Server hijackings happen in multiplayer video games more often than you'd expect. But I doubt I've seen anything on this scale before. Especially not for a game like Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville. Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville was an interesting game. It was created as a third installment to the Plants vs. Zombies 3rd Person shooter series. Unlike the other 2 games, this game deviated quite a lot from Garden Warfare 1&2. It is even in the name that bfn would be very different to what people were expecting of a 3rd Garden Warfare. Despite all of the negetive feedback about the game, it has always been one my favourite shooters. In fact when it came out I would spend hours playing it. Levelling up my characters and unlocking skins for them. But what happened to BfN in June 2020 was NOT something I would expect. Nor was it an event I would ever forget. The summer of 2020 was coming up. I was really looking forward to it this time around. No school means more time to play PvZ Bfn and thats all I really wanted to do. It was the first night of the summer and since the pressure of school was off, I had full freedom to play Battle for Neighborville all night. Multiplayer was not yeilding any lobbies that night. Which is strange considering the first night of summer should have the most populated lobbies. Since I had finished all the singleplayer activities I decided to just run around in Giddy Park. Unfortunately that too would be cut short.
The game froze and everyone started running on the spot and all my buttons went unresponsive. I groaned as I knew the game was about to crash. Sure enough it kicked me to the title screen with the pop-up
"Zombies broke into the server room and chewed on some cables. Unfortunately the servers are down. Please try again later."
Are you fucking serious? Why are the servers down? I clicked ok and the pop-up went away and I was left with the empty title screen. I lied back in frustration and went onto my phone to check the server status. But then in the corner of my eye I noticed a new pop-up came up.
"The servers are better than ever. A new update has installed. Join us in the Battle for Paradise <3"
This surprised me. Now in hindsight I probably should have been more skeptical. Updates don't usually just install on their own with the game open. But to be honest what else could this pop-up have meant? Pop-Cap wouldn't put that there for no reason. This was Pop-Cap right?
Curious about this pop-up I got my phone out and took a picture of it. Then I clicked ok and the pop up box went blank. The screen froze and nothing happened. "Well shit I guess the game really is that broken". I was about to turn the game off when the screen went dark and saturated for a second. The word "Welcome" appeared on the dialogue box before switching to the loading screen. It was not the loading screen that usually pops up. Instead this is what it looked like.
It looked kinda cool to be honest. Whatever this update was whether it be a Giddy Park event or something else I was very excited for it. That all changed when the game loaded in. Usually in bfn when the game loads, you have a menu with your character on the left, Giddy Park in the background and a few options to start in either Giddy Park or one of the 3 PvE regions. There would also be an option to view the daily missions or upgrade some characters or whatever. But this time the menu was very different. The background wasn't Giddy Park. In fact there was nothing there. The only thing you could see was a stormy crimson sky. It was barely in the same style as the rest of the game. It looked a lot more amature and someone took a recording of a real sky and then ran it through a software to make it 3D to put it in the game. Then there were the options. Or rather lack there of. The images and text were missing and the select button was greyed out on most of them. Clicking them would result in text briefly appearing saying "NO". The only one that worked was the option to change characters. The customization menu took forever to load and when it finally did, thats when I saw just how fucked the game truly was.
First of all, all of the plants and zombies were on one team. I could literally select any character from the same menu. Which made no sense as they were two different teams. The elephant in the room was all the visual changes. All the characters were deformed in the most unusual and disgusting ways. All of the icons of the characters were concealed to hide their horrific appearances until you selected them. Usually the most deformed you would see these characters are if their models were bugged and certain parts of them would be stretched out or bent in unnatural and absurd ways. This would happen if someone managed to mesh one of the characters with an incompatible animation with another character. A lot of people did this for fun in the first 2 games. However these weren't deformed in that sense. They were looked like they have been mutilated and killed in the most horrific and violent ways. Like the designer was on some kind of edgy drug-trip.
Peashooter and Citron were colourless and dried up like a dead plant.
Chomper, Deadbeard and Snapdragon were chewing on some bleeding mass.
Kernel Corn had a trypophobia inducing cluster of eyes replacing his face,
Night Cap and Electric Slide were nothing more than pitch black slihoutes.
