Used cleverly, friendly-fire can heighten a game’s tension. It’s bad enough that you’re being stalked by an unkillable murderer in a hockey mask, but there’s a chance your friends could panic as you take a corner and down you with a stray shotgun blast. That was the intention of the mechanic in one-vs-four horror game Friday the 13th, but it’s been spoiled by trolls.
If you want to kill your friends, there’s plenty of that in our list of the best multiplayer games.
People have been team-killing in Friday the 13th on purpose, because of course they have. Not only does it spoil the game for the person killed, but it can’t be fun for people who play as Jason either, what with their prey knocking each other off before he can menacingly stomp towards the camp counselors. This has led to publishers Gun Media announcing that friendly-fire is being switched off for public games.
“In the next patch, Public Games will no longer allow counselor team killing through weapons use against other counselor players,” Gun Media announce in a Reddit post. “The shotgun, machete, and other assorted weapons will no longer have any effect on friendly players. However, there remain a couple dangers. The biggest one is that the car will remain as-is. A car can and will be able to run you over and kill you. We decided on this as the alternative was abused during our beta where users would simply stand in front of the car, effectively blocking it from moving.”
In addition to cars being able to kill, counselor-placed bear-traps will also harm other players. There’s no XP penalty for a death resulting from this, either.
“Our team believes that the ability to hurt other counselors is something that this game should have as it adds tension and requires players to make tough calls,” Gun Media continue. “However, we do not believe this should be a mechanic that is abused by players to the point where the vast majority of our current communications from fans are complaints of rampant/unwarranted team-killing/griefing/trolling. We will include this mechanic in private matches for now, with the hope of better options in the future.”