South Park: The Stick of Truth has been a long time coming, in part because of the ambition of the project. At a San Diego Comic-Con panel, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained how the game grew to epic, somewhat unrealistic proportions.

Polygon reports that after taking inspiration from Skyrim, the script became 850 pages and included "just about every character" from South Park. The team at Obsidian joked that they were targeting "holiday season 2032." They were urged to cut, and make extra content into DLC. Parker noted that the cut content will "get out there" somehow, possibly as TV episodes.

"We did have this whole delusion of actually incorporating the game into the season," Parker said, "but that sounds like a bitch. We really just wanted it to be that you could pick it up anywhere and it would kind of make sense."

The pair also said they didn't know much about THQ's financial troubles. "We really just read about it in the news," Parker said, "that they were going bankrupt, that someone else bought [the rights to] the game. Once we heard who had bought it, we got really excited. We flew up to [Ubisoft] and all that momentum picked up and we got really excited again."