The Xbox Game Studios Double Fine team, headed up by Tim Schafer, has finished Psychonauts 2, leaving the studio free to focus on other things.

Double Fine Productions used to work on several games at once (we could list a lot of them, but we’ll just give a few examples with release years: Psychonauts, 2005; Brütal Legend, 2009; Stacking, 2011; Broken Age, 2014; Grim Fandango Remastered, 2015; Day of the Tentacle Remastered, 2016; Full Throttle Remastered, 2017), but since 2017, they have had a single release, Rad, which Bandai Namco released in 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.

But Rad was also a bit of a detour for Schafer, as, after the Full Throttle update in 2017 (Schafer used to be a LucasArts stalwart, so he’s got several big-name projects to his name), they started focusing almost entirely on Psychonauts 2. Microsoft’s acquisition of the game was a later event by comparison, but Double Fine has not forgotten where the game’s development began. It started with crowdfunding.

The studio wrote on Fig (where the community funding for Psychonauts 2 started), “Psychonauts 2 has essentially wrapped up as a project although there will be tweaks and fixes as we move forward. The studio is already splitting up into various teams and starting different projects that we think you’ll enjoy. We like experimentation here at Double Fine. Every game is a chance to explore new ideas, new visual styles or gameplay, emotions, and more. Psychonauts 2 was a chance to revisit and reimagine the classic that launched our studio into the future. It was a long process, but we think the payoff was pretty great. We stuck the landing.”

Microsoft, therefore, continues to have no say in how they make games, and the arrival of Phil Spencer has not diminished their creative approach. That’s good, but you have to ask: why didn’t the Redmond-based company task Schafer’s team with working on a more significant project like Psychonauts 2?

Source: WCCFTech