Publisher of Poor XIII Remake Seems to Miss the Point with Apology Post

That art style is terrible! Completely covers half of her cleavage for no reason! And her hair’s flipping the wrong way.
Oh, yeah, and it just generally looks like terrible polygonal models rather than terrible comic artwork.

The price doesn't help either.

They're just sorry that it got such bad reviews and they've consequently taken less sales than they'd hoped.

So now we get the standard whiney 'please listen to us and understand' non-apology for releasing a buggy, unfinished game instead of putting more resources into it or delaying it.

"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"

I'm sorry but you cannot make that statement for a product that you have deemed up to your quality standards enough to take people's money. The developers deserve absolutely no respect after admitting to that and they won't be getting any of my money as they simply do not deserve it. Also that art style is crap, I'll just play the better looking original on my PS2 instead

"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."

Is this going to be the excuse now for every sh*tty game for the next year or two?

The return window for my copy is rapidly closing, so I’ll hang on and hope that the patch(es) can salvage the experience.

Not too bothered about the graphical changes. What I do find incredible is that the game had already been delayed over a year for ‘added polish!’ Imagine what state it must have been in 12 months ago! 😱

Cue the South Park Cthulu episode corporate "We're sorry!" ....that the gaming press & twitter picked up on how buggy this was before we could sell enough copies based off nostalgia!
Yep,it doesn't meet our QA standards but we put it out there anyway! It's that dastardly Day 1 patch's fault!
So I suppose Blacksad must be running an absolute treat by now with its patches after the review highlighted it's ps4 shortcomings,right?
Okay,I thought the Toki remake was alright,but seems to be a bit of a pattern with Microids published titles.

I find it perfectly fine of them to apologize for the technical problems and not for the "artistic direction", because that is still up to the studio to decide.
What I don't understand is why people are even disappointed? The original was lame, what could this ever offer? And if you don't like the style, the trailers made no secret of it! It's not the 90s where you have to go by cover art and if lucky a magazine article.

I can't stand fortnight lol this looked bad but hopefully given time the will patch it.

I really wanted to play through this again. But after seeing what they did to it, I won’t bother. Very strange decision to destroy the art style. The visuals were the only thing that made this game stand out.

First, I think the new art style completely destroys what made this game interesting in the first place. It has been turned into a sub-par look-alike.

That being said, the expectation that they would issue an update re-doing the entire art-style of the game seems somewhat unrealistic at this point. They would have to remake the game again.

So, all they really can do at this point is fix the technical issues.

On the other hand, blaming the pandemic for a poor quality product is totally unacceptable from my perspective. They chose to release a game knowing it was full of bugs. They could have delayed the release until it was of sufficient quality.

Issues like this are why I never criticize a video game for delays. I would much rather see a delay than a crap product released.

I still have it on Gamecube and actually quite like the new visual style of the PC remake. Went back to Gamecube game yesterday and I have to say, it hasn't aged well .... not that it was a particularly good game (regarding gameplay or graphics) to start with. If they fix the bugs it'll be a decent little game with interesting cartoony style. Not great but certainly not the unmitigated disaster some are claiming.

After Blacksad I gave Microids and another chance. I didn't think they could mess XIII up but they did. I know theres a pandemic but they had an extra year to get this ready regardless. Should've bit the bullet and delayed again. Even if its not cel shaded they shouldn't have released the game in this state.

Bit convenient that the steam version of the original is on sale right now though. Almost as if they knew this remake wasn't up to scratch

@God_of_Nowt It's called a remake for a reason not a reimagining...

Much as I hate the remake's new, worse, art-style you can't expect the developer to apologise for it. It's not just a bug that can be fixed.

@God_of_Nowt I get what you are saying and I may be with you if they offered something original in the art department but instead its just copied something popular.

@God_of_Nowt People like to have their games remade exactly the way it was. Why devs feel the need to change something that was liked by the community of that game is confusing to me like the change in art style. Just keep it the same or if you're going to change something give the players an option to have it set to the original art style, like Demon's Souls has done with the camera angles and filters.

Are you serious Liam!?
You think the art style is more important than having a bug free stable game? What is wrong with you?
First and foremost is to fix the game and second, if there is time, the art style.
Aestethics will NEVER be more important than performance. Ever.

Don’t worry guys! They have a Road Map! 🙄

I’d be more interested if they had a development path where the last 3 steps were “Complete Game”, “QA testing and Debugging” and “Release Game” in that order.

I don't really care about the game itself, but I'm still baffled that the art direction on this remake was so irreverent, cel-shading aside, that they couldn't even be bothered to part the hair of the character in that tweet on the same side.

Somebody tasked with rebuilding the model from scratch actually sat down, studied the original, and said "Let's change the hair's parting, not because it looks any better or worse, just as a poke in the eye to the idea of fidelity to our source material."

I think the art style needed to be updated, but I wish they'd done something like Void Bastards' flat shading, which struck me as using the same idea but a much more modern implementation.

Other graphical styles might have been viable, but given how much of the originality of the original was based on having an unusual art style, it's disappointing to see it so generic

GmanLives video sums it up perfectly. It is a bad, buggy remake of a game nobody was asking for, for a licence that was already very obscure back then.

I'd like to point out that developers don't always make the decision on when a games released.

@God_of_Nowt Thank god the 2013 Legend of Zelda Windwaker HD got its "cheesy cell shaded borderlands style artwork" as the original on Gamecube and 7 years later it still looks gorgeous!
https://youtu.be/8B6Yfuue9R8

@God_of_Nowt The problem here is that literally the major appeal of the game was that it looked like a comic book. The game uses cell shading, actual popup comic strips, comic text that flashes on screen, etc to establish this look. Without it there is just a mediocre game, because the aesthetic was a larg part of it.

It kinda sounds like you never even played the original, because idk how the game could be remade without that style and be successful ever. I understand not liking cell shading, but when it IS the appeal of the game, you cannot remove it.