The War Z, a zombie survival MMO that shares more than a passing resemblance with insanely popular ARMA II modification, DayZ, has been plagued with issues since before its release and they've continued well after. Now, in hopes of assuaging some of the hate he, his company and his game have received recently, Sergey Titov, one of developer Hammerpoint's most vocal producers, has stepped forward to apologize.
While there were calls of "ripoff" before The War Z was even released, when it finally was, the problems got far worse. Gamers noticed that many features on the Steam page simply didn't exist in the game world itself. Server player counts were half what they were claimed to be. Similarly the environment players could actually move around in was a fraction of what Hammerpoint said it was. The skill system that was supposed to be in the "foundation" release still hasn't surfaced either.
Understandably gamers got mad and with huge numbers of bugs in the game, as well as shoddy textures and mapping, it was time someone stepped forward and took some blame.
"I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective player," said Titov in a message to gamers.
"This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as 'haters' or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault."
It's not quite clear if Titov is also apologizing for claiming that gamers merely misinterpreted the description for the game which suggested so many features that have yet to materialize.
The full letter is published over at VG247 where he repeatedly apologizes. However, judging from the comment section, it's not going down well.
"At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a "perfect storm" that affected all of our community members. For that I’m truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z."
The whole "saga" of The War Z and its release, has led the creation of a website dedicated to its failings. lists all the faults and screw ups if you fancy a laugh at Hammerpoint's expense.
So, with an apology under his belt, does Titov deserve forgiveness? Are you guys any more likely to buy The War Z now? Let us know.