There was major beef in the PC Gamer Slack recently when we, along with everyone else, discovered that faction choices in the recently launched shooter Gray Zone Warfare were permanent: If you and your gaming buddies signed up for opposing sides, well, that was just too damn bad: There was no going back until an eventual server reset, which is months down the road.
Believe me, it got ugly in here.
We weren't the only ones who found ourselves waging internecine war: Plenty of other players levelled complaints when they discovered they were unable to group up with their friends, too.
- The Forever Winter, my favourite extraction shooter, just overhauled its most contentious feature for the second time: 'It was a hell of a rollercoaster to make the adjustment'
- Helldivers 2 director decides to kick off 2025 by wading into a conversation about DEI: 'Make good games, don't make a contemporary political statement'
Fortunately for those who chose poorly, there is now an out: The most recent hotfix adds an option to wipe your current character and start over from scratch.
"We've listened to your feedback, and an account wipe option is now live in Gray Zone Warfare," developer Madfinger Games wrote. "After wiping, all your progress will reset and the game will shut down smoothly. Upon relaunching, you will go through the character creation and get Edition Content and starter gear again."
Only characters that are at least one hour old can be wiped, and there's a one-hour cooldown after a wipe, so you'll still want to be reasonably certain about your choices before you lock into anything. You'll also want to be sure about wiping in the first place: "This action is irreversible," Madfinger warned.
A total character wipe strikes me as kind of a nuclear option, but the response is very positive overall. And understandably so: Bad-faction-chooser Morgan said "the fact that you could inadvertently lock yourself out of playing with friends was a priority-one problem." Which is completely correct, mainly because it's not something I (and clearly a lot of other people) would've ever considered during the character creation process despite a missable on-screen warning. Having to go all-in with a particular faction is great in a singleplayer immersive sim, but a multiplayer online shooter? Not so much.
Madfinger said the character wipe option will also fix the "missing head/secure container bug," although it warned that the problem may reoccur until a proper fix is released. More generally, the hotfix also fixes "several GPU-related crashes."
Sadly, while the ability to change factions has corrected one of Gray Zone Warfare's most egregious oversights, it has also opened the door to a whole new kind of beef:
It's a jungle in here, folks.
