In an interview with the Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe’s Matthew Groizard at E3 2016, Ubisoft San Francisco Senior Producer Jason Schroeder said, “My aspiration is to make sure every South Park fan gets an unedited Matt Stone and Trey Parker experience” with South Park: The Fractured But Whole.
Working closely with South Park’s creators on the new game, Schroeder says they ask Stone and Parker their opinions on jokes, deciding if they should do it as a gag or a dynamic part of the game. Following this comment, Sony’s Groizard wrote, “And this seems to be the biggest obstacle for the team – comedy is largely about timing and the difference between a 25-minute TV episode and an eight to 12-hour game can change a lot.”
Provided this is an accurate estimate of The Fractured But Whole’s length, it will be about as long as The Stick of Truth.
Last month, The Fractured But Whole Lead Game Designer Ken Strickland suggested it will be at least 10 hours long. “As the plot evolves, certain things will happen to the town, so when you’re playing through the town in hour 10, it will not be the town you see in hour one. I can’t go further than that without going into spoiler territory,” he told Stevivor.
Elsewhere in the Sony interview, Schroeder talked about how comedy games can make you think:
Comedy games definitely have room for growth.One of the things that we’ve discovered is that you can really make people think with a comedy game because you’re able to subvert their expectations. Even the typical way they might do things on a PlayStation controller: we say ‘pull the triggers and start rotating the analogue sticks’ and then they see on screen that the kid is moving his butt around.
As you may recall, The Stick of Truth was subjected to some censorship in certain regions. According to Strickland, “We are always going to deliver unfiltered South Park madness. What we have not done is say ‘it got censored [in Australia] last time, we better be tamer this time.’ It’s funnier when you push ratings boards to try and match your game. I’m anticipating we’re going to have a lot of long talks with them.“
There’s hopefully going to be some stuff in there that people will say ‘how did that make it through classification?'” Schroeder said.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole releases on December 6 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can pre-order it to receive South Park: The Stick of Truth.
