Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht devoted his keynote speech in GCDC developer conference in Leipzig to criticize the ESRB for what he called a "bizarre system" of rating games.
In his speech, Eggebrecht used his experience with ESRB while developing his PS3 exclusive Lair to demonstrate his point of view. In Lair, players control a dragon which breathes fire and feeds on humans (among other things) with photorealistic violence part of the next-gen title.
In order to maintain a reasonable rating, Factor 5 developers had to tweak every part of the game according to the ESRB ratings board guidelines. For example, players can blow up a huge flying manta troop transport, a living being; but after several ESRB modifications, Factor 5 had to reduce the gore many times until nothing was left but an explosion.
In another example, Factor 5 had to remove all ragdoll physics and blood splatters when the dragon feeds on human prey. Those effects were already implemented when ESRB decided they were inappropriate.
Ironically, Lair's dragon can spew fire, setting thousands of people alight, who then run around, screaming. But that was no problem for the ESRB board, because there is no blood in these scenes.
"The whole rating process was a charade", said Eggebrecht who then went on to propose his solution: introduce a new rating model for computer games different from the movie rating model.
