Biomutant Interview

With Biomutant now set to launch on May 25, 2021, you may be wondering what took the developers so long, seeing how they originally intended to release the game back in 2019. If that’s the case, you should check out this Eurogamer interview with Experiment 101’s art & creative director Stefan Ljungqvist where he discusses some of the reasons for the game’s delay.

For example:

It goes a small way to understanding why the game has been delayed, because when your writer (and director) can’t finish the script because he’s laid up in bed after back surgery, there’s not a lot you can do. Especially when you’re only 20 people – I didn’t realise that. That’s a much smaller team than I thought.

But Biomutant’s doesn’t seem to be a story of troubled development, which surprised me. I don’t hear about cut features or about a publisher brute-forcing a game out. Instead I hear about a script quadrupling in size, a crafting system multiplying in complexity, and features like the factional tribe system being beefed up and moved centre stage. If anything, I hear about embellishments, and about THQ Nordic, the publisher, apparently being supportive of it.

“I don’t know if that’s troubled or not,” Ljungqvist says. “Was it more complicated than we thought? Yes. The part where there are so many interconnected features: that’s where we kind of underestimated the challenge.”