South Park: The Stick of Truth Interview

Eurogamer went over South Park: The Stick of Truth’s troubled development with Obsidian Entertainment’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, and the finished work of this chat is a lengthy and interesting read. Here’s a snippet on THQ’s downfall and the Ubisoft switch:

It was Christmas 2011 when he found out about the impending THQ auction, at which the publishing rights to South Park: The Stick of Truth would be sold. “Holy… what is going on?!” was his reaction, and Christmas came and went in a cacophony of phone calls.

Urquhart wasn’t allowed to the auction himself, but a friend of a friend had gone to the charmingly “underground” occasion, and described it as “the dirtiest… I had to take a shower afterwards, it was horrible”. Slimy slippery money eels all wriggling over each other to get their deal.

Urquhart found out Ubisoft was his game’s new owner roughly the same time we did.

“I would say ‘that’s such a weird thing to happen’, but it’s not. Being an independent developer, there are these constant points in time where you are waiting around to know ‘am I going to get shot in the head today or not?'”

He was “very happy” it was Ubisoft, though, because of the company’s heft and strong presence abroad, outside of the US. “Of course we were not looking forward to the uPlay conversation,” he giggles.

And one on the game’s metascore:

According to Metacritic, cringe, South Park: The Stick of Truth (on PS3) is one of Obsidian’s best games, scoring a review average of 86 per cent (the same as KOTOR2 on Xbox).

Metacritic is relevant here because an 85-plus score was exactly what Obsidian needed Fallout: New Vegas to achieve in order to receive a bonus payment from publisher Bethesda. But it didn’t; Fallout: New Vegas averaged an agonisingly close 84 per cent, and Obsidian lost out, despite the game being a big success for Bethesda. There was quite a fall out.

There’s nothing like that in place for South Park: The Stick of Truth, thankfully, and Obsidian never intends taking that road again.

“We have a general policy whenever we’re talking to different publishers now: we don’t do anything that has to do with Metacritic. It’s an unfair way of… in a lot of ways it can only be used as a way to take advantage of a developer.