Hype in the Gaming Industry and Failed Expectations

[TorontoReign]

How many times have we been told that [Insert Game Name Here] will revolutionize the gaming industry forever? Many games use aggressive marketing in some of the most annoying ways. Do we really need Call of Duty on Doritos and Mountain Dew? What games do you think have failed to live up to the hype, or been hyped to extreme degrees? Here are a few of my picks for games that failed to meet my expectations:

Daikatana - You can't mention hype without mentioning Daikatana right? Romero sure made us his bitch didn't he? Id has gotten even worse since then. Look at Doom 3 and Rage. Mediocrity at it's best. Daikatana wasn't as bad as Duke Nuke Forever though.

Duke Nukem Forever - I remember back in 1997 when PC Gamer did a issue on Duke Nukem Forever. The expectations were too high for this game to ever succeed anyway, but the developers really fucked this one over. Just watching the timeline of the development schedule makes me want to cry. What the hell was their problem? 3D Realms deserved what they got. I think DNF would have been better received if they sold it as a 20 dollar game. I actually enjoyed it briefly (about 5 hours) TBH. After being in development for over 15 years, the anticipation is really a bitch, so I did expect it to be a letdown, but I owed it to Duke to play it anyway. I don't really understand why they took so long to get it out there though. It was a pretty mediocre shooter even by 2007 standards, so what took so fucking long? They had to keep creating new maps for what reason? Why did they change the graphics engine a hundred times? The worst thing about the whole experience was that I told myself no matter how bad the game was, I would beat it on it's hardest difficulty. It was one of the most joyless gaming feats I have ever completed.

Fable - This game was once called Project Ego. It was supposed to be the one to rule them all. A RPG that would destroy your life with awesomeness. Molyneux is notorious for over-hyping games to the point of absurdity. Peter promised incredible things, like trees that grow in real time, and characters that would age naturally over time. When my friend described the game to me I pictured a world where my actions actually mattered. I hoped for a expansive non-linear storyline that would change drastically depending on how you played. I waited a couple of years for it to come out, but was disappointed when it did. The years of hype had ruined it all. I quickly saw through the lies upon my first playthrough. This game was so half-assed it hurt. Yes, your character did grow up, but not in the way that they described. The environment did not change over time, so that one fell flat. They didn't even release all the content for the game at launch ; You had to wait for the Lost Chapters to come out to receive the finished product. Bullshit. Ever since then I have never trusted a fucking word that Molyneux says, or any game developer for that matter. Fable 3 kinda lives up to the promises that were made with Fable 1 but just barely.

Black And White - Molyneux ruined this one for me too. He tells fabulous lies about every game he works on. I don't think I can name a game he hasn't done this on. At least to my knowledge anyway.

I personally feel that Halo and Call of Duty have been over-hyped to ridiculous heights. I am sick of hearing about them. I am sick of seeing them in gaming magazines. I couldn't care less about Halo or the next Call of Duty clone. I am ready for the FPS genre to progress to the next level. I don't know when that will happen though. I know I am in the minority, but fuck the majority.


My Message to Game Developers: If you have to change the game engine numerous times over several years with no finished demo in sight, do yourself a big favor, and cancel the project. If you can't follow through on your promises, quit making so many promises.


An interesting view on hype http://www.tsanalysis.com/2011/05/the-video-game-hype-cycle/

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

GTA4 - Do I have really to explain myself? Hyped to hell and back and raving reviews everywhere for a game that's certainly good but not even close to the hype that surrounded it.

Fallout 3 - When I saw the reveal trailer and read the first previews I was thrilled. I became interested in RPGs kind of late so all I knew about Bethesda was that they had a great history in the genre. The art direction was great and there was a respected developer at the helm; what could possibly go wrong? Then, while searching for informations, I stumbled on this site and learnt what I should really expect from the game...

Daikatana - You can't mention hype without mentioning Daikatana right? Romero sure made us his bitch didn't he?

[spoiler:7e1857ae03]

[/spoiler:7e1857ae03]

Daikatana wasn't as bad as Duke Nuke Forever though.

Isn't that exagerating a bit? I have played only the demo of DNF but I doubt that the complete game is worse than a game where you have to babysit two companions with terrible AI, among others things.

 

[Jebus]

Spore: Oh my lord this game seemed promising. So innovative. So intelligent. So flexible!

It turned out to be incredibly short, incredibly boring, and incredibly pointless to play. Unless you liked making penis-shaped aliens.

Call Of Duty: I agree. They get worse with each iteration. I should really stop buying this shit.

Duke Nukem Forever: Once again, I agree. I bought it in a Steam sale out of pure nostalgia, but haven't been able to bring myself to finish it. So painful. It's like seeing your first girlfriend back after ten years and finding out she's transformed into a bloated, dumb redneck. It not only sucks today, it actually reaches back in the past and taints the memories you had of the 'original'.

Every Settler game after nr. II: These used to be so good. They have become so bland now.

Age of Empires III: SO. BORING.

Dawn Of War: I also bought these on a Steam sale because, hey, I figured a game with this much expansion packs just had to be good. I never even managed to finish the first map, as the inane dialog and storywriting pissed me off to no end. It's like it was written by a 13-year-old, what with a pee-brain Space Marine and everything.

Dungeons: The successor to Dungeon Keeper? Fuck you, you unscrupoulous rapist assholes.

Jagged Alliance: Back In Action: We're going to bring back Jagged Alliance! We're huge fans, so we're going to recreate JA2 with better graphics! It's because we love the game as much as you!
FUCK YOU, you bastards, you ripped out the heart and soul of everything that made Jagged Alliance be Jagged Alliance. And I could paint better graphics with a brush sticking out of my anus.

 

[Serge 13]

I am not really sure if games have to necessarily "revolutionize" the gaming industry.

It also depends on what you expect from a game. Most people say that Postal² was/is a crappy game, but I personally enjoyed every nano second of both the game and its expansion pack 'Apocalypse Weekend'.

When I start playing a game, I pay close attention to one important factor:

The Story and its pace.*

I am playing Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning right now, and trust me when I tell you that everything in this game is really really well done, everything except for the story which is boring me to death. It's as if somebody is talking to me about something I really don't care about.

There have been some exceptions where the world design was so good that it made me stop caring about the story(FarCry2), but these exceptions are rare. In the end it's all a matter of taste. Everybody likes a good story though, but then again, it all depends on what kind of a story is a good story in your book.

*= Note that Postal² didn't have a spectacular story, but it did have lots of funny characters and weird moments, this counts as story I guess...sorta...

 

[PainlessDocM]

Black And White Molyneux ruined this one for me too. He tells fabulous lies about every game he works on. I don't think I can name a game he hasn't done this on. At least to my knowledge anyway.

What's wrong with Black and White?
It was an innovative, fun game and an amazing technical achievement much like everything Molyneux touched before he went the way of the Xbox and started developing casual titles.

Of course not every feature he mentioned in pre-release interviews made it into the final game but I much prefer to see visionary developers trying new things (that unfortunately don't always get implemented) over the endless stream of safe and bland "AAA" titles and butchered reboots we see today.

Dungeons: The successor to Dungeon Keeper?

That's how they tried to market that POS and con desperate fans into pre-ordering their awful product. Apart from superficial elements it has nothing in common with DK, nonetheless I'm surprised EA or whoever holds the right to DK hasn't sued them into oblivion for blatantly ripping off parts of their IP.

Fuck you, you unscrupoulous rapist assholes indeed.

 

[Wooz]

When my friend described the game to me I pictured a world where my actions actually mattered

Probably one of the saddest things on a forum I've read in the history of ever.

Jagged Alliance: Back In Action: We're going to bring back Jagged Alliance! We're huge fans, so we're going to recreate JA2 with better graphics! It's because we love the game as much as you!
FUCK YOU, you bastards, you ripped out the heart and soul of everything that made Jagged Alliance be Jagged Alliance. And I could paint better graphics with a brush sticking out of my anus.

No, you couldn't. Your anus has, for all its otherwise prehensile and quivering abilities, a limited grasp on the mouse/keyboard combo required to do digital 3D work. The analog 3D stuff is frankly, shit.

