Day Z creator depressed about the War Z controversy

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   December 22nd, 2012   |  

PC News

The Day Z creator says the War Z controversy made him consider quitting the industry altogether.

The mind behind 2012 multiplayer open world survival horror mod Day Z for 2009’s tactical shooter ArmA II, Dean Hall, has finally ended his silence on the situation surrounding Hammerpoint Interactive’s zombie survival shooter War Z.

Posting on Reddit as “rocket2guns,” he said that the whole controversy had disappointed him to a point where he had given serious thought to quitting game development altogether.

“I know I have been very quiet lately. So this will be really all I’ll say for the moment. I’ve been pretty depressed about the whole situation,” Hall said. “From a personal standpoint, this whole ‘saga’ of the development made me seriously question if I wanted to be involved in the industry and I gave serious thought to cutting my losses and not being involved in the project.”

Despite getting a lot of requests from the media and fans to comment on the controversy, Hall said that he has decided to keep to himself and remain focused on Day Z.

The situation surrounding Hammerpoint Interactive’s zombie survival shooter started when the game hit Steam on December 17.

Within no time of the game’s full release, gamers started complaining about various issues with the game.

One of the primary concerns of the players who had bought War Z was that the key features that Hammerpoint Interactive had advertised were nowhere to be found in the game.

These features included but were not limited to multiple huge game worlds of different sizes, levelling system based on skill points, player versus environment combat, servers with support for hundred of players and private servers.

Even though the Steam page of the game got updated within 24 hours of its release, the developer had not made any corrections to the information, which continued to lead consumers into believing that the mentioned features were part of the game.

Aside from accusing Hammerpoint Interactive of misleading them with War Z’s information on Steam, gamers also accused the developer of putting up an incomplete version of the game for sale.

The developer released a patch 24 hours after the game hit Steam, which made some significant changes, two of which resulted in strong grievances of the players.

The first of these changes was the extension of respawn time of a player’s character from one hour to four hours. However, an ability to instantly respawn one’s character was added, though this utilised in-game currency that required real-world money.

Secondly, the new patch forced the players to sign new terms of service, which disallowed refunds.

Valve has pulled War Z from its digital distribution platform and will bring it back after talks with the game’s developer.