2023 has been a wild ride for FNAF fans, hasn’t it? The community has eaten well, and it’s not even over yet! Tomorrow at 6 AM PST, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2 launches on the PSVR2 and SteamVR. We’d like to share a few details about the game and its launch, as well as provide a short-term roadmap.
Help Wanted 2 contains about 40 minigames, with the vast majority of them designed for replay-ability. Beyond tutorial content, we randomly generate what the player needs to do in the respective games. This includes customer orders in El Chip’s, Glamrock Roxy’s fashion demands in the Glamrock Salon, emergencies in First Aid, Turning up the beat in DJ Music Man’s recording studio, as well as a bunch more that we’re very excited for you all to finally see! Our goal was to deliver gameplay you’d be able to enjoy for years to come.
As for the narrative, well, it’s probably best if you experience it firsthand. Be sure to try all the different career opportunities you’re presented with - you never know what’ll speak to you.
The launch version will be VR only, but you can expect the flat/standard version in Spring 2024. If you purchase the VR version, you are entitled to the flat version at no additional cost. The game will cost $39.99 at launch.
Let’s talk about what the next week or so is going to look like. On launch day, we’re going to do what we always do - watch you play the game! We genuinely love seeing how much y’all enjoy what we’ve made, and it really reinvigorates the passion we have for making games. That’s step one.
Step two is all about diligence; keeping an eye out for any unexpected balance issues or bugs that may have slipped through the cracks. Now, if there is a serious game breaking bug that suddenly appears, we will start working to address it immediately, keeping everyone updated as we do. We’re not at all expecting that to happen, but we are absolutely prepared for it.
Overall, we are absolutely over the moon with what’s going out the door, and I can speak for the whole team when I say that we’re completely proud of what we’ve built. It has the laughs, screams, and vibe we targeted, bar none. Still, that overwhelming joy doesn’t stop us from saying to ourselves, “I wish I could have done just one more bit of polish.” So, to that end, we’re planning on doing a larger patch in early 2024. It won’t be a massive feature addition, or contain narrative changes; we’re focusing on a quality of life patch. We’ve got things we already know we’d like to improve, but we’re also eager to hear your opinions about things like gameplay clarity and balance. Obviously, we won’t be able to do everything that the community brings up, but we still want to hear it all. The more we know about how the gameplay feels, the better the patch will be.
For our PC folks who are planning to use a Quest headset, we discovered a problem just last night that we need to scream from the rooftops so folks are aware. Only 13 days ago, a new app was released on the Oculus app store for Steam Link support, and because it’s less than two weeks old, our game does not support it. Your inputs will not work when you launch the game. We are planning to fix this in our QoL patch. Launching the game through Oculus Link and SteamVR while using the actual link cable is the best way to play on PC.
The only additional patch that’s planned is for the flat version, and its development is going really well thus far. We will let you know as soon as we pick a release date.
While our core focus is going to be Help Wanted 2, I’d like to quickly address Ruin’s release on Xbox and Switch. Back in August, I said we were hoping to have the Xbox version out by the end of this year, and it really came close. Ultimately, we decided to push it out a little more. Had we rushed, we would have been releasing a product that wasn’t as tested as it needed to be. Inevitably there would’ve been issues; you’d be mad, we’d feel stupid, and neither of us would have a very good time. We will pick it back up in January with fresh eyes so we can quickly give you an actual release date. We shared a plan, didn’t deliver, and we are sorry for that. Pushing was not an easy decision, but we hope you can understand why it was the right one.
Unfortunately, there are no new updates for Ruin’s Switch release right now. To put it plainly, we do not have concrete plans and have not started development. I wish I had better news, but we want you to know where it actually stands.
We’re excited to see where 2024 takes us in the long haul, but we’ve got our roadmap laid out, and know what key decisions need to be made in the next few months.
That’s everything we can share at the moment. If launch goes as expected, you won’t see another post here until early next year! If there are hiccups, you’ll hear from us right away. We hope you all enjoy Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted 2.
Ray McCaffrey
Executive Producer
