No one is as vicious about a game as its most dedicated player. Take a jaunt over to the forums for WoW, or CoD, or Overwatch sometime and you'll see what I mean: Scores of people who play almost nothing but the game in question but have almost nothing positive to say about it.
But not a single irritated MMO player is a patch on my own personal icon of this genre: Herp McDerperson—real name Scott Smith—who I discovered one day when I stumbled on the negative review he left on Steam for Battlezone 98 Redux (BZ98R), Rebellion's 2016 remaster of the original RTS/FPS hybrid from 1998. A negative review which he left, says Steam, after 8,461.1 hours of playtime, then followed up with 600 more.
I've been curious about Smith since before I even began writing about games—a product of both the disparity between his hour-count and his attitude and the authoritative tone of his review (it pretty much kicks off with the statement "This review involves numerous statements of objective fact"). It's a relationship with a single piece of art that I can't really fathom. My favourite game of all time is Morrowind and I've poured a paltry few hundred hours into that. My most-played, according to Steam? Fallout: New Vegas with 650ish hours, a mere 7% of Smith's total in BZ98R. I have only positive things to say about either. Naturally, I had to leverage my position as a PCG writer to reach out to Smith and see if he'd chat about what makes him tick.
Moon units
"I don't blame people for thinking that something is wrong with me after playing over 8,000 hours of a game only to leave a negative review," says Smith. "Anyone who came back to either BZ1 or BZ2 after a decade or more, specifically the multiplayer, and also sticks around to this day, has something seriously wrong with them."
But Smith clearly still lives and breathes the game, even if he's long-since fallen off the BZ98R train. His chatter is peppered with references to obscure devs, infamous community figures, niche bugs, and a litany of grievances. "I believe that I received Battlezone along with a handful of other games from my mother for Christmas in 1999… I can tell you that I still had 56k [dial-up internet] as I remember downloading the 1.31 and 1.4 patches… and suffering."
Those were the Battlezone salad days. Before Rebellion, before the remaster, perhaps even before the "ever-present malignant force" of a player Smith remembers as "Captain Choes"—"he's a troll who, I think, has always been there. There may have been some gaps, but there's reports of him being around in '98, '99.
"He's not very smart, obviously, because he can't spell 'chaos,' [although] he spells it correctly now." Per Smith, Choes' reign of terror is so pervasive and enduring that there are players who only play skirmish matches "alone in passworded games" to this day, the better to ensure he doesn't pop up and start ruining their fun.
"He's not very smart, obviously, because he can't spell 'chaos.'"
Scott Smith, on Captain Choes
But Choes/Chaos wasn't as infamous in '99, and besides, Smith was "single-player only" for years before he fell off the game altogether for a while. Besides a brief dalliance in 2008, it was only around 2012—when he discovered the 1.5 unofficial patch for the original game—that Smith resumed playing "pretty consistently." The original Battlezone never got a Steam release, of course, meaning none of that play is even factored into his legendary hour-count.
Redux, undo
"When BZ98R came out, it was something I flat-out DID NOT WANT," says Smith. "When I first heard about it, one of the first things I did was email Rebellion in a panic regarding the future of 1.5 and whether they'd interfere with its continued existence.
"(They did not respond)."
But the answer soon became clear anyway: The existence of an 'official' modernised, dolled-up version of the original Battlezone was pretty much the apocalypse for the existing community scene. "[BZ98R's] release largely killed 1.5's multiplayer scene," says Smith, "It's very very dead now." That's one of the key reasons he migrated over to Rebellion's version of the game in spite of his misgivings (the other was, admittedly, the studio had made some "QoL changes I couldn't really give up again.")
When he got there, he didn't like what he found. Smith's "list of grievances" with BZ98R is long and detailed, both in his original review and in the elaboration he provided me over email. They range from seemingly niche and obscure—at least to a Battlezone neophyte like me—to downright "DAMNING," in Smith's words.
Although he's imbued with the experience that only nearly a full year of playtime could endow, some of Smith's complaints seem like peccadillos. Jump sniping in the remaster, for instance, is inauthentic to this day. "It took some skill to abuse this aspect of the [original] game," says Smith, detailing a process whereby players would have to repeatedly bunny-hop while undeploying their snipers before they touched the ground and became rooted in place. In BZ98R it's a walk in the park: "You can just hold the jump key with the sniper rifle deployed indefinitely without having to worry about it."
