The Rise and Fall Guys of Cheater Island

Fall Guys is so hot right now. The plucky Takeshi’s Castle / obstacle course Battle Royale has taken the world by storm due to its bright, light streaming potential and free PlayStation Plus launch. Now, more than a month after release, a new mid-season update has added a bunch of new features but none are more interesting than how the team has been dealing with cheaters.

Having played Fall Guys, cheating seems kind of ridiculous. It’s a bumbling kind of game where skill and luck seem to have interchanging weight at all times. I’m sure winning a crown would feel great, but not having done so what I enjoy about Fall Guys is the fun bouncy ridiculous ride.

Cheating feels like it gets rid of everything that makes Fall Guys the hit that it is, and the dev team at Mediatonic tried to teach people this directly through some interesting lessons.

In a series of tweets, the official Fall Guys account talks about a Cheater Island that was created to group fans of foul play together. Great lengths were taken to ensure only cheaters went there, and if there weren’t enough people the cheaters would fall forever in loading.

Beautifully, many took to the internet to complain about this free fall glitch, potentially outing themselves as good for nothing Crown Thieves.

Soon enough Cheater Island’s population rose in numbers enough to allow for actual games. Videos began to appear of what looked like really glitchy games where players would suddenly teleport to the end or other off-looking shenanigans. Again, the Fall Guys team is pretty sure these videos are just all examples of Cheater Island doing its job but they couldn’t let anyone know and give away the secret and, given they look super glitchy, it doesn’t reflect well on the game.

So in the mid-season update appropriately named Big Yeetus and Anti-Cheatus, Fall Guys will be enlisting Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat rather than having a cool island full of criminals which in no way was like Australia.

The Big Yeetus part of the update refers to a new large hammer that can appear on stages that swings wildly. Anyone who’s played Fall Guys will know that being hit by a hammer is true chaotic energy. I’ve had some send me soaring almost to first place while others have knocked me out of the competition entirely. The Big Yeetus is said to be no different. It holds no alliance to bean nor guy, and simply exists to yeet like an object of pure instinct.

Other inclusions within the update that are neither cheatus nor yeetus include the ability to assign mouse buttons to game actions, new dynamic objects, better connection stability, lower minimum player counts for certain stages so they appear more often, and the Fall Ball timer has gone down to 120 seconds rather than 150.

Fall Guys first season is set to wrap up in early October making way for the second which will be medieval themed. New minigames and costumes are coming too, so maybe people can get some sort of false crown that way rather than by nefarious means.

Don't forget to check out our episode of High Resolution where Seamus spoke with two of the devs at Mediatonic back when it was just fanciful thinking that this would become the feel good hit of the pandemic.