The highly anticipated remake of 2003’s first-person action title XIII released this week, after a delay of nearly one year. Unfortunately, the game was received negatively by both players and critics pretty much across the board upon launch, due to changes from the original game that were deemed unnecessary, gameplay problems and limitations, as well as serious audio and technical issues in the XIII remake.
Now the game’s developer PlayMagic and publisher Microids have released an official statement to apologize to gamers for the numerous problems they’ve encountered with the remake, and to say that player disappointment and their legitimate criticisms have been heard loud and clear by the development team.
“In its present state, XIII does not meet our quality standards and we fully understand players’ frustrations,” the statement reads. It then goes on to explain that, as with many video game projects due for release in 2020 or next year, development was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Transitioning from an office working environment to a situation where the majority of employees had to work from home inevitably resulted in hiccups in the development pipeline and the QA process.
PlayMagic was aware of at least some of the issues with the XIII remake when it released and had hoped to fix many of them with a day one patch. However, development of the planned update has taken longer than expected, causing many of the problems to remain in the game longer than intended. The developer then reassures players that it is working hard to solve the game's various issues and intends to release multiple smaller patches in the upcoming days and weeks that will hopefully bring the game’s quality up to standard.
The first patch to fix the game’s most urgent issues—control, framerate, collision, rendering, and sound problems—is expected to release soon, though the statement did not specify when, and a list of intended future fixes has been made available for players to view online. These include rectifying problems with the game crashing in certain locations and situations, graphical glitches, and dialog cutting off unexpectedly or missing entirely. Gameplay issues such as missing objective markers, specific missions being broken, and players sometimes being unable to pick up ammo are also earmarked to receive an overhaul.
The statement by PlayMagic and Microids finishes by thanking the XIII gaming community for all of the feedback and reassuring players that comments and reported issues will be carefully reviewed and passed on to the development team. PlayMagic is also currently working on creating a detailed roadmap that will provide information about upcoming free additional content such as new levels, skins, local multiplayer modes, and weapons for the XIII remake.
XIII is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and a Nintendo Switch version is planned for release in 2021.
Source: Microids.com