5 Hilariously Terrible Choices Game Developers Actually Made

5 Telltale's Batman Game Showed An Actual Corpse

Telltale is famous for turning exciting action-adventure franchises like The Walking Dead, Jurassic Park, and Guardians Of The Galaxy into games in which you mostly walk around and have awkward chats with people. So when the developers got their hands on Batman, they of course decided to focus less on Batman the Moody Ass-Kicker and more on Batman the World's Greatest Detective. But despite the whole game being about paying attention to detail, the developers overlooked one tiny detail themselves: murder.

Chapter 2 of Batman: The Telltale Series starts with Bruce Wayne investigating a recent crime wave in Gotham. One of the most daring sprees is perpetrated by Harley Quinn, who stole $10 million in diamonds and left behind a trail of dead brokers in her wake.

While most of the game has a very comic book aesthetic, for some reason, the developers decided to make all the crime footage look quasi-realistic, with full CGI effects and even real-looking people. But it seems that Telltale took that realism a bit too far, as closer inspection of the dead stockbroker in Quinn's file reveals that the programmers copy/pasted a real photo of a dead man into the game.

That is Andrey Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey who was assassinated in 2016 at an art gallery in Ankara. Not only was it the main story on every news channel in the world, but it's also one of the most famously photographed events of recent times. A different picture of Karlov's murder won Photo of the Year in the World Press Photo contest. But apparently that wasn't enough to immortalize Karlov's lifeless body; he also needed to make a cameo as the victim of an insane clown moll with an oversized mallet.

4 Far Cry Primal Reused The Entire Map From Far Cry 4

Far Cry Primal was Ubisoft's stone-age follow-up to Far Cry 4. But fans accused it of feeling too familiar -- especially when they opened the map.

It turns out that fans who accused Far Cry Primal of just being Far Cry 4 with slightly bigger cats were more right than they knew, as the game was lazily using the same map. The topography of both regions, despite them being canonically thousands of miles and millions of years apart, is almost identical. Look at how the waterfall on the right cascades exactly the same way in both games:

Or how these rivers bend exactly the same way because of the outcropping rocks:

And here's the exact same rock formation sans the bridge:

Entire mountain ranges have been copied and pasted:

This isn't the first time Ubisoft has reused a map in this franchise. After Far Cry 3, they released Far Cry: Blood Dragon, a game that showed that almost anything is better once you add cyberpunk dinosaurs. In that case, Ubisoft announced beforehand that they'd be reusing the map and assets of their previous game. Also, Blood Dragon was a DLC that cost $15, while the studio quickly pumped out Primal and had the gall to charge 60 bucks for a game we'd played before, but now with worse weapons.

Also, Blood Dragon lets you fight the Ninja Turtles.

3 Dead Island: Riptide Programmers Called One Character A "Feminist Whore"

Gaming culture isn't ... super great when it comes to gender equality. In fact, it sometimes feels like misogyny is hardwired into the industry. Quite literally in Dead Island's case.

Dead Island is a zombie game developed by Techland wherein you pick a pre-made "Hero" to slice up the undead like evil pastrami. In the game's expansion, Riptide, one of these Heroes is a lady named Purna, a hard case with dreads and serious trust issues.

Each Hero also gets access to a bunch of unique perks based on their personality and fighting style. Because of her backstory (a history of chasing child molesters and being arm candy to rich assholes), one of Puma's perks causes her to do extra damage to male enemies. In-game it's called "Gender Wars," but that's not the name the coders gave it. They called it "feministwhorepurna."

Feminist. Whore. Purna.

After Riptide's release, one gamer found this piece of leftover misogyny buried in the code. Techland responded by apologizing and saying it was merely "a case of a bad joke during crunch time" made by one rogue programmer, and that they simply forgot to cut it out while finalizing the game. Thankfully, the developers learned from this mistake, and never launched a product that could be seen as exploitative or derogatory to women again... until they released a half-naked dismembered woman's torso as a collector's edition. Maybe just hire one woman, Techland? She would save you so much money.

You might want to hold onto your monocles, because we're about to suggest that the recent Sonic games haven't been particularly good. Such a salacious claim clearly needs absolute proof, and luckily, we have it. Here's a clip of some of Sonic's robot enemies attacking:

Those cheery powerhouses are from the 2008 game Sonic Unleashed. Here's an enemy in 2010's Sonic Colors,:

But then, somewhere down the line, either Robotnik or (more likely) Team Sonic stopped caring about their enemy AI, resulting in these expensive doorstops from 2017's Sonic Forces:

Found in the game's first zone, these robots straight up do not attack. They just stand there and occasionally flex, only damaging Sonic if he voluntarily walks into them, triggering his severe robot allergies. So how did this happen? Did some careless programmer accidentally delete an important line of code? Did they simply forget to program behavioral AI for these enemies? Or, far more sinister, is this all a part of Robotnik's plan? To lull Sonic into a false sense of security and then, when he's least expecting it, WHAM! A series of terrible reviews and a bevy of disappointed fans.

Metal Gear Survive, the successor to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, was ironically dead on arrival. Players felt the game was weird, empty, and awkward -- and not the kind of weird, empty, and awkward they usually love in a Metal Gear game. That dip in quality might've been because it was the first game in the series made without creator Hideo Kojima. But in his honor, the team behind Survive did sneak in one of their old boss' favorite themes: revenge.

In 2017, Konami fired Kojima, their longtime visionary auteur / straight up crazy person. And when we say "fired," we mean they tried to burn his legacy to the ground. Despite 25 years of loyal service, Konami removed all references to the man from their website, renamed his studio, and forbade him from collecting the awards he'd earned for Metal Gear Solid V. A lot of Kojima's staff followed him, but some stayed at Konami to work on Metal Gear Survive, a terrible game with no creative vision that simply chased a bunch of gaming buzzwords like "zombies" and "crafting."

But Kojima's old team did manage to get creative with one part of the game. Right at the start, after you and a bunch of other random soldiers are sucked into a portal to a weird zombie dimension (so far, so Kojima), one character consults a list of their departed comrades' code names, featuring badass soldier handles like "Bloody Raven" and "Big Corn."

But two names really stick out (which is saying something, considering this list includes "Thunder Parrot"): Bastard Yota and Cunning Yuji. Coincidentally, Survive's new director and producer are named Yota Tsutsumizaki and Yuji Korekado, respectively. Calling your new bosses a bunch of sneaky bastards in their first game? Pretty bold move, but as with everything Kojima-related, the madness goes much deeper.

Fans figured that the entire document might be a hidden message. The name at the top, Vengeful Mosquito, is a reference to a character from MGSV -- a former soldier under Big Boss who lost his sense of loyalty and formed his own private army. Huh. That could be seen as analogous to what happened to Kojima and Konami. And the next two soldiers are listed as KIA, or "killed in action," and their animal names happen to begin with an M and G. Like Metal Gear, perhaps? Is whoever compiled this list saying Metal Gear has been killed? OK, that sounds like we're reaching ... but if you then keep looking at the animal initials, they spell out KJPFOREVER. "KJP," of course, was the official shorthand for Kojima Productions.

So the message reads: "Metal Gear is dead. Kojima and his team are legends, and screw our new bosses." And all of that made it through to the finished product. It puts passive-aggressive Facebook posts about your middle manager to shame.

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For more, check out 6 Video Game Easter Eggs Developers Didn't Want You To Find and The 5 Most Evil Ways Video Game Developers Trolled Players.

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