While they remain tight-lipped about release dates, developer Gun Media is all about giving the fans what they want. Hardcore horror fans themselves, the team has been adamant about creating the best possible slasher movie experience in the upcoming Friday The 13th: The Game. A large part of that experience will depend on fine-tuning and balancing the abilities of un-killable murder machine, Jason Voorhees.
A recent forum post from Creative Director, Wes Keltner gives fans a look at how Jason’s abilities will help control the pacing of each match. The idea is to provide longer matches with more of the exciting “near miss” moments that keeps player’s blood pumping.
In his post, Keltner detailed how the team has tuned Jason’s ‘sense’ ability. This gives cautious counselors a chance to form a plan before the slaughter begins. First, the “sounds blips” Jason sees had to be correctly tied to counselor action and stats. If you’re running around being noisy right off the bat then Jason will see a blip near your location. He won’t know exactly where you are, but it will give him a place to begin hunting.
He Sees You When You’re Searching, He Knows When You Escape
The next tweak dealt with the proximity of the ‘sense’ ability. At the beginning of a match, Jason can only sense players within a certain area relative to where he is. As the match progresses and Jason’s powers increase so does the area he is able to sense. Once he hits his “Rage” state, Jason will be able to sense across nearly the entire map making him more deadly as the match wears on.
“We’ve found that this change upped the fun factor immensely. It provided more outcomes of counselors getting a vehicle started, or getting the cops called…to be clear, that doesn’t mean that a lot of people escape. But it does give counselors hope,” Keltner wrote.
This method of building tension perfectly mirrors the source material where every passing second brings characters closer to a gruesome death. So many games have tried to imitate the slasher movie genre, but Friday the 13th: The Game looks poised to deliver. Now if only they’d give backers a release date.
