XIII Remake Developer Apologizes for Their Awful Job

Last week, the remake of the cult classic FPS XIII was released on Steam. Long story short, people didn't like it. Not only did it strip away the iconic cell-shaded comic style that made the first one so memorable, it's got a plethora of bugs that makes the game rather miserable to play through.

The negative reaction to the remake has been so pronounced, in fact, that both the publisher and developer (Microids and PlayMagic, respectively) have issued an apology on the former's website.

First and foremost, 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 update will be pushed shortly to fix the most urgent issues regarding the controls, frame rate, collisions, rendering and sound.

I don't doubt the pandemic is to blame for the bugs. Some teams are better at the "work at home" thing than others. Not sure about the stylistic change, but in their apology they also said that they were listening to user feedback and were preparing ways to hopefully make things right with the community.

It always sucks when a game... well, sucks, but at least the studio is responsive and seems to care. It's not much of a win, but it's something.