Personally, I recall a very familiar version of Golf With Your Friends, where nobody’s actually trying to win. Forget lining up your putt, you’ve got a glint in your eye as you see your friend positioned precariously close to that landmine.
“We very affectionately call it Golf With Your Enemies”, laughs Annie Grudeva, Lead Designer at Radical Forge, the studio behind the sequel (releasing in Autumn this year) to Team17’s mini-golf party game. “You’re not playing to win, you’re playing so your friends don’t win – pinging others off the course, taking advantage of the collision.”
It’s expressed with a smile, but it’s very much the foundation upon which the title was built. When Grudeva and Team17 Portfolio Director Harriet Hughes sat down to ponder what Golf With Your Friends 2 needed to be, they didn’t just start with a discussion around graphics or physics. Instead, they observed how people actually interacted with the first game and identified three distinct types of players. I’ll broadly bucket them into: try-hards, troublemakers, and Zen masters.
Image Credit: Team17/Radical Forge
If my experience is anything to go by, I had a penchant for hopping into a game with mates, calm and collected. By the third hole, my sweaty competitive side had well and truly emerged, and upon conceding to myself that I was a hopeless case and never going to win, I’d become petulant, flippant, and chaos-inducing.
Grudeva describes my initial intentions with aplomb, the attitude of “we’re just going to put the game on, catch up on the score, see who’s doing what.” It’s still, at its core, a party game that friends can play while sipping a pint, rather than a full-blown hardcore competition.
Then there’s the inherent competitor which probably lives in all of us; chasing under-par scores on every hole, trying to stay composed when we see a ball disappear into the ether on the world’s most irritating workshop map.
And then, the troublemaker. Every group has at least one person who knows they’re just not very good and enjoys nothing more than sparking a reaction from the try-hard who treats Golf With Your Friends like they’re playing in the Ryder Cup.
“That’s our biggest learning,” Grudeva says. “We wanted to build a game that leans into all three player archetypes.” Every course in Golf With Your Friends 2 comes with a setting that can dial the difficulty down for the Zen crowd or crank it up for the one that can’t bear losing. However, it’s the chaos built for those who love meddling that absolutely defines the sequel.
You’re not playing to win, you’re playing so your friends don’t win – pinging others off the course, taking advantage of the collision.
Unlimited chaos
Chaos Mode, the game’s headline new feature, started small. “It was just weather at first,” Grudeva explains, “a little rain cloud here, a puddle there. That’s not fun, let’s push this thing to a thousand.”
The result? A system with so many mechanics, variations, and possibilities that by the developer’s own estimate, you’d have to replay the same hole ten thousand times to see the exact same combination twice.
It still caters to those who do hours of calm-inducing breathwork a day and can keep their patience while the world explodes around them. “You can take more time, and really angle your shot, because your hole-in-one is completely different now,” she explains. But at the same time, that inner child can come out, and you can reap the reward of catapulting your mate into a mine and watching them explode off the course.
Chaos has no quarantine, either. It layers into Dunk, Hockey, and Explore modes too, so a friend-mode that wants a different experience, with everything exploding around them, can have that too.
None of these features are put into the game to alienate a player who is serious about their mini-golf, though. Grudeva reaffirms that it’s still very much built with enjoyment in mind for everyone. “We didn’t want to make a game that was punishing for no reason,” she says. “If you’re someone who’s going to take your time, go slow and steady – maybe you’re not going to have the highest score, but you’re still going to enjoy the game.”
There are decisions for players to make, balancing risk and reward with every stroke. At Ukie’s For One Night Only, there’s a demo downstairs, which is a level mixed with pinball. There are pinball bumpers, which I know full well, and if I hit them at the right angle, I’ll be launched towards the hole.
As I gear up, ready to take the shot, I ask myself “who am I?” The illicit child of Albert Einstein and Jack Nicklaus of course. The reality is very different. The calculus I’ve done in my little head is…completely wrong, and instead, I’m chucked into the next neighborhood. “It’s about having that dual purpose to everything, as much as possible,” Grudeva tells me.
We didn’t want to make a game that was punishing for no reason,
Serious enough to play, but not taking itself too seriously
Given the penchant for watching popular streamers play party games that are also rooted in skill, I float the idea of Golf With Your Friends2, being played in front of thousands at an event and Hughes doesn’t rule it out – but she’s far from angling for it either.
“I never say never” she chuckles, humoring my suggestion. “But I think that part of it is that it’s very tongue-in-cheek, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. At the end of the day, you don’t have to be good at golf to play Golf With Your Friends. It’s not designed to be too technical.”
There’s probably a reason that we’ve not had Fall Guys and other popular party games pop up at esports competitions. But hey, hear me out, in an industry which sometimes takes itself far too seriously, I’ve again convinced myself that there’s an appetite for watching players explode around 72 holes of chaos mode with $1 million on the line. Golf With Your Friends 2 Esports World Championship, when?
I think it’s much more about creating memories, sparking friendships, either reconnecting with old friends or making new ones through these games
The level editor holds the key
If Chaos Mode is where the troublemakers thrive, the Level Editor provides a safe space for those who want a peaceful time. It’s also, Hughes and Grudeva explain, intrinsic to the game’s long-term future.
Golf One’s course creator was a massive hit, but it was locked to Steam. For the upcoming sequel, Team17 and Radical Forge rebuilt it as a fully cross-platform tool. Players can build a course on Xbox, upload it to mod.io, and someone on PC or PlayStation can play it the same day.
Image Credit: Team17/Radical Forge
“It was a huge, very important part of Golf One”, says Hughes, “but obviously it was limited to one platform. The real intention here was to bring that to all players on all platforms – for them to be able to share their courses across all platforms.”
For Team17, it’s not just a nice-to-have feature; it’s the key to the title’s longevity. “That gives us a huge amount of potential for the future – things like creator tournaments, branding opportunities,” Hughes explains. “We found people were really hungry for content before, and they get through content quickly, so having thousands of community-created courses to go and play is definitely going to create the longevity.”
The crossplay functionality and expanded Level Editor were also a large driving force behind the fact that Team17 pressed the go button on a sequel, rather than another round of DLC. “I don’t think the Golf One codebase would have enabled that in the fullest sense,” Hughes states. “It felt like, to futureproof the franchise, it was better to make that investment now, so there’s something for the next ten years.”
Creating memories and sparking friendships
It strikes me as crucial in the game development cycle to engineer that long-tail potential for party games now, in a world where there are party games aplenty, and the term “friendslop” is banded about in what feels like a demeaning fashion.
“For me, [friendslop] implies something isn’t polished, and that there isn’t franchise potential,” asserts Hughes. “The games we’re responsible for at Team17 are incredibly long-standing franchises, with fans spanning all generations – so for me, it’s a bit of a sloppy term, if you’ll pardon the pun,” she laughs.
I will admit, the bulk of my interviews at FONO were about games that emphasize joviality – that bring smiles to the faces of people who are feeling the heft of a world which can often feel very small and dark. Golf With Your Friends 2, underneath the mines, pinball bumpers, and community courses, is built on that very rubric.
“Games don’t have to be super-competitive, dark, and rage-baiting,” Hughes agrees. “They can be an opportunity for people to connect with their friends – something they’re playing in the background while having a great conversation, or catching up.”
“I think it’s much more about creating memories, sparking friendships, either reconnecting with old friends or making new ones through these games,” Hughes continues, “that feeling of connectedness is incredibly important – everybody’s feeling more isolated right now – and having these opportunities to connect, with something like twelve players, is a great way of catching up with eleven other people.”
Grudeva’s hope for the year after launch is a community that tears up the playbook and runs in every single direction simultaneously, and she harks back to what she saw in Mario Maker. “I’d love to see big, complex courses,” she smiles, “but also, those small, quirky things. I hope we see that wide range of courses, people playing and engaging with them. It’s not just about the base game – it’s about appreciating how creative people are.”
Whatever camp you fall into – Zen, try-hard, or obnoxious troublemaker – and perhaps you’re all three – what seems to be the actual bet with Golf With Your Friends 2 is that chaos is not a distraction from connection; it’s the delivery mechanism for it.
This interview was conducted at Ukie’s For One Night Only showcase. You can read our other coverage from the event here:
Ollie has worked across video games, esports, and gambling for more than ten years, including consultancy work in the gambling industry. His bylines include BBC, Red Bull Gaming, Esports Insider, CasinoBeats, PC Gamer, Green Man Gaming, and Esprouts, his Substack on the overlap between games and gambling. Whereas he once enjoyed the chaos of PvP and running six WoW Classic accounts to min-max every aspect of his gaming life, Ollie now enjoys a tycoon or management game with far less pressure (and people) involved.
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