The kind of bug that might annoy an old-timer, sure, but you probably wouldn't warn new players away for it. But others are worse. One bug lets players detonate a specific kind of bomb in their own base without taking damage themselves, providing a hacky way to vaporise invaders. Another? The remaster's minimap reveals everything where the original only showed the areas your radar covered—essentially abolishing fog of war from the game's RTS layer.
There are plenty more besides, but most of Smith's most trenchant criticisms go back to the multiplayer. His number one complaint is the netcode. Community legend holds, says Smith, that BZ98R's multiplayer code was ginned up "'in about a week'," though he isn't sure if that's really true.
Still, the fact it could be believed says a lot. "Players get disconnected too easily and it often has nothing to do with the quality of their internet connection… In the past, both Battlezone remasters had repeat issues with their multiplayer servers and I was DEEPLY involved in trying to get that addressed. Rebellion was often VERY slow to address these kinds of problems… As a result of my interactions, I have an adversarial relationship with one of them (who I will not name). Naturally, I blame the other party for this."
Detective mode
Smith's unnamed nemesis isn't the only acrimonious relationship he has with members of the BZ98R team. After expanding on the various bugs and design changes in the remaster that went into shaping his negative review of the game, he references a story he considers both emblematic of the project and of his relationship with (some of) its creators: "The BZ98R Bot Fiasco."
Over the course of an hour-long call including time-stamped chat logs and audio files from the game, which Smith has unpacked on his computer, he tells the tale of the time he played Discord detective, rubbing some feathers the wrong way and—if such a thing were possible—perhaps souring him even further on the remaster.
In essence, the game's official Discord had a channel which showed when multiplayer games began and ended. "What we started to notice is that there were players in there that didn't talk, had really weird names, and one would create a game that was locked, and a bunch of them would filter in there, and then, at some point, the game would end."
Phantom players playing phantom games. In other words: A mystery. Smith dimly recalls someone telling the community—after complaints about this weirdness—that the players were "Indian beta testers." Unsurprisingly, that explanation didn't fly.
Smith decided to do something about it. He sent support requests, but they were closed without answer. He took a look at the players themselves and, where usually a tag would list if a player was on Steam or GOG, theirs would just say "Other."
"They sit in the lobby, and then the game closes, and that's when things started getting pretty obvious that something was going on."
Smith operated in gumshoe mode for a year, "collecting all this information," and eventually settled on a theory. Some of the phantom players used names—or variations of names—historically associated with some of the devs. His conclusion? These were bots spun up to generate a "false sense of activity" in the game's multiplayer—multiplayer that was, in Smith's eyes, rife with newly created problems that weren't present in the old game and that had been built on the razed foundations of the previous community scene.
"They sit in the lobby, and then the game closes, and that's when things started getting pretty obvious that something was going on."
Scott Smith
Is that accurate? The community never got a firm answer, but the whole episode seems emblematic of Smith's relationship with BZ98R: A lack of trust and communication, and a feeling that something that had once been the domain of a passionate and active few had been taken over and puppeted by outside forces.
And I would play 600 more
Smith says he no longer plays BZ98R, though he does boot up the remaster of the sequel—Battlezone: Combat Commander—from time to time. He wrote his review in August 2021, five years after the remaster came out. "I don't think anything in particular triggered me to finally write my review. I had meant to do so for YEARS," he says. He just happened to get around to it (it is quite lengthy) at that time.
But the question remains: Steam the eternal tattle-tale says that, even after he wrote that review, Smith poured almost 600 extra hours into BZ98R, a game that had destroyed the multiplayer scene he was part of and that was still riddled with bugs he considered unforgivable. Why?
Turns out the answer is pretty wholesome. "For a long time now, I've only opened the game to help someone, usually modders, with problems. I possess(ed) some rare institutional knowledge and I like helping people with what I know. I've spent easily a couple dozen hours doing tech support," says Smith.
I think that kind of gets to the root of it. I admit it, when I first considered writing this, I never imagined I'd truly get Smith's point of view. It felt like he and I simply played games too differently to bridge that gulf of understanding; I'd never really parse how you could play 8,000 hours of a thing and then say it's bad.
But I think the gold thread running through everything Smith says is a mourning for the Battlezone community as it was, and that was disintegrated when the remaster arrived on the scene. That I understand better than anything, and dipping back into a game you don't really like very much in order to help out whatever embers of a community remain? That makes sense too. As someone who still dips into the dying MMOs of his youth to relive thinning and faded memories, I get it.
Plus, I have to admit, some of those bugs really do seem unforgivable.
