Some quotes from Twitter, Steam forums, PS4 Reddit AMA.
Inject Joy into my neck if old.
For context - the quote that Jim "misunderstood":
On Jim Sterling and that "be sad rather than take drugs" interpretation:
On pS4 (at least) bugs:
On releasing a broken game:
On Gearbox:
More:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/97izv4/we_are_compulsion_games_who_made_contrast_and_we/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/320240/discussions/0/1736588252369024447/
Inject Joy into my neck if old.
For context - the quote that Jim "misunderstood":
"Sure! We Happy Few is inspired by, among other things, prescription drug culture — the idea that no one should have to be sad if they can pop a pill and fix it. It's also about Happy Facebook culture: no one shares their bad news because it would bring everyone down. As a culture, we no longer value sadness."
https://web.archive.org/web/2016081...s-making-a-comeback-with-an-eerie-1960s-twist
On Jim Sterling and that "be sad rather than take drugs" interpretation:
I don't fault Jim for calling out bugs, and I am equally as frustrated as he is that he faced the issues he did. No one wants to ship a game that makes someone that mad. He does overstate the issues with the game a fair bit (and is wrong in terms of why those issues are happening), but hey, that's what his channel is about. He's a hyperbole guy, not a developer. There's a reason why his video is so angry when other reviews aren't.
/start rant
I am frustrated though that he misinterpreted a statement from our narrative director about the game's exploration of prescription drug culture. As a result, our ND and his wife have been receiving constant attacks from social justice advocates on twitter for the last few days... even though they have literally written a game about prescription drugs and dealt with these issues in a humane, kind and interesting way. They are kind, good people, and We Happy Few is an excellent, nuanced, story.
I contacted Jim, and he posted a statement being disappointed in people doing that. I appreciate him for doing that. However, it hasn't stopped - unfortunately, once people get started on this kind of thing they won't stop. Jim's video in August last year about Gearbox did the same thing, leading to review bombing and a ton of harrassment thrown our way for months. That bothers me.
I don't care why someone is an asshole online. Most think they're righteous, whether that's a social justice warrior or an alt-right instigator. I'm sick of people treating others badly, particularly on twitter - it's not a medium that deals well with complex topics.
The world would be a far better place if instead of getting angry we just asked "hey, what's up with that" and genuinely listened to the answer.
On pS4 (at least) bugs:
We're aiming for a hotfix to temporarily fix the save corruption issue. We're also working on a patch to improve framerate and a range of other bugs. The rendering issues you're talking about are caused by pretty intense load on the CPU and hard drive of the PS4 and Xbox - not issues that you guys would probably hear a lot about - which is causing the pop ins etc.
I am genuinely sorry for these issues - we had to back out some optimizations last minute because they were too unstable, and it caused a fairly significant drop in framerate for the day 1 version. Unfortunately we weren't able to delay release due to the retail builds being out in the wild.
I'm hoping to have a build today to fix the save issue and a few other bugs, and we'll then need to go through cert. That can take up to 5 days for the first patch. We're working on a bigger optimization and bug fixing patch too, which we'll push out as soon as we're comfortable it is stable.
On releasing a broken game:
I think you're overestimating independent teams' resources, and assuming that we're all the same.
In our case, I don't think this game is a "buggy broken product". The console versions are not at the framerate that we wanted, which causes a lot of the visible issues that you see... but that's not really a lot of bugs. Really just consequences of lower framerate. The game itself has almost no progression blockers, except for one issue that we had never seen before on release (the issue with keys randomly not spawning where they are supposed to).
We released because we had to. If we could have delayed the console versions we might have, but it wasn't an option. You can sum it up as "we thought we could optimize in the time we had and we got 95% of the way there". Unfortunately that 5% caused the issues that people are seeing on PS4.
On Gearbox:
We wrote about this in detail at the time about why we were doing what we were doing. We had a full scoped game on the way, with a significant amount of new content. We had reinvested, and believed that the increased game scope and quality was worth an increase in price - and importantly it needed to be the same price everywhere, and retail games are $60. Gearbox came on to publish the game - no development funding, just helping us getting it to retail and, importantly to PS4.
Yeah, most people don't want to hear that unfortunately. They'd rather stroke their Gearbox hate boner (pardon the appalling analogy but I feel like it's the best way I can describe it), than hear about how Gearbox are good people that did everything in their power to help us create the game we wanted to create. I've said it before, but Gearbox are not the enemies that the vocal minority think.
More:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/97izv4/we_are_compulsion_games_who_made_contrast_and_we/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/320240/discussions/0/1736588252369024447/
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