Silent Hill: Ascension carried the weight of the entire Silent Hill franchise, of which there hasn’t been an official installment in about a decade, and immediately fumbled it during a disastrous October 31 premiere. The series—essentially, an extended choose-your-own adventure cutscene progressed by a live audience—already suffers from wonky UI and a useless “battle pass,” which requires you pay $US20 for, among other things, a “legendary” bread sticker.
An unexpected number of people are watching, developer Genvid’s CEO Jacob Navok told Kotaku over email, making it so that “several systems were strained” during its launch. A lot of those people were also posting about game director Hideo Kojima’s cum, so Genvid disabled Ascension’s chat for its second night of streaming on November 1. Ascension’s 15-ish minute episodes air nightly.
Metal Gear Solid designer Kojima is particularly revered in the Silent Hill fan community for P.T., a defunct and daunting PS4 SH demo, and I suppose that makes some people want his “cummy in my tummy,” as they spammed in Ascension’s chat. Other chat participants requested “pyramid head to appear with big boing boing,” and announced they “need pyramid head to impregnate me.”
Genvid, apparently, couldn’t take another 24 hours of this, and pulled the chat feature ahead of Ascension’s second episode.
“Up until we can figure out how we handle the moderation queue,” Navok said in an aftershow livestream, “we’re gonna limit the chat to stickers, and hopefully, I can get the emojis in there, too.”
After that, Genvid will try to have its Twitch-style chat overlay back on track within the next few months. “We’re not gonna get it right the first time, we’re definitely not going to get it right the second time,” Navok said. “But there’s a reason that [Ascension’s episode schedule] is gonna go on for, like, eight months, which is going to give us the time that we need to tune and make things perfect and improve them.”
As for Ascension’s microtransactions, battle pass, and its generally unsightly growing pains, Navok implores haters—of which there are many—to see that he’s trying his best.
Read More: There’s Finally A New Silent Hill Game And Fans Already Hate It
“We’re still a very young company,” Navok said. “We’re still learning. Most of the people who worked on this project were only doing DLC projects before […]. We don’t have deep experience in monetization, we are not great at it yet, we admit this.”
“But […] the idea that we’re here to scam or be scummy is just absurd,” he continued. The more difficult problem to address is that many of Ascension’s detractors don’t only think that the series is a scam, but also that it shouldn’t exist.
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