because we'll be making them wishlistable fairly soon!
Just so everyone is aware, we are going to hold off on doing more holiday events in the short term after these ones (but more are still coming). So, while you probably won't see new events for the first half of next year, we are planning new content for Halloween and Winter in late 2023 and will introduce more exciting new holidays beyond that point!
The reason for this is we do need to take some time in early 2023 to work on finalizing the toggle on/off feature, packaging these events into permanent playable DLCs for you, and not get too distracted from focusing on other development that we need to do for the game (like our next mystery guest, VR, and planning Office Party). The holidays are amazing, but they have taken a bit more time than we expected from overall game development, so we do need to slow that timeline a bit!
Also, in the sake of transparency, we wanted to be up-front that things were going really well with PlayStation, but they drastically changed their stance and flipped to to a more Twitch-like position recently…but we’re used to this by now, and we are still discussing content guidelines with them and comparing those guidelines to what’s already on their store with what’s in our game. We have hope they'll come around and work with us on bringing House Party to console. We'll continue to keep you updated on this as time goes on!
Anyway, we have had so much fun doing these seasonal events so far, and we can't wait to expand on them more for you (and add new holidays to the mix)! You've given us amazing feedback to use for our 2023 Halloween and Winter Holiday updates, and now we're going to sit down as a team and plan the best way for us to incorporate this feedback alongside the rest of our development pipeline moving forward!
The winter update is live now...so what are you waiting for? Go play it, partiers! The event will be available to play until January 9th! Deck the balls, doods!
P.S. If you complete the new holiday achievement during the update, you will not have to redo it again when the winter content is a permanent DLC to get 100% completion. However, if you are not around to play during the winter update and you miss the achievement, the achievement will be on the Steam list but unable to complete until the House Party - Winter Holiday Pack is released permanently in Q1 2023.
P.P.S. If you're not feeling the holiday spirit and don't want to play the winter content, don't forget that you can swap back to the regular base game version of the game at any time! To do this, just go to the Steam beta branch and select the previous game version!
