For consistency sake, let’s say that any game that’s >or=7/10 at what it’s trying to do while having a popular perception of being a <5/10 game in general would count. Want to specify that this is more about the perception of the game compared to, say, a game just being really niche.
My personal Go-to for this would probably be the Callisto Protocol, because while it certainly did have some troubles at launch they were massively overblown. IMO most of the hate for it comes down to people expecting it to be Dead Space 4 with a new name, ignoring the devs the multitude of times they said that it’s something else before release, and then getting mad when it released and wasn’t dead space 4 under a new name.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the poster child for this. That game was easily 7/10 even when it came out as a buggy mess. Now that it’s had a few years of polish, it’s much better than 7/10.
But the public perception was bad mostly because of unmet expectations. I don’t know if I’d call them “unreasonable” a they were set by the devs themselves, but either way, the game was and is much better than a lot of people think.
- It was announced way way way too early.
- Announced “It will be finished when it’s finished” on that way too early reveal.
- Years later, it’s not finished, but tough shit, the studio is out of money and the shareholders are pushing for release.
- It was released unfinished. Oops.
- Years later, it is now closer to the original expectations.
- Still no wall-running, so a lot of things they hyped and were expected are still unmet.
- The Flathead was supposed to be a thing you kept throughout the game, but they never got the AI pathing right with it, so they dropped it.
Well you’re mostly right in your original post, game was a solid 7/10 on release, but the studio just did so much disservice to themselves by hyping it up for nearly a decade before release, and especially hyping a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final product, and on top of all that breaking their own promise to not release until it’s finished.
The whole reason people liked The Witcher 3 was people were convinced the multiple delays to release “made it a better game.” It was at that moment that CDPR built the image that they won’t release a game “until it’s done.” They now had their own studio history working against them when they made the promise of “It’s finished when it’s finished” and people were expecting that. People loved that CDPR was so dedicated to the gamers that they wouldn’t let pesky things like money-men push a game out too early when it’s half-baked. Oops, they did exactly that with their next game, which absolutely shot all that goodwill from the players right through the heart, especially after already waiting nearly a decade for it.
In the end, are the expectations really unreasonable if the studio themselves were the people who built the hype those expectations were based on?
The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.
Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.
I don’t know what to tell you, I played it on Xbox just fine. Played the whole game through from start to finish and had fun. I believe the issue was with last gen consoles specifically.
And again, I think a lot of the criticism was reasonable. But my point is that the game itself was and is fun, but suffers because of the bad reputation it got at launch thanks to some ill-advised (intentional understatement alert!) decisions by CDPR.
Yes, the issue was with last gen consoles. I don’t think that matters to the point I am making, nor that it worked for you personally on your setup. It worked okay for me too, but I was on a high-end PC.
No Man’s Sky is still, in my opinion, trying to make up for what it was on release. It’s a great game now. Not my jam as I find it far too expansive for my tastes, but I can’t knock it for what it is today. I think it’s a work of art and the seamless planet travel is pretty damn cool.
I really enjoyed Watch_Dogs, despite the shit it got at the time.
I got it for free and really enjoyed it. The main character is the epitome of beige and bland generic gruff white dude but the game did quite a lot new and had some good ideas.
The second one was even better, it’s very meme heavy in its characters but if you can tolerate them the gameplay is even better and the story is better too.
Maybe No Man’s Sky. I’m not too sure what people think of it now a days but it had a massive turn around since launch
Absolutely
To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don’t blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,
But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.
When people say it’s shallow, I wonder if they didn’t even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn’t even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.
Because of that I’m also really looking forward for their new game.
Yes, NMS was overhyped and completely failed to meet expectations. But it was also complete garbage on release. 7/10? Not even close. It’s one of the only games I ever bought on physical disk that I returned because it was so bad when it wasn’t unplayable. That wasn’t a problem with expectations, that was a terrible fucking game.
Eh. NMS is unfair because it is literally a different game today then when it launched.
Maybe a bit unpopular but… Cyberpunk 2077. I followed this game intensely since it was first announced with nothing more than a short animatic sequence. It went through all kinds of changes, and many of those were publicly documented before the launch of the game and still had people complaining that they were not in the final game.
