Via Game Trailers:

South Park fans who have been praying and hoping for someone to finally give them a good South Park game will have to wait a little longer, now that THQ delayed its release to next year.

Gameinformer posted a short blurb on its site confirming THQ’s announcement about the game’s delay. Now the game won’t ship until at least 2013, sometime during the company’s fourth fiscal quarter. An official release date hasn’t been set.

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Does The Upcoming South Park RPG Have a Name? - Game Trailers:

Not officially, as neither Obsidian Entertainment nor THQ has confirmed as much. But according to a recent listing on Xbox Live Marketplace, the game would seem to be carrying ‘The Stick of Truth” wording in its title.

The Xbox.com game listing (now removed) also had a description of the game:

“From the perilous battlefields of the fourth-grade playground, a young hero will rise, destined to be South Park’s savior. From the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, comes an epic quest to become… cool. Introducing South Park: The Stick of Truth.”

The new title could be both a play on the series of fantasy novels The Sword of Truth and a bit of a callback to Make Love, Not Warcraft’s Sword of a Thousand Truths. The page also mentioned offline co-op for up to two players, but nothing is confirmed until Obsidian or THQ have a say.

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Last month, Obsidian (the studio producing ‘South Park: The Game’) was hit with layoffs and a few members of the South Park team were affected. Today, Danny Bilson, the EVP for Core Games at THQ (the publisher), revealed that the game is still on track and says it will “absolutely be the funniest game ever made.”

Via Michael Futter at RipTen:

MF: You mentioned games that people are really excited for. One of the games that has been on people’s radar since December of last year is the South Park RPG that was announced. I have two questions about that. First, is that still on track and moving forward with Obsidian.

DB: Yes. It absolutely is.

MF: When it was announced, it was slated for a 2012 release. Is that still going to happen?

DB: Potentially, but it’s going to be very close. It’s all about… because that game is being written by Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker]… some of the production process ebbs and flows with their schedule. They are in the middle of a season right now, and as soon as they are done, they get back to the game, and their season takes them out for a couple of months at a time. Again, it’s like I said about Darksiders. We can’t afford to ship it until it’s perfect.

Matt and Trey won’t ship until it’s their vision of this ultimate role playing game, where you’re the new kid in town and it’s like being in a South Park episode. Once all the pieces are together, we’ll announce a date and we’ll ship it. I can tell you from progress and process. I’ve got sections of the game that they’ve completed; they are phenomenal. If you like South Park, and I love South Park, it’s South Park! It’s incredible and it’ll absolutely be the funniest game ever made. There’s no two ways about it.

[Later in the interview…]

MF: We received confirmation that an Obsidian project was canceled in the same week that it was announced the studio had missed their Metacritic bonus by one point. They had to lay off people, as well. It appears, based on what we were able to find, that some of the staff affected worked on the South Park RPG. Obviously, that game is still moving forward, so you weren’t the publisher that canceled the project. It seems like your relationship with Obsidian, and the project they are working on with you, might have been affected by this. How do you deal with that when two other publishers making decisions affect a project you are working on?

DB: It had no effect. Just like any studio, when you downsize, you keep your best people. Think about it. If South Park becomes the lead sku in the studio, it’s just going to have all the most experienced people on it. It didn’t affect us in any way. Obsidian isn’t our studio. If people were removed from that team, they were replaced by more senior people. There was no negative, except for the negative of any studio having to lay off employees. It’s incredibly painful. It wasn’t a game of ours that was canceled there, and I do like Obsidian. I want to see them succeed, and I don’t want to see them stressed by not having enough games, but Feargus seems to feel that he has a pipeline of stuff coming in. So, the answer is, really, that it had no effect.

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Via Joystiq:

Obsidian Entertainment reportedly experienced a round of layoffs this week, with the extent of the damage not entirely clear. The company’s forums lay out an idea of the body count, with messages on Twitter filling in more details.

“Another project canceled, this time for a future next-gen project and the layoffs impacted that team, plus the existing South Park team,” a tipster wrote Joystiq. “Approximately 20-30 people from all disciplines, including one person who started yesterday, as well as one who started last week.”

