Five Nights at Freddy's creator apologizes for ugly FNAF World launch

Five Nights at Freddy's World is quite a departure from the usual Five Nights fare. It's a cute, colorful adventure-RPG starring entirely-unscary manifestations of your favorite FNAF animatronics. It wasn't supposed to be out until next month, but it actually went live yesterday—a premature launch that creator Scott Cawthon now says he regrets.

“You know, I’ve been accused of rushing my games ever since FNaF 1, but I’ve never felt that I’d released a game too early… until now,” Cawthon wrote in a message on Steam. “There are a lot of features that this game should have had before release, features that I was told about, but ignored and didn’t implement. Features such as being able to see what abilities do during battle, or being able to see a stats page for your characters. These are features that any good RPG would have. I got too eager to show the things that were finished, that I neglected to pay attention to the things that weren’t.”

User reviews for Five Nights at Freddy's World are actually “very positive” overall, with 87 percent thumbs-up—far from a complete train wreck. But a lot of the negative reviews are very specific in their complaints (and have quite a few of them), and if you sort the reviews by “most helpful,” it's really not a pretty picture at all.

Cawthon said he's going to continue working on the game, and will release updates with the requested features over the coming weeks. “I say this to a community that I've enjoyed and respected for over a year and a half now—I'm sorry,” he wrote. “I will continue to add features to the game and make it right.”

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.