In Fallen Earth, an MMO where players struggle for survival in a no-holds-barred, post-apocalyptic world, the developers thought that they could never have enough cadavers.
But they were wrong. You can have enough dead bodies -- the Entertainment Software Rating Board told them so. The independent body that assigns game ratings in the U.S. ruled that Fallen Earth's piles of corpses were just too much for a Teen rating, says the developer of the upcoming PC game. The game has received a Mature rating as a result.
"There's one town that's literally hung with 200 corpses," said the game's lead designer Lee Hammock while demoing the game at E3. "(The ESRB) was like, 'That's too many corpses. You hit your limit.'"
Developed by independent North Carolina studio Fallen Earth LLC, Fallen Earth takes place in the Grand Canyon and combines both massively multiplayer and first-person shooter gameplay elements. When the developers were making the game, they had a small hope that they could get a Teen rating, said Hammock.
"We weren't sure what we were going to get because we don't have F-bombs every five seconds and there's no sex in the game," he said.
"We didn't want to have sex because, really, it's the apocalypse. Look at this dude -- he has open sores! There's no sexy there."
While there's no virtual copulation, *Fallen Earth *does have drugs, alcohol, strong language and violence, so a Teen rating might have been a stretch. But Hammock claimed that the biggest thing the ESRB noticed was the "amazing abundance" of cadavers in the game. It also didn't help that some of the quests in the game require... unusual tasks.
"We have a mission where you go cut this guy's face off and give it to somebody so he can make a boot out of it, because he wants to walk on the guy's face," said Hammock.
"There is no 'corpse count' that determines whether a game is assigned a Teen or Mature rating," said ESRB spokesperson Eliot Mizrachi in an email.
"Generally speaking, there's no way to say in absolute terms that X instances of Y content will result in Z rating. Ratings are not formulaic or quantitative; they're inherently subjective. Elements like context, realism, intensity, reward system and the degree of player control are among many factors that our raters take into account," he said.
Fallen Earth LLC said that it was not aiming for a specific rating. "We just wrote the game that we wanted to make," said Hammock. "And we don't have violence for the sake of violence."
He also noted that developers whose games are given a Mature rating often consider altering the game to get a Teen instead, because T-rated games can have much higher sales. "A lot of places just won't stock your game if it's Mature," he said.
If Fallen Earth had decided to change its game for a rating that would allow it to be sold in more stores, it wouldn't be the first time. In 2007, Take-Two Interactive released a cut-down Manhunt 2 with a Mature rating after it was branded "Adults Only" by the ESRB for its violence.
The silver lining to running into ratings issues with the ESRB is that marketers can make hay with the controversy. It was Take-Two that went public with the Manhunt story, generating lots of discussion over the game. Ditto Fallen Earth LLC, with its lurid stories of corpse-piles.
In the end, the creators of Fallen Earth decided to keep the cadavers and accept the possibility that younger gamers won't be allowed to play in their body-riddled wasteland. "What it would take us to get to 'Teen' would change the game to something we didn't want it to be," Hammock said. "When I say it like that it sounds like we have amazing artistic integrity, but it's true."
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