And via The Verge:

The next-gen project appears to have been codenamed Project North Carolina, while several LinkedIn profiles show that the fired employees did indeed work on the South Park RPG.

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These images aren’t from future episodes of South Park, but are actually screenshots right out of the South Park RPG. When Matt said, “it’s like playing the show”, he wasn’t kidding around.

Click to enlarge the epicness:

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Two new articles from Game Informer cover the sounds and the items in the South Park RPG. Here are some highlights:

“…the classic South Park guitar lines and bumpers will be making their appearance from time to time.” “…We have to record a ton [of lines] to make sure it is constantly fresh and also evolving over the course of the game. We don’t want you to have to hear the same thing over and over again.”

“When Obsidian first began creating items, armor, and weapons for South Park: The Game, the team made all kinds of fancy swords and impressive garb. When South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw these, they immediately told them to “make it crappier.” The idea is that most of the items are things that the kids found and/or made themselves, imagining that they are a gallant knight or wizard. In early demos we saw, weapons included golf clubs, tack hammers, suction cup arrows, wooden swords, and more.”

“The most prominent items we saw were various Chinpokomon, known from an episode of the same name in season three of the show. These Pokémon parodies took the town of South Park by storm, but there were plenty of the toy designs left on the cutting room floor. Obsidian has access to all of the legacy assets from all 15 seasons, including never-before-seen Chinpokomon.”

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A new Game Informer video interview with the lead designer of South Park: The Game reveals (as many fans suspected) the fifth playable class is “Jew”! Rundown of the video below.

• The Jew class is a “paladin/monk type” that becomes more powerful the closer he is to death.
• The combat is closer to Paper Mario than Final Fantasy. “Properly-timed inputs” make attack/defense moves more effective.
• The combat is “kids being kids” with weapons that are “fully unsafe toys” like wooden swords and suction-cup bows, but there are also flaming tennis balls and the Good Times with Weapons ninja stars.
• The weapons are upgradeable with enchantments that can make them faster or add poison damage. They aren’t going loot crazy by dropping a bunch of items, but are instead encouraging players to enhance their original toys/weapons over time.
• While a lot of games were discussed to base a combat system off of, nothing was the ideal model. Instead the goal was to have a system of “kids being kids” as there were comments from Matt and Trey like, “I want the kids to bleed more, I want the kids to cry more, I want these kids to really just treat each other like crap because that’s what kids do because they are really rough with each other.” They wanted, “kids being little bastards”.
• You can taunt and kick people in the nuts, but the boys also do pretend stuff like casting a “magic missile” which is actually them just throwing flaming objects.
• The combat is closer to a turn-based system than a real-time one because it allows you to control your companions.
• The game is designed to appeal to those who have never played an RPG before, but they also planted powerful creatures (which drop collectibles) that can only be beaten on subsequent playthroughs.
• The story is “a real adventure almost on the scale of the South Park movie” but it will also be satirical and poke fun at elements of other games like “unskippable cutscenes and long diatribes from bosses.”

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The details come from a user at NeoGAF who received January’s Game Informer magazine.

• The first game Trey and Matt have directly participated in, writing the script and the dialogue.
• Trey has always preferred silent protagonists in RPGs, so the player’s character will be silent.
• The player’s character will be fully customizable.
• Your character has a smartphone that acts as the primary game menu and has a Facebook-like app showing the number of friends you have and your current standing with the various kid factions.
• There are five classes—wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unannounced class.
• Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine.
• Obsidian developed a dynamic lip-syncing tool to accommodate changes to the script.
• Trey and Matt gave Obsidian 15 years of assets used during the show and a detailed list of approved textures and colors.
• Critical hits, cash rewards, experience, and consumables are in the game.
• Trey hates unskippable cutscenes, so there likely won’t be cutscenes at all or they’ll be interactive.
• The humor will focus on the games they have played in the past, but Trey mentions that games have lampooned other games before so they don’t want to do exactly that. Instead, they are focusing more on RPGs and how big and bombastic they can get sometimes.
• The game looks like an episode of South Park.
• You can explore the town in between quests, as “exploration takes the characters from the left to the the right (and vice versa), but branching paths occasionally take them in the background or foreground to prevent the game from becoming overly linear”.

