Video games a multi-billion dollar media industry, so it’s natural that a lot of hype in various forms will be used to promote titles, especially the bigger budget ones that are expected to do well.
However, not all games can live up to the hype. Here are eight examples of games that tried and failed to live up to what their marketing promised.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, you’re Darth Vader’s apprentice, one of great power in the force and as many saw in its trailer, even able to bring down a Star Destroyer by yourself. The action was intense, the storytelling was fantastic and it offered both a challenge and simple fun for any player into the Star Wars universe. It seems as though the game lived up to the hype that everyone heard about beforehand.
For the first half of the game…
The second half seems to die down a bit and turn into a typical 3rd person shooter, just with a lightsaber. The second half feels more rushed and less substance hoping to lure folks into a half-finished game.
Fable Series
First thing, Fable isn’t a bad series. It’s rather well done and gives you plenty to do. The issue is with its creator, Peter Molyneux. He had a tendency of promising these fantastic ideas and features in each of the games and just failed to deliver on most of his promises. While the game was good enough for players to enjoy it, they were still disappointed that it wasn’t all it was promised to be.
Spore
Spore was a simulator unlike any other. You started your adventure at the cellular level, bonding with other microbes to form the first organism of life, evolving into bigger and more evolved creatures. There were tons of combinations to choose from allowing you to create a limitless amount of variations as to how your character would look and play. However, that’s where the innovation seems to end. It had such a powerful system to create a massive game of innovation and imagination but ended up falling short due to a seeming lack of focus as to how it should progress once you get beyond that beginning part of the game.
Homefront
Homefront played on the chance that North Korea would invade mainland US causing an all out war on American soil for the first time since the Civil War. The scuttlebutt about the game when it was first announced is it would be akin to the type of emotional storyline you found in a game such as Half-Life 2. Unfortunately, it failed to hit that mark and couldn’t compete with the other shooters that populate the FPS market and ended up being an over-hyped bomb.
Medal of Honor (2010)
Medal of Honor and Call of Duty used to have a bit of a back and forth between which was better due to their similar content. Then Activision released Call of Duty: Black Ops and EA felt they could adequately compete against that years latest version of Call of Duty. Medal of Honor was released in 2010 and followed in the footsteps of the FPS juggernaut and trying to get the love and favor of the Call of Duty crowd. While the game itself wasn’t that bad, it was proven to be inferior in every aspect against Activision’s flagship title. A sequel, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, was released in 2012, and tanked completely, thus killing the franchise for good.
Destiny
When Destiny was announced, you couldn’t visit a webpage without seeing some sort of advertisement for it. Though, given the partnership between Activision and Bungie, the hypetrain was in full force for this one. With a whopping $500 million budget and elements taken from MMORPGs, Destiny was set to be the next big thing in FPSs. When it was first released it was given rave reviews for its graphics and gameplay mechanics. But, in the areas it should have excelled at such as the storyline, it bombed horribly. It failed to deliver on the replayability of the title causing players to become disinterested in the title.
Bungie has made improvements since then, but it was seen as too little, too late for many who since stopped playing.
Watch Dogs
When it was first announced at E3 2012, press and players were blown away by the trailer and demo they saw being delivered. The graphics were amazing, the gameplay looked like GTA, but with fun new technology tricks to use to mess with the environment in various ways.
Then it was released…
Watch Dogs graphics were downgraded significantly and not even the settings cranked to full on the power PC platform could they tune it up to E3 settings on its own. Doing comparisons between what they saw at E3 to what they were playing made everyone upset by what they were given. Those tech hacks they saw in the E3 demo were pretty much it in terms of new mechanics that really made it stand out from other open world driving games and players had to hack the games code to get the E3 settings online (something that wasn’t available to those that purchased it on console).
Hopefully it’s a lesson learned by all developers in what not to do for their own games.
No Man’s Sky
If you lived in a world of any sort of technology, you heard about No Man’s Sky. It was touted as being a open sandbox space exploration title that allowed you to colonize worlds and explore the galaxy keeping you at the “center of the univserse”.
However, once you got passed the advertised features, you found that the game was rather bland. The planets, while randomly generated were, for the most part, very similar and the animal sprites left a lot to be desired. The only record it set was the amount of refunds that were requested for it and even had a lawsuit against it for false-advertising.
