HomeGenreActionCapsule Computers Lame of the Year Awards 2012

Capsule Computers Lame of the Year Awards 2012

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Lamest PC

The War Z

Jamie Laike writes:

Does anyone need to think about this? When The War Z was announced, people were torn between curiosity and disgust. If there is only one thing The War Z does well is drive gamers for the poles in opinion. Either you’re a white knight of the game or you think The War Z is the scum of the gaming earth. The game’s announcement was met with fury due to its likeness to Rocket’s hit zombie apocalypse mod Day Z for ArmA II.

Sergey Titov is a man better known as being associated with the possible the lousiest game ever, Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing that was immortalized as MetaCritic’s worst scoring game ever. Titov insists his producer and co-programmer credit only comes from the licensing of his game engine to the Big Rigs team. He also insists that The War Z was in development for years before Rocket and Day Z. It originally was meant for the Playstation 3 but after the success of Day Z, Titov and his team decided to modify their game to become a zombie survival game on the PC.

None the less, people began screaming fraud when The War Z began accepting pre orders to get into their Alpha test that was supposed to be released to buyers only a month before the release of the Beta phase. Clearly The War Z was looking to tear a page out of the Kickstarter manual without actually letting Kickstarter and Amazon get their grubby paws on 10% of the income. To make matters more interesting, The War Z team managed to get their beta version onto Steam after the fiasco/release of Towns onto Steam. Steam users soon began crying foul and demanding for refunds as people began pointing out that The War Z’s description was a blatant lie. The game described was the future intentions of the game, not the current product. Advertised features like private servers and skills were mysteriously absent from the game. The icing on the cake was Titov’s general attitude that buyers simply misunderstood the description of the game.

After Valve pulled The War Z from Steam with an obviously hastily thrown together apology, The War Z finally found its way back onto Steam with its current and more accurate description. The woes of The War Z did not end there, a spurned moderator who was banned from the forums claimed the developers planned on stopping development in six months if they did not make enough money from sales and were randomly banning players putting in a high level of hours into the game in hopes they would buy the game again to continue playing, amongst other claims. Although this former moderator would later recant his claims, this only fueled the fires of angry gamers who hated the game and steeled the resolve of its fans.

Sergey Titov eventually posted a teary almost apology that blamed hubris due to his obsession with “the early success and quick growth of The War Z” that caused him to ignore a “vocal minority.” He implored The War Z fans to not dismiss that vocal minority as haters and pledged to put in place a better community management team to improve the situation. He also shared his future plans for The War Z in attempt to put to rest the never ending flow of accusations that The War Z is simply a well-planned money grab. Titov switched between apologetic and patting himself on the back over The War Z. But his apology did little to bridge the gap between the two groups of gamers. What lies in the future for The War Z? No one knows for sure, at least until the release of the standalone Day Z game.

The lamest thing about The War Z? None of the above was satire.

Benjamin Webb
Benjamin Webbhttp://www.facebook.com/linkageax
Gaming for as long as my memory serves me, probably longer.