• The player will play as the new kid in town, with the main themes of the game being about fitting in and acceptance.
• The story begins with your character participating in a live action role-playing game that the neighborhood kids started, which eventually evolves into a real adventure.
• Eric Cartman will greet your character and help you decide your class, which are wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unconventional class made up by Cartman. (I’m thinking “Jew”!)

• Combat system is like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games.
• If the player initiates combat they will attack first and vice versa.
• X button is for melee attacks, pressing it in well-timed succession will result in multiple hits.
• Timed inputs occur for defense as well for reduced damage.
• Obsidian doesn’t want the player to have to sit and watch animations play out; they’re incorporating dynamic camera angles at certain times, such as the Rochambeau attack that stuns an enemy.
• Screenshot of combat shows that encounters are like classic Final Fantasy (presented from a side view). Combat screenshots show only the player and one other party member (Cartman, Kyle, or Butters), fighting 2-5 enemies (Girls, Gingers, Hippies, Fantasy style, and Goth) at a time.

• Enemy encounters are visible on the map.
• Sodas are health potions and Tweek’s coffee is a Haste-inducing item.
• There are melee and ranged weapons, and a lightning-powered Okama Gamesphere makes an appearance as a magic item.
• There is a Final Fantasy VII Materia-like system in the game to augment weapons with various abilities like fire, poison, and electricity.
• There is a Summon System, but they are not able to talk about it.

• There are collectibles to look for in the environments, some appear throughout the game while other are in specific areas.
• An example of a collectible is a Chinpokomon doll and a magazine, though Chinpokomon dolls are not all the same model. Obsidian is using various models that appeared in the episode, probably “Pengy” and “Shoe” to name a couple.

• When Obsidian was first coming up with ideas, they showed Trey and Matt a quest where you go into a cave and fight a giant bat boss that Ike is riding on. Trey and Matt said that the quest “wasn’t South Park.” Trey and Matt then suggested a quest to “get Kung Pao Chicken from City Wok” to readjust Obsidian’s focus.
• When they started making the town hub, Trey and Matt realized that they didn’t have a true layout for the town, so they had fun figuring out where everything went.
• There will not be any platforming—jumping was tested early on, but it didn’t seem right.
• They talk about how they have had to scrap a level, because the perspective wasn’t right with everything being hand-illustrated and hand-animated.
• They talk about the challenges of making a comedy-driven game. Portal 2 is mentioned by name, and they said that if Portal 2 had had “shitty dialogue on top of being a shitty game,” it wouldn’t have succeeded. Trey and Matt want to make a game that’s as funny as it is playable.

• The first concept art is a ‘Gnome Mine,’ (hints Underpants Gnomes).
• The second concept art is ‘UFO Crash Site,’ showing Kenny, Cartman, Stan, and Kyle in front of a military fence with a UFO further away in a forest surrounded by mountains.
• The third concept art is a ‘Gnome/Crab People D.M.Z.’ Labeled as a rough concept, it show a border fence with Gnomes on one side and Crab People on the other.
• The last concept art is ‘Christmas Town,’ currently in its conceptual stages.

• Trey and Matt really enjoy RPGs and they do think that RPGs are the best fit for South Park.
• They were asked how making an RPG story differs for an episode, they say that the learning curve was bigger than anything they have done, except for The Book of Mormon.
• Visual styles seen in episodes like Good Times With Weapons, or the live action hamsters in Pandemic, will not be in the game. They wanted to keep a simple 2D style.
• Trey has been a lifelong gamers, he really likes RPGs, because he likes the single player nature of them. He doesn’t like or get MMOs, and his favorite game is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
• Matt, when he was young, used to play the old Infocom game and Wizardry. He likes open world games like Arkham City, inFamous,Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, but also enjoys hockey and soccer games. He mention that he is more of a button masher and remembers Serious Sam, because he likes to “shoot shit” and “blow shit up,” but he is now more interested in games like Arkham City. He hasn’t played an RPG in years, because he got tired of walking everywhere. His favorite game of all time is FIFA and he mentions getting his ass kicked online by kids with English Accents.
• Lastly, they joke how this South Park game will be a cross between Obilivion and FIFA where “you gotta go kill a bunch of monsters and shit, but you can only use your feet.”

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