Category: Editorials

[Bad Press] Kotaku Lies About Smash, Doubles Down


Kotaku UK, a website that bills itself as “Kotaku, but without the integrity of Jason Schreier.” When Kotaku UK isn’t pumping out plain old clickbait compost for articles, they’re pumping out slanderous clickbait compost.

Last night marked the launch of Smash Bros Ultimate 3.0, and also the release of Nintendo’s first DLC fighter Joker from Persona 5. As is standard for Smash character releases, Joker comes with his own stage, a number of costumes, and a number of songs. In other words, it’s the perfect time for tabloid e-zine Kotaku to rev up the faux outrage and find something you should be offended by.

Enter Laura K. Dale penning an article that posted today, “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Persona 5 DLC Includes a Disability Slur.” Dale listened to the track “Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There” and decided that not only does the song use the term “retarded,” but apparently justifies its use by saying “I can say it” right after. Here is Dale’s personal transcript of the lyrics.

Oh Ah Hi
Are you ready?
Ready to pick up the pieces
Let’s go, let’s play, retarded
I can say it
Are you ready?
Uh Huh

The article got the attention of Erika Harlacher, voice actress for Ann in Persona 5, who confirmed that of course the song doesn’t use the word “retarded.”

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The article has been slammed even in Kotaku’s community as racist, as a large number of commenters are calling out Dale for essentially accusing an Asian singer of using a slur because of her accent. Folks in the comment section are calling out the article for shaming someone for not speaking English good enough for Dale to understand it, when English is very likely not her first language.

You’ll also notice that the title of the article doesn’t leave anything to theory and just straight claims that the slur is absolutely included. Dale goes on to wag her finger and wax poetic about how inappropriate this is for Nintendo’s “family friendly image.” It’s hard to imagine Nintendo would allow the word “retard” to get into a song. It’s easier to imagine that Kotaku UK knows exactly what it is doing and is deliberately pushing out a bit of defamatory content and outrage-bait to jump on the coattails of a big video game update.

Laura, for her part, has posted multiple apologies via Twitter and acknowledged that her conclusion to the song’s lyrics was wrong. Kotaku UK has refused to pull the article, has not posted a genuine correction, and has simply updated the article to essentially say “some people say it’s different, but we disagree.”

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It’s disappointing to see this level of reckless behavior from Laura K. Dale, who MMO Fallout generally holds in higher regard.

Diaries From H1Z1: I Walked 100 Levels, And I Won’t Walk 100 More


I promise this is my last piece about H1Z1 for a while, because I officially quit.

Last week I reached the promised land, the deluxe apartment in the sky if you will. I hit level 100 on the H1Z1 battle pass. That’s right, praise me for accomplishing in roughly two months what most of you likely finished by the end of week three. Gaze upon my mediocrity and be amazed for all the wrong reasons. I won’t be coming back.

I could go on for hours about how absolutely incompetent the H1Z1 team is, but I think anyone reading this wouldn’t be too surprised that the same company that has fumbled the ball so many times with H1Z1 and its other projects would do it again. For more information on my gripes, please refer to my last rant. In the time since I wrote that article a few weeks back, H1Z1 has not improved. In fact, it has managed to continue degrading. The shotgun is so stupidly overpowered that it can one-shot someone at full health wearing armor, while the crossbow was severely buffed with an EMP explosion that will knock out cars for an extended amount of time, do a lot of damage, and basically ruin your enjoyment of the game.

Last time around I complained a lot about challenges. Week 8 challenges sound like someone at Daybreak saw all of the complaints about the challenges being stupid and decided to ratchet it up to 11 just to spite the players. We have;

  • Place in the top 10 while having 10 first aid kits in your inventory in fives
  • Go to the hospital in map grid B7 and get 7 kills
  • Destroy 20 camping tents
  • Get 10 kills with the RPG-7, grenades, crossbow, or air strike signals
  • Parachute into Cranberry

Nothing says fun like ridiculously convoluted “challenges.”

These top Week 7 having only two depraved challenges being two kills within the orchard in map grid J2 within a single match and getting to the transmission tower at the top of Spence Hills while specifically driving a pickup truck. Parachuting into Cranberry is a lot harder when you have no control over where you start and the game has still refused to drop you in that area after all this time. Getting 7 kills in the hospital in B7 is difficult enough as it is, assuming that (1) B7 isn’t part of the area immediately or shortly thereafter covered by fog and (2) you can even find people in there. I’ll add in a (3) for good measure, that the game doesn’t bug out and actually tracks the kills.

