March 28, 2011 by Paul Curtin
Most would agree that the Resident Evil franchise is hurting bad right now. With Hollywood constantly pushing out poor iterations of movies based on the games, Resident Evil 5 dropping the ball by failing to improve upon anything from Resident Evil 4 (our review here), and Dead Space perfecting the survival horror genre, it’s clear things aren’t looking too good over at Capcom. And while you would think that multiple new games coming out in the near future is a good sign, many don’t know the history of Slant Six Games, the developer behind the upcoming Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City game who did their best to kill the once highly popular SOCOM series back in 2008 with SOCOM: Confrontation on the PlayStation 3.
For those who have never played SOCOM: Confrontation, consider yourself lucky, the game was launched back in 2008 exclusively on the PlayStation 3 and came bundled with an official PS3 headset — the headset was the only good to come out of buying the game. Before Confrontation, all major console versions of SOCOM were developed by Zipper Interactive, the same studio that created SOCOM, recently released MAG, and who are currently in the process of releasing SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs. Zipper took a break from the series to work on MAG, and that’s where Slant Six came in and did their best to ruin the once iconic series.
Confrontation‘s launch was a disaster with what seemed like hundreds of bugs and exploits, the game was considered completely “broken” by the majority of those who played multiplayer. While releasing broken games is nothing new in the industry (looks at you, Bethesda), the biggest problem with Confrontation was the delayed response time of Slant Six in terms of fixing said bugs. Patches for the multiplayer took months before being released, and for every one problem that a patch would fix, it would create three more. Not only were patches far and few between, but it took a full year until a map pack was released with a ridiculous price tag of $14.99. YouTube user Blackwido88 took the time to hilariously record almost 40 videos of glitches, you can watch part 24 below that showcases how bad the lag was.
The bottom line is that Slant Six’s take on SOCOM almost killed the series and is one of the main reasons why Call of Duty is the top dog in the modern war genre right now. While I’m sure Slant Six has learned a lot from the SOCOM debacle, don’t set your hopes too high for the next Resident Evil, because I wouldn’t be surpised if Operation Raccoon City is also a complete failure. Personally, I’d rather buy stock in Dead Space 3.
