The much-anticipated action RPG Biomutant was supposed to be out in 2019, but it’s already 2021. Nothing happened between then and up until the Biomutant announcement from developer Experiment 101 regarding its May release date. Why is that?

The answer is simple: the game needed a ton of bug-fixing, and the team wanted to do that without putting themselves in crunch. The studio boss Stefan Ljungqvist told IGN the following:

“It’s been a huge amount of work for QA, because it’s not easy in an open-world game to find [bugs]. And then once they’ve been found, we have to fix them, and that’s put some additional challenge on us, being a small team.”

Ljungqvist’s past experiences with video game companies left him “burned out” and aware of the negative effects of constant overwork. He also credits THQ Nordic for not pushing the studio to hit an earlier release date, even though the company will need to work extra hours to support the game after release.

“I mean, the studio, we are 20 people and we can’t afford to have [staff] leave the studio, or be destroyed during development. That would be devastating.

For certain pushes, you might do it in a limited form. But the most important thing is you get paid, which is not common in our industry, crazily enough. And also you get ‘recap time’, because you have to have rest. If you’re just doing this constantly for 12-14 hours a day, you will eventually have to pay for it.”

On a related note, the game will not have PS5 and Xbox Series X versions because the game is “led on the last-gen”.

“If you look at it from a development perspective, that’s really important because it’s easier to scale up than to scale down. [Besides], there is a high-end version of Biomutant already made for PC. The game already in some form exists in what you would expect on the current-gen platforms.”

Sounds like some companies should be taking lessons from Experiment 101, especially big ones based in Europe. Biomutant will be out this May.