It might be April 1, but Coffee Stain North isn’t joking around with its first Goat Direct. With so many announcements, you might think that at least one is too good to be true, but there’s no tomfoolery here. Everything announced is really happening.
Goat Simulator: The Card Game is launching a Kickstarter campaign on April 30, CRKD is releasing a Goat Simulator controller range, Multiverse of Nonsense will soon be arriving on mobile, Goat Simulator 3 is coming to Twitch Rivals, and the A Goat outfit will be returning to Fortnite. Pause for a breath or a bleat, because that’s not all.
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Today, a brand new free update for Goat Simulator 3, Gifts from the Rift, drops, adding 27 new gears, as well as a special hidden gear (we’ll get to that later), two new events, and a brand new alternate goat: Plushie Pilgor. This latest and most adorable goat skin is based on the new YouTooz collectible Pilgor Plushie, which was also announced as part of today’s direct.
A Treasure Hunt Awaits
The YouTooz Pilgor grants access to a hidden in-game gear in the Gifts of the Rift update. In a Q&A with Coffee Stain North producer Olivia Follin and creative Director Santiago Ferrero, it’s quickly explained that the gear isn’t tied to purchasing the plushie and will be “available to everybody”, but the plushie will give you a hint as to where to find it.
“You will only get the hint once the pre-order ends and people actually get their plushies, so we’re excited to see people find it,” Follin says. “It’s very hidden. And you can only get it by doing specific things. We’ll see. Maybe they’ll hack it, find it that way.”
It might seem like the marketing day from hell to choose for announcements given that everyone will wonder whether any of them are legit or not, but Ferrero tells us April 1 is “a holy day for the Goat Simulator brand” as that’s the date the original game launched. Given the series’ penchant for everything silly and chaotic, it really does fit the bill.
Last year, the Multiverse of Nonsense DLC launched to celebrate Goat Simulator’s tenth anniversary, and added a rift that you could interact with to reach new areas. Gifts from the Rift has yet another new multiverse rift, which Ferrero explains will shower presents from the sky all over the map, describing it as “like a little Easter egg hunt, but for presents.” Each present can yield one to three gears, but you must find them and open the packages to get your grubby little hooves on them.
“We had a lot of gears that our artists made over the years, but that never got added to the game, or got cut, or just something that people are playing around with. We went through all those and just gathered them, polished them up, and then made a whole free update, just adding the rest of the gears we had laying around.”
The Goat Direct ended with a teaser clip that Pilgor’s journey would continue. It showed Pilgor walking past the settings of the base game, the Multiverse of Nonsense DLC, and finally, walking into a desert landscape. Will we be seeing a sandbox mode? Ferrero tells us that having these new gears to add for Gifts of the Rift was “a win-win” as it was “a nice way of getting something out without spending too much time away from the bigger expansion that we’re working on”.
Multiverse of Nonsense was heavily inspired by Marvel’s multiverse, and Ferrero says “it would be amazing” to have a proper collab with Marvel. “We have a lot of Marvel fans at the office. If they’re willing to let us go wild with some kind of collaboration, it will be really fun. We’re not crossing off the table.”
Virtual Bleat-ality
Considering how the Goat Simulator series embraces the absurd, weird, and wonderful, I couldn’t help wondering how far Coffee Stain North was willing to take it, and whether the team had ever considered a VR game that makes players have to headbutt around their homes like complete idiots.
“We’ve talked about it, in a more of a concept way, that it would be fun to have a game where the game forces you to be on all fours, and you have to do the movements of a goat,” Ferrero laughs. “Maybe you have to headbutt, you have no controllers, maybe everything is just like the PSVR 2 headset or something. Just to make the players feel like a goat, and you have to do these stupid movements.
“But then again, it’s like, how much work can we put into something that is just a joke? It’s always the balance of Goat Sim. It’s a stupid game, but also a real game. When can we divert and just make it stupid? But a VR game Goat Sim is super fun. I would love to play.”
Follin explains that every month, the team has Creative Friday, where they can do whatever they want in-game or learn a new tool, which is how many of the gears being introduced in Gift from the Rift came about. She jokes that on Creative Friday, they should “start a VR team because it would be really cool”.
All this talk of VR prompts the team to tell us about the VR mutator from Goat Simulator 1 that also reappeared in Goat Simulator 3, which causes the field of view to distort. “That VR gear we have is probably one of the most awful ones,” Follin admits. There’s an instinct in-game where you must wear the headset for five minutes, but Follin tells us the team reduced this after initial tests. “In the beginning, you had to wear it for an hour or something, and it’s just awful, especially since we had to play test it.”
The Balance Of Goat Sim Chaos
When I ask whether the next mainline Goat Simulator title will be 4 or something else completely random, Ferrero jokes, “Probably Goat Simulator 23 or something” before explaining that the team is still working hard on Goat Simulator 3. He also says Coffee Stain North has “a lot of other ideas of totally other games that we’re experimenting with” and that until the team feels creatively drained about Goat Simulator 3, they’ll keep expanding it.
As the Goat Simulator brand has grown and become more established, it hasn’t lost its whimsy and love for chaos and randomness, so when asked if it’s harder to stay true to the janky, unhinged, comedic ethos of the first game now, Ferrero answers “yes and no.”
Fun fact: the pose of the A Goat skin in Fortnite was modeled by Ferrero himself as he sent Epic a photo of himself in the pose he wanted for the goat.
“The more we’re kind of going into card games or other things, there are new ways of being janky or new ways of being chaotic and doing unorthodox stuff, like the plushy die in the card game. We’re thinking differently or doing something absurd with it. The card game is also pretty chaotic in nature.
“Now Goat Simulator 3 is a multiplayer game that adds complexity to the systems, where it’s a lot harder to balance what is okay to be jank and what is just disruptive. That’s always a hard balance. But we always try to see how far we can take it before it’s not fun playing. But we’re still very okay with janky bugs in the game, if it doesn’t crash or anything. We’re still pretty open to doing weird marketing things, like the Goat Director is pretty out there, even if it’s still a very businessy thing. We can always just throw in some weirdness and make it our own. It’s a blessing and a curse.”
As we sit here on April 1, with many still wondering whether all the Goat Simulator announcements are to be believed, it’s safe to say that Coffee Stain North is successfully upholding and sharing its love for chaos, goats, and fun. Now please excuse me, I have a Pilgor plushie to purchase and a gear to hunt down.
- Released
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November 17, 2022
- ESRB
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t
- Developer(s)
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Coffee Stain North
- Publisher(s)
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Coffee Stain Publishing