The internet is, again, in a state of wild, ferocious anger at a game publisher. The internet has been known to frequently go on large-scale boycotting of companies such as Konami, for removing the fantastic P.T from the PlayStation Store, or Blizzard when they announced that there would be no LAN play for Starcraft 2 (a feature which has since been added through a patch). Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s design director, David Vonderhaar, received some of the worst death/abuse threats towards him and his family for reducing the rate of fire on a DSR by a few fractions of a second. The internet is a huge, feral beast and the one thing you do not want to do is piss them off.
Enter Maximum Games, publisher of Farming Simulator, Hello Kitty Online, Alekhine’s Gun and the now-infamous Lichdom: Battlemage. Maximum haven’t really been a name associated with a seal of quality. They have the occasional alright title like WRC or the Farming Simulator titles—if you’re into them—but Maximum haven’t really got their hands on a solid good title as of yet.
Lichdom: Battlemage was a game which received average critical response on its original PC launch, currently holding a 69 on Metacritic for that version. Somehow, Maximum Games got a hold of the title in order to port the game over to consoles with an original release date of March 22nd, 2016. The game was soon delayed . . . and then delayed again. While delays should be seen as a good thing—as they give the developer more time to bring a polished experienced to the consumer—they don’t always bring the joy that some gamers want to see at the end of the long-winded tunnel. Duke Nukem Forever, an extreme example, was announced back in April 1997 and was stuck in development hell for fifteen years until it finally released in 2011.
Duke Nukem Forever, however, began development at a time when technology was consistently shifting and changing the way in which graphics and AI worked. Any failure to keep up with the times would be criticised. The original Shadow Warrior was criticised upon release for not being a fully 3D world like Quake which released a little over a year before. After fifteen years, 3D Realms went bankrupt and sold the rights to Duke Nukem to Gearbox who made the game slightly less unplayable then how it released so they could make their money back.
Lichdom: Battlemage was nowhere near the situation that Duke Nukem was in. I’m not a game developer, I have only created a few levels in Doom Builder and Game Guru, but a port should be a lot simpler than creating a full game from scratch; especially in an engine such as CryEngine 3 which is “already primed for Xbox One development”. Being just a port, Lichdom is the type of game where we can start to get worried about titles we’re excited for being repeatedly delayed.
The game finally released on April 19th in North America and was one of the worst games on the Xbox One. Our reviewer gave Lichdom: Battlemage a one out of ten as the game is practically unplayable for anyone with eyes. The game was one of the most unoptimised experiences ever seen on a console. The Xbox One version is subject to horrible framerate problems, screen tearing, long loading times and, bizarrely, has seriously decreased brightness that cannot be changed and isn’t active in any other version of the game. Digital Foundry, a part of Eurogamer that tests game performance, noted that Lichdom: Battlemage was the worst console game that they had ever tested since they started in 2008.
Maximum Games promised a patch on the day of release; a patch that has not come. Consumers are, understandably, quite mad at Maximum. Lichdom: Battlemage is an unplayable mess and I would urge anyone that can to trade the game in or attempt to get a refund through Xbox Live if that’s still possible. No company should be allowed to release a product in the state that Lichdom: Battlemage was and is still in. Performance is a much more talked about topic when it comes to gaming than it was in the days of the N64 for example and any modern company releasing games that consistently run at 15fps know exactly what they’re doing; they’re shipping an unfinished and broken product.
Maximum Games have stated on a consistent basis that a patch is coming. A “partial framerate patch” released on April 29th but many users have reported that this patch resulted in no change to the overall performance. But Maximum keep on releasing tweet after tweet of apologies, consumers are even angrier than before. (The below tweets contain some instances of explicit language.)
In the era of social media you just can’t release a title in the state that Lichdom: Battlemage is in. Assassin’s Creed: Unity released in a broken state and it was ripped to shreds by fans. Batman: Arkham Knight suffered from performance issues on PC and that was also boycotted and resulted in Reddit post after Reddit post slamming the game. In 2016, your game has to run at a consistent 30 or 60fps on console—unless for stylistic purposes that work it runs otherwise—or else your game will be panned and the internet will not rest until it sees it fixed. For now, we can only hope that Maximum Games fixes Lichdom: Battlemage. While I don’t think they will or can patch what they released, others may still have hope. But for now, stay as far away from Lichdom: Battlemage as humanly possible.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.