Ink & Bytes
Ink & Bytes
Episode 10 - The Tarkov Turmoil and Helldivers 2 Controversy
Could the gaming industry’s fiery disputes be a call to arms for players worldwide? That's what we're tackling as we mount our soapbox to address the uproar surrounding Battlestate Games' Escape from Tarkov. Our latest episode zeroes in on the studio's contentious decision to introduce a costly new game edition, which has sparked allegations of fraud and false advertising. We dissect how the promised season pass of the original Edge of Darkness edition got shuffled aside, fueling gamer rage. Furthermore, we delve into how hackers are running rampant in the game, and how BSG's response—or lack thereof—is casting serious doubts on the studio's future.
Amidst the chaos, we align with the gaming community, sharing their collective reactions to the disheartening pay-to-win scenarios cropping up in Escape from Tarkov. With voices like Moist Critical and Angry Joe leading the charge, the community's influence is undeniable and fiercely potent. The episode doesn't stop there; we also shed light on how Sony and Arrowhead Studios are navigating the stormy seas of controversy with Helldivers 2, dissecting the enforced PSN account linking and regional player exclusion that's left gamers in an uproar.
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Ink and Bytes podcast. I think I've opened up every single episode like that, but today I'm grabbing my soapbox, I'm dusting it off and I'm going to stand on it tall and proud once more, because we are going to be talking about some of the most wild gaming stories that I've ever seen and experienced, in some cases in a very long time. In particular, out of the many stories that we could probably talk about, these two are very recent, one of them relating Escape from Tarkov and Battlestate Games, also known as BSG. I'm going to be saying BSG predominantly instead of Battlestate Games, because it takes way too long, be saying BST predominantly instead of Battlestate Games because it takes way too long. And then Helldivers 2, more particularly, or more whatever, sony and the move that they pulled on the game. Yeah, I really haven't had a video game episode in a while. I haven't stepped on my soapbox in a little bit, and this kind of ties in nicely with the episode I had with my good friend chris. So check that out if you would like to, uh, get some context, I guess. But, as always, if you enjoy this episode, feel free to check out my ko-fi and we're just gonna jump right in and get through this wild.
Speaker 1:This month has been crazy. I can't even like quantify it. It's been absolutely wild. But anyway, let's get in there, let's talk about it, let's just psychoanalyze this shit. I'll see you on the other side. So we're going to start with BSG and to understand fully why the world or I shouldn't say world the internet exploded, and I mean literally most of the gaming internet blew up over this. You're going to need a little bit of context. So Escape from Tarkov is what's called an extraction shooter. To be more specific, eft was the first extraction shooter and it was the first extraction shooter that really blew up. It was in early alpha. For a long time it went to open beta and were theorized to get a 1.0 release this year, but personally I don't think the company is going to be around in two years. But we'll see.
Speaker 1:But in order originally to gain access to the alpha, you would have to buy the. I believe it was the highest tiered edition of the game, because all of the other ones are just pre-orders and there are tiers of the game. You can buy the standard edition, the left-behind edition, the prepare-for-escape edition and after that there was another edition called Edge of Darkness, which was the biggest edition of the game. That gave you a possibility to get into the alpha, so on and so forth, and each one of these tiers have progressive rewards and the highest one, like I said, edge of darkness had the most rewards possible. One of them in particular was called a season pass. It said access to all current and future dlcs in parentheses, season pass. And that was the uh, that was the, the flow for a very long time and the game kept growing. It kept getting better. I gained a pretty substantial hardcore following that stuck with it.
Speaker 1:And bsg and nikita is very notorious for not really being that communicative with the community. They're not really that transparent. They were only recently starting to get better with their community by having emissaries that are community members that actually talk with Nikita and are dealing with the stew directly. So the community is heard. They have like Sherpas that teach people the game. So they recently started getting better. But BSG is notorious for not making good decisions and we have bouncing madness. And we have bouncing madness. They do stupid things like adding the fountain raid status to things, making the game even more harder than it needs to be. But then fast forward to like two weeks ago at this point, and that's when they made the worst decision they've ever made in their entire studio's history. Hackers running amok, they're in like every lobby.
