Too Human – A Disaster

   Too Human is an RPG developed since 1999 by Silicon Knights and published in 2008 by Microsoft, and all unsold copies were ordered to be destroyed by a US judge in 2012.

   That’s a hell of a sentence, huh?

   Too Human was meant to be the magnum opus of canadian auteur Denis Dyack, slated for release on the original PlayStation on four CDs. Unsatisfied with the playstation’s hardware, then unsatisfied with the GameCube, then the Wii, Silicon Knights’ development stalled until 2005 when Microsoft picked it up in hopes of having it be a launch title for the Xbox 360. It ended up not getting released until a year after the 360’s launch. It was released in 2008, failed to sell even a million copies, and was forgotten.

   Frustrated by poor reviews, Denis Dyack blamed Epic Games, the creator of Unreal engine 3. The engine’s difficulty to use, Dyack alleged, was because Epic had withheld documentation from other developers so that the games they made on Unreal engine would perform better than third party competitors, leading Dyack to move production to his own engine and suing Epic Games. There was one problem with this: Silicon Knights never bought a license for Unreal Engine 3.

   They tried to sue a company for not providing documentation for a piece of software they pirated from them.

   After proving that the games did in fact have Unreal Engine 3 code in them despite Silicon Knights’ denial, all copies of Too Human, X-Men: Destiny (whose publisher alleges also suffered from wasted resources) and The Sandman were ordered destroyed and removed from digital sales, and Silicon Knights folded shortly after being forced to pay 4.5 million dollars in damages.

   Well, maybe that’s not true. There’s a special joy in playing a game like Too Human, where nothing, not one thing, works correctly. This game is that truly special kind of bad that the entire big budget games industry has developed homogenized models and decentralized development teams designed to prevent this exact thing from happening. It’s The Room, a disaster so catastrophic and yet so strangely funny it could only have come from one very confident man with too much money at his disposal who would stop at nothing to pull his bad ideas off paper and onto the screen.

   It would almost be cruel to spend time explaining what’s wrong with it. How the attack button has been mapped to the right stick so there’s no way of controlling the camera or targeting which flips wildly wherever it feels, which is usually towards the most distant and least pressing targets it can find. How it gives you long ranged weapons expecting you to hold back at first and pick enemies off from a distance but every enemy (of which there are maybe 4 or 5 types) runs at easily twice your running speed, making it impossible to engage. Combat is stiff and feels terrible because there’s a full second pause between every attack you pull off, and it all just reeks of a game that never made it to testing before release, something that becomes very clear when enemies and allies get caught on the floor and start running in place.

   I have no idea what the story is trying to do. It describes itself as a dark cyberpunk story based on Norse myths where the gods are cybernetically enhanced humans of which you are Baldur, the least enhanced among them. But there’s no indication what might distinguish this from a fantasy story other than that they add “cyber” before every proper noun and the colour pallet is desaturated grey metal. The relationship you have with regular people is basically the same as it is in Halo and it doesn’t play off Norse myths at all so the distinction is meaningless. Burly white men growl at each other about nothing in particular but in a way that comes across like Dyack really really thinks he has something profound going.

   Too Human is an unfinished, non-functional game that really doesn’t need to be remembered. Its one reason to exist is as another warning: even if it’s online, it can still be lost for good.

   Anyways, here’s a copy I bought last week for 5$: