‘South Park: The Fractured But Whole’ Has 8-12 Hours Gameplay On PS4, Maps A Butt To Controller’s Analog Stick

In an extensive interview for an official Playstation blog, Jason Schoeder, senior producer of Stick of Truth sequel South Park: The Fractured But Whole, described working with South Park writers Matt Stone and Trey Parker. Along the way we learned The Fractured But Whole has approximately eight to 12 hours of gameplay, putting it in line with its predecessor, The Stick of Truth.

“They’re really, really involved,” Schoeder said. “We have daily calls and I’m down there a few times a month just constantly trying to make sure that they’re getting the comedy they want into the game and making sure that it all makes sense moment to moment.”

Schoeder compared the high-pressure game development environment to the infamously rushed production window of a typical South Park episode (documented in detail for The Making of South Park: 6 Days to Air). “Deadlines and pressure are actually some of the best ways they get their comedy,” Schoeder said. “It’s from that pressure that they get their really relevant, really timely jokes. The video game cycle, by comparison, is brutally long for them.”

It’s Schoeder’s hope The Fractured But Whole will give every South Park fan “an unedited Matt Stone and Trey Parker experience,” with his team at Ubisoft cramming the game with as much of their humor as possible.

“We always want to try and make sure to get every joke in that we can. Sometimes we have to ask the guys ‘okay, do you want that to be a gag or do you want it to be a whole system? Should we build this in as dynamic part of the game or do want it to just be something that happens?'”

This results in some interesting gameplay innovations, expanding the language of comedy to the specific mechanics of video games. “Comedy games definitely have room for growth,” Schoeder told Playstation.blog. “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.”