Speaker 1:Nikita was on an interview. It seemed like some great things were going to be incorporated to the game. I mean, hackers were never really addressed anyway. Basically, nikita said hackers are too difficult. Leave me alone. I think we're past the point of using that as an excuse if you're the most hacked game in existence. But they went silent for a while and then on friday morning about two two-ish weeks ago I believe it was a new video was released from Battlestate Games' YouTube channel and this was a trailer for a brand new edition of the game this awesome cult-looking thing and, oh my god, it's $250, or $100 if you're upgrading from the Edge of Darkness edition.
Speaker 1:And they basically committed fraud. That's where we're at the new edition Escape from Tarkov. The unheard edition literally took EOD. That was taken away from the market a month prior. It was no longer for sale, and then they incorporated microtransactions shortly after that. The unheard edition basically is a giant middle finger to the community because they basically moved the season pass that Edge of Darkness had over to the Unheard Edition, which I'm not an expert in the legal system and I'm definitely not an expert in the legal system in Russia, but that seems to me very fraudulent.
Speaker 1:In false advertising, among other things, they give you the biggest stash size if you don't purchase a stash upgrade because oh yeah, trey, remember when I said there's microtransactions, you can the biggest stash size. If you don't purchase a stash upgrade because oh yeah, that's right, remember when I said there's micro transactions, you can upgrade your stash for 40 bucks. That doesn't even give you an addition to the game. That's just straight up more space. You have expanded pockets. You have all these other additions of, basically, screen pay to win.
Speaker 1:But the worst thing, next to the fact that they removed the season pass from EOD and brought it up to the unheard edition for $250 base and 100 if you're upgrading from EOD is they put access to a PVE co-op mode with persistent progression. Progression will not reset with wipes, so an official single player mode that everybody has been begging for for years now locks behind a two again a 250 or 100 price tag. That was really the biggest nail on the head. And I will say, for transparency, did I buy this edition? Yes, I did because I like the color blue and I like the coal in the game. So I was basically directly targeted. But I, you know, I made a video about it right when I bought it. I got my, I got my money's worth out of it, so you know.
Speaker 1:But, like, right when everyone was done investigating that the like, their reddit blew up, their discord blew up and it was just downhill from there. They then, during that same day, a few hours later, they didn't decide to respond to their community. They didn't respond to any emails asking why the people who have eod aren't getting this stuff, because single player is clearly a dlc, not a feature. That is a whole, nother topic. But instead of communicating with their community and digging themselves out of the grave, they have done the well-known double down and their community managers were literally screenshotted saying that solo single player is not a DLC, it is a feature. If you Google what DLC means, it means significant content added to the game. Single player mode is significant content added. It's just content added to the game. That's what DLC is.
Speaker 1:But Nikita and BSJ as an entirety literally went on record to say I guess we understand DLCs differently than you. It's not a DLC, and they stuck with it. They did a fabled and well-known double down and then that same evening they released a post on Twitter saying that they were bashing their competition. Another game that's coming out is called Arena Breakout and it's basically a free talk-off. That seems a lot more casual. And BSE went out and bashing them, calling them out for plagiarism and saying it's going to be a bad game, instead of dealing with the giant fire under them.
Speaker 1:Fast forward 24 hours and we got to witness the unheard of triple down. Nikita went out on reddit and released a statement, basically adding more pay to win features and not really apologizing. It was they. He decided to say that eod will be able to get access to the single player EOD is Edge of Darkness, by the way but they would only get access to it for six months. Eod would also get access to the primary matchmaking queue, but only for six months, and it was a bitter message. It was very clear that Nikita didn't care and was so unconnected disconnected with his community that he honestly thought it was going to be okay to do this. I can't imagine everyone sitting in a meeting agreed with this. I just feel like Nikita said to do it and threatened the people because there's no way anybody think that's a good idea. But don't worry, we're not done yet.
