Funcom’s Conan Chop Chop, originally introduced as a rogue-like ARPG back in 2019, wrecked our predictions for 2020 by not launching, and I’m holding a grudge. OK, I’m not. But it really has been a long time coming, something that Funcom acknowledges in today’s press release.
See, in 2019, Funcom and developer Mighty Kingdom delayed the game from September into 2020 specifically to “expand multiplayer from just couch co-op to also include full online multiplayer” – music to our ears as we’re MMO players. Last December, the studios set February 25th for the official launch. Two weeks before that date, the teams pushed off the date to Q2 2020. At the tail end of that window, the game was delayed to later in 2020 for more development time.
We’re down to two weeks of 2020, so it was real clear Funcom couldn’t make that, but now it’s promising early 2021 with an expanded scope that will hopefully extend the game’s longevity and make it less of, well, an upjumped April Fool’s prank.
“[T]his time we mean it for real. After a series of brilliant ideas have been implemented and a new bunch of cute and deadly mobs and traps have found their way to Hyboria, the development is nearly complete. Conan Chop Chop will release in early 2021, bigger and better than originally intended. […] Following a resurgence of cutesy online co-op games, the scope of Conan Chop Chop has increased. The hack ‘n’ slash, which supports both couch co-op and online co-op on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, has been augmented with more random events, new traps, and vicious minibosses roaming the world of Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian. While the previous number of possible item combinations was a measly 14 trillion, it is now too high for the human brain to fathom, guaranteeing infinite replayability in a beautifully designed procedurally generated world.”
“If we had launched this year, there’d be half the number of cute pigs in the game,” Joel Bylos quips. “And you can’t launch a Conan game without that.” He’s not wrong.
