
The biggest challenge that Compulsion is facing is trying to meet the expectations that come with a $60 game. “It’s a game aimed at a larger audience, so we wanted less friction for people,” Epstein explained. Overall, Compulsion’s goal for the new changes was to create an immersive experience that anyone could play through. The team kept the large, procedurally generated areas, but they also added more handmade levels for specific moments in the story. You still need to eat, sleep, and drink, but now they won’t affect your health (satisfying these requirements give you temporary buffs instead). We said, ‘OK, we’ll write more goofy encounters then,’” said Epstein. “What the community told us is that they liked these goofy encounters with these crazy people more than they liked the systemic situations. While the storylines mostly stayed the same - Epstein and his co-writer just added to them over the years - the developers softened the survival mechanics and got rid of permadeath.
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This also meant that the original price of $30 was increasing to $60 for the full release.Īt that point, “We Happy Few” was already moving away from its hardcore roguelike elements and into a narrative-driven experience. It partnered with Gearbox Publishing for retail versions of “We Happy Few.” In the background, the game was becoming much bigger than Compulsion originally envisioned it to be, partially as a reaction to feedback from fans. The studio saw tremendous growth, increasing its headcount to 40. Since then, both Compulsion and the game underwent dramatic changes. It still has an open-world element to it,” said Clayton. … people know that it wasn’t BioShock, it’s not just one long, scripted narrative game. We never intended to do the full game like that, even though we had really strong storylines. “We showed a really juicy narrative moment at that time, and people asked us if the whole game was going to be this linear experience. In this version, death was permanent, forcing you to start over if you wanted to play again. What the trailer didn’t show was that a large portion of of the game consisted of procedurally generated islands with tough survival mechanics.

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But with the spotlight came added scrutiny, especially when Compulsion released an early access version of “We Happy Few” on PC and Xbox One later that summer. The video introduced Arthur Hastings, one of the three playable characters who realize that something is terribly wrong in the town of Wellington Wells. At E3 2016, the studio debuted an evocative trailer during Microsoft’s press briefing, exposing “We Happy Few” to a global audience. In this timeline, the people had to do something so bad to survive that they keep taking a powerful drug called Joy just to forget about it.Īt first, the developers turned to crowdfunding for the game, ultimately raising $334,754 CAD on Kickstarter. For “We Happy Few,” Compulsion set out to create another distinctive-looking world, one that imagined what 1960s British society would look like if the Germans invaded England during WW2.

Their first project was “Contrast,” a platformer with a haunting film noir aesthetic that came out in 2013.

apparently loves that, too!” added art director Whitney Clayton.Ĭlayton was the first employee that studio founder Guillaume Provost hired in 2009, with Epstein joining not too long after that. We’ve been doing weird things for so long, and that’s what we love to do. “It’s nice to be acknowledged by something like that.
