'Hatred' for PC just released an extremely controversial, internet exploding trailer

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

A new trailer seems to be storming the internet. A game trailer was released recently for a game called Hatred.

The name of the game is simple. Mass murder. As far as I can see it, your only goal is to walk around and kill men and women who are begging for their lives. That's it.

The trailer has largely been downvoted. Epic Games has asked for the Unreal Engine 4 logo to be removed.

People against it: They say it's crass, brutal, completely unnecessary. They're preparing for the storm of news outlets who are looking for one more excuse to blame violence on video games. Finally, a shooter that will be everything the media at large actually believes shooters to be. You can't even justify it with "you're saving the world from aliens/zombies". It's just violence for the sake of it.

People for it: They say calm down, it's just a game. Fiction is fiction. This is technically the type of thing you can already do in Grand Theft Auto games, while admitting that it's not the point of GTA and other games of the same ilk.

What are your thoughts? Me personally, I haven't put a lot of thought into it. I'm not vehemently against it, but it's not something I'll pick up, either. I find that most character driven games I buy have some sense of a moral compass and a progression toward something that matters.

18+ trailer for violence and maybe an f-bomb.

RrX7G-1xPLs

[Vyk]

I don't think they expected it to be a success. I saw an article on Polygon about it. And most of the comments I read for their facebook post on said article were parroting some thoughts I'd mostly agree with. This is how 80% of people play GTA. There are people who enjoy violence and video games in general as just a simple video game to goof around in. They don't consider NPCs representative of real people. They're computers. So they have no problem killing them without any remorse. I don't think anyone who enjoys this game is really any less of a person. I don't think the game should be banned from being sold or released the way some people seem to think it will. I even seen the old argument about violence in games causing violence in life. Even annotations saying "Well it may not happen to normal people but this will affect those with mental issues". Sorry. But those people are already affected by whatever is affecting them

I'm all for freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Not because I agree with anything about it, I don't want the game, and I don't support what it stands for. But I support its right to exist. And if there's even the slightest chance it has an effect on people, I would imagine it'd be more positive than negative. People who enjoy that kind of violence and may also cause violence of their own, obviously need some sort of outlet before they actually do cause something. And this may be their catharsis. Just like I'd rather deprive/depraved and disturbed guys watch their rape fantasy porn rather than go out and actually rape chicks. I'd rather potential murders play their murder simulator to get off rather than go out and actually murder people. So in that way I'm glad this game exists and maybe there's a slim chance it'll do some good in the world

For me however. I would probably feel sick and dirty to play it or watch it being played. But to each their own I suppose..

[Slothy]

I'll say what I told a friend of mine when he linked me to the Polygon article and I saw just how irrationally butthurt people are over this: I know what I'm adding to my Steam wish list.

Honestly though, to call this a murder simulator is no less absurd than calling GTA a murder simulator. Just because killing is the goal does not mean the term simulator is appropriate. Hell, if anything given the gameplay footage, I'd say it's the exact opposite of a sim. So what we essentially have as far as I can tell is a game built around the idea of going on a rampage in a sandbox game. That thing everyone who's ever played a sandbox game has probably done every single time they sit down to play one. Sure it's not the sole point of the game in those, but they still let you do it and I've yet to meet someone who doesn't. So should I really feel bad about a game dispensing with the pretense and just being about something most people have enjoyed previously? Because I don't. And I don't consider it something worth getting bent out of shape about. Hell, I'd say if some of the people, the writer of the Polygon article for example, were really that disgusted by it then the responsible thing to do would have been to not write an article about it. Let it just fade away into obscurity, not give it more publicity.

So I'll say what I generally say about silly controversies like this: don't like it? Don't buy it. It's that simple.

