Compulsion Games has released a dev update video revealing new details for dystopian survival horror game We Happy Few , including the reveal of a second playable character, Sally as something of a palliative to the unfortunate news of a release date delay. Check out the update video below:
We Happy Few is now content-complete, but Compulsion Games is taking more time to polish up the content following big improvements to the start of Arthur’s storyline.
“There are these moments that are memorable, very funny, and super weird and we’re really excited to show you all,” said Sam Abbott, Producer for We Happy Few in a press release. “But we felt that the first two hours of Arthur’s story just didn’t live up to those moments, meaning that the game didn’t start as well as it should. So we went back to the drawing board and made a couple of big decisions: we brought forward a number of story moments, to get into the action faster, and also rebuilt the whole first island for Arthur.”
The game’s scope has been increased to include a full-length story campaign, three playable characters, and more than 250 unique encounters. The first three hours of the game now feel like “a completely different experience now,” said Abbott, “and we think it’s much much better than it was… but it means that we need that extra time.”
Creative director Guillaume Provost added that the We Happy Few team has been releasing updates every week across their various social media channels and will continue doing so every week until release. As part of that, the final part of the update video teases the character Sally’s re-encounter with Arthur.
“ We Happy Few is the tale of a plucky bunch of moderately terrible people trying to escape from a lifetime of cheerful denial in the city of Wellington Wells. In this alternative 1960s England, conformity is key. You’ll have to fight or blend in with the drug-addled inhabitants, most of whom don’t take kindly to people who won’t abide by their not-so-normal rules.
“Discover the retrofuturistic city’s dark history as you play through the intertwined narratives of three quietly rebellious citizens of Wellington Wells, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, as they face their pasts, prepare for the future, and engage in activities that aren’t exactly status quo in the artificially enthused society,” states the press release.
In an update on Steam , the dev team acknowledged that the pre-purchase asking price of $60, double what was originally asked, didn’t make players happy, especially since We Happy Few is technically still categorized as Early Access. “ Given all the content we have yet to reveal to the public, we can see their point. That being said, we’ve done a huge amount of work and the scope of the game is substantially increasing over what’s there right now, which is a very unusual situation for Early Access games, especially as we have a retail release on the way,” the team explained.
The team will not be offering additional Early Access updates beyond August’s “Life in Technicolour,” so as well as revising the release date, they are doing two things:
Enabling refunds for all players who purchased on Steam, past and present, regardless of playtime
Temporarily disabling the buy button on Steam as of February 1st, 2018.
The buy button will be re-enabled once the game is closer to launch when more information on the game has been released so that players have “more clarity on what they can expect in the full version of We Happy Few .”
We Happy Few is now scheduled to release in Summer 2018 for Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4. It was previously scheduled for an April 2018 release.