It did kind of start with pretty pie in the sky promises, but over thirteen years those promises were tempered. The hacking stuff most people point to is technically all there. Just not as presented in that extremely obvious pre-rendering. Many of the other disappointing things like cops not chasing you should have been expected. They were adamant about it not being like GTA and the cops wouldn’t give chase the same way.
Somehow, everyone got hyped to shit about a lot of stuff with this game only ever mentioned way early into production while they were still brainstorming ideas they wanted to do while I was watching every single thing CDPR put out about it and ended up getting exactly what I expected. My biggest disappointment with the game is the overhype and overreaction leading to them cancelling a lot of planned additions and likely even completely changing the scope of the DLC.
That isn’t to say I think it’s a flawless masterpiece; I expected The Witcher 3 but sci-fi, and I feel that’s what I got. Great story, well done dialogue, cool world, and fun combat. I see a lot of bad decisions and unfinished pieces, but as a long time gamer I can’t say I don’t expect that kind of shit from pretty much every game. Even the best games have those parts where you can clearly see the budget dropped off or management pulled some bullshit.
I’m on my 3rd play through. It’s still janky and buggy in some regards, but my god the theme, the characterisation, the stories, the plot. It’s how you put together an open world game, where immersion relies on the art of story telling.
Someone tell Todd Howard. Maybe the next Bethesda game won’t be so incredibly bland.
The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it’s such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it’s fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it
I just did a replay recently and it was a lot of fun. They really nailed environments, sound, really the whole look and feel of the thing. Gameplay too; I did a monowire netrunner build this time and it was wild. Unlike anything I’ve played before, really. But I did have to cheat a bit to get there.
There used to be a monowire you could go grab out of a box right from the start, but they took it out and locked access to any monowire behind street smarts. I added a console to give myself one and added some cyberware while I’m at it, because why not chrome up?
This was, in fact, totally fine. The locking out doesn’t seem to have anything at all to do with balance.
I did have to spawn myself a bunch of these new shards to increase my cyberware limit, though, because they decided to cap them out and add an item to unlock them. Again, my going crazy with it really didn’t disrupt balance at all.
So why? Because someone in some department somewhere sees game mechanics as a commodity, and they’re treating them like dlc. I get an infinite sea of generic weapons, but try to do the cyberpunk things and the game wags its finger.
Aside from treating game mechanics as a commodity and meting out little scraps, it really doesn’t seem to have any concern for player autonomy when it comes to a lot of the quests. At one point they shoved me into a hideous green snake skin pantsuit and I stopped playing for a week. The game repeatedly forced me to use a pistol, turning what would have been fun quests into obnoxious slogs while I waited to be allowed to play the game again.
Hell, even a pivotal moment in the DLC literally forces a gun into my hands and glitches out if I try to do anything it doesn’t expect. I had a character literally glitch its hands through its head to shoot at me when I tried to run behind it. That’s not even mentioning the numerous points where going off the rails just immediately kills you and forces you to reload. Not because of anything actually dangerous or bad, but just because you’re not supposed to go that way. Rather than making some obstacle, they literally just pick you up and put you back on the path. Could have invented literally anything to explain it away, maybe a security shield or something that kills anyone with a head computer who tries to leave the area, but they just didn’t bother. Telling the player ‘no’ is enough for them. Cool. Fun.
It’s a fun game overall, but it could have been a way better game with a little more inter-departmental communication, a few less money people, and a little more respect for player agency.
How do you get 13 years? It’s been 11 years since the pre-rendered teaser trailer, and it was less than that between announcement and release. They also were open about not being full force on development for the game until Witcher 3 finished, and the announcement trailer served as a recruitment tool, something that most studios don’t do anymore.
Er… I think I was just thinking 2013 when that teaser came out. Them not being full-on in development was part of my point. A lot of things they mentioned that hyped the game up were before they were actually set in stone and actively being worked on.
Well, if you feel that that’s what set that game up for failure, let me tell you about another RPG going through the exact same cycle: the next Mass Effect. That game isn’t getting full attention until after Dragon Age. Its first teaser was 3 years ago, and it’s still got at least 3 more years to go, assuming Dragon Age comes out this year.
