Dangerous Golf developer rules out expansions or sequels

Dangerous Golf, the game about wrecking things with your club and balls, is by most reports—including ours—not particularly good. So the desire for more, be it through an expansion or a sequel, may not be running all that hot anyway. But on the off-chance that you were looking forward to more courses or options in the future, the news isn't good: When Console Obsession asked Three Fields Entertainment Creative Director Alex Ward if the game will “continue to evolve over time,” he answered bluntly, “No.”

The bottom line is that Dangerous Golf hasn't yet met sales expectations, and so the team simply can't afford to do anything else with it. “We pooled our life savings to start our studio and to start making games. We’re a 100 percent player-supported studio. Every copy sold directly supports our 11 person development team. The money goes to the people who actually make the game,” Ward said.

“We’re a small indie team. Tiny by comparison to almost all other teams operating on the platforms we develop for,” he continued. “We’ve always listened to feedback and our customers and we all take that really seriously. Whilst we’d love to be able to add more levels to the game—the reality is that we just can’t afford to do so.”

He also explained the absence of replays, even though they'd appear to be an obvious fit for a game about smashing things to smithereens in glorious, UE4-powered detail—“Replays sound fun to everyone who hasn’t had to spend time implementing them and testing them for a videogame”—and explained why the online multiplayer was kind of a bust.

“The constraint is that players are interacting with over 3500 dynamic objects in the Holes,” he said. “Modern shooters mainly only network player positions of 24 people on consoles. Networking incredibly intensive physics simulations is a challenge for a massive development team—and even more so for a tiny indie like us. It is the same reason why games like Just Cause 3 don’t have networked simulations. Throwing physics around online is incredibly tough.”

As for the future, Ward said it's no secret that the studio would like to make a driving game next—by which he presumably means a racing sim, as befits Three Fields' roots in Burnout studio Criterion, and not an arcade driving range game.

Thanks, MCV.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.