Clawed Developer Admits Deep Co-op Faults, Halts Dragonfall to Fix Them

What happened

Clawed launched to a rough reception on the co-op side. Developer Flatrock Games Studio has now published a candid post-mortem acknowledging that even the studio was caught off guard by the severity of the problems — problems serious enough to force multiple patch rollbacks when updates broke the game in new ways.

After a prolonged internal investigation, the team identified three root causes:

• The co-op hosting foundation was too fragile to handle joining and hosting sessions reliably.
• The save system was not functioning correctly in co-op and required a full redesign.
• The quest system was a modified port of the studio's next game Dragonfall — originally built for single-player — and was incompatible with Clawed's co-op environment, also requiring a redesign.

The studio did not soften the admission: all three issues should have been caught before launch.

What comes next

Flatrock has stated that 100% of current development focus is on Clawed — fixing existing problems and delivering new content. Work on Dragonfall, which had previously been announced, is being deferred to next year. The studio attributed some of the co-op failures to inexperience with co-op development processes and says the experience has prompted a complete rethink of its internal testing approach.

For players who had written the game off, the commitment is clear: Clawed has not been abandoned. Whether the foundational repairs prove sufficient will determine whether that trust is rebuilt.