[Old Manus]

Looks like a load of cynical bullshit to me. I'm sure some people will weigh in with some beard-stroking nonsense about 'profound social commentary' and the fact people will buy it is some kind of self-fulfilling cultural performance art, but it just reminds me of that whole airport sequence in one of the Call of Duty games - what better way to guarantee sales than to heap it with controversy (or in this case, take that controversy to its logical conclusion)? It looks like the kind of 'cool idea' I might have thought up when I was in school. Furthermore, I have a feeling that any fuss that is made will mainly be about 'people making a fuss' (similar to the whole 'racism row' that didn't actually happen over RE5). It just all sounds a bit dumb, really. I wonder what the 'freedom' reactions would be like if the goal of the game wasn't to slaughter civilians, but to sexually assault them instead...

[Pheesh]

All I can say is that there's no way this game is making it through the Australian ratings system.

[Vyk]

@Manus: There are hundreds of Japanese games already out for that fantasy, and loads of westerners hunt them down for just that reason. Nobody stops them. But I'm sure Steam would get in a huge pile of trout if they started selling them

[Bolivar]

Intrinsically, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. Weird stuff comes out in media all the time, this simply signals the diversity in gaming right now.

Instrumentally, these guys are not doing the industry any favors. The mainstream media has already caught wind of Gamer Gate. In an era where the journalists latch onto sensationalism to combat their diminishing ratings, these guys are serving a story to them on a silver platter. Between Gamergate, this, and all the stories of school shootings and police brutality, a lot of parents are going to make the unfortunate but completely understandable decision that they don't want their kids gaming. And that really sucks.

[Slothy]

Honestly, I don't think we have a lot to worry about from parents stopping their kids from playing games because of this stuff. We live in a time when the average age of gamers is over 30, and a sizeable chunk of the people popping out kids these days are gamers, or were at some point. The days where parents are going to attack all games because of the content of a few is, if not gone, at the very least quickly diminishing. There is no existential threat to gaming here.

[Pumpkin]

I really don't like this idea so it certainly isn't for me. Do you know how I play GTA? I steal cars and proceed to drive around the city obeying all traffic laws for a few hours. I'm not even joking, that's how I play the game. This game makes me a little bit sick but um

I guess if some people want to play it, its their money.

As a parent, if my son wanted this game (when he was older than 5 obviously) I would probably ask him why he wants to. Maybe open the way to communication about it. Or maybe he'll just scoff or eyeroll at me. I mean I play games where you kill people, it happens in FF games, I'm basically commiting mass genocide in Xenoblade but I know why I play those games and the main motive is not "to kill things". So I would want to hear his thoughts about why the game appeals to him, which I'm guessing would probably be along the lines of "I get to shoot things". But who knows!

[escobert]

I used to do the gta killing sprees. But, that trouts boring now.

I actually had someone call me a vegetarian liberal asshat on the DayZ forums because I said I don't kill animals in game unless I actually need the meat. I just can't bring myself to kill things needlessly anymore, regardless if it's real or not.

[Psychotic]

Much ado about nothing. Bet the game sucks anyway. It'll be Manhunt all over again.

I - and I assume others - like rampages in sandbox games because it's not the aim of the game. It's emergent gameplay where we use the tools provided to make our own rules. Somehow making me do it to complete the game doesn't seem quite as fun.

[Slothy]

vegetarian liberal asshat

That is the most hilariously stupid attempt at an insult I've seen in a while. I'd like to meet this person so I can laugh at them in person.

[Vyk]

I don't think a game like this is intended for underage consumption anyway. To me it's the video game equivalent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or House of 1000 Corpses. Just violence for the sake of violence in an entertainment medium. People of age have a right to feel entertained by it, and therefor have a right to seek out that entertainment. For whatever reason. No skin off my back. But I agree. I hate GTA games for various reasons, but I've had the random rampages on Saints Row. Tossing sticky satchel charges onto random pedestrians and laughing at the calamity that ensues. Then you load an old save and go back to doing missions and playing the game how you're supposed to. At best, mayhem is just a bonus game, or as Psy said, in some cases not even intended, but completely possible, when just doing your own thing. I don't think I'd enjoy it as much if people were begging for their lives, and the point was to kill them anywayAs stated, I don't like GTA games, but when I found out about an interactive torture scenario in V I was a bit more put off. Seeing clips of it made my gut wrench. It's also why I can't watch things like Reservoir Dogs. But that sort of thing has always been in entertainment. And people have existed that have always enjoyed it

[escobert]

vegetarian liberal asshat

That is the most hilariously stupid attempt at an insult I've seen in a while. I'd like to meet this person so I can laugh at them in person.