Also, really? I thought the environments were pretty damn good. They completely took away the 'canadian town' dissonance present in JA2 and added a tropical vibe. A bit hamfisted, and as a colleague likes to say about German games "hmph, you can almost feel the sunny mountains of Bavaria with this light", but I like them. I also like some of the character re-interpertations, (buns, conrad, dynamo) while hating others (reaper, scope).

And while we're on the hatewagon, pretty much everything else sucks. The animations, combat system... can't blow up walls liberally and in good measure... tacky quests, too easy enemies. The list goes on and on. I mostly kept playing for aforementioned enviros. I wonder how moddable this game is.

 

[ZeusComplex]

Dragon Age: Origins Coming from Bioware, I should of known better, but I was quickly suckered into their marketing of a old school party focused RPG. Things started alright, but then it suddenly disappeared for many years to come. The only screenshots to be released where simple mockups of builds made in the NWN toolset. (or so it seemed.)

But then it returned to the forefront and worst of all, on consoles. What the hell? I'm not trying to make a consoles suck argument here, but some genres just can't be done on consoles without serious dumbing down and stripping the game's mechanics. Dragon Age is a great example. The deep character system of D&D was replaced with a three class three race restriction, the gameworld was horribly generic, and the combat they so praised as being a return to the party rpgs of old was a complete joke.

I guess this may sound strange when I say I don't completely hate this game. The music was decent and the writing was passable, but it was just so god damn boring. A video game shouldn't be a chore to play and DA was exactly that. I could never finish the big city or the werewolf quest because of how dull and uninspiring it was.

I think the worst part about it however was the realization that party based RPG's are, at this time of gaming history, dead to the mainstream. I was really hoping DA2 would of fixed many of my gripes, make the game actually tactical and tense. Yet, we all know how much cooler pressing A is than thinking round by round how to emerge from a fight, victorious.

To my knowledge, that is the biggest disappointment I've felt in some time. Not just the game itself, but what it's release herald not only for my favorite genre, but my once favorite developer as well.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

To be fair, DA:O's three classes were fairly flexible, especially with all those specs. It's more like they replaced DnD's bloated character creation system with a more simplified MMO-like system.

But yes, DA:O was good but boring for the most part. It basically felt like they took NWN2 and dumbed it down and down and down. NWN2's combat was far superior, and while the OC's premise was largely similar, it felt somehow more inspired.

I think a lot of party-based games are dying out because of ow prevalent multiplayer has become. That most MMOs suck and don't offer any commensurately satisfying party experience is beside the point. I did find though that despite its many shortcomings, DDO, given a good group of people in your party, makes that spirit live on somewhat.

 

[Ilosar]

Spore is the biggest one I can think of. It seemed like such a revolutionary game. Ended up being a mediocre game with a cool creation tool. The Space part was the only one that had any sort of depth, and it got repetitive fast.

Dragon Age 2, of course. Not so much for the broken promises (we got what was advertised, sadly) but the What Could Have Been. There were genuinly good ideas here. But you simply can't make an RPG in slightly more than a year. Doesn't help that the story department go the shaft when it came to the game's design (all that senselessness in Act 3? Laidlaw wanted more boss fights and didn't care when Gaider said it didn't fit the story). The first game is my favourite Bioware game and probably my favourite RPG behind Torment, so let's just agree to disagree here Zeus.

Hm, what else? Oh, I am dissapointed of the course the Assassin's Creed has chosen. One game per year? Yeah, it's not like this will mean that the changes will be almost purely superficial and that the series will become stale as all hell /sarcasm. AC2 was wonderful, Brotherhood was good but dragged on, and Revelations is a joke as soon as Constantinople gets old, which is surprisingly fast.

 

[TorontoReign]

Daikatana - You can't mention hype without mentioning Daikatana right? Romero sure made us his bitch didn't he?

[spoiler:b4f3710b5c]

[/spoiler:b4f3710b5c]

Daikatana wasn't as bad as Duke Nuke Forever though.

Isn't that exagerating a bit? I have played only the demo of DNF but I doubt that the complete game is worse than a game where you have to babysit two companions with terrible AI, among others things.

I don't think so. I have Duke Nukem Forever and it was a big letdown. I liked it for awhile, but it doesn't hold up to Duke 3d. Biggest fucking letdown ever. 3D Realms be damned. At least Gearbox tried though. Duke Begins may redeem the series.

