I’m just sitting here thinking about all the hoopla around palworld right now and I was wondering what other titles out there have been in the controversy filled category in the past few years/decade? I can think of a few, but my game interests are kinda narrow.
What are some of your picks?
Showing my age here, but the OGs of Doom, Mortal Kombat and GTA turned all the millennial gamers into murderous sociopaths who can’t tell the difference between video games and reality. That’s after Dungeons & Dragons turned us into murderous sociopaths who can’t tell the difference between board games and reality. If I recall correctly, the hoopla around all of that made national news in the States.
There used to be an institution in Germany, abbreviated BPJM (I will spare you the full German name) that checked if games are in need of being restricted due to excessive violence. They curated a public list of games that were only acessible for age 18+ to purchase. You can imagine what this list did for young teenage gamers, it was the forbidden fruit, the Streisand-effect before the Streisand. I played those games before I was 18 and that rating had a bit to do with that. It was colloquially called the Index and so any game that would make it to the Index would be highly sought after by gamer teens.
In other news this institution is the reason why there were some specific changes in a few games for the German market. From what I remember, Command and Conquer ( yes the RTS, not just FPS games went on there) had to change the color of blood for the human soldiers which became robots/cyborgs whatever in the German version.
Don’t forget Soldier of Fortune 2 where they replaced all humans with robots and invented a whole new backstory.
Humans created robots, robots staged an uprising, killed all humans. Robots took over the lifes of humans because that was all they knew. That’s why there were robot druglords, robot hobos, robot police men, robot scientists, and so on.
This is not a joke.
No, no, no, Dungeons & Dragons turned us into devil worshipping heathens. The murderers all came from videogames.
Right you are. I have fallen to the sway of various evils so many times that I get them mixed up.
I thought rock ‘n’ roll did both a long time ago. Who would Charles Manson have become without the Beatles’ White Album and Helter Skelter?
I’m old enough to remember the OG Mortal Kombat controversy. If I recall, the Sega and SNES versions were different. I believe the SNES version had no blood and the Sega one had blood.
IIRC the Sega version had the blood hidden behind a code.
It’s crazy the controversy that game caused, considering how tame it is compared to what has come out since. But the first MK opened the floodgates to graphic violence in games.
On the menu for the Genesis version Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, Down. Opened up the cheat menu.
Burned in to my head as a Sega kid growing up.
Oddly enough, doom and Wolfenstein was never controversial in my circles, but we weren’t allowed to play the terminator game. It was very willy nilly. I think quake was a bit of a nono as well, but counterstrike was fine.
“Hatred” caused a big controversy ahead of its launch back in 2016, for being a game where the main objective is mass-murdering innocent civilians. Then it released, turned out to be a pretty sub-par uninteresting game and was promptly forgotten by most people.
Depends what you mean by controversial. Shooting innocent civilians in an airport in Call of Duty or Spec Ops.
Ark releasing DLC for a game that is still in early access.
7 Days to Die, a game that is still in alpha after 11 years.
EA releasing over $1000 in DLC for Sims game most of which is just different colours of the same item.
GTA: Hiring a hooker and after the hanky panky you murder her for the cash back.Is that last one a specific game or did a developer do that?
Grand theft auto in general.
GTA 3 or Vice City, iirc.
7 days to die has been making progress though .I remember picking it up and thinking I made a huge mistake then I played it a couple years later and loved it
Surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention “Postal” or “Bully”.
From the wiki for Postal… “ A man referred to simply as the “Postal Dude” has been evicted from his home. He believes the United States Air Force is releasing an airborne agent upon his town of Paradise and that he is the only individual unaffected by the ensuing “hate plague”. He fights his way from his house to an Air Force Base through various locations, including a ghetto, train station, trailer park, truck stop, and an ostrich farm.”
Hot coffee mod for one of the GTAs (San Andreas I think?), legit news stations were reporting on that
Kinda feels like any big release has some kind of controversy added to it, be it poor performance, bugs, riddled with mtx/day1 dlc/seasonpass-nonsense, denuvo/horrid-drm-in-general, invasive anticheats, unnescessary launcher apps… you name it.
Off the top of my head the few “hooplas” I can remember. Also I’m not claiming to remember 100% correctly on the reasons/details
- Arkham Knight
- poor performance, 30 fps lock
- Cyberpunk 2077
- poor performance, bugs. BUGS. No 3rd person camera, cut content
- Starfield
- poor performance, lacluster gameplay, bugs
- No Man’s Sky
- performance issues, content not what was promised
- The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition
- horrid performance, technical issues
- Diablo 3
- always online, in-game auction house (real money & in-game currency)
- Diablo 4
- seasonpasses, mtx, etc. IMO, on the surface level it looks like it’s monetized like F2P game.
- Diablo 2 remake/remaster
- “p2p matchmaking, we promise” -> “oh hey, blizz servers only, no offline. kthxbai”
- Diablo Immortal
- “don’t you guys have phones?”
- pay-to-win gatcha game
- Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
- whatever is going on with this game. Seems like the usual shitshow with haters hating and coping users coping, trolling eachother.
- Basically any 2k sports game, possibly others too
- at minimum 60 £/€/$ entrance fee to virtual casino
- HATRED
- caused a concern storm about in-game violence (shooting civilians/innocent etc)
- Haven’t played it myself, but it looks like a nothing burger. Fairly mid twinstick shooter with edgelord paint over it. Wasn’t Postal already doing this eons before?
- Payday 2
- “we promise we won’t add lootboxes” -> “Oh hey, we added lootboxes”
- Aliens: Colonial Marines
- apparently was quite the shitshow on launch
- isn’t stellar now either, but on heavy discount at 5€ or so, it aint that bad for coop.
Wasn’t Colonial Marines the game that gearbox “stole” budget from so they could fund Borderlands 2?
Iirc, it also had absolutely abysmal AI, with Alien(s) standing perfectly still in clear view, not reacting until they had been shot multiple times.
Then someone found that there was a single value in one of the game’s ini configuration files you could change from 0 to 1, and the AI would become competent. The switch had been there since release, over multiple years the game was never updated to flip the “make the AI not braindead” switch. As far as I know, it still hasn’t been updated to flip it.
Not a clue about budget stuff.
Iirc the config value key was mistyped, it was supposed to read “tether” (like, alient ai “tethers” to player, so it can find a path to the player, or somesuch), but it was mistyped in the config. ref: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Aliens:_Colonial_Marines#Improved_Xenomorph_AI
haven’t tried the fix myself yet, not THAT keen on replaying it. :D
Fo76 basically was a shitshow to the point it was false advertising. (Fucking canvas bags)
and moldy powerarmor helmets, which were a potential health hazard.
But even bigger issue, IMO, is the pvp/“mmo” aspect of it, which I don’t care one bit. If anything I’d like p2p coop Fallout.
Good points, but a few of these are mixing up controversy with genuine critics.
- Arkham Knight’s performance was terrible at launch. But many Ubisoft games could make this list, they were quite famous for their buggy games for some time.
- Along with the Diablo 2 remake, you could add the Warcraft 3 remaster as well which was nonetheless apparently abysmal, but which also removed the original game from Battle.NET. We may also add most remakes and remasters, it feels like an exception when a remaster is generally appreciated.
- Like Starfield, Fallout 4 was also heavily criticized at launch for the same reasons: unengaging story, always the same bugs, lackluster roleplay due to the voiced character… But maybe that’s always the case with every new Bethesda game.
- If I remember correctly, on of the main issues with Alien: Colonial Marines wasn’t so much that it was a terrible and unfinished game (which it was), but that the demo released was very engaging, and a completely unfair representation of the actual game, which was considered false advertising.
Did they actually fix the performance of AK or did we just get better hardware to run the game better? And I’m also recalling some gameplay trailer which was sped up to seem like the game was running at 60 fps. But, yea, horrid performance is mostly genuine critique.
With Fallout 4, I think the biggest issue with roleplay was the dialogue options, not the voice acting per se. Basically each dialogue selection was 4 options: “Yes”, “Yes (but snarky)”, “No”, and some non sequitur… give or take, it’s been a hot minute since I last played it.
Did they actually fix the performance of AK or did we just get better hardware to run the game better?
They actually pulled it from Steam for a while, and re-released it properly a few weeks later. But yes, they ended up fixing it properly, and it’s probably one of the best-looking games of its generation on PC. The photo mode, in particular, is stellar.
They actually pulled it from Steam for a while, and re-released it properly a few weeks later.
Ooh, right. Completely forgot about that. And, yea the game is definitely a looker.
Back when the game was fairly new I did get it as a bundled game with my 2nd gpu. My SLI setup was quite the stutterfest with it, and I don’t think it even supported SLI well, or at all. So I shelved it until several years later, and played it through with a lot beefier pc.
Same: I got both Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 with my 980! That’s actually one of the reasons I bought one: I had planned to buy both games anyway, it made me “save” (as in, not spend) that much money. And given that it was NVIDIA’s flagship at the time, it worked quite well with that GPU and I wouldn’t have noticed the performance issues if I had not read so much backlash about them.
it feels like an exception when a remaster is generally appreciated.
Don’t think I ever heard something bad about the Starcraft remaster.
The Yakuza Kiwami games are supposedly good too, but I never played them or the originals.
The Resident Evil games are more like remakes, the only bad thing I heard is about 4. But that was from the perspective of challenge runners, apparently some weirdness going on there. But supposedly absolutely fine for casual gaming, but I never played any of these either.Off the top of my head:
- I don’t remember which one, but one recent Resident Evil remaster. Must be 4, if you say so!
- As I mentioned, Warcraft III: Reforged was (is?) considered terrible
- The GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas remasters, which are pretty bad ports of the Android/iOS versions
- Batman: Return to Arkham
- Dark Souls: Remastered
- Metro 2033: Redux
- Halo: The MCC as well, although I heard that it got a lot better down the line
- Didn’t some Final Fantasy recent remasters / new releases get criticized?
From what I recall, most of these were criticized for lacking the hand-crafted textures and lighting that the originals had. For obvious reasons, since most remasters are AI-enhanced textures, upgraded engines and little to no handcraft ever comes into play.
- Arkham Knight
Super Columbine Massacre RPG was pretty damn controversial (Wikipedia link).
I’m surprised there isn’t a Storm the Capitol, Insurrection 2021 game.
Ok, you win
Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet:
THRILL KILL had some heady controversy around that time as well, for the same reasons.
What is the hoopla around Palworld?
A small but vocal subset of turbovirgins loudly denouncing it for plagiarizing pokemon, who even the pokemon company themselves is fed up with lmao. The pokemon company’s investigation of the game is basically them saying “we’ll do our due diligence but please shut up they don’t seem to have done anything wrong”
I think it’s more like “We are aware of it” and also unspoken “we are investigating legal action.”
Sure! That’s part of due diligence. But in case you’re still convinced it’s some big conspiracy, just look at Valve. Valve has a proven track record of doing whatever they can to NOT fuck with Nintendo’s legal team. You think they didn’t make sure the game was square?
You think they didn’t make sure the game was square?
The developers of the game? I’d give it a 50/50 shot, how many times do people get so enthusiastic about something that they are more worried about doing it rather then whether they should be doing it? Maybe they are Pokemon fans that saw a big market and weren’t happy with the quality or output of Pokemon games. The company that made the game is called Pocket Pair and seems to only have 3 games:
Palworld (2024) Craftopia (2020) Overdungeon (2018)
If nothing else the creatures are very similar and it’s impossible to know how a court would rule on that. The line between infringement and non-infringement can be blurry and hopefully Pocket Pair is prepared to defend their content.
People are likeing it to Pokemon and big daddy N are very heavy handed when it comes to its IP.
Damn pokemon fans have to be the biggest weirdos around. Even nintendo was like: look, we know, we looked into it, stop mailing us. And the pokemonkos just keep crying to their overlords because people enjoy themselves, sending death threats around. I was listening to the jimquisition podcast and she absolutely hated it for no apparent reason, other than it’s not pokemon and a cheap pokemon rip off and she would rather play pokemon, than this game that is pro slavery and you van even catch humans. Which, completely fair imo, but just one week later she talked about yakuza and how they have a full fetched pokemon rip off in their game where you catch humans to fight for you, and it’s the best thing ever.
But Pokemon is pro slavery. It always has been. Beat them down till you can capture it, then have it fight for you or trade it off to someone else for something you want
Also, didn’t one of the more recent games have the antagonists a group of people who want to release Pokemon. Making you the bad guy for wanting to keep slavery.
A singificant number of Palworld players are Pokemon fans, that’s why it’s so successful. Weirdoes who take it too far are a thing in every fandom.
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Legally controversial or critically controversial? Legally, Yandere Simulator probably takes the top spot, although it can be debated if it’s even considered a game. As for critically, nothing that I’ve played recently comes to mind. But I would pick The Last of Us 2 for critically controversial
What’s the controversy with Yandere Simulator? I missed it.
- Uses a lot of stolen assets without giving credit. As far as I know, it still has many stolen assets in the game.
- A major, unavoidable mechanic of the game involves you crawling around on the ground and taking secret upskirt pictures of your underage classmates
- Game has made almost zero developmental progress despite being something like 10 years old at this point. It is widely accepted that the developer is likely intentionally dragging out the development time so that he can farm more money from his supporters
- Recently, it came out that the developer, a 30+ year old man, was having explicit and sexual conversations with an underaged girl. The texts (which were released online) show that he believes having sexual relations with a minor is “95% ok” (paraphrasing here). It also shows that he manipulated and gaslit her into keeping quiet about the relationship by accusing her of manipulating him. These texts were confirmed to be true and accurate by the developer himself in a YouTube apology video, although he never takes responsibility for his actions, instead claiming that the texts were taken out of context.
Those are the ones that I remember off the top of my head. There’s more. Way more. And that’s looking at only the legally questionable controversies surrounding the game. There’s also a ton of moral and critical controversies
Soldier of Fortune. Look it up. SoF Payback was a fun game too.
Hot take on Payback, maybe it’s worth a revisit. I remember that game being a dog after the awesomeness that was 1 and 2. Especially with 2’s crazy rogue’esque mission generator and stellar multiplayer. We ran a heavily modded MP server for years and it was a blast.
Too bad what happened to Raven. Once in awhile you can still feel and see their spirit in some of the CoD details.
I still play SoF2, I like to grab a few random maps here and there!
Ion Fury came with some controversy
https://www.eurogamer.net/ion-fury-studio-apologises-for-sexist-and-transphobic-comments-from-staff
No mention of Postal yet?
Doom
Duke Nukem
Mortal Kombat Fatalities
Conkers Bad Fur Day
Catherine
Manhunt
Bully
Postal
Modern Warfare: airport scene
Leisure Suit Larry
Catherine
GTA : rampages, interactions with hookers
Dead or Alive
Missed opportunity when double-listing Catherine to use both spellings.
I remember Carmageddon making the news in 1997. It made the game immediately a lot more interesting.
