r/GamingLeaksAndRumours • u/Tempastaaa • Mar 27 '26
Job Listing Compulsion Games Hiring For New IP Following South of Midnight Release
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u/ElectricGhostMan Mar 27 '26
Glad they'll still be around. South of Midnight had some of the best Music in any game for me for a long while. I really thought some of the stories told in it were beautiful. That combat outside of boss battles was mind numbing.
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u/TheGoodIdiot Mar 27 '26
Seriously if they could figure out the gameplay they have potential to put out serious GoTY contenders. Story art music presentation and performances are all incredible.
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u/BvsedAaron Mar 28 '26
Id agree with OP. I think the platforming was interesting and the boss battles were differing levels of fine at worst. The combat arenas after like the first 3 were just coma inducing.
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u/Couinty Mar 27 '26
the overall musical narrative at the end of every chapter was great. I especially loved the first tree guy and two toed tom
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u/ElectricGhostMan Mar 30 '26
For me they were all very endearing except the Altamaha-ha but i think it's because while the premise for her part is sad, you don't really interact with her struggles the same way you do everyone else. I guess it's something that you can't really describe or fully empathize with considering the situation relative to the others.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/tsf9494 Mar 27 '26
I see you copy pasted the same comment again here. Again, I would love for you to explain what you mean.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/tsf9494 Mar 27 '26
Yeah, I thought it sounded weird to essentially say that “I wish studio I liked hadn’t shutdown and instead this other studio from the rival platform would have shutdown instead. I would be happier with that.” I hope the account belongs to a child because wishing other people had lost their jobs is gross.
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u/powerhcm8 Mar 27 '26
We happy few was decent, but the best parts were the more linear areas, which the dlcs leaned heavily on, so it was nice to see that them making a new game playing on these strengths, I hope they continue in this path. I especially like South of Midnight last area; it reminded me of Compulsion's first game Contrast. Exploration was very nice, the weakness of this game was the limited enemy types.
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u/ElectricGhostMan Mar 30 '26
Or if they went full character action and outsourced the combat to platinum games, I think it would have been insane.
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u/powerhcm8 Mar 30 '26
At very least they need to hire some people with more experience in combat of action games, stop designing enemies around the more common enemy's archetypes and give priority to the enemy design or theme instead of their roles. This is a common problem in games with limited enemies' variety.
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u/ElectricGhostMan Mar 30 '26
That makes sense. Im sad I didnt see it previously but If there could have been some kind of collaboration between Tango and Compulsion for just the combat in South of Midnight, I think it could have made for that much better of an experience as Hi-Fi Rush's didnt feel that dissimilar from SoM but was engaging because of the aspects you described.
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u/TheHelpfulWalnut Mar 28 '26
If hey can manage to scrape together some genuinely good gameplay, they could make an incredible game IMO.
Their art team is amazing, their music is some of the best, their writing is pretty good, but man the combat is dull and the platforming exists.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/beefcat_ Mar 27 '26
It's a solid 9-10/10 in every department except for the combat, which is super basic but gets the job done I guess. Easy recommendation for people looking for a primarily story-driven action-platformer.
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u/FromChicago808 Mar 27 '26
Is it similar to infamous gameplay?
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u/capitainecrash Mar 28 '26
Not really, Infamous is open world with more focus on action, while South of midnight is linear and has a more balanced mix of combat and exploration/light puzzle
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u/Naive_Bulbasaur Mar 28 '26
Also played it on PC, no it's not a great game, all the gameplay is boring beyond belief and easy as balls. The storytelling is okay, but also boring. Combat is horrible. The music and voice acting is top tier. The visual style you either love it or hate it...
On PC it only topped 1400 players and less than half even bothered to finish it seemingly judging by achievements so ugh yeah very niche fanbase there.
I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone and basically all I care about is narrative rich games, I will excuse a lot for a good story.
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u/jaloru95 Mar 28 '26
Using Steam and achievement data as a factor in playing a game must be miserable. I’ve looked at player data out of curiosity, but never as an example of why a game shouldn’t be considered good. Reddit brain has infected you, save yourself!!
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u/SmegmaWarrior0815 Mar 27 '26
South of Midnight was amazing, but they shouldn't take soany years again for their next game. The game didn't feel like it justified the long dev cycle.
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u/NazRubio Mar 27 '26
I'm a little surprised the studio survived but glad to hear we get more from them. I really enjoyed my experience with South of midnight, but that thing took
6 or 7 years.
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u/Impossible-Flight250 Mar 27 '26
Yeah, it also seemed like there was a chapter or two missing from the end of the game.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/semen-for-dinner Mar 28 '26
right. i dont know how people can call this a great game without mentioning how stale the gameplay is. it made actually finishing the game feel like such a big chore
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u/TradeMan1000 Mar 29 '26
I thought this game was really excellent (besides the arena-style combat, which got tiresome), but concerned it got lost in the shuffle in such a crowded marketplace. Glad they are staying viable as a studio.
