‘XIII’ Developer and Publisher Apologizes For Remake

Last week, a remake of the cult-hit shooter XIII was released and was met with negative reviews. The FPS from 2003 was praised for its unique cell-shaded comic book art style, but the remake abandoned its original look for far less impressive art direction. Meanwhile, the game was released with a number of audio and graphical glitches, along with a ton of bugs and a limit to how many weapons the player can carry.

On Friday the 13th, publisher Microids and the developer of the remake, Playmagic, released an official statement apologizing to the community for the low-quality product, blaming the ongoing COVID-19 as the reason for the end product.

“We would like to offer our most sincere apologies for the game’s technical issues. In its present state, XIII does not meet our quality standards, and we fully understand players’ frustrations. The pandemic has impacted the game’s production on many levels. Pivoting to home working for the teams has added unexpected delays in the development schedule and the QA process. We hoped we would be able to provide a Day One patch fixing all the issues, but the development of this update is taking more time than expected.”

“We want to assure you that PlayMagic is working hard to solve all the game’s issues. With live monitoring and multiple patches in the upcoming days and weeks, we hope to reach the quality level we all expect for the optimum gaming experience.”

The first patch will be arriving sometime this week, with the devs hoping it will fix some of the issues with the game’s controls, frame rate, collisions, rendering and sound.

Currently, XIII has a user score of 2 out of 10 on Steam, with over 550 user reviews written. For those who still wish to experience the 2003 game, the original XIII is available on Steam for about $6