Studio MDHR first announced a bonus round of DLC content for their amazing Cuphead game in 2018. Back then it was assumed the DLC would make its way onto the game’s platforms by the end of that year. It…uh, didn’t quite work out that way.
Instead it took until now for Delicious Last Course to see a solid release date. And fans have been wondering: why did it take the DLC nearly as long as the main game to get finished? According to a new interview between IGN and MDHR’s own Maja Moldenhauer, there are several reasons for the extreme delay.
Scope Creep: Anyone who has worked on video games should be familiar with this term. It’s what happens when you start with a simple set of goals, but then keep getting ideas and just HAVE to throw them in. Maja says Delicious Last Course started out as just five bosses and the introduction of Miss Chalice, but the concept kept growing. She says they ended up making nearly as many drawings as they had to for the main game!
As a result, everything is bigger, and every fight is way more over the top than anything seen in the Cuphead game as-is. In the base game, bosses rarely change locations, but in Delicious Last Course they do it all the time, with a new background, a new set of animations and everything. Maja doesn’t mean to brag but she says the animation quality is “closer to Fantasia” this time than it was to Silly Symphonies before.
Developer Fatigue: Studio MDHR is one of the few video game studios on Earth that happens to actually care about the mental health of its workers, and allowed them to take breaks whenever necessary. In addition, the team remained small, with a capacity of only six animators working on the DLC at the same time. A small team means the ability to keep costs low, but it also means nothing is getting done in a speedy fashion. It’s the old business saying of how you can have fast, cheap or good, but never all three at once.
Everything Is In It: The original goal for the Cuphead DLC was to create everything that was left on the cutting room floor from the main release. Maja brags they managed to pull that off 100%, and EVERY idea they ever had for Cuphead is now realized. That being said, they are not ruling out a sequel, but will not reveal what next project they have in mind just yet.
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course will be released on June 30.