Speaker 1:The next day we had the world-famous triple or quadruple down the unheard of never done before quadruple down where he tried to apologize again and it didn't work. Just tried to add more things to it, tried to come out and adjust things and it just it was really really bad. Come out and adjust things and it just it was. It was really really bad. And at this point, why this is so monumental and why I'm even talking about it is one it's definitely fraud. They quadruple downed by changing the website so it would hide all of the evidence that they committed fraud, and people found this out through using the Wayback Machine, and the way back machine allows you to technically time travel back in time on the internet to see what pages were like before they were updated. It categorizes everything and people found the evidence. They scrubbed in the web pages they changed to make it look like they didn't do anything.
Speaker 1:It was so big, in fact, that content creators that are really popular, like moist, critical and angry Joee and a lot of other gaming personas actually, who have no ties at all with eft. They never talked about it, they never made content about it. They never most. Sometimes they might not even heard of it. They have no, they're not in that circle or in that corner. They actually came out making videos against bhg and adding their voice to the community. It was wild. I've never seen that before. I would never expect Moist Critical to come out and talk about how scummy it is. Bsg, in literally three days, ruined five years of goodwill and completely smeared their public image.
Speaker 1:And after all of that, nikita finally did something relatively okay and removed some of the pay-to-win features, like the Mark of the Unheard, which makes enemies' AI not shoot you from a certain distance, and made that only in the single-player mode and also made the distress signal, which literally would allow you to call your friends into your specific raid if you got into a fight, basically making pvp even more unbalanced. He made that item earnable and now eod is getting access to single player completely. So there's some things that he did that were good and he did, and the devs did some fire firefighting. But the last thing I will say is and I said this to everyone who I talked to about it we should not forget, as a community, that BSG pulled this. I don't think anyone's going to let them forget, because if we forget then they're going to think that they can do it again and that they'll get away with it, because now they know people are going to fund, as the meme says, their exit strategy. Because a lot of people think this was just a one last ditch ever to make money before they pull the plug, because they probably ran out of money. Their financial reports apparently didn't look too good. But we shouldn't forget this happened so we can hold them accountable for their actions. And when, if 1.0 comes around, I have a theory that Nikita is going to try to pull something like this again with a mega 1.0 edition, and we gotta keep that torch lit and be ready for it, because this was not a good move. So we'll see how the future progresses for PSG. But that wasn't the only big shitshow that happened. Within a week of each other. There was one more massive incident that had nearly the same effect and unfortunately it happened to a really good game had nearly the same effect and unfortunately it happened to a really good game hell divers 2.
Speaker 1:If you haven't played hell divers 2, I highly recommend it. You probably heard of it at least once because the internet is. It's basically like another's balder, another balder's gate, kind of. That's how big it was, how many ripples are sent through the industry. It's a third person action horde shooter that kind of came out of nowhere, and what I mean by that is the first game was a top down arcade horde shooter and it sold relatively well. It wasn't really considered a success and the game actually technically died, with only a few veterans playing the game and keeping the servers active.
Speaker 1:I have a whole blog about this. I kind of had two blogs about this, about the game in general. So if you want to read more and get a deeper dive, check out my blog at the-world-buildercom and then slash blog and you'll be able to see my catalog and you'll be able to find it. But the Helldivers 2 came out and it was a complete genre shift. It blew everybody away. The graphics graphics looked great. It was just genuinely fun. There was no. Even though the game is live service, the live service isn't forced down your throat. It's one game that does live service perfectly well and the warranted.
Speaker 1:When the game launched there were a lot of server issues. Millions of people were trying to play it. Not too many people could play it. A lot of crashes and stuff like that, but nothing like a lot of games have now. It was still bad. They had a war room and they just weren't prepared for the success that this game had, because it is one of the number one selling games of the year so far.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that did broke broke. That did break was the PSN account linking and because they wanted to get people into the game, sony said to arrowhead studios it's okay, you don't need to do the the playstation network linking right now. We want people to get into your game and sony helped them with their servers and so on and so forth. They let engineers over. So the account linking was turned off. And to play devil's advocate, before we get into what happened, we all technically knew the PSN linking was a thing. It just got turned off and it was off for months. So still, that doesn't make it right, but we did all kind of get a warning about it. But as the game got more popular and more people played it and Sony seen the sales that was going on and it became stable and stuff was going well, they were like they knocked on the door and they looked at Arrowhead and they were like it's time to pay up, your time has come, and they forced them to re-enable the account linking. And what this did was, for one, it stopped anybody who didn't have a PSN account from playing, and it also made it so countries that don't have access to PSN actually were not able to play at all. If they bought it, they were locked out completely and the game was removed from storefronts in many countries. Now the entire internet blew up again. People who were freaking out about EFT now ran over to this Sony Helldivers 2 issue, reloaded and ready to go.
