The Sudden Death of “Sudden Attack 2”
How one of Korea’s most popular FPS died a cruel and humiliating death
When I first came to Korea, one of the first games I played was Sudden Attack, a twitchy, quirky mix between Counter Strike and Quake. It was a ton of fun to play: short, bite-sized matches overloaded with frantic, awkwardly-animated characters shooting up the map with poorly coordinated but superbly timed attacks. My friends and I would go to PC bangs at midnight to play and find ourselves leaving at noon once we were done. It was mindless fun, and we weren’t the only ones enjoying it. Developed by GameHi and launched in 2005, it was the #1 PC bang game for 106 consecutive weeks. Counter Strike may have been ubiquitous around the world, but in this country, Sudden Attack was king.
Of course, no game lasts forever, and with the booming popularity of Western FPS games like Overwatch, Nexon (who bought out GameHi and later converted the studio into Nexon GT) went all-in on creating Sudden Attack 2 in hopes of protecting its turf. The development of SA2 took four years, employed about 100 developers, and cost about 30 billion won (approximately US$27 million). It launched on July 6th, 2016, with great publicity surrounding it— and skip to September 29th, 2016, and the game has completely shut down. In 3 short months, Nexon decided to cancel all servers and services for SA2 in what is perhaps the shortest-lived triple A game in Korean history. How the mighty have fallen.
Why did Sudden Attack 2 fail? Specs of the SA2 seemed fairly admirable. The game looked great, and according to their website, would feature “STUNNING GRAPHIC QUALITY; SENSATIONAL HIT IMPACT; STYLISH WEAPON CUSTOMIZATION; VARIOUS GAME MODES; STRATEGIC SPECIAL CONTENTS SQUAD WAR.” But in an era where even mobile games use Unreal Engine 4, the fact that SA2 used Unreal Engine 3 had to have a tangible negative impact on the game’s potential.
The community forums on Korean gaming website Inven shed some light on the critically negative reception of SA2. Their main problem was the use of in-game purchases such as power-ups for their characters, a common feature in many F2P games. However, the way that the power-ups were structured allowed the players to gain a huge advantage over people who chose not to buy. Other criticisms were thrown at the game, but as a general overview of it, the game was just technically bad compared to other recent FPS games, from the graphics and animation, to glitches and bugs in the game.
These shortcomings were in stark contrast to Blizzard’s Overwatch. In what appears to be a massive miscalculation of scheduling by Nexon, SA2 debuted right when the hype for Overwatch was fomenting into something sensational. It may have been Blizzard’s first foray into the FPS genre, but they absolutely murdered it, not just from a production standpoint but also in embracing the Korean market. In one particularly endearing story, members of the Overwatch development team wandered into a PC bang in Korea and promptly got pwned by a team of fierce middle school Overwatch killas.
When looking at Sudden Attack 2 and Overwatch side by side, you see the past and future. Overwatch is bright, varied, and eccentric. You have all these memorable characters that have layers of complexity in their usage; absolutely no two characters are alike. The maps are colorful and have tons of verticality. The weapons are unique and balanced. It’s a game that is accessible to everyone, but rewards players who take the time and effort to learn new strategies and maneuvers. SA2 on the other hand seemed stale and past its prime. It relied on those overused scenes of firefights in storage warehouses, sniping in dilapidated city streets, and present day weapons that we’ve seen over and over again. Taking a look at the competition, both Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1 are leagues away from their past installments set during present day. We used to be tired of WWII shooters, now we’re tired of modern day shooters. Compared to those powerhouse franchises, SA2 just seemed bland and trite, trying to recapture that frenzied glee from games that were filled with AK-47s and special ops characters.
SA2 debuted at #7, and on the same day, SA1 ranked higher than SA2 at #5. How could a brand new game that was the sequel of such an immensely popular shooter IP do so badly?
I remember before the launch of the game, I would sometimes see SA2 commercials on TV: the first scene is a woman adjusting a camera, and our view is instantly drawn towards the woman’s cleavage. That shows up at the end of the commercial as well. This leads to a secondary problem of the game: blatant misogynistic advertising. When the game released, one of the first controversies was the appearances of the female skins. While the male characters were in typical military wardrobe, the females looked as if they were in a Call of Duty porn parody. Now we’ve seen this countless times in gaming history. Sex does sell.
Both the imaging and trailers using the female skins were obviously sexist. However, the controversy didn’t really pick up until players would film their sessions and position the female characters in extremely inappropriate and graphic positions:
That’s when Nexon GT finally decided to pull the skins from the game.
Behind the scenes, Nexon was going through its own turmoil: corporate scandal. This year it came out that Founder and Chairman Kim Jung-Ju, was being indicted for bribery of a senior government prosecutor. That prosecutor was found guilty and sent to prison for taking a 425 million won (US$374,000) bribe in cash and Nexon shares in exchange for favors for Kim. Not only cash and stocks, but personal luxury items such as cars and vacation trips were also exchanged. Kim has since stepped down from his position as Chairman of NXC Corp., Nexon’s holding firm. South Korea has experienced a a number of corporate scandals involving greedy arrogant executives in recent years, and this simply reminded the public of another incident, except this time it was behind something as innocuous as a computer game.
When watching gameplay videos of SA2, except for a graphical update, the game kind of looked like…Sudden Attack, the original. It still had that floaty movement, those arcade physics, and many of the same weapons. When I was watching some of the gameplay, I was thinking “This is just SA1 with a new coat of paint. Where did that 30 billion won go?” As much as you might criticize Call of Duty for rehashing the same hardcore military FPS storyline, at least they try to create new features such as space combat, new melee attacks, and stylish evasion moves. Sudden Attack 2 just presented itself as a regurgitated version of SA1 with some store-bought confetti hastily sprinkled on top.
After the end of SA2, Nexon GT also stated that it was ending its contract with Nexon, and it was possible for Nexon GT to reclaim the down payment of 10 billion won (US$8.86 million) and its contract worth 1.17 billion won (approximately US$1 million). Maybe they can use some of those funds to make a more original shooter.
