I've spent literally the entire day today reading up on upcoming games and the controversies in the gaming industry of 2012. Think they're worth noting, if in some form of hope of noting them down to remind myself to never let these happen. Hopefully.
'Secret' Agents Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar
I'm going to start this blog off with these two, simply because I feel it's the one that deserves the most attention. This isn't strictly about the game. Nor is it about the developers making poor choices through marketing or endgame footage. Nor is it arrogance ruining the face of a game. This is a real world problem that has gone far out of hand and could use some real support.
Bohemia Interactive employees Ivan Buchta and Martin Pezlar went on a harmless holiday trip to the Greek island of Lemnos and while they were there, the decided to do some research for the upcoming military simulator ArmA III - which is going to be set on the island. Ivan initially wanted to go with his wife, but she had to stay due to pregnancy so he took Martin with him instead. The trip was never intended to be ArmA III based and Ivan just wanted to experience the island he'd helped to create over the previous two years. As they explored, they took a few photos and a video of the airport, which was also sometimes used for military purposes. ALL of this is public information. Granted there was a sign saying photography is prohibited, which when noticed by the two they switched the camera off. It was harmless. The material they collected was public information.
"No!" said the Greek government. "You are spies!" they said. And they were arrested on espionage. Since then, they've been held under the accounts of espionage and are trying to fight their way out. Bohemia made the website helpivanmartin.org that gives you all of the details.
Games blamed for Newtown Shooting
An old one revived really. This year, a school in Newtown, Conneticut, a gunman entered the school and started shooting school children and teachers alike, before turning the gun on himself. Along with sparking a surprising amount of uproar about the current legislations on gun laws in the US, it was revealed that the shooter used to play video games. Now, you're probably thinking along the lines of the usual suspects - Call of Duty, Grand Theft auto, maybe some classic Doom. But it turns out it was instead the strategy game StarCraft 2. I'm... Not even going to say anything. The only instance that really makes any StarCraft player upset is a Zerg rush. Never has StarCraft been called a "violent" video game simply because of its RTS nature (it's an odd conundrum). It was also reported he played Dance Dance Revolution, which is more likely to cause violence by accidentally punching someone in the face with a Wiimote while trying to copy the moves. Luckily, it's only sparked up a mild interest, prolonged only by the NRA who, in a stereotypical fashion, want to blame everyone but themselves.
DLC - Disk Loaded Content
Capcom have ran into trouble a few times this year regarding to DLC content being implemented on the actual disc. Rather than giving this content straight to the player (present on Street Fighter x Tekken and Resident Evil 6 (albeit that was at least free)) they instead loaded it onto the disc as locked, stating that it was "necessary for the code to be on the disc for later updates". This isn't the first year they've done this either, but, after a press release saying they're going to review their methods, it's hopefully the last.
Getting some Bobba on Habbo
If you don't get that joke, don't worry. Bobba was basically the filter word used for swearing in Habbo, rather than the normal star s**t. I'll admit, I used to play Habbo quite a lot. I'll leave out the details, it kind of embarrasses me now. However, at some point this year (it slipped completely under the radar for me), it came under fire after the British TV channel Channel 4 found a lapse in its moderation and found that "sexual activities" were becoming more and more present in the massively popular teen chat room, resulting in many retail stores pulling out points cards from the store shelves. Such a sweet, innocent game ruined by 3.7% of its population.
Mass Effect 3
'Nuff said. Mass Effect 3, the ending to the epic galaxy wide trilogy, came under serious fire from its fans from an understandably disappointing ending. Fans were promised many variations of endings, dependent on the choices that were made across the three games. It ended up as three main choices, all three of which were basically the same thing with different coloured beams of light and three variations of what happens to the Reapers and organic life. The outcry was so loud that Bioware settled on making an extended cut for the fans to try and give more clearance on what happens after the events, which are based on the player's choices. An ending I haven't actually gotten round to watching come to think of it.
Diablo 37
After however long of waiting, Diablo fans finally got their hands on the eagerly anticipated Diablo 3. Just to be met with the game being unplayable. The game's DRM demanded that while players were playing, whether online or offline, they MUST be connected to Blizzard's servers. But there was a catch on launch: the servers weren't quite configured in a better manner to handle all of the data at once. It resulted in the servers crashing on startup and many players receiving the now infamous "Error 37". It was understandably, although rather insensitively, met with lots of shouting and angry people across forums and social networks. Well, what did you expect when you constantly demanded the server let you in by spamming the login button?
Lara and Hitman
Alway a touchy subject in gaming is ladies! Sometimes the reason is understandable, sometimes it's just silly. This year, the two instances are Lara Croft and Hitman: Absolution, one understandable and one kind of understandable in a confusing sort of way. Lara Croft's new game that takes her to grittier roots and shows how she got into the Tom Raiding business came under some worries when a particular scene was poorly portrayed through inadvertently clipping the video in all the wrong places. The scene in question shows Lara trying to dart around some bandits, or captors, or whatever they are. As she tries to however, one of the men see her and start to get a bit touchy feely with her. Stroking a hand down her arm before he gets a rather cringe worthy knee to the family jewels. The scene then plays out as the two scrapping, Lara wanting to get away. The scrap included some rather grim showoffs such as Lara biting the man's ear off. The man has her pinned with Lara holding a gun to him. There's a bang (you don't see the shot) when the shot cuts to another scene of Lara looking a bit worse for wear. On top of a poorly worded description from one of the developers, it ended up inadvertently looking like a rape scene. It was confirmed later on that, if you lost that scene, you were strangled to death, but all the same the editing could've been done a bit better.
And Hitman: Absolution with its... Nunsassins? I don't even know.
One trailer for the new Hitman shown a bunch of Nun assassins in BDSM style latex (or leather, I don't know) start shooting up some building, only to be assassinated by Agent 47. At first, I couldn't see why it was really sexist (hence "understandable in a confusing sort of way"). When I first heard of the controversy, I thought it was because the Agent was killing the women. But hold on, they're trying to kill him. Hardly sexist when they're the instigators. They just blew up a building with a grenade launcher. I thought, at first, it was because he'd just killed them off. It was only later, when it actually clicked in my head what they were wearing, that I realised why it was sexist. It was what they were wearing. At first, I thought it was a weird gimmick, then I started realising the little things about what they were wearing that made it, in the best way to describe, impractical for combat. The developers said it was never intended to be that way, but they must have been very ashamed by the video as the Nunsassins never made an appearance in the final game, presumably because of this.
Oh, wait, it doesn't finish there for Hitman! On top of the Nunsassins, the marketers released a seemingly harmless game gone terribly wrong. For Facebook, you could select a friend, hire a hitman and select why you wanted them dead. Seems like a bit of a laugh and a joke at first, until the methods came to light. It could be for having a small penis, small breasts, a big gut and several other options. The game was very quickly pulled amongst even more controversy.
Day Z - I mean, The War Z
I keep doing that.
In short, the Dev team Hammerpoint basically massacred what could have been a good game. One controversial point after another and the game has all but collapsed, with some loyal fans and the Dev team still hoping to revive the game.
It all started very promising, a sandbox zombie survival game from a Dev team that (apparently) had a very solid background and been creating this game for well over a year wanted to finally release their masterpiece to the world. They offered up invitations to the Alpha and Beta stages for the game and the fanbase grew very rapidly, likely due to the success of the ArmA II mod Day Z and the fact the people wanted more. The Alpha release was shown on October 15. Then, oddly enough, it went straight to the beta on October 31st, quite a gap to leap in such a short space of time.
A month and a bit later, it started. Horribly. The Dev team threw the War Z "Foundation Stage" straight onto Steam. It promised players all of its current features on the Steam page - "a huge persistent world" with "areas between 100 and 400 kilometres." There was only one map. Originally thought to be around 72km2, someone then went on to accurately measure the game and found it to be a mere 10km2. "Explore, scavenge, kill, survive". Probably the only truth in the original description. "play with friends: hundreds of servers to play on and you can rent and create public or private servers allocating spots for friends or clans." There were no private servers, or any option to rent said servers. "Gain experience points and spend it to learn dozens of available skills." There were no skills. "Two modes of play: normal and hardcore." No hardcore mode. There we two very strong reactions to these: false advertising and "it's just foundation." While some cried out that the game was not complete as it held none of the features described, as well as being severely glitchy and unpolished to say the least, some decided to cry back and say that the game was at a foundation level and would be completed with these features through updates. Interestingly, the game was originally going to be a pay once game - pay for the game, play forever without any in-game transactions. That was the advert. But in game, every item in the store can be bought with real money through microtransactions. Again, this was criticised, not only because it was a feature that they said would never be implemented but because of how well it was working, despite everything else being very glitchy. Even the anti-cheat system, which was designated as "flawless" by the Dev team, wasn't working as players found themselves amidst a sea of hackers. And finally, the "in-game" screenshots. When the game was first announced, several screenshots were released, showing quite a vibrant world with zombies aplenty, gorgeous scenery and varying areas, from forests to cities. But upon exploring the area, no one was able to find the places in these images. And as for this image released for War Z, people found (as shown in the image) that most, if not all, of the image was plagiarised from images that could easily have been found from Google, images ranging from friend outings to zombie events to the popular Walking Dead TV series.
And it doesn't end there. In an attempt to cover their tracks, Hammerpoint then changed the description of the Steam game to have something very different and to add salt to the wound, stated that they "were sorry for the players who have misinterpreted the information." They tried to blame the players on supposedly misinterpreting the very direct information. Carrying on, when players called the game appauling etc. they were banned by the moderators. In all, around 3,000 players were banned from the game and Steam forum for speaking out (and, as the forum rules say, you're not allowed to speak ill of the game!). On top of that, they were reported (and screencapped) as being arrogant and patronising to players. This then followed with false numbers on their poles to try and steer away from the Day Z ripoff label. One Youtuber found that most of the skins and models were taken from the lead developer's previous game WarInc. (in his previous company) and it was a copy-pasta job. He also revealed that the company had lied about their past experience, that the game hadn't been in development for nearly as long as Hammerpoint had previously suggested and it is essentially an attempt to cash-in with the success of Day Z.
The game, deemed incomplete by Valve employees, has since been pulled from Steam until Valve deems it at a "complete" state, Steam offering refunds to those who sent in a ticket.
The lead designer has since apologised for the company's poor decisions and bad practice, but I personally don't think that alone will repair War Z's reputation. Could it be a good game? Possibly, once its current flaws are ironed out and the full features are implemented and, if it comes out as originally promised, it would be a game worth putting some time into. but amidst this controversy and despite its surprisingly loyal fans, it may never claw its way out of this grave. Looking over this mahusive list, it easily caps as probably the most controversial game of 2012.
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