The same goes for getting 10 kills with the explosive weapons, it wouldn’t be on the list were it not for Daybreak’s shoddy programming meaning the challenge is basically broken. Going back to prior challenges has shown multiple that by all means I should have achieved by now that are either not properly tracking or just flat out broken. Daily challenges similarly seem to be riddled with bugs and many of them can’t be completed. The game for some reason absolutely abhors recognizing the player performing emotes, I noticed it has started handing out ridiculous daily challenges like “destroy 99 chairs within Cranberry” which is just fantastic and isn’t a tedious chore.

And it seems like the population in H1Z1 is dying fast as the ratio of full games to not full games during what should be relatively peak hours is declining. I played a few fives matches on Saturday afternoon this past weekend where the game couldn’t grab more than 70 players before the match began. Played a few free for all matches that same day that weren’t even half-full (some were as low as 11 people). H1Z1 hasn’t hosted an arcade mode in a loooooong time. Lag in matches seems to be getting worse as the game goes on, as I have seen numerous rounds where I die because the person is literally teleporting around the screen and can’t be shot. It’s like playing old Quake on dial-up. Had this been on the PC, I’d suspect foul play. Since it’s on the Playstation 4, I’m fairly certain it is the game. Obviously these are all anecdotal and from my own perspective.

So I am officially washing my hands of H1Z1, and will start posting Diaries From articles for games that I am actually enjoying playing.

MapleStory HOlds Co-Promotional Event With Line Friends On April 24


Iconic MMORPG MapleStory will hold a co-promotional event introducing characters from the Line Friends title to Maple World in an upcoming event. The Line Friends X MapleStory event starts on April 24 and runs through May 21, 2019, and is available for all players with characters at level 61 and higher. The event will feature characters including Brown, Cony, and Leonard, and players who take part in the event can obtain Line Friends coins which can be redeemed for items and consumables.

Upcoming events include:

  • A Surplus of Snapshots Event – Complete special photography quests to obtain LINEFRIENDS Stickers and other items including LINE FRIENDS Coins, gift boxes, and medals.
  • Souvenir Collection Event – Gather Maple World souvenirs over 14 days to obtain a LINE FRIENDS Gift Box or collect Maple World Leaves in exchange for souvenirs.
  • Proactive Peacekeeping Event – Help the LINE FRIENDS characters tour Maple World safely by hunting monsters to receive a LINE FRIENDS Gift Box.

Additional Line Friends items will be available for purchase through the cash shop during the same period.

Mobility: Elder Scrolls Blades, the Disappointment I’d Never Hoped For


Have you ever looked at The Elder Scrolls and thought to yourself; “Self, I want to play more Elder Scrolls, but this quality of work is just too high. Why can’t Bethesda deliver a shoddy, low quality version on my phone that isn’t really fun to play and is chock full of predatory microtransactions?” If you’ve ever thought this, boy do I have the product for you. It’s called Elder Scrolls: Blades, and it just dropped on the mobile store for the low low price of zero dollars and zero cents. It’s also in early access, because Bethesda is an independent company who has yet to make a hit game, and needs the money to continue “development.” It is absolutely not a sign of low confidence in their product.

Alright, now that the hyperbole is out of the way, I’ve had a fair amount of time to play through The Elder Scrolls: Blades and I have come off of it with the idea that the game is…about as bad as you’d expect. Just as an early start, you will not find much enjoyment in Blades if you absolutely need any of the following in order to consider playing:

  1. A full-fledged Elder Scrolls experience.
  2. A full-fledged RPG.
  3. A half-assed RPG.
  4. A game without microtransactions.
  5. A game without loot boxes.
  6. A game with movement during combat.
  7. A game with stealth
  8. A game with ranged combat
  9. A game with meaningful interactions with the world.
  10. A game with any interaction with the world.

Elder Scrolls Blades follows none other than the Blades. Once hired to guard the Emperor, and then in the service of the Dragonborn, the Blades are no more. You return back to your village to find it a smouldering ruin, possibly because some group of mercenaries came and burned it down but more likely because the village idiot left the oven on and wants an easy scapegoat so homeowners insurance doesn’t deny a payout. As the designated player character, it is your job to figure out who tasked the village idiot with cooking a hot pocket and why nobody was supervising him at the time of the incident.

