Initially revealed back in 2017, developer Experiment 101 has long been underway on Biomutant, with the post-apocalyptic RPG touting an enhanced animal protagonist, martial arts-inspired combat, as well as a dense open-world environment. However, after making an initial splash, news regarding the project gradually went dark as the game saw several repeated delays. Now after a surprise announcement, Biomutant is finally on track to release, and Experiment 101 recently explained its lengthy silence in a recent interview with IGN.

As suggested by studio head Stefan Ljungqvist, Biomutant was mainly delayed due to the adventure’s immense scale, which proved to be a challenge when tackling the project’s various bugs. In fact, it’s said that much of the last year of development had been spent terminating every bug they could find, a tall task when considering the game’s ambitious open-world design and the relatively limited capability of the 20-person studio. As Ljungqvist put things, “It’s a big game, a big bite for 20 people to chew off.”

​​​​“At the end of the project, there’s only a certain amount of bugs that you can physically fix during the course of the day,” he continued. “It’s been a huge amount of work for QA, because it’s not easy in an open-world game to find them. 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.”

As development moved along, various improvements also lent to the lengthy development of Biomutant. This was said to be most apparent in the script, which was expanded from “80-85,000 words” in 2019 to around “250,000 words” in the final release. An increased dialogue presence is only half of it, as the updated script also enabled greater depth of the game’s karma system, a more robust tutorial, as well as extended support for 13 languages, 10 of which being fully-voiced in the game.

Even while developing and testing each of these impressive features led to a pile of added studio time, Ljungqvist suggested the pressure for employee crunch was rarely on the table as publisher THQ Nordic broadly encouraged a “when it’s done” approach for Biomutant. For a team of 20, this deliberate work schedule may have further stretched development, but the decision to minimize crunch was said to have ultimately benefited the workers as well as the game itself.

One of the main drawbacks of the lengthy wait is a current lack of new-gen release plans for Biomutant, with the game only set to launch for PC and last-generation consoles. However, the Experiment 101 head proposed this too was intentional as well. Keeping with the studio’s relatively chill approach, Ljungqvist assured this strategy was all in the name of ensuring a smooth development, stating it would be “easier to scale up than to scale down.” In terms of what to expect for next-gen, he suggested that fans look no further than the game’s PC port.

There is a high-end version of Biomutant already made for PC high-end versions. I mean, the game already in some form exists in what you would expect on the current-gen platforms.”

Biomutant is set to release May 25th for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with the game also playable on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S via backward compatibility.

What do you think? Are you glad to see so much effort went into the development of Biomutant, or do you feel that those only adds pressure to live up to the hype? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Twitter and Facebook to be informed of the latest gaming and entertainment news 24 hours a day! For more headlines recently featured on DFTG, check out these next few news stories:

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