South Park: Snow Day! is nothing like the two South Park RPGs that preceded it, with its 3D animated aesthetic, its co-op battle gameplay, and even its surprisingly cheap $30 price tag. The move away from epic-scale, in-depth RPGs was a deliberate choice, says co-creator Matt Stone, and gives them the freedom to do some new things with the South Park gaming franchise.

"We came off of The Fractured But Whole, and we definitely wanted to do another video game, but we wanted to do something different," Stone said in an interview with IGN. "We started talking about doing something a little different, more about replayability. More about being able to update characters. We always thought we wanted to do that thing where we do a thing in a show and then like, it's in the game two weeks later, or three weeks, or whatever it is."

The change in both gameplay and animation style will help facilitate this more live service style of game, making it easier for the developers to add new content. "The 2D stuff--amazing as it was to make those games--it was really, really hard when you think about what you have to work with. It's just very confined, how we even made those fights work," Stone explains. "And it's the freedom here to create, it's just a lot easier in the 3D realm. For me, I just accept that these are the South Park kids."

Exploration will also get a shake up, with Snow Day's world designed to be more of a sandbox compared to the previous games' narrative-driven progression. "The previous games feel like you're in a South Park movie," said South Park writer Jameel Saleem, who also worked on Snow Day. "It's very immersive. This is more of a visceral feeling of just like being able to run around in South Park and run around in the snow."

Instead of a movie, Stone explains that the new game is narratively "kind of like a long episode of South Park." The game will start with the low-stakes set up of the kids just wanting to play on a snow day, with any larger threat or narrative emerging more gradually.

Overall, Stone admits the game is taking some risks by straying so far from its much-loved predecessors, but the low pricing allows space for them to play around a bit more with a new format. "As a $29.99 game, that seemed like the right size for us to try 3D for the first time [and] make it work, make all those systems work without biting off too much and failing at it, you know."

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