What's wrong with Black and White?
It was an innovative, fun game and an amazing technical achievement much like everything Molyneux touched before he went the way of the Xbox and started developing casual titles.

Of course not every feature he mentioned in pre-release interviews made it into the final game but I much prefer to see visionary developers trying new things (that unfortunately don't always get implemented) over the endless stream of safe and bland "AAA" titles and butchered reboots we see today. -

Black and White didn't live up to the promises he made beforehand. It was a pretty shallow title from my experience with it. It was a decent game though. Yes he comes up with creative concepts, but lately he has been slacking in that department as well. A Fable Kinect title? Crap.

Dragon Age: Origins Coming from Bioware, I should of known better, but I was quickly suckered into their marketing of a old school party focused RPG. Things started alright, but then it suddenly disappeared for many years to come. The only screenshots to be released where simple mockups of builds made in the NWN toolset. (or so it seemed.)

But then it returned to the forefront and worst of all, on consoles. What the hell? I'm not trying to make a consoles suck argument here, but some genres just can't be done on consoles without serious dumbing down and stripping the game's mechanics. Dragon Age is a great example. The deep character system of D&D was replaced with a three class three race restriction, the gameworld was horribly generic, and the combat they so praised as being a return to the party rpgs of old was a complete joke.

I guess this may sound strange when I say I don't completely hate this game. The music was decent and the writing was passable, but it was just so god damn boring. A video game shouldn't be a chore to play and DA was exactly that. I could never finish the big city or the werewolf quest because of how dull and uninspiring it was.

I think the worst part about it however was the realization that party based RPG's are, at this time of gaming history, dead to the mainstream. I was really hoping DA2 would of fixed many of my gripes, make the game actually tactical and tense. Yet, we all know how much cooler pressing A is than thinking round by round how to emerge from a fight, victorious.

To my knowledge, that is the biggest disappointment I've felt in some time. Not just the game itself, but what it's release herald not only for my favorite genre, but my once favorite developer as well.

I couldn't agree more. Those two games are what killed my relationship with Bioware. Dragon Age: Origins was a masterpiece compared to the crap that was Dragon Age 2. I am exaggerating a bit of course. Since Knights of the Old Republic their RPG's have went downhill. They hardly resemble RPG's anymore. Mainstream garbage.

 

[Ausdoerrt]

Yeah, L4D can get old and repetitive, but it's also somehow addictive. It's definitely made my list of fun "party" games alongside things like UT'99 or CS 1.6. Though it definitely doesn't work properly as a single-player game.

I also think a lot of hype around it was player-generated more than PR-generated, which is subtly different.

 

[Stanislao Moulinsky]

I don't think so. I have Duke Nukem Forever and it was a big letdown. I liked it for awhile, but it doesn't hold up to Duke 3d. Biggest fucking letdown ever. 3D Realms be damned.

My bad, didn't realize you were talking of "letdown" and not comparing their quality. In that case I agree.

 

[the_cpl]

They FAIL because they say they grab a good game, they say they make another episode, but they make it different and it kills the original one. The Fallout 3 is ok, but it's an FPS, not a turn based RPG. New Jagged Alliance games fails. There was a new X-COM UFO, they made it FPS and everybody hated it.

But Hollywood is the same. They keep making "remakes", great movies get stupid CGI monsters. "The Thing" needed a remake? I don't think so. They made it anyway, and it failed. A Nightmare on Elm Street? The remake is much worse.

 

[Mad Max RW]

Going backwards starting at most recently disappointed:


Rage. Being an id software game I didn't expect much, but man did they blow it big time. The basic shooting mechanics are ok, levels are kinda nice looking, but it's just so bland and hand-holdy with the worst ending I have ever seen. The biggest selling point, the spiffy new graphics engine, actually sucks. Anything closer than 100 feet is a blurry mess. To top it off this is id's first game that doesn't support modding whatsoever. The editor they repeatedly promised would ship with it was cut days before launch. They even went so far as to lock all the cvar settings in the first patch to prevent people from tweaking the game.

