English
Gamereactor
news
Friday the 13th: The Game

No Friday the 13th release date because of consoles

Gun Media outline the hurdles they have to overcome.

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

Do you want to play Friday the 13th: The Game as much as we do and wonder when we can do this? Well, it turns out so do the developers. In a lengthy post over at their forums, Wes Keltner from Gun Media explains what is taking them so long. It turns out the game is almost done, but the certification for consoles make things a lot harder:

"Once we have a candidate (feature and content complete) we have to send a build to Sony and Microsoft," Keltner explains. "Their internal teams test the game against a very intense checklist to make sure we pass. We have some details on how this process is "graded" but we don't have everything they check against."

It's not too hard to understand why not knowing what you need to pass is hard, but it actually gets worse: "Additionally, each territory has different guidelines. Let's just look at Sony. There's SCEA, SCEE, SCEJ and Sony Asia. Each of these territories has a different rule book and we don't have access to all of these. So, to a certain degree, we go at this a little blind. What passes in North America, may not pass in Japan for example."

Unfortunately, Sony is not the only company making things harder when it comes to certification, as Microsoft also offers extra hurdles with Xbox One: "There are several "levels" to passing certification. The first level is pretty basic; Does it boot and can you start a game? While other levels are far, far more intricate. For example; MS still requires that we support Kinect, yet they no longer sell/bundle this device for XB1. You, as the player, still need to be able to say "Xbox Record That." You also need to be able to hot swap between apps, while the game is still running in the background. These console features actually use one of the CPU cores, thus taking one of those away from us, the developer. It's like building a car, only to figure out that the Engine is a V8, but you can only use 7 of the cylinders. Bummer."

"Additionally, what happens if a player boots F13, but has a Rockband peripheral plugged in? Well, we have to support that to at least allow the player to navigate around to get back to the home screen so they can swap out for a proper controller."

It's a really interesting read if you want to know more about this process and why big resources help a lot. Keltner ends by saying that when the game has reached gold status, we can expect that the actual launch will be roughly one month away. Just don't expect any pre-orders until then, because Microsoft and Sony won't allow that either.

Do you think this process of jumping through hurdles to get on consoles is too lengthy?

Friday the 13th: The Game

Related texts



Loading next content