Cactus and Super Brainz were decapitated and missing one of their limbs.
Oak was dried up and darkened with bloodshot eyes that were weeping some kind of black fluid. Acorn's face was ripped off, same with Imp.
Z-Mech was rusted up and had some kind of glitchy mass projected onto his cockpit window.
Sunflower and All-Star were faceless and hanging from nooses.
Foot Soldier and 80s Action Hero were covered head to toe in gunshot wounds and bleeding everywhere.
Space Cadet's little space vehicle had crashed and she was severely injured.
Wizard was crucified.
Scientist and Engineer were both on fire.
And I don't even want to tell you what happened to Rose.
My mind was racing. There is no way in HELL that Pop Cap in the right mind would turn the game into this... shit. But if it wasn't them then who could it have been? I just hurried up and selected a character. I selected Chomper since that was the one I usually played then I spawned into Giddy Park. But where I spawned wasn't Giddy Park. It wasn't the plant base or the zombie base. In fact it wasn't any of the POIs in BFN that I have seen before. I spawned in this big open cavern that seemed to go on infinitely in all directions. Everywhere was shrouded in a disgusting dark blue fog. The roof was held up by big columns made from a tark visceral kind of material. The roof that it was holding up was made of the same stuff as the columns and had big holes in it. The holes revealed a night sky covered in a thick layer of red clouds. The only resemblence to Giddy Park it had was the fact you had other players there. They were trying to communicate via the emoticon feature but all of the text in the chat emoticons have been wiped. But if I had to guess they were just as confused as I was. I tried to run around and explore to see what the hell this map even was, but that proved useless as I kept looping back to the same location no matter where or how I ran. Why were we here? Whats happening? Thats when I noticed that there was a timer at the top of the screen. It read "DARKNESS BEGINS" and counted down from 60 seconds. The fuck? What do you mean by “Darkness”?
What does anything mean? What is happening? Everybody seemed to be running around more and more frantically. As the timer went down, chunks of the ceiling would collapse and the game would get laggier and laggier. I felt that whatever was gonna happen it was gonna be huge. Once the timer hit 0, the text switched to "THE END IS NOW". Nothing happened at first until suddenly, this fucker appeared:
The only known picture of the “thing”
A bunch of explosions suddenly went off around the map and the game then crashed not long after. I was kicked back to the title screen with this error.
"Servers are currently offline due to breach. We are sorry for the inconvenience. 500,000 coins have been added to your account for any damages that may have occurred. We once again apologise and promise to get to the bottom of this."
I decided to just shut the game off and try and get some sleep after what just happened. What was that thing? Why was the game so demented? I didn't sleep at all that night. The next morning I discovered Reddit and the EA forums were buzzing with discussions about this event. We found out the game was hijacked. Who did it and why was unknown. Some people think it was out of protest, while others speculated it was a work of some cult, mostly jokingly. What happened to some people really intrigued me, some people said that when they tried to select one of the more injured characters (e.g Cactus or All-Star) their game would crash and re-entering just left them with the servers down message. Others said that the hijacking damaged their system. Others even pointed out that the game was renamed both on the main menu and the store as "Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Hell".
I didn't really have anything to add other than the screenshot of that entity that appeared right before the servers crashed. I turned off my computer and went to play some BfN, I was kind of nervous to check the game again but luckiy when I did the game was online just fine. However some progress that I gained yesterday was unfortunately lost. My phone suddenly buzzed unexpectedly just as I was beginning to forget about the hijacking. I saw I got an email from an burner gmail address.
Attatched was an image called JustADream.jpg . The file showed a dimly lit photo of a kitchen with the Battle for Neighborville DvD case on the bench next to a bloody knife. The case had the orginal cover ripped out and replaced with a crudely drawn picture of the entity with the phrase "just a dream" written over and over behind him. On the wall behind it. The phrase "Hell is already here" was written in blood. On the far upper right corner you could see a date. Unfortunately the numbers have been smudged out. Over brightening the image I saw what I thought was grain from the darkness of the photo was actually lines of morse code.
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