Aliens vs. Predator 3. For me this was a bigger disappointment than Fallout 3 and Invisible War combined. I waited more than 10 years for a proper sequel. Somehow the studio behind the awesome first PC AvP game (as well as the even older Jaguar version) was brought on to make the third installment. In short, they fucked everything up. Controls are broken, there's no balance at all, AI is worse than first generation shooters, the singleplayer campaigns recycle the same 3 totally linear maps, so many stupid design decisions at every turn from lack of crouching to alien wall-walk being totally fucked to an extremely narrow FOV you cannot change. Of course no mod support. After they failed to sell a handful of multiplayer maps as DLC, Sega officially yanked support from the game a few months after launch. Oh yeah, and multiplayer had no anti-cheat system and was filled with hackers. Aliens: Colonial Marines is the next shitstorm I have no interest in thanks to this abomination.

Metro 2033. What a weird game. It's a PC exclusive but plays like a bad console port. Narrow FOV, linear stupid maps, crappy controls, no anti-aliasing, and tons more basic features missing. What killed it for me is the game plays for you more often than not. First person cutscenes. That's all it is.

Batman: Arkham Asylum. I love Batman, I love the graphics, they nailed it using the voice actors from the old cartoon, and I love the classic setting. However, the gameplay itself is so damn boring and easy. After a few joyless hours I never touched the game again.

 

[DevilTakeMe]

No mention of Battlecruiser 3000 AD? I don't know if Derek Smart is on these boards, but yeah, for all the hype, it was a major letdown. Even the final version wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

 

[Hoxie]

Dawn Of War: I also bought these on a Steam sale because, hey, I figured a game with this much expansion packs just had to be good. I never even managed to finish the first map, as the inane dialog and storywriting pissed me off to no end. It's like it was written by a 13-year-old, what with a pee-brain Space Marine and everything.

Aside from that, Duke Nukem Forever was pretty awful for how fun it could've been.

Battlefield 3 was a decently big one for me. I enjoy the Battlefield series, but this one suffered horribly from too much hype. After playing it for a long while, I would've preferred to go back and play one of the run and gun FPS it was supposed to "beat" or whatever. Maybe it'll be more entertaining when I don't get killed half the time because someone blinded me with a flashlight on their gun from 100 feet away, in the middle of the day, in the desert.

One smaller but still there, Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword. I love M&B, but Fire and Sword took away a few of the most enjoyable aspects from the previous one. The most heinous being, I liked actually fighting in the previous games. Being able to lead my warriors into battle was entertaining, charging in with all your guys and having this huge sea of melee. In Fire and Sword however, thanks to the addition of the guns and how unpredictable they are, I have to stay at the back like a pussy or risk getting 1-hit blown away by some asshole who got a really lucky shot in from half a mile away.

 

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Metro 2033. What a weird game. It's a PC exclusive but plays like a bad console port. Narrow FOV, linear stupid maps, crappy controls, no anti-aliasing, and tons more basic features missing. What killed it for me is the game plays for you more often than not. First person cutscenes. That's all it is.

Metro 2033 wasn't a pc exclusive, I played on the 360. It felt like a bad pc port, the inventory and controls were too complex/fussy for a controller kind of like Rage in that aspect.

 

[Mad Max RW]

Ha, I wasn't aware of a Xbox version. That helps explain why it's such a piece of shit.

 

[Sub-Human]

Red Alert 3. This comes both from the hype, and my own expectations. To be honest, I imagined better graphics and perhaps a little bit more units, and that's about it. What the game did instead was, stop the player from being able to toggle superweapons (this ain't a Cold War race - this is a strategy game) in skirmish (only reason I play Red Alert). No speed increase. And what's more, they managed to make units like that Soviet artillery battleship which could fuck the shit out of your opponent. Not fun when you rely on one unit rather than five. Luckily though, the girls managed to be a good substitute.

 

[WillisPDunlevey]

Ha, I wasn't aware of a Xbox version. That helps explain why it's such a piece of shit.

The world they created was pretty interesting (in a Fallouty sort of way), I could have done without the Demon monsters or whatever.

I liked the weapons and having to use the pump dynamo to power your flashlight and your nightvision goggles. It was pretty cool how they ran out so slowly, you could not notice they were not working any more.

The gas and gas masks was pretty cool too.

Plot: Lame
Controls: Sucked
Game: not so good.