You'd have a field day on those forums.

[Spuuky]

vegetarian liberal asshat

That is the most hilariously stupid attempt at an insult I've seen in a while. I'd like to meet this person so I can laugh at them in person.Don't worry, they'd be very quick to threaten to find your house and kick your ass for being such a broccoli-eating, socially-conscious butthead.

[Del Murder]

No difference between this and those human centipede type movies. Both are terrible but you don't have to play it. Just keep it away from the kiddies.

[Fox]

It's weird how when you put two games side by side that let you do the same grizzly stuff, nobody actually gets upset about the grizzly stuff. The only thing they care about is why.

Call of Duty is fine because while yes, you're murdering lots of people, they're the baddies. They're trying to kill you or do something evil so it is fine to murder them.
Hotline Miami is fine because the murdering is more of a puzzle game really.
GTA's murdering random innocent people is fine because it's something the player chooses to do, not something the player has to do. If grizzly innocent person murder is optional then it is fine.

Do I want to play this game? No. It sickens me. It's too graphic and aimless to be entertaining for me. But that doesn't make it any worse morally than the generally accepted stuff like GTA or CoD. At the end of the day: is it actually hurting and actual​ people? No? Then it's fine. Problematic, certainly, but no more so than a lot of other stuff. It is not a special case.

[Bolivar]

Honestly, I don't think we have a lot to worry about from parents stopping their kids from playing games because of this stuff. We live in a time when the average age of gamers is over 30, and a sizeable chunk of the people popping out kids these days are gamers, or were at some point. The days where parents are going to attack all games because of the content of a few is, if not gone, at the very least quickly diminishing. There is no existential threat to gaming here.

It's a mistake to attribute such reactions to the naivete of those who never gamed. I remember after Sandy Hook, a group of kids, on their own, began a campaign to convince others in their community to part with their games, going around and collecting them in garbage bins. Again, the games aren't the "existential threat." Rather, its the way the media spins them together with real life to depict a culture which people no longer want to associate with.

Even worse, our own community is now manufacturing the ammunition for that debate. This week, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times each featured industry commentators linking the portrayal of women in video games to the recent misogynistic attacks on feminist critics. All three segments extended the cause past even Gamergate, arguing this is attributable to the gamer identity itself. As with Sandy Hook, some people will decide this just isn't something they want to be a part of anymore, regardless of how tenuous they understand such correlations to be.

[Shorty]

This game sounds sadistic as trout. Many games obviously involve an element of killing as either an objective or a consequence of the gameplay, though, but I don't know. I think it's in poor taste to focus a game on mass murdering people who are begging for their lives, especially with so many of them in the midst of our social issues and mass shootings in the past couple of years just even for America alone.

But hey, the developers and players are free to do what they want. I find it in extremely poor taste and borderline enabling.

[Slothy]

It's a mistake to attribute such reactions to the naivete of those who never gamed. I remember after Sandy Hook, a group of kids, on their own, began a campaign to convince others in their community to part with their games, going around and collecting them in garbage bins.

It's a mistake to assume that because they were kids that they were gamers.


Again, the games aren't the "existential threat."

That's not what I said.


Even worse, our own community is now manufacturing the ammunition for that debate. This week, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times each featured industry commentators linking the portrayal of women in video games to the recent misogynistic attacks on feminist critics. All three segments extended the cause past even Gamergate, arguing this is attributable to the gamer identity itself. As with Sandy Hook, some people will decide this just isn't something they want to be a part of anymore, regardless of how tenuous they understand such correlations to be.

Not really relevant to what I said since most of the people running those networks would not have actually grown up with games. Moreover, media outlets that don't understand games trying to stir up controversy is no different than it was in 22 years ago. The relevant difference is that there are millions more parents who will be able to recognize their attempts for what they are: fear mongering bullshit.

