Friday The 13th Dev Discusses Progress On Dedicated Servers

Friday the 13th launched last year, and although it sold well, it had frequent stability, performance, and server issues. In response to these issues and player feedback, developer IllFonic and publisher Gun Media announced in October that they would be upgrading the game to a newer version of Unreal Engine. Today, they provided an update on their progress toward this goal, saying that the engine upgrade is a couple of months out–and it’ll set the stage for dedicated servers on PS4 and Xbox One.

In a post on Friday the 13th’s forum, community lead Daniel Nixon explained the improvements that the engine upgrade will hopefully bring. Among other things, it’ll likely improve physics, increase performance on all platforms, and fix “long-standing issues that will be automatically resolved by moving to the new engine version.”

The highlight of the engine upgrade is making it possible to roll out dedicated servers to console players. These servers are designed to provide much better multiplayer stability. There’s still no release timeframe for the dedicated servers, however. “Our focus has to be on the [engine] update first,” Nixon wrote. “So we’ll need to wait until that’s wrapping up to start estimating the work remaining to get to dedicated servers, and provide you with that information.”

However, in order to successfully achieve the engine upgrade, the developer is halting regular game updates. According to Nixon, the studio is transitioning the full team to this task, which will preclude it from developing other patches. IllFonic is targeting an April release for the upgrade.