Friday the 13th: The Game Team Breaks Silence on Past Issues and Upcoming Single Player Plans

The team over at Gun Media and IllFonic have been hard at work on the Friday the 13th game since its rocky launch. With more content than ever before, new DLC, and breaking a Guinness World Record in their spare time, the team behind the survival horror game have much more up their sleeve in the future. But before they move forward, they want to address a few important issues seen in recent months.

Though no concrete dates have been set yet, Gun Media put together a fun Content Guide (seen above) that looks like something straight out of Summer Camp. Fitting with the game’s setting, this handy guide lays out the future plans for the horror title including new counselors, new kills, clothing, challenges, and more.

Reason for the delays and silence

The message to players on the official game’s forum starts off with an explanation from the admins about their silence concerning recent delays and ineffective patches: 

“I know we have been pretty quiet in terms of the Xbox not getting patches or being delayed but it is really because there happens to be no good answer we can give the community that fixes the problem with delays. The reality is that, as of right now, the cert process on Xbox takes the longest of the platforms and if something happens it starts the process over again.”

In an effort to make up for the lack of communication, this handy guide has been configured to give a little insight to future plans for the game itself. 

The statement begins by explaining just what went wrong with the August patches on Xbox One. There were a series of memory leak issues that occurred last month that negatively impacted players on the Microsoft consoles. Because of this, Xbox fans kept running into their game crashing for no apparent reason. After a few weeks, the team was able to track down what went wrong and fix the initial memory leak but at the cost of many resources. The patch that sought to fix the subsequent bugs seemed to do the trick on the PS4 and PC, but Xbox kept blocking the recent update. 

The reason behind the block was because of the Disc Build going through cert. According to Gertz, 

“I know you are not going to like this answer but the patch was blocked by the Disc Build that was going through cert. Aside from time, for Xbox, we can only have one thing in cert at a time so we had to wait for it to clear. Disc cert was a little different as well, we had to first submit the exclusive DLC content in one cert and then the disc version that had the game and DLC as a bundle in a subsequent cert. There were no failures in cert but we did bottleneck ourselves with multiple back-to-back certifications for a couple of weeks.”

Good news is that as of today, the next patch is near complete to fix all of the above issues. The full patch notes for that specific update can be found here. 

What’s new for Single Player?

Now that the last of the major bugs should be wrapped up, the focus can now be shifted towards future plans. That includes some major updates coming to the single-player mode of the game. 

The initial for SP was supposed to release earlier this summer, but because of the previously mentioned issues; those plans saw an immediate delay. It is understandable that the team would not want to continuously barrage the game with new content when the base game was still so broken. With the game more stabilised, the team at Gun Media and IllFonic can move forward with their initial plans. 

Gun Media has hired several different contractors and split up multiple teams to conquer the single-player tasks at once so that they are independently worked on and released independently as well. This move allows for a smoother release of new content so that it is not dependant on anything else outside of that particular DLC pack. 

While discussing the allocation of single-player responsibilities and goals, Gun Media also wanted to clear up a few misconceptions about the affect new updates have on the game and its single-player components: 

“I also want to address the misconception that certain content we launch affects single player. It doesn’t. An artist working on outfits is not the same person that is programming AI. The designer setting up scripted events for single player is not making the new Jason models. What does impact Single Player are the bugs and stability issues; that AI programmer may have to shift to fixing a bug occasionally. The designer may have to shift to fix balance or gameplay bugs on maps. This is why we are delayed. We made the decision to fix rather than add new stuff which again, is what caused the delay.”

As seen in the image at the top of this article, the next update players will see in-game will include the Free Emote Pack, Spring Break Clothing DLC, and Part IV Jason, as well as a few new maps and counselors on the way. 

Friday the 13th: The Game is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.