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Bungie’s highly anticipated Destiny has been finally released into the world, and gamers everywhere are having a blast exploring the vast world crafted by the team responsible for the Halo series. With a half billion dollar budget, commercials featuring Led Zeppelin and music written by Sir Paul McCartney himself, Destiny became one of the most anticipated games ever made.
After a week or so of playing the finished game though, a number of the game’s glaring flaws started to surface—or, specifically, its repetition.
This seems to be the consensus about what Destiny’s all about:
Spawn on a planet. Ride Sparrow around. Kill some dudes. Wait while Peter Dinklebot does something. Dance. Fight a bigger dude. Repeat for next mission.
Things can get a little boring. Considering that Bungie has proposed a ten year plan with the series however, they have plenty of time to build something more interesting. For now though, let’s just safely say thatDