Love and Deepspace’s Valko romance cancelled following backlash

• Infold Games has cancelled plans to introduce a new romanceable character.
• Fans expressed a range of speculative concerns, such as gacha changes and reduced content per character.

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Infold Games has cancelled the inclusion of a new werewolf character to Love and Deepspace following backlash.

The character Valko was planned as the sixth male protagonist within the romance title, scheduled to be added in-game on July 9th as part of the version 6.0 update. According to an official post on Weixin, highlighted on Game Daily, his addition marked part of a “long-term content plan for Love and Deepspace”.

The announcement led to negative feedback from thousands of players, with concerns over increasing the number of love interests from five to six. More than 200,000 complaints were made on Weixin, while Reddit users speculated the update would dilute the amount of new content for each character and mean worse rates for their favourite character on future gacha banners.

On June 28th, the developer assured that the team has “been continuously expanding and growing since its launch” but players still weren’t content.

However, these weren’t fans’ only concerns. At the same time, some speculated the werewolf character relates to a file labelled A-0731 found in April, evoking theories around the real-world Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731, which conducted human experiments during the Second World War.

According to MalayMail, A-0731 “was a randomly generated placeholder”.

Rolling back

Today, the official Love and Deepspace account released a public letter to players on X, stating: “Over the past several days, our team has been closely following your conversations and feedback across all platforms. For the issues that have surfaced since the announcement of version 6.0 – and the frustration these have caused our community – we want to clearly state: we are sorry.

“As we’ve expressed before, our vision for Love and Deepspace has always been to build a world that grows alongside you – one that offers a richer, deeper sense of companionship over time. As various issues have arisen in recent days, we have moved quickly to make the necessary adjustments.

“After reflecting on recent events, we recognise that we moved forward with the introduction of Valko before we were truly ready. In doing so, we let down the players who have supported us from the start, and we also fell short of delivering the experience that players anticipating Valko deserved.”

Love and Deepspace originally launched in January 2024 with three romanceable characters: Xavier, Zayne and Rafayel. Sylus was added as the fourth romance option in version 2.0 and Caleb in version 3.0. The game has featured these five romance options for almost 18 months, only now coming close to a new addition.

Following the backlash, the development team has committed that “no additional love interests will be introduced in future content plans”. The entire team will instead focus on developing the stories of the five existing love interests.

Read more about Love and Deepspace on our sister site, PocketGamer.com.