[Mirage]

I'd get it if i could play as a girl.

too bad, huh

[Dr Unne]

This reminds me a little of Hotline Miami, where you also murder tons of people. But in that game you murder bad guys and in this game you murder innocent people. Weird how that makes any difference. You're still murdering people. This game seems a bit tasteless, but I'd have to see more of it.


No difference between this and those human centipede type movies. Both are terrible but you don't have to play it. Just keep it away from the kiddies.

Pretty much. I support people's right to publish entertainment that I don't like. The whole horror movie genre lets people enjoy watching innocent people being tortured to death. Real-life people, not cartoons and polygons. Somehow society hasn't collapsed yet.

Maybe people panic over games because they still assume that games are all meant for children, but that hasn't been true for a long while.

[DMKA]

Someone also recently discovered that one or two of the guys on the dev team are white supremacists. The controversy thickens.

......................................

As others have already said, you can do this in 90% of all sandbox games ever released, and one of the big draws GTA has for people is playing it exactly like this.

The controversy is silly, and it's exactly what the developers wanted. This is also the sort of thing that the louder you whine about it, the more people are going to gain interest in it/seeing what it is you're so worked up about.

Personally, I have no desire to play this, or anything like it. I remember playing Manhunt (which, quite frankly, was far more gross in terms of both plot and killing animations) ten or so years ago and just putting it down half way through because it was so dark and gruesome that it wasn't even fun to me. This gives me about the same feeling...a game with no story or actions beyond kill kill kill doesn't appeal to me. Am I against such a product existing though? Absolutely not! If you want to make or play games like this by all means do so. I'll completely support your right to do it as well.

[Spooniest]

Proof that some people consider it their moral obligation in life to smash down all barriers of good taste.

[DMKA]

"Good taste" is purely subjective.

[Spooniest]

"Good taste" is purely subjective.

But subjectivity is objective! ;)

[Hannibal_Khan]

This game looks insane and i would definitely buy it. And all you phony ass haters can eat a D!#@. Why does Hollywood have free reign to make 10+ psycho/murder thrillers every year, but if a game does it everyone goes bananas?!!

Wanting to play this game is no worse than wanting to see any of those SAW movies...

[Skyblade]

Honestly, there's not really a lot we should do about this.

Yes, it's an absolutely awful piece of distasteful drivel.

So what?

If we restrict the creative work and will of directors based on content, then we're really no better than the video game critics who have been arguing for years about the lack of value of the medium, and the need for tighter restrictions. Not being allowed to make a game like this is not functionally different from not being allowed to sell a game like this.

When we accept this media and push it forward, we have to understand that we are going to get distasteful crap. Books, movies, music, opera... There are examples of similar works in all of them. We're not going to get away from that.

Our role, as consumers, is to not buy the bad products, and express to the producers why we are not buying it so that they can consider it when making future products. That's all.

[Spooniest]

Honestly, there's not really a lot we should do about this.

Yes, it's an absolutely awful piece of distasteful drivel.

So what?

If we restrict the creative work and will of directors based on content, then we're really no better than the video game critics who have been arguing for years about the lack of value of the medium, and the need for tighter restrictions. Not being allowed to make a game like this is not functionally different from not being allowed to sell a game like this.

When we accept this media and push it forward, we have to understand that we are going to get distasteful crap. Books, movies, music, opera... There are examples of similar works in all of them. We're not going to get away from that.

Our role, as consumers, is to not buy the bad products, and express to the producers why we are not buying it so that they can consider it when making future products. That's all.

Nice, well said.

No, you can't call for games like Hatred to stop being made. If anything, they'll get made all the more.

But the thing is, once you single out one type of content that a creator is not allowed to create, you open the floodgates for suppression of basically anything a power-hungry asshole wants to silence.

The old saying goes, "You have to accept the good with the bad."