Speaker 1:The Steam reviews for Helldivers 2 was the highest I've seen overwhelmingly positive. There were hardly any bad reviews because there was hardly anything wrong with the game, and it went from that to overwhelmingly negative in like a few hours. Hundreds of thousands of overly overwhelmingly negative reviews screaming at Sony, and I feel really bad for Arrowhead because they were contractually obligated to reinforce this account linking feature. But they also got a lot of flack, and recently I just learned that there were community managers actually encouraging people to leave negative reviews. So that was kind of interesting. I believe that community manager was let go and it wasn't willingly, as he reported and it was a 24 hours of absolutely bashing this game's Steam review and if you go and look at the chart it is quite drastic from huge spikes in blue to massive, almost to the bottom of the chart in red. It is actually a pretty cool design, to be honest. More on that in a second.
Speaker 1:And I've never seen a game company respond so quickly or I shouldn't say company, a game publisher respond so quickly because within I think like a day and a half, even after Sony started to pull the game off the stores in countries that didn't have PSN. They actually responded to the backlash, which is so rare to get these mega corporations with their 90 year old CEOs who don't care and are so disconnected from their player base or from their audience and only want to see numbers. It's so rare to get them to respond to anything. And they were like we hear your feedback, we're not going forward with the account linking and the internet rejoiced. And the way that Arrowhead and its community managers and the team handles community communication is probably the most unique thing I've ever seen, because they're constantly funny, they're constantly talking with people. They actually issued a in real life order, because in the game there are major orders to take planets, defend things or do specific things. They made a real life one where the mission was for the Steam review page to get fixed to where the game rightfully belongs and the community was going to be awarded with a cape and the design on the cape is the Steam review chart Because, like I said, it made a really cool design with the massive drop and the blue uprise.
Speaker 1:Again, it might seem like really inconsequential that I'm really talking about this, but how fast the publisher responded, how fast people bonded together and even people who don't play Helldivers, just the internet, completely rallied. And once again, sony has added a very gross tally mark on their public image because nobody can really trust them. They didn't listen to their audience before they made the decision. So, yeah, I mean it's not really uncommon for publishers to look bad if you, if you haven't been keeping up with gaming news. Xbox recently just closed a bunch of studios arcane, the people who did um prey, and even one of the studios that did hi-fi rush, and Hi-Fi Rush was a substantially successful game that sold really well and Xbox said it met their expectations, and Xbox literally closed the studio down. So success is treated just like failure. In the publishing world, people are mad at Xbox too. So there's like a lot of crazy drama going on with these studios and I think people are kind of having enough of the big corporations who are clearly not paying attention to anything other than, you know, charts, and I know at that level of business that's the only thing they can think about. But there's a difference between numbers and results, you know. Well, kind of I shouldn't phrase it like that, but it's just the disconnect, you know, it's just.
Speaker 1:It's been a very, very interesting few months. That's the rundown. That is the rundown. I won't stand on my pedestal that much longer. I'm actually going to step off of it, but just keep an eye. Like I ran out of popcorn, I was sitting back, writing blogs, making videos about it, popping popcorn all the while. It's been wild.
Speaker 1:So thank you for hanging out listening to me rant talking about some video game stuff. We just had a really great episode about cybersecurity and we're going to have a knife fire back on soon. So, as always, thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode. Have a good one, everybody. I can't believe I nearly forgot, but happy 10 episodes everybody. This is the 10th episode of the Ink and Bites podcast and, while I'm very new to this and I'm doing a lot of other things on top of it, it has been an absolute blast and I'm really looking forward to seeing what we do going forward, and I can only get better. So, please, thank you so much for spending your time with me and hearing me talk about things I enjoy, and let's see where 2024 takes us. You.