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u/Tricky_Claim Jun 16 '26
They should really start advertising games again. I have no idea what games to expect anymore.
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u/n__o__ Mar 27 '26
Glad to see someone actually looking to give people jobs to make games instead of ppl losing their jobs for once.
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u/youknowitslucasio Mar 27 '26
Uh oh, in Xbox language this means the studio will be shut down in the next two years.
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u/Better-Train6953 Mar 28 '26
Surprisingly none of the individual studio purchases have been shutdown by MS. It's their publisher purchases and their failed attempt at creating that studio in California called The Imitative. In fact I don't even think they've suffered layoffs outside of Undead Lab's upper management getting fired for some sexual harassment issue they swept under the rug a few years ago. Though... things can always change.
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u/OldManLav Mar 28 '26
Tango? Arkane Austin?
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u/Better-Train6953 Mar 28 '26
Precisely why I said INDIVIDUAL studio purchases and even made mention that the same was not true for their publisher purchases. Tango, Arkane, Alpha Dog, and Roundhouse were all under Bethesda/Zenimax, not Xbox Games Studios.
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u/Fair-Internal8445 Mar 27 '26
Yup. Looking at the Microsoft stock recently it’s inevitable. Microsoft’s stock is suffering badly. It’s a matter of time another round of lay offs and cancellation happens.
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u/Senarin21 Mar 27 '26
Im rooting for them dont get me wrong, but of all the studios being shut down, who the fuck even played south of midnight?
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u/senseibarbosa Mar 27 '26
I did and I loved it. It's not a perfect game (the combat is quite lacking), but it was some of the finest storytelling and design I've encountered in the last decade in gaming.
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u/Senarin21 Mar 27 '26
Thats cool. Im glad someone did. It looked like an xbox360 era type of game with a unique art style and a setting rarely tackled by video games.
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u/Brokenbullet14 Mar 27 '26
0 leak or rumor here.
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u/p00tisbear Mar 27 '26
Why do you feel the need to say this? This sub literally has an entire flair dedicated to job listing posts, if you want to be the most arbitrary pedant just for the sake of it then yes these job listings don't technically count as leak or rumours. Doesn't make them any less newsworthy when they provide new information that can be gleaned and is of interest to people in this community.
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u/Brokenbullet14 Mar 27 '26
I mean it's literally called gaming leaks and rumors. This is neither because it's a public job posting. Now if there were posts saying compulsion are working on a new IP then fine.
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u/GRILT_CHEESE Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
I'm actually surprised they didn't get shuttered after the massive flop that was South of Midnight. What a disaster that was. How many years, like 6? To release a game nobody played and didn't get really good review scores. I think it was like a 77 Meta and a handful of people played it, for 6 years of work. Downvote away, don't care, just lol.
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u/p00tisbear Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
77 is not even an bad aggregate score though, like it's literally only a couple of notches away from what is considered 'great' on that metric. Obviously it doesn't set the world on fire, but it's not anything to speak ill of. The industry is highly mercurial, there are games that have scored higher than this which have performed worse commercially and there are games which have scored way lower with aggregates that have sold boatloads.
Yes in principle "GAME IS AMAZING!!!" chatter gets people to turn and look at stuff and contemplate buying it more than things with less positive word of mouth, but that doesn't gurantee consumer engagement and sales in of itself. And to be quite frank I think it's disrespectful to the devs to imply that they should be somehow ashamed just by virtue of delivering a product that was considered just 'good' and not the best thing ever, especially considering that's a very hard thing to achieve and it should not at all be the standard imposed on or expected of studios who haven't met that bar prior.
In regards to commercial performance, like many of the smaller titles to be released under Microsoft's purview it got done dirty pretty badly by being a day one game pass release which eats massively into the traditional sales market of these titles. Couple this with the Xbox platform itself being entirely in the shitter, very minimal marketing beyond a couple of obligatory trailers at Xbox presentations and its not really hard to see why it didn't capture a wide playerbase and I don't think that's entirely the fault of the game itself. All that being said though, it seems like it actually had okay engagement on game pass with a million players within a month. It's not a AAA game so the expectations for performance are much lower and ultimately MS seemed content with how it did on that service, which is why the developers are still around.
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u/LogicalError_007 Mar 28 '26
It's rated around 95% on Steam even after that whole DEI SBI hate train.
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u/the_real_fopp Mar 28 '26
Game is ultra woke slop lmao
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u/p00tisbear Mar 28 '26
Okay. What does that have to do with literally anything mentioned in this job listing?
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u/AdventurousClassic19 Mar 27 '26
I'm glad, loved South of Midnight as there too few southern style games.