[Hannibal_Khan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLCEUpIg8rE

[Loony BoB]

Can't have put it better than Skyblade. I don't like the idea of this game, but I don't think we should have the right to stop it existing. Just the right to hope that people don't buy it.

[Del Murder]

As an aside, am I the only one who doesn't go out of his way to kill innocents in these open world action games? I've maybe purposely killed like 5 innocents in my lifetime of gaming (though you could argue what have the goombas done to deserve being squashed?).

[escobert]

As an aside, am I the only one who doesn't go out of his way to kill innocents in these open world action games? I've maybe purposely killed like 5 innocents in my lifetime of gaming (though you could argue what have the goombas done to deserve being squashed?).
Nope, you're not :p

I used to do the gta killing sprees. But, that trouts boring now.

I actually had someone call me a vegetarian liberal asshat on the DayZ forums because I said I don't kill animals in game unless I actually need the meat. I just can't bring myself to kill things needlessly anymore, regardless if it's real or not.

[Spooniest]

As an aside, am I the only one who doesn't go out of his way to kill innocents in these open world action games? I've maybe purposely killed like 5 innocents in my lifetime of gaming (though you could argue what have the goombas done to deserve being squashed?).

Not only that, but I don't pick up items I don't need either.

Because it's a waste of my time. I'm kind of single-minded when I play a game, I want to get to the end and kick the last boss to the curb with a minimum of time and frustration. So I don't go after every single enemy. Some I just leave alone and move on my way.

Interestingly, there's a mechanic in Legend of Zelda that rewards mercy. If you kill all the enemies on the screen, they'll reappear after you have gone a certain radius away from that screen. But if you leave one enemy alive, there will always be one enemy on that screen.

That aside; I started to get disillusioned with games as they got bloodier and gorier...I'm kind of...uh...sensitive? To that stuff.

Even though Batman: Arkham City wasn't particularly bloody, the violence still kind of got to me. I'm ok when it's stylized to the point it is in something like Marvel Vs. Capcom or say, the Tekken series, but something about the animation and collision physics in Arkham City made me queasy for a reason I can't quite put my finger on.

Hatred, then, I can assume will put me off my soup. I haven't watched the trailer, and I'm not gonna cuz I like my stomach right-side in, and I like being conscious.

[Mirage]

I eradicated Megaton a few times in FO3 but that's about it.

[Loony BoB]

As an aside, am I the only one who doesn't go out of his way to kill innocents in these open world action games? I've maybe purposely killed like 5 innocents in my lifetime of gaming (though you could argue what have the goombas done to deserve being squashed?).
I don't tend to do this kind of thing either. I do, however, kill anything that can kill me. I just don't find killing the innocent to give me much enjoyment in a game.

[Spuuky]

No one is innocent.

[Loony BoB]

There are a lot of innocent characters in video games. ;)

[Spooniest]

No one is innocent.

For the terms of the debate, would it help if it were amended to account for the relative nature of such a blanket term as "innocence?" Killing a defenseless person is usually frowned upon, for example, unless their crimes are extremely vicious and heinous.

It occurs to me that when I make the decision whether or not to kill an enemy, nine times out of ten, the first question I ask is, "is this enemy in my way," i.e., will I suffer damage if I try to go through the enemy. If it's not in my way, I ignore it. If it's in my way, I kill it.

There are games that strangely avert this, such as Soul Blazer or Illusion of Gaia, which reward you if you eliminate every enemy in an area, but the presentation is fantastically unrealistic.

Usually, you are given a choice as to whether or not you need to waste time/ammunition/health fighting an enemy.

This game seems to work on the mechanic that, so to speak, "killing enemies" is the whole point of gaming. I like to think of it as simply one mechanic that games can be (and mostly have been) built on, to give you some kind of obstacle to completing the game. But the objective is to complete the game, not just mindlessly kill enemies.

So if the whole game is just killing everything in sight, then...? What type of enemy hierarchy is there? Are there bosses? Wouldn't that negate the premise of just killing for killing's sake?

This concept seems inherently obtuse to me for some reason.

