Now that Compulsion Games’ new story-based survival game We Happy Few is out in the wild, players have finally gotten to experience the game’s final build for themselves. Unfortunately, that final build is also riddled with technical issues that have led to problems both minor (low frame-rates, sudden texture pop-ins) and major (corrupted and/or lost save files). During a recent Reddit AMA, We Happy Few producer Sam Abbot confirmed that Compulsion is working hard on a fix for all of the above issues.
Within the AMA, Abbot spoke openly about the challenges Compulsion faced while developing We Happy Few and how those challenges played a role in the game’s buggy launch version. Not only were they a small team struggling to meet high fan expectations (Compulsion was comprised of a mere six people when development on We Happy Few began), but they also encountered severe optimization issues when they transitioned the game build from early access to final release:
“As a specific issue, we optimized the game fairly heavily when we released on Early Access, and when it came to full release optimization was a great deal more difficult, surprisingly on the CPU and hard disk IO side. That’s been more difficult/took more time than anticipated.”
As for correcting the current list of issues, Abbot said that Compulsion’s number one priority is dealing with the save game corruptions/deletions that in some cases have been costing players many hours of unrecoverable progress. A hotfix for the save game issues should be deployed momentarily and it might even be live by the time you read this. Compulsion is also working on a more substantial patch which will address the frame-rate and texture pop-in problems that are mainly affecting We Happy Few’s console versions (Abbot says this is due to the unexpectedly high amount of strain the game is putting on both console CPU’s and hard drives).
Hopefully, Compulsion will get the launch issues sorted out sooner rather than later since it’s unlikely that fans will want to invest in the DLC season pass of such a buggy game.