Hammerpoint Interactive's highly anticipated 'The War Z' MMO survival zombie game was quickly removed from the company's Steam store after it was only released earlier on Tuesday.
According to reports, Valve removed War Z from Steam when gamers expressed widespread criticism of the game's shortcomings. In fact, some gamers even said the game played in an "unfinished state."
When War Z was first introduced, the game promised an expansive experience that supported 100 players per server in maps so vast that they range from 100-400 square kilometers. However, by the time the game was introduced, gamers realized the server capacity was limited to only 50 players and maps were 100 square kilometers at their largest. What's more, War Z also promised a class of kill systems and a friend list feature. These features were missing when the game was introduced.
While The War Z page on Steam is still up, Valve no longer made the game available for purchase. In fact, Valve called the launch of The War Z "premature" and will offer a refund for the unhappy customers.
Controversy also sparked when a bizarre patch reportedly caused respawn times to extend as long as an outrageous 60 minutes to four hours. A microtransaction was offered to let gamers return to the game.
In a statement, Valve said, "We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build.”
Damage control didn't end there. A Reddit thread collected a slew of harsh criticism towards War Z to the point where Steam forum reacted to ban negative comments from their forum thread.
Also addressing the criticism was War Z boss Sergey Titov. In an interview with Kontaku, Titov says, "We’re constantly running surveys to ask our players what they think – how we’re doing.
“As of right now over 93% of our customers like the game, with over 40% saying it’s perfect and around 50% saying it’s good, but they’d like to see more polishing and features.
“Yet, 4% don’t like the game and decided not to play it, and 3% hate the game. My point is that absolute majority of our players are supporting us, yet, yes, players who don’t like the game will be very vocal about it.”
Finally, addressing the discrepancy in the server capacity, Titov said, "I don’t see ‘LIE’ in saying ‘up to 100 players per server’ and having the current limit at 50 players."
“We’ve just lowered the number of players per map down from 70 based on requests and votes from our players. Ie – we’ve had 70 players per server – which was what we felt was the ‘comfort level’ for this map, but when we asked our players about it, the majority voted for 50 slots per server. So we did exactly what our community and our players asked us for.”
Although Steam has suspended the sale of the game until the developers can work on a new build, The War Z can be purchased at Hammerpoint's website.
Undecided on whether you love or hate the game? Check out the gameplay video below and come to your own decision:
~idigitaltimes.com
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