Compulsion Games have released a substantial update for We Happy Few. This update introduces a completely new island to the dystopic English town of Wellington Wells in addition to other new features, tweaks, and bugfixes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZLAUSN8rOU
This represents the biggest change to the meta gameplay of We Happy Few since we launched on Early Access, and potentially the biggest since we made permadeath optional in 2015.The full patch notes can be found here or you can read on to learn all there is to know about this patch's biggest additions.
The biggest thing in this update is the introduction of Maidenholm, a mysterious new town on a new island near the Village of Hamlyn. This island is filled with buildings to explore, strange people to meet (and kill/run away from), and new items to find. Maidenholm is a difficult place to be in. Combat is more taxing, the encounters are way more difficult this time around, and you'll have to make some hard decision to survive.
Coming with these updates are playstyles, of which there are three. Birdwatcher is for players who just want to explore, Downer is the classic We Happy Few gameplay with some new balance tweaks, and Vigilante is for players who are hard as nails. For more details on the playstyles system, you can read another article here. Note that permadeath can be switched on at every level if you so desire.
We Happy Few also got some updates under the hood. The game's audio has been completely reworked and is now fully procedural, which allows the music to better fit the activities you're undertaking in Wellington Wells. The game's world generation has also gotten a few upgrades and is now capable of generating terrain that seamlessly connects villages to forests, forests to meadows.
What you see above is a peeper, Wellington Wells' police's new favorite toy for finding citizens that are low on Joy. This mobile alarm is capable of scanning you and of alerting the local authorities if it finds something it doesn't like. Other new enemies are Plague Wastrels and Hooligans, the latter of which patrols the streets of the Garden District at night. Hooligans also guard the various water pumps in the Garden District, so you'll have to be quick as well as brutal to get yourself some water. If you do manage to get yourself noticed and chased, you can now use more bushes and carts to hide in.
With this update, the game will have a revamped new game experience that now effectively communicates whether you've selected normal or permadeath at the start of your game. There's also the new support for multiple saves, support for saving your games to the Steam cloud, and better subtitle support.
The Maidenholm update implements a variety of new encounters for you to discover, giving you more opportunities to interact with the psychotically weird inhabitants of Wellington Wells. In addition to this, Compulsion Games added three new shelters to the game, all of which need you to complete a challenge before you can unlock it.
Lastly, this update automatically optimizes your settings for 60 fps and you'll have some new parameters to tweak to get the best performance out of your system.
What do you think of the Maidenholm update? Let us know in the comment section down below!