Recent reviews by Shotgun

Long read ahead.

I don't normally post game reviews, but felt compelled to make an exception. I was making an argument against PvE servers (more on this later), and received a permanent ban. Normally, I prefer to provide feedback on Steam games in person via forums, but that avenue has been closed to me, so I'll rely on this alternative.

First of all, how's the game itself?

It's not too bad, but if I were to sum it up with a title, it would be "H1Z1: Pre-Pre-Alpha Edition." It has a 36 player cap, runs on CryEngine, and is unable to support more than a few dozen entities in a ~25km² playable area. Speaking of the map, I did find it to be one of the game's high points. Unfortunately, this is where the "pros" list more or less ends.

I'll make this simple by going line-item with regard to what I believe to be the core concepts necessary to a survival game's integrity. You can decide for yourself whether these are done well or not, according to your own survival game experiences.

The Environment
Nature is realistic enough (can actually hide in the bushes), but the (enterable) buildings are about as generic as they can be. It's pretty much a copy-paste job for a few "small home" types of buildings, a few shops, and a factory.

The "Zombies"
These perma-aggro on you if they spot you. They also die in about three swings from a melee weapon. You will encounter these less than a fifth of the time you encounter players on a full server; the engine simply can't support a decent amount of NPCs. There are also wolves, which interestingly enough try to distract you for others in the pack to strike from behind, but they tether and teleport back if you run about 300 meters.

The Items/Loot
By far one of the game's worst aspects, and something I brought up in the forums very often. Ammunition is extremely rare, which is probably intended to mitigate player-killing. About 97% of what you find is food and clothing. In fact, food is trivialized to such an extent, that I'm not sure why it's in the game. Meanwhile, crafting materials are very rare, which brings me to...

The Crafting
Freeform base-building. Similar to other games, but you're not limited by structure part "latch" points. You can only build on a plot of land that you "claim" (one per server), and the structures are easy to break into, unless you use exploits to build in the air. The single most important aspect of base-building, storage, is trivialized because of excessive load on the engine hoarding. You get to have one small box (8 slots) and one large box (never found the recipe) per server. That's it. As far as item crafting goes, the selection is extremely limited, and you'll rarely find what you want anyway. Example: there are 16 arrow/bolt recipes (making up 64% of all weapon recipes), but in the time I've played, I found arrows exactly once. Oh, and the inventory uses an outdated "slot" system.

The Performance, et cetera
The game runs...okay. That said, crashes are very common, and you will need to drop your settings to make the swings in frame rates tolerable. I had to drop shadows and AO on my stock GTX 980 just to not dip into the 30s all the time. Also, there are frequent lag-pauses, which is something that's apparently being addressed soon. There are some issues with getting stuck on geometry, and some "temporary" bugs, such as headshots not working.

The Atmosphere
The environment looks good, and the weather effects are nice, but outside of that, there's nothing that makes you really feel that you're "surviving," aside from the occasional encounters with other players, which, because of the low player cap, don't happen too often. And when they do, the players usually go their separate ways because no one is armed with a ranged weapon. The geared players, on the other hand, will almost always kill you, because the game lacks PvE content to such an extent that there's really nothing else they can do for fun. And because ammo is so rare, it's usually a very one-sided affair, as you can't reliably arm yourself with low-end ranged weapons until you've farmed for a while. You'll find guns, and you'll find ammo, but you'll rarely survive long enough to have matching sets. The few gunfights I've been in were against groups of 2-4 geared players when I at best had half a clip to fire. In their intention to combat mindless killing, the devs created a situation in which it's extremely difficult to deter better-geared players killing everything they see. In other games, it's easy to get some kind of pistol quickly, which, despite its inferiority, poses some danger to someone with a dope carbine.

Did I mention that nights are dark? They're extremely dark, to the point that you might as well be playing blind. If you have a glossy monitor and/or any kind of reflective glare, forget it. Fortunately for you, there's a fix: just turn up your driver gamma. But here's a quick anecdote with regard to that: when the devs were pressed as to why they don't balance the darkness a bit in the face of such a fix, they said that they didn't want to turn down the (let me paraphrase) "hardcore" darkness, because then they would essentially be "responsible for implementing a darkness-subverting exploit." That, and no one would be using the flashlight they put in the game. That's some logic right there.

Well, I feel that this has gone on long enough. I'd like to just touch up on what brought me here in the first place: the devs' treatment of the community. It appears to be, shall I say it, very "politically-correct." Disagreement is frowned upon, and rules are enforced arbitrarily. When I got in touch with a developer to inquire about my situation, he said he would look into it, and in a few minutes, blocked me without saying a word. It was pretty obvious that it was a matter of politics, and they just wanted to remove someone who publicly spoke about the game's issues (outlined here) instead of giving praise to meager iterations of progress. I know for a fact that they didn't get rid of me to protect any of their "fans" from emotional harm. I was active for about three weeks, and during that time, I was pretty much the only one who logically addressed the game's issues, instead of either mindlessly praising or cursing it.

It was curious how they threw in "insulting developers" into the reason, considering I've done no such thing, and in fact wasn't even insulting the carebear advocates edging me on. Not a single cuss ever left my mouth. Of course they also ran the "remove all posts" toggle, so I can't prove it. Over twelve years and almost 11,000 posts, and this is the first game company to give me this sort of treatment. And I never expected these guys to do it, since I was advocating for their intent to create a survival game that's more hardcore than others on the market.

But in the end, if this game seems like a good investment (and I would've honestly still given it a thumbs-up if it was $6.99 or less, despite everything else), you have to ask yourself this: if you can't trust them to be honest with regard to how they treat their community members, can you trust them to deliver on the promises they're making with regard to their product? The game has been out for two years now, and I got it during the recent sale. It was in my wishlist during that entire time, and yet it doesn't feel much different from the videos I watched in 2014.

I take censorship very seriously (and you should too). Here are the links to pictures of the offending post, if anyone wants to get a better idea of what you'll be dealing with:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=732862049
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=732862148
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=732862206