Friday The 13th Delayed, But Getting Singleplayer
Eat it, teens
Good horror news/bad(?) horror news. Let's go good first: upcoming multiplayer slasherfest Friday the 13th: The Game [official site] will be getting a singleplayer side after launch and AI bots too, developers IllFonic and publishers Gun Media have announced. Bad(?) news: it's delayed from its planned autumn launch into 2017.
That sounds good considering that its rival-to-be Dead by Daylight is also getting its own licensed movie killer, Michael Meyers, but can be janky and lacks singleplayer. It'd be nice for Friday the 13th to arrive proper polished.
Friday the 13th, to recap, is a 1v7 multiplayer game casting one player as Jason Vorhees and the rest as potential victims. Hapless teens will try to avoid getting supermurdered and, hopefully, escape. Maybe they'll fix the phones and call the rozzers, maybe they'll repair a boat to cross Crystal Lake, maybe they'll even try to fight Jace. It sounds a fair bit like and more freeform than Dead by Daylight, where teens are always trying to restart generators to open gates. Meanwhile, the Jason player is trying wants to murder the teens, using his mild supernatural powers like tracking people and magically warping around to pop up in just the right place.
Here's the new plan: a multiplayer-only version of Friday the 13th will launch in spring 2017, then singleplayer will follow in summer 2017. "Singleplayer includes both offline bots and several missions ripped straight from the films," is the official word.
The announcement also mentions boshing a third map into multiplayer, Packanack Lodge (from Friday the 13th Part 2), along with serial survivor Tommy Jarvis as a playable character.
2017's Fridays the 13th are in January and October, so expect a wholly inappropriate release date when the multiplayer launches in spring.
Here, this old, pre-alpha 'gameplay' (which looks to include a lot of players roleplaying, to my eyes) from June shows a bit of how the game will do hide 'n' facesmash:
