Jedi2016
Sr Member
Not sure how many of you have heard of this debacle yet.
First things first: If you're interested in the game, DO NOT BUY IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Whereupon I expound upon the reasons:
The game is essentially a (bad) clone of a game called "DayZ", that some of you may have heard of. DayZ is actually a mod for ArmA II, and they were hired on by ArmA's creators to make a standalone version, due out sometime early next year. DayZ is an online multiplayer game featuring a large, open world filled with zombies. It's meant to be a "realistic" take on the zombie apocalypse, where you have to scavenge for food and weapons to survive, and also have to deal with other players who may team up with you or who may try to kill you and steal your stuff.
On the surface, WarZ does the same thing, at least on paper. It's execution is... shall we say, less than good.
First off, the game is incredibly buggy. I watched a video where a player was killed by another player before they had even spawned into the game. He was literally killed by nothing. The game is essentially still in Alpha stage, nowhere near release. The developers have released it under the moniker of "Foundation Release", implying that this is the core upon which the rest of the game will be built (but isn't yet).
Secondly, there's the feature set, or lack thereof. Here's the original feature list from Steam, with my notes in bold italic:
-A Huge Persistent World: The War Z is an open world game. Each world has areas between 100 and 400 square kilometers. [There is only one available map at launch, that the developer claims is over 100 square km. That's three times the size of Skyrim. User measurements put it closer to 8 square kilometers. The developer continues to insist it's over 100]
-Explore, Scavenge, Kill, Survive: You are one of the few survivors and must navigate the desolate countryside exploring cities and scavenging for items. [This part is more or less true, especially if you read "desolate" as meaning "empty". The map is mostly just open wilderness with zero content]
-Play with Friends: Hundreds of Servers to play on and you can also rent and create Public or Private Servers allocating spots for Friends or Clans. [They do have a big server list, I'll give them that. But there are no public or private servers, and no support for Friends or Clans.]
-No Classes, No Levels, No Caps: Create your own survival campaign, gain experience points and spend it to learn dozens of available skills. [The game does grant you experience, but there's no skill tree to spend it on. At all.]
-Two modes of Play: Normal and Hardcore. [Hardcore mode appears on the menus, but is not selectable]
-Combination of First-person and third-person perspectives
-Meld of PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) [Technically true, but there are no PvE servers as MMO players are used to seeing. PvE is limited to you versus zombies.]
-Safe Settlements where Players can purchase, sell, and store items as well as post notes for other players.
-Up to 100 players per game server [Flat-out lie, all servers support maximum 50 players. The developer was called on this, and said something to the effect of "50 still counts as 'up to'..."]
-Dedicated public servers as well as private servers [As already noted, another bold-faced lie. They're neither dedicated nor private]
-Single Purchase: Downloadable client with ability to play the full game without subscriptions or requiring in-game transactions. [We'll talk about this below]
They were called on this by Gamespy, which equates quite clearly as false advertising, and their response was to blame the customers. I'm not kidding. They basically said that everyone had "misread" the statements and "imagined" things that weren't really there. While they have amended the Features page on Steam, it still contains a few of these falsehoods.
Now's where it gets good:
When your character dies, they lose all equipment currently being carried. Sounds pretty straightforward, but we'll pick this up later.
When your character dies, you must wait one hour before playing that character again (without their stuff, of course). Otherwise, you'll have to make a new character. But it gets better! A new patch, released today I think, increases the cooldown to four hours, but adds the ability to pay real money to revive instantly. Yes, they've added a monetary cost to basic MMO resurrection.
You can pay real money to get extra items, such as weapons (no guns, but things like a spiked baseball bat), extra food, ammo, as well as cosmetic items like masks and a fireman's helmet. The "pay to win" idea of selling weapons and in-game items is questionable, but they're not the only ones to do it. And the cosmetic items are quite common in games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends.
But remember what I said about losing your items when your character dies? Yes, that includes your purchased items. Meaning they go away. Forever. If you want that spiked baseball bat and fireman's helmet back, you'll have to buy them again.
This is all on top of the performance issues I mentioned. You can be killed by something you never saw, and it will cost you actual money.
There were apparently hackers early on (of course), botting or doing whatever hackers do on games like this. The developer's response, since they couldn't properly identify the hackers, was to randomly ban a select number of players, whether they were hacking or not, in an attempt to "scare off" the hackers.
The worst part of it all is that the game was actually popular. The general consensus is that a lot of people mistakenly believed the game to be the standalone DayZ release. It actually hit #2 in Steam Sales yesterday, before most of this came to light.
Needless to say, this all erupted in quite a ****storm right after the game's launch. And here's where it gets EVEN BETTER:
Requests for refunds were either shuffled into the "we'll get back to you" loop, or flat-out denied. Request for refunds on the forums resulted in your account getting banned. Their response to complaints boiled down to "We already have your money, what do we care if you like it?"
Negative comments on the forums would result in the threads being deleted, and your account banned.
Their new patch included, right in the Terms of Service, a statement that said "By agreeing to these terms of service, you agree to never ask for a refund". I'm not making that up, either. To my knowledge, that sort of thing has never been done. Ever.
I'm not sure what they were hoping would happen, but things like this don't stay quiet for long. NeoGAF (where I first read about it) is not a small site, nor do they lack influence. Word quickly spread to game sites around the world, resulting in the ridiculous interview from Gamespy where the developer actually defended all of their actions (poorly), and even hit Forbes, of all place.
The game still exists on Steam, but can no longer be purchased. I'm assuming that Valve will eventually remove the game entirely. They're already offering refunds themselves to anyone who wants one, and they'll presumably sue the hell out the developer to get that refund money back (and they'll win.. Valve is not some little indie studio, after all).
Here's TotalBiscuit's impressions/review video on YouTube
Here's the original thread on NeoGAF.
Here's the Gamespy interview.
Here's the Forbes article.
Someone could probably write a paper about this. I don't think I've seen a release like this in all my years of gaming, and that's a lot of years. These developers are just dirty... slimy money-grubbing bastards.
First things first: If you're interested in the game, DO NOT BUY IT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Whereupon I expound upon the reasons:
The game is essentially a (bad) clone of a game called "DayZ", that some of you may have heard of. DayZ is actually a mod for ArmA II, and they were hired on by ArmA's creators to make a standalone version, due out sometime early next year. DayZ is an online multiplayer game featuring a large, open world filled with zombies. It's meant to be a "realistic" take on the zombie apocalypse, where you have to scavenge for food and weapons to survive, and also have to deal with other players who may team up with you or who may try to kill you and steal your stuff.
On the surface, WarZ does the same thing, at least on paper. It's execution is... shall we say, less than good.
First off, the game is incredibly buggy. I watched a video where a player was killed by another player before they had even spawned into the game. He was literally killed by nothing. The game is essentially still in Alpha stage, nowhere near release. The developers have released it under the moniker of "Foundation Release", implying that this is the core upon which the rest of the game will be built (but isn't yet).
Secondly, there's the feature set, or lack thereof. Here's the original feature list from Steam, with my notes in bold italic:
-A Huge Persistent World: The War Z is an open world game. Each world has areas between 100 and 400 square kilometers. [There is only one available map at launch, that the developer claims is over 100 square km. That's three times the size of Skyrim. User measurements put it closer to 8 square kilometers. The developer continues to insist it's over 100]
-Explore, Scavenge, Kill, Survive: You are one of the few survivors and must navigate the desolate countryside exploring cities and scavenging for items. [This part is more or less true, especially if you read "desolate" as meaning "empty". The map is mostly just open wilderness with zero content]
-Play with Friends: Hundreds of Servers to play on and you can also rent and create Public or Private Servers allocating spots for Friends or Clans. [They do have a big server list, I'll give them that. But there are no public or private servers, and no support for Friends or Clans.]
-No Classes, No Levels, No Caps: Create your own survival campaign, gain experience points and spend it to learn dozens of available skills. [The game does grant you experience, but there's no skill tree to spend it on. At all.]
-Two modes of Play: Normal and Hardcore. [Hardcore mode appears on the menus, but is not selectable]
-Combination of First-person and third-person perspectives
-Meld of PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) [Technically true, but there are no PvE servers as MMO players are used to seeing. PvE is limited to you versus zombies.]
-Safe Settlements where Players can purchase, sell, and store items as well as post notes for other players.
-Up to 100 players per game server [Flat-out lie, all servers support maximum 50 players. The developer was called on this, and said something to the effect of "50 still counts as 'up to'..."]
-Dedicated public servers as well as private servers [As already noted, another bold-faced lie. They're neither dedicated nor private]
-Single Purchase: Downloadable client with ability to play the full game without subscriptions or requiring in-game transactions. [We'll talk about this below]
They were called on this by Gamespy, which equates quite clearly as false advertising, and their response was to blame the customers. I'm not kidding. They basically said that everyone had "misread" the statements and "imagined" things that weren't really there. While they have amended the Features page on Steam, it still contains a few of these falsehoods.
Now's where it gets good:
When your character dies, they lose all equipment currently being carried. Sounds pretty straightforward, but we'll pick this up later.
When your character dies, you must wait one hour before playing that character again (without their stuff, of course). Otherwise, you'll have to make a new character. But it gets better! A new patch, released today I think, increases the cooldown to four hours, but adds the ability to pay real money to revive instantly. Yes, they've added a monetary cost to basic MMO resurrection.
You can pay real money to get extra items, such as weapons (no guns, but things like a spiked baseball bat), extra food, ammo, as well as cosmetic items like masks and a fireman's helmet. The "pay to win" idea of selling weapons and in-game items is questionable, but they're not the only ones to do it. And the cosmetic items are quite common in games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends.
But remember what I said about losing your items when your character dies? Yes, that includes your purchased items. Meaning they go away. Forever. If you want that spiked baseball bat and fireman's helmet back, you'll have to buy them again.
This is all on top of the performance issues I mentioned. You can be killed by something you never saw, and it will cost you actual money.
There were apparently hackers early on (of course), botting or doing whatever hackers do on games like this. The developer's response, since they couldn't properly identify the hackers, was to randomly ban a select number of players, whether they were hacking or not, in an attempt to "scare off" the hackers.
The worst part of it all is that the game was actually popular. The general consensus is that a lot of people mistakenly believed the game to be the standalone DayZ release. It actually hit #2 in Steam Sales yesterday, before most of this came to light.
Needless to say, this all erupted in quite a ****storm right after the game's launch. And here's where it gets EVEN BETTER:
Requests for refunds were either shuffled into the "we'll get back to you" loop, or flat-out denied. Request for refunds on the forums resulted in your account getting banned. Their response to complaints boiled down to "We already have your money, what do we care if you like it?"
Negative comments on the forums would result in the threads being deleted, and your account banned.
Their new patch included, right in the Terms of Service, a statement that said "By agreeing to these terms of service, you agree to never ask for a refund". I'm not making that up, either. To my knowledge, that sort of thing has never been done. Ever.
I'm not sure what they were hoping would happen, but things like this don't stay quiet for long. NeoGAF (where I first read about it) is not a small site, nor do they lack influence. Word quickly spread to game sites around the world, resulting in the ridiculous interview from Gamespy where the developer actually defended all of their actions (poorly), and even hit Forbes, of all place.
The game still exists on Steam, but can no longer be purchased. I'm assuming that Valve will eventually remove the game entirely. They're already offering refunds themselves to anyone who wants one, and they'll presumably sue the hell out the developer to get that refund money back (and they'll win.. Valve is not some little indie studio, after all).
Here's TotalBiscuit's impressions/review video on YouTube
Here's the original thread on NeoGAF.
Here's the Gamespy interview.
Here's the Forbes article.
Someone could probably write a paper about this. I don't think I've seen a release like this in all my years of gaming, and that's a lot of years. These developers are just dirty... slimy money-grubbing bastards.
