Devs Blame Xbox’s Cert Process for Lack of Patches
Illfonic has broken the silence regarding Friday the 13th: The Game‘s rocky launch that has seen some delay for the promised single-player content, and a lack of patches for the buggy Xbox One version. The devs shared their apology and outline for future content in a letter in the game’s official forum.
Regarding the single player content which was originally promised for a summer release, Gertz says:
“Let’s talk about single player. Currently we are behind on the Summer date. There are number of reasons why this is, but it all boils down to making sure we are not releasing new content while still having issues with the core game. There were a number of issues we needed to address with the games stability prior to committing additional resources to making Single Player happen. We now feel we have turned that corner and have doubled down on Single Player to try and catch up.
We have hired additional people, are working with contractors and even diverted others working on other tasks to help. We have also decided to take a look at Single Player and we are breaking it into a number of different experiences that can be released independent of one another. This way as soon as one thing is done we can launch it without having to wait on everything else.
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 for the tricky Xbox patches, he says the platform’s certification process, which is one of the last hoops devs must jump through to get their game on that platform, has been difficult to work around:
“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.
Here is a timeline of the last month and where we are now…
Through most of August we were dealing with the Memory Leak issue that was causing Xbox players to crash consistently. It took weeks to track down the issue and took a majority of our engineering resources. We also got engineering support from outside sources as well. By mid-end of August we were able to go into cert with the memory leak fixed but ended up failing because of lobby issues and a few other crashes/stability. While it was far more stable that the July patch, the right call was to fix the issues. At the end of August we released the patch that is currently live on Xbox. We got a ton of great feedback and were able to resolve a number of bugs quickly which we were then able to roll out on PS4 and PC but ended up getting blocked on Xbox.
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.
So as of today, we are clear and finalizing the next patch internally which I posted about here along with a couple of notes on issues we have addressed: http://forum.f13game.com/index.php?/topic/10636-state-of-the-camp-sept-7th-2017/
Again, there is nothing we can do about the cert process but right now we are moving forward with bug fixing rolling at ASAP on any platform but new content coming out together on all three platforms. This is still tough to do but this is what we are going to attempt.”
Besides that, Gun Media also put out a handy graphic that rounds up what’s in the pipeline for Friday the 13th:
Friday the 13th: The Game is out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC now. One day, I hope we’ll see Rebecca Black and Kevin Bacon as DLC characters.
Source: Illfonic