Let’s start by talking about people who can immediately go find something else to do with their time. If you came into this game thinking “boy, I’d love to create a stealthy assassin,” I’ll disappoint you now and let you know that’s not possible. In the time since the Oblivion crisis, biology in Tamriel has undergone a drastic change. Crouching is no longer possible, as is moving your body around while engaged in combat, or jumping, or traversing terrain. The world has suffered a crunch and has essentially become one very long corridor. The bows and arrows, much like the crossbows from Morrowind and Dawguard, were turned into a pyre to burn Bethesda’s respect for their customer’s time and money. Similarly, those of you who want to play a dedicated mage can walk off as well, you’re not welcome here.

This leads to what I like to call “unnecessary frustration,” like when fighting the myriad of beasts whose attack pattern is to stand just out of your range and then attack and then go back. Maybe it’s my lack of depth perception but the game doesn’t really seem to be good at figuring out distance with how close enemies are and you miss more than you’d think and you want to walk two feet forward to attack but you can’t because the game firmly roots you to the ground and that’s not annoying at all. It also doesn’t remind you how much the lack of ranged weaponry really degrades the experience in this game.

Elder Scrolls: Blades is exactly what you would expect from a mobile spinoff of a well loved franchise; an unreasonable facsimile that takes the original recipe, replaces most of the ingredients with water, and then expects you to pay over the course of the meal an approximate three thousand percent premium over the original piece. And my contempt of the title isn’t just warranted by Todd Howard, the most prolific compulsive liar in the games industry next to Peter Molyneux and the guy who with a straight face told the world that Blades was a genuine Elder Scrolls experience. It’s also fueled by members of the media waxing poetic about how quaint and charming Blades is because the armory vendor lets you sell items and salvage them all in one space. This truly is Elder Scrolls.

But truly nothing says insulting intelligence quite like the fact that Blades introduces a guiding light letting you know where to go for your objective. Yes, this game has so little faith in your ability to move that it will guide you down a single path corridor like an infant. Combat in Blades is a matter of holding down the screen to attack and trying to line up the inner circle with the outer circle so you can get a more powerful attack. You can also block enemy attacks. Over the course of leveling up, you’ll add more abilities to your little bar, but it’s basically the same from start to finish.

Combat is initiated by getting an enemy’s attention and having them approach you, thus changing the interface to combat mode. As I said earlier, you can’t move in combat mode so dodging attacks is out of the question.

Let’s talk about the loot boxes because Blades has these out the wazoo and they are so much worse than in other games. As you travel through the environment you’ll pick up wooden chests which are the bare essentials of life in Blades. For every mission you finish, you’ll generally receive a silver chest (sometimes gold) and occasionally a few gems if it’s a story mission. It’s possible to obtain gems during missions themselves but they are rare and drop one at a time. A wooden chest takes five seconds to open and generally contains miniscule amounts of building materials. The silver chest takes three hours to open and contains better building/crafting materials and maybe some cheap weapons/armor, and the gold chests take six hours to open and contain better stuff than you’ll find in the lower chests (naturally).

The problem that Blades has that players will figure out early on is that the game is very cheap on dropping equipment naturally. I think in the numerous hours that I have played that maybe one weapon has dropped that wasn’t from a chest in the entirety, and that weapon may have actually been from a chest. Remember the days of killing guys and having to sort through their inventory because they were carrying full sets of gear? Those days are over, loser. If you want to get decent gear, you’re going to have to wait like the plebian you are or dish out some hard cash to open those boxes faster.

A gem is worth roughly $1.2 cents USD, going by the value that the base cost of a pouch of gems being $1.99 for 160 gems. A golden chest (unlocked) costs 250 gems ($3) and contains 1400-1700 gold, 1 uncommon, 1 uncommon or rare (75-25% split), 1-3 stacks of materials, 50% chance of potions, 50% chance of jewel or rare ingot, and a whopping .1% chance at a bonus artifact. The Elder Chest at 750 gems ($9) gives 3500-4300 gold, 1 epic, 1 extra rare/epic (90-10% split), 1-5 stacks of materials, 2-6 potions, 2-3 scrolls of revival, 3-9 jewels or rare ingots, and a whopping 1% chance of a bonus artifact. Then we have the legendary chest which, at 2,500 gems ($30) offers a whole 5% chance at a bonus legendary artifact.

Elder Scrolls Blades feels like going to a restaurant and having the waiter say “we don’t have root beer, but we do have Dr. Pepper.” Really it’s like going to a restaurant and ordering a root beer only for the waiter to slam a twenty year old can of Slice on the table. This isn’t what I ordered, it isn’t even close to what I wanted, and you can almost see the toxic fumes coming out of the can.

