The colorful cat fighting game Bimutant has been beautiful since we heard about it, making it even more disappointing when information from its developers was scarce for so long after it passed its original 2018 launch window. Experiment 101 finally announced a release date in May earlier this week and now said what they have been doing all this time: silently eliminating bugs and trying not to overwhelm their small team.
The head of the Experiment 101 studio, Stefan Ljungqvist, spoke to IGN, explaining that the team is made up of only 20 people and that the ambitious open world game they envisioned was too much for that small team. You have a sense of how much Biomutant is trying to make in the RPS interview with Ljungqvist last summer. Check it out below.
It’s an open world with a customizable cat protagonist, tribes from other cats, RPG systems, tons of customizable weapons, huge enemies, gliding in the air and more. Last year, Ljungqvist said that Biomutant’s script also more than doubled as part of the game’s karma system, in which NPCs will react to their character’s alignment. Oh, and it’s beautiful too.
With any open world game, there are inevitable open world bugs that need to be fixed before launch. “At the end of the project, there are only a certain number of bugs that you can physically fix during the day,” explains Ljungqvist. This is even more true with such a small team. He says the E101 waited to announce a release date until they were definitely ready, hoping to avoid shipping with any major problems and, even more importantly, not exhaust the team that fixed them to get to the launch day.
“If we do that, it is controlled and it has been rare. I think now, moving on to the release, we are prepared to do that for a few days, but it is not a constant thing. This will kill you, ”says Ljungqvist on the subject of the crisis. “We are 20 people and we cannot have [staff] leave the studio or be destroyed during development. That would be devastating. ”
The concept of crunch in the game studios returned to the spotlight thanks to the open world ’em up Cyberpunk 2077, whose management claimed that it would not require the crunch team to complete the game, ended up demanding an extension anyway, and then had a notable buggy launch. CD Projekt Red are far from being the only example, but they are the biggest of recent.
It is encouraging to see Experiment 101 come out of a long period of quiet work to say that they are trying to create a beautiful and ambitious game that the team can be proud of, without offering their health and happiness in return. I’m really excited to play their colorful martial arts cat game when it launches in May and I hope they can be a success story for healthy development when it does.
Biomutant will be released on May 25 on Steam. It will also be available on PS4 and Xbox One.