[Slothy]

There are a lot of innocent characters in video games. ;)

The only innocent characters aren't fleshed out enough to qualify as interesting characters.

[Dr Unne]

There are a lot of innocent characters in video games. ;)

The only innocent characters aren't fleshed out enough to qualify as interesting characters.

Pretty much. When you see them as AIs with avatars, it's hard to care. I like to try to break games by doing the opposite of what the devs wanted. I like to see how clever the devs were and test the boundaries of the game mechanics. Sometimes you get cool easter eggs or funny dialogue. Sometimes you discover that this thing that seems dangerous is actually safe because they never bothered to program it in.

If I have AI helpers or allies, I'll always try to kill them. If I have to rescue someone, I'll try to murder them myself and see what happens. If I'm playing a racing game, I'll go around the track backwards and smash head-on into oncoming traffic. Flight sim = go as high as possible and fly straight down, and see how fast you can go. I remember in some old DOS game, it'd make you black out due to G forces and the wings would tear off your plane. How cool is that?

Any RPG that gives me a fireball spell and damageable peasants is going to have that spell detonated in the middle of a busy tavern, I guarantee that. Baldur's Gate was the best for that. If you started murdering peasants, eventually high-level Flaming Fist guards would show up and kill the crap out of you. You'd get really bad deals in shops due to your bad reputation. Your party members would start yelling at you and leave the party or fight you themselves. Thank god for save + reload that makes such fun possible.

Surely everyone who's played a text adventure has had the urge to 1) type in swear words and 2) try to kill yourself. Or think of Shadowgate for NES, getting yourself killed was the greatest part of that game. "USE SWORD ON SELF"

[Del Murder]

You could kill yourself in Shadowgate? I remember doing "HIT SELF" in Deja Vu and it said I got a black eye or something.

[Dr Unne]

60218

[Spuuky]

I remember once in Gothic 3 (an open-world Elder Scrolls-style game) I attempted to exterminate every single living human from the world, to see if I could do it.

[Spooniest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbi0wRIK0ao

Heh! I remember that.

[Loony BoB]

If I have AI helpers or allies, I'll always try to kill them. If I have to rescue someone, I'll try to murder them myself and see what happens. If I'm playing a racing game, I'll go around the track backwards and smash head-on into oncoming traffic. Flight sim = go as high as possible and fly straight down, and see how fast you can go. I remember in some old DOS game, it'd make you black out due to G forces and the wings would tear off your plane. How cool is that?
But have you tried 4x Black Belts in Final Fantasy? ;)

[Bolivar]

I remember once in Gothic 3 (an open-world Elder Scrolls-style game) I attempted to exterminate every single living human from the world, to see if I could do it.

Could you?

[Spuuky]

Could you?It was very challenging, especially once I had a reputation as a mass murderer and started to get attacked on-sight. I killed everyone I could find, but the world is very large and there are almost certainly some guys out there that I missed.

[Iceglow]

This game looks pretty dire imho. I'm not a fan of gore porn like Hostel, Saw or any of that crap so a gore porn game does even less for me. At least when doing crazy rampages in games like GTA it's done purely because 1) it can be but it's not the goal of the game or 2) because of some minor plot point in a grander better storyline which involves more than simply killing everyone.

[Rowan]

It mirrors the same effect of that of a horror movie, in my opinion. There are very few games that allow you to take control of a psychopath and murder people for the sake of murder (as far as we know about the gameplay), but my argument would be as follows; How is this any different to watching a horror movie?

If people feel that others wont have the mental capacity to play this game without going on a mass murder spree themselves, I hate to tell you that anyone that does, has other problems that need to seriously be adressed. Video games dont breed violence, hate and mental disorders breed violence. I am intruiged by the design of the game (not so much the gameplay) since it appears to take some ques from the horror/gore genre, especially with its executions.

I dont think this is a game though that will be praised, due to its controversial nature. The gaming industry has come so far in terms of these very issues, and this game may perhaps be the one that sets it back again. I for one, hope the game gets released in all due fairness to the fact that its film equivelents have little to no issues.