Since its release at the end of August, Astral Chain has already broken out as one of this year's hit Nintendo Switch titles (and a critical success in its own right), and in the latest

In the latest dev blog published by PlatinumGames, Astral Chain designer Sota Kotajima shared several interesting insights on how the title changed over the course of its development. Specifically, the blog itself dives into the way that Astral Chain's mission structure changed throughout its development cycle, and how the team completely altered the way that players would take on new missions for its release.

Kotajima highlighted that originally, the structure of Astral Chain had players taking on one mission at a time from the hub world of Neuron Headquarters. That entailed players heading to Neuron HQ, picking a mission, completing it, and then heading back to the hub to head out on another excursion, to give a bit more of a focused experience through the story.

At the time, Kotajima said that "we felt like this was the best structure for emphasizing the action gameplay of taking on enemies together with your Legion." However, as development progressed, the team realized that this structure "didn’t sufficiently emphasize the theme of carrying out police duties, which often involve walking a beat, searching for clues and talking to people."

According to Kotajima, this led to the team rethinking this approach and instead crafting the levels and cases to be a bit more open, allowing players to focus on the main objective at hand but with a little more leeway to other missions and tasks. Of course, this also opened up the possibility of giving players new side missions and cases to take on throughout the course of the game, but the endgame content of Astral Chain does follow a similar path to how the development team originally envisioned this structure.

Astral Chain is available now exclusively on Nintendo Switch, and you can pick up the game now over on Amazon.