Biomutant Devs Kept Quiet For A While As They Fix Bugs, Avoid Crunch

Biomutant, the open-world game by ex-Just Cause developers, has gone really quiet over the last year. It was not until this week that we heard any news about it, which was the news of a new release date.

In an interview with IGN, Experiment 101 studio head Stefan Ljungqvist explained why they’ve been quiet for so long. It’s not a surprising answer, but something you can breathe with a sigh of relief. The main reason is quality assurance (QA). In other words: looking for and fixing bugs.

“It’s been a huge amount of work for QA, because it’s not easy in an open-world game to find them,” said Ljungqvist to IGN. “And then once they’ve been found, we have to fix them, and that’s put some additional challenge on us, being a small team.”

That small team? Only 20 people. Just 20. Working on an open-world game with a map spanning eight kilometers square.

Most of the work right now is bug fixing, but the scope of the game has increased over the years as well. Ljungqvist says the final script of Biomutant is 250,000 words, when it was around 80,000-85,000 words back in 2019.

Also, the long time spent on bug-fixing is afforded thanks to THQ Nordic not pressuring the release of Biomutant. So the 20-people team are able to avoid constant crunch. Not necessarily avoiding it entirely, but greatly reduced compared to Ljungqvist’s past experience in the industry.

“I think it’s part of the DNA of the studio to not do it,” he concludes. “That’s why I think for us, if we do it, it’s controlled, and it has been rare. I guess now moving into the release, we’re prepared to do it for some days, but it’s not the constant thing. It will kill you.”

Biomutant will not be bug-free, of course, and Ljungqvist admits “any game is going to ship with [smaller] bugs”, but at least there’s an effort to not only allocate time to polish the game, but also having a publisher that’s okay with that.

Biomutant will be out on PS4, PC and Xbox One on May 25.

Source: IGN

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