It’s April Fool’s Day, and plenty of developers are getting in on the action! Some have been announcing bogus new characters (looking at you, Riot Games) while some have been adding in ridiculous new game modes to get everyone in the playing mood, like PUBG Corp’s new Fantasy Battle Royale.
Klei Entertainment wasn’t going to let the holiday go by without getting in on the celebration. They’ve announced a new “update” to the game’s resident mime, Wes, along with an adorable little animated short that you can watch below.
“We know that Wes is largely considered the most overpowered of all the survivors, but with this refresh, we’ve challenged ourselves to bring out even more of his potential,” Klei writes in their totally-legit patch notes. “Now, our most beloved character is finally getting the attention he deserves and has been polished to perfection. We hope that players enjoy just how much these radical changes affect his gameplay!”
So what are those changes that so radically change our favorite mime? Klei has done the following:
- Fixed several typos in Wes’s strings
- Resolved conflicts in Wes’s “internal dialogue”
- Increased height and width of Wes’s invisible walls by exactly 9%
- Decreased the maximum weight of Wes’s bicycle
- Further decreased experience required to unlock Wes (of whom is automatically unlocked at the start of the game)
- Replaced sense of existential dread with acceptance of the inevitable (which we could probably all use nowadays, honestly)
- Increased durability of pile o’ balloons
- Adjusted sense of reality to include that which inherently cannot be understood, effectively making Wes a Lovecraftian deity
- Applied a fresh coat of facepaint
- And perhaps most importantly, increased the length of pantomimed rope by 25%
If you haven’t picked up on the language, Wes isn’t getting any changes in this April Fool’s patch. There are, unfortunately, no invisible walls and we cannot have much of an effect on Wes’s understanding of that which inherently cannot be understood.
Still, it’s a fun little distraction from the stresses of everything nowadays, which Klei seems to have picked up on.
“We don’t usually do ‘surprises’ like this, but we came up with the idea a couple of weeks back and it just sounded like a fun thing to do while we try to keep ourselves sane,” Klei writes. And if you’re worried about this affecting productivity, don’t be concerned. Klei says that the entire short took less than two weeks from start to finish and that none of this silliness has slowed down their content plan.