Another thing I’d like to note is that I went ahead and bought the legendary sword that was up for grabs in the first week for $10. In all the time since I bought the sword, nothing that I have found in crates has been even halfway as powerful which should hammer home how hard Bethesda is going in on the pay to win for this title.

Otherwise I have no opinions on the game.

[NM] Kotaku Investigates Bioware, Bioware Makes It Worse


The only constants in life are death and taxes. The only constants in the gaming industry are EA (or a subsidiary) creating its own PR nightmare and then making the situation worse in response.

If you’ve been following the tale of Anthem and its alleged six year development cycle, today’s investigative piece by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier may not be that surprising to you. Titled “How Bioware’s Anthem Went Wrong,” Schreier talks to no less than 19 ex-Bioware employees who had been involved in the development of the game. The story is a tale of ineffective leadership, understaffed teams, and various departments either unwilling or unable to work together to put a cohesive and thought out plan together. While EA may tout that the game has been in the works for six years, according to employees the majority of the game was built in the last 12-16 months.

Bioware responded with a very stern letter to the public addressing the article. The response is quite baffling as the developer hides behind its declared passion for its customers, concluding with a thinly veiled attack at Kotaku that the article exposing Bioware’s poor working conditions and indifferent management is somehow a detriment to the industry and craft.

“People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”

And here’s the kicker; You may notice that the letter from Bioware doesn’t actually address any of the specific statements made in Kotaku’s article. That’s because Bioware’s response went up mere minutes after Kotaku published their piece. The folks responding to the article didn’t even bother to read it, and it also means that they had this pre-written and ready to go.

How fitting that a company accused of being tone deaf would be so tone deaf as to so blatantly not read the article that they are dismissively responding to. The management at Bioware either naively thinks that this response is going to pull the public to their side, or they are so deep in denial that they don’t see how bizarre the response comes off as.

Source: Kotaku

Bad Press: The Internet Falls For Another Con Artist [Fortnite Edition]


The internet has a such a vibrant imagination.

For those of you healthy adults who don’t follow Fortnite news, Epic yesterday was accused of stealing artwork and using it as a cosmetic costume in their battle royale shooter. The tweet highlighting the claim showcased a Deviant Art user’s creation submitted September 2018 compared to the Fortnite model released in November of the same year. Taken at face value, the models look very similar, almost too similar to not be a coincidence.

Here at MMO Fallout, I pride myself very highly on my BS detector. It came at a very high price, my eternal soul which upon my death will be stored in a garage in Buffalo. Not all too different from my living soul. This gift has come in very handy as in MMO Fallout’s nine years of existence, I have had to correct perhaps one or two pieces in total while breaking some stories that were later confirmed by third parties as genuine and preliminarily offering my doubts to numerous other stories that turned out to be fake.

So when yesterday’s story started hitting that Epic Games was being accused of plagiarism of a Deviant Art…artist, my detector shattered six coffee mugs and bolted down the street singing Queen. Maybe it’s the difficult task of taking seriously a person whose username comes from a television show for toddlers. Maybe it’s because Deviant Art is a bastion of plagiarism under the guise of “this is my OC character, plz donut steal.” Perhaps I just found it very hard to believe that an Epic Games artist would look at this drawing and think “I need to rush this into production yesterday,” funneling the skin from original post to seeing it to designing a knockoff to modeling to testing to release all within two months. That’s an artist with pull.

That could be it. It could also be that I’m aware of Deviant Art allowing people to change photos without altering the “user submitted” date. Such as with this 2009 creation.

The story didn’t fool many people outside of the reactionary Youtube news vlogger circuit, but it did manage to snag the attention and coverage of none other than Forbes Magazine. And why not? Their coverage of the faux-controversy has gathered nearly 140,000 views as of this publishing, far more than discussion of The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead, and the Epic Chinese Avengers poster. Web hosting doesn’t come cheap, folks, and clickbait doesn’t have time for verifying your facts. If you think about it, the fact that the accusation happened is news in and of itself. Basic investigative skills are for nerds like Twitter user Ding Dong who decided to check the website’s cached version and found that the art was swapped. Maybe Forbes should hire Ding Dong instead.

Perhaps the other side of this coin is the general habit of the public to immediately believe anything bad about an individual/entity that they don’t personally like. This claim was instantly believed by large swaths of the internet because Epic did a thing and made a game they wanted exclusive, so why wouldn’t this no-good scumbag literally-Hitler company steal artwork from an innocent 13 year old? It boggles the mind to think that a company you don’t personally care for wouldn’t be guilty of every half-baked accusation that gets laid out over Twitter.

But of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Gamefly You Fools: Luigi’s Mansion on 3DS


I recently revived my subscription to Gamefly (no, this isn’t sponsored) because I don’t have enough going on in my life outside of law school and these MMOs that I am allegedly playing. Essentially I wanted a cheap way to play some games that I have had my eye on but never really wanted to buy or more specifically put a down payment on at Gamestop and return within the seven day return period because the policy is great and no matter how annoyed the employees get there’s nothing they can do to turn me down. Is this justification for me writing off my Gamefly subscription as a business expense? If only I knew a lawyer.

The first game I’m going to talk about is one that is near and dear to my heart. I bought Luigi’s Mansion back on the Gamecube when it originally came out and I have to say the game creeped me out as a tween. It made me ask a lot of questions, like how in this timeline apparently Bowser is legitimately dead. The Mario series has always tiptoed around the idea of death, it’s a kid’s game after all, and Bowser has been “killed” and reanimated by Koopa and other figures numerous times through the series.

Porting Luigi’s Mansion to the 3DS instead of the Switch makes sense in a twisted sort of way. Way back before consoles could do much online, Nintendo had the plans to make the Gamecube a 3D capable system, they even went as far as creating a couple of prototype games that could take advantage of this technology including none other than Luigi’s Mansion. The technology for a 3D overlay on televisions was ultimately too expensive, but Nintendo basically had everything ready to go. They just needed seventeen years and a new system to accomplish it. I like to think that the folks at Nintendo had a serious discussion about whether to port this to the aging 3DS or the exploding Switch, and some guy who was on the original team threw a fit about not wanting his work to completely go to waste.

Luigi’s Mansion also happens to be one of those titles that kids like me would make fun of other gamers for spending their meager allowance on. I love Luigi’s Mansion, but I refuse to pay full price for it at the age of thirty as much as I did at the age of twelve. The full game, assuming you’re stopping to take in the sights, can be beaten in less than seven hours. In my days we called that a half-Blockbuster. You rent it on Friday/Saturday and you’ve done everything by Sunday afternoon with enough time left to still neglect your homework due Monday. It’s a great game, no doubt, but something that short needs to have some level of replayability otherwise why keep it in your collection?

This marriage of gameplay and technology doesn’t show up empty handed, and Luigi’s Mansion offers something old, something new, something borrowed, and something Boo. We have our basic story; Luigi wins a scary mansion in a contest and he heads over to meet up with Mario to give it a once-over before he presumably torches the place for the insurance money. Mario enters the mansion before Luigi gets there and goes missing. Luigi follows and gets attacked by ghosts, only to be saved by Professor E. Gadd, who looks like an infant and equips Luigi with a powerful vacuum capable of sucking up ghosts.

In a sense, Luigi’s Mansion is an early game in the Boss Rush genre with some Metroidvania thrown in for good measure. You control Luigi in what is a mostly linear path throughout the mansion, unlocking doors, clearing rooms of various ghosts, and finding keys and gems and completing puzzles. What difficulty there is comes from the “portrait ghosts,” the unique looking ghosts that Luigi eventually turns into fancy portraits. These bosses generally have their own mechanics on how they fight, how to expose their hearts and vacuum them up, and how to even activate them to begin with. Again, I use the term “difficulty” with some leeway. Luigi’s Mansion isn’t exactly difficult, certainly not Nintendo difficult.

But Luigi’s Mansion has a metric ton of charm to it, like how Luigi will start humming in sync with various parts of the game’s soundtrack and if you are in a room that hasn’t been cleared of its ghosts or Boo, you’ll hear them mockingly singing right along. Replacing Luigi’s Game Boy Horror from the original game is the…Game Boy Horror in this game. It’s a spruced up version that is constantly on display on the bottom screen with a minimap letting you know where you can go and what your progress is at any given time.

Luigi’s Mansion features a new co-op mode where a second person can take on the role of Luigi’s gooey clone Gooigi and you can tackle the mansion together. I don’t have any friends, so I did not test out this feature. One thing completionists will like is that the game now allows you to re-fight bosses in order to get a better rank (sucking them with less falls) without playing through the whole game over again or save scumming. If you want the best portraits, it’s a lot easier than the last time around.

Luigi’s Mansion is a wonderfully charming game. If you played the Gamecube version and want to revisit it on a modern console, go right ahead. If you didn’t play the game the first time around, I wholly recommend at least renting it.

Snapshots: The Fifteenth Scapeversary


Today, March 29, 2019, marks fifteen years to the day since the official launch of RuneScape 2. It’s incredible to think how much the game and Jagex as a company has changed and evolved over the last decade and a half, but if you want to take a walk down nostalgia road (or visit for the first time), I recommend checking out the following imgur galleries showcasing screenshots from the RuneScape 2 beta with comparisons between the two versions and snapshots from the early days.

Apple Arcade Announced, Game Subscription Service


Apple today has announced Apple Arcade, a video game subscription service that will span multiple platforms and will launch later this year. Apple Arcade will give access to over 100 titles available on iPhone, iPad, Mac computers and Apple TV.

Every game will be available offline, will be fully featured at launch, and will carry no adverts or ad tracking to respect user privacy. Big name developers including Sega and Konami are already on board to release games. Apple Arcade launches in Fall 2019.

Source: Trusted Reviews

Diaries From H1Z1: How Does It Get Continually Worse?


I want to talk about H1Z1 on the Playstation 4.

H1Z1 has become the Battle Royale of choice for me, partially because I have invested enough time and money ($20) into the game that I’d rather not start anew on another BR title and partially because I like the simplistic gameplay. I don’t have the reaction time to build and play Fortnite at a decent level and PUBG is a bit too much of a broken mess most of the time to keep my attention while Realm Royale’s player base was crashing hard. Plus my character looks like a total badass.

That said, I have to hand it to Daybreak for instituting the battle pass into H1Z1, because if it weren’t for the fact that I can log in a couple of times a week and churn out some decent ranks, I would have stopped playing out of frustration a long time ago.

It could be because the stamp missions in H1Z1 are broken beyond recognition. It only took five times entering and reentering the training grounds before the game recognized me picking up an AR weapon for the achievement, and after the third time I picked one up in solos for it to register that mission completed. While writing this article I spent the fifth match in which I used the “wave bye” emote three times during a match without it registering completion. What the game did register is me surviving to place in the top 15 in Fives which we didn’t (we placed in the top 20), me driving an ARV 1000 meters in any BR mode (I didn’t), placing in the top 15 without using bandages or first aid kits (I had used numerous), and one achievement I had actually accomplished in reviving a teammate and one for finishing three fives matches.

Free for all, to put it bluntly, sucks on ice. The Battle Royale engine that Daybreak has put together is clearly not built to house this many people in this close proximity on the Playstation 4. I play with the Playstation 4 Pro which is connected to an ethernet and sits within arm’s reach of my router, on a Verizon FiOS line running to the tune of 150mbps. I’m not humble bragging about my internet speed, I’m just pointing out the kind of connection I’m working with. At many times, H1Z1 Free for All gets such bad lag that the original Everquest has less character rubberbanding by comparison. There’s nothing that says engaging gameplay quite like pumping a full clip from an automatic weapon into someone at close range and having none of the shots register, only for the game to recognize that you actually died five seconds ago from a guy who was probably killed before he pulled the trigger.

And because the zone is so small and seemingly randomly placed, the spawn points are absolute trash. You’ll find yourself getting thrown into the wide open valley only to be immediately popped by the group of snipers that were already aiming in your direction. If not an open valley, you’ll be lucky to minimize the number of times that players will spawn in right in front of you, only to gun you down while still in an immune phase, or twenty feet behind you only to do the same. Get a good spot? Think again, because the random spawn system loaded you up with the worst weapons possible and screw you.

This of course assumes that the game properly loads itself while spawning you into the world, and doesn’t let you die while the loading screen is still up. This also assumes that the game grants you any immunity and doesn’t just let someone with a high powered sniper pop you in the head the second the loading screen does disappear. This assumes that the loading screen appears and doesn’t just leave you hanging as a spectator. This assumes that the game responds to your pressing X to respawn and doesn’t just ignore your controller. This assumes it doesn’t crash to the console dashboard. This assumes that it lets you bring your weapon out.

It’s incredible how the further H1Z1 gets away from launch, the more it seems to degrade in quality. Some stamp missions are broken, some weekly missions are broken, Free for All is broken, experience boosts seem to be broken, the master coins you get after completing the battle pass are (for some) broken.