There’s a remake of cult classic XIII out, and it sucks! It’s cheap, it’s rushed and it strips away some of the only things people liked about the original, namely its bold cel-shaded comic book art style. For that, both the publishers and developers are now — only now, after everyone has panned the game — sorry.
[referenced id=”1192469″ url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/11/the-xiii-remake-is-not-good/” thumb=”https://www.gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/11/suhoa10mngonc0ev99qc-300×169.jpg” title=”The XIII Remake Is Not Good” excerpt=”Cult classic XIII, a cel-shaded shooter from 2003, has been remade, with the newer version out today. And boy, fans of the original are not happy with it.”]
In a joint statement issued on the site of publishers Microids, both they and developers PlayMagic say (emphasis mine):
Greetings,
The highly anticipated remake of XIII, awaited by many fans, came out earlier this week. Unfortunately, players expectations have not been met by the launch version and we hear loud and clear the legitimate criticism and disappointment.
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. For information about the upcoming patches, please follow this link:
In addition, we wanted to thank the community for all the feedback. We are reviewing every single comment carefully, passing along the bugs and issues to the development team. Feel free to send us your feedback and questions to: support_XIII@microids.com
Finally, know that we are working on a detailed road map highlighting the upcoming free additions to the game content like new levels, weapons, skins and modes for the local multiplayer.
We are aiming to please all the XIII fans and we’ll work relentlessly to achieve our goal.
The teams at Microids and PlayMagic
Blaming the pandemic is pretty weak, since there was surely no super important deadline they had to hit with this! At least 2020’s sports games had an excuse for being a little light, but nobody was demanding a remake of a 2003 shooter land this quarter or else. If the pandemic was causing “unexpected delays”, just…delay the game!
Anyway, I said this last week, but you can still buy the original for pocket change, which at this seems like a much better way to play the game than wait for this to somehow be made less terrible.
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