With the success of open-world zombie RPG's thanks to the creation of the ARMA mod Day Z, my friends and I were super excited about the opportunities and the release of the game originally known as The War Z.

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While it wasn't a terrible game and I feel like I definitely got my money's worth out of the game, it definitely fell way short of expectations and what was originally promised from the game creators. While I don't remember all the promises, I hope to explain why this game was a huge let down in my opinion.

Joined in the Alpha

If I remember correctly my friends and I decided to get the game in Alpha before it was even released on Steam. We quickly found ourselves having a lot of fun in the game trying to figure out where the best weapon locations were at and running around in a team trying to survive the zombies and other players on the platform.

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It was frustrating as it was funny because half of the time one of my friends would fire at a zombie without saying anything over discord. Then we'd spend the next 10 minutes running around shooting at each other because there was no way good to identify your friends from strangers besides all choosing the same outfit and hoping others didn't choose your outfit.

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Most of the game was spent chasing other players and hoping that you could kill them before they killed you, but 9 times out of 10, you'd kill them, just to have some other group of people kill you and take all the stuff you had spent the last three or four hours accumulating while surviving groups of NPC zombies. It was fun and frustrating, to say the least.

It got to the point where I found a random point on the map that would spawn a sniper rifle consistently that was close to a point in which you could log out and "save" your weapons and items. This went on for a few weeks before they released the next patch or map or something and the sniper rifle no longer spawned. Needless to say after a few weeks of farming the spot and weapon I had some of the best guns and items in the game spawn camping the spot with friends.

Around this time the game was released on Steam and ran into some issues. One of the issues that they ran into was the Brad Pitt Movie World War Z was getting released and the company was required to rename their game into Infestation: Survival Stories.

Then when the game was released on Steam the description contained items that were not yet in the game so Steam forced them to take down the game until the game was updated or until the description was updated. After all this happened, they decided to reset the game, I think due to the "full game" releasing, and reset all the supplies everyone had accumulated to that point.

Game Developer Issues

As stated earlier I don't remember all the promises that were made during the Alpha, but not a lot of them that were made were followed through with by the time my friends and I stopped playing.

One of the largest promises, from what I remember, was the ability to build your own fortresses in the game. My friends and I thought this would eventually turn into the ability to have fortresses that were defended by guilds with "safe's" that could be cracked by other guilds to steal top items.

This was definitely never achieved and the closest they got was safe zones in-game which you could log out and "store" your items or have lockers that you could drop anywhere in-game and set a 4 digit code to open. This was neat in that you could hack them and guess the passwords, but we were never able to do that with 0-9 4 digit codes, and most of the time you'd end up getting sniped trying to access them.

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Following the game's release, many customers accused the developers of fraud because of key features that were advertised but not featured in the game. The game was initially described on Steam by the developers as containing certain features, such as multiple large game worlds varying in size, a skill point-based leveling system, player versus environment combat, hundred-player servers, and private servers, none of which were a part of the game at the time. Wikipedia

Wikipedia also reminded me that when you died you had to wait 1 hour before your character could revive. Since you had 4 characters, and it took you a while to stockpile items anyways, this was rarely an issue. For a certain period of time, however, the game creators tried to increase the time to 4 hours between revives which could be reduced by in-game currency or microtransactions.

This was quickly reversed in a few days due to backlash from the community. They also received backlash for making people pay for the game but then including micro-transactions in the game that's usually reserved for freemium games.

In Conclusion

As I said I think this game was worth the money I paid, however, when we bought this game, they were talking about guild on guild battles with being able to build bases like in Minecraft and have cross guild all out Wars, this was one of the most disappointing game experiences from a hype perspective.

The fact that identifying team-mates was never really solved and about every 1 or 2 weeks we would either all kill ourselves thinking it was an enemy or one person would kill a group of 4 or 5 of us because we couldn't determine who was who in the heat of the battle, was very realistic, but also incredibly frustrating when you're spread out over an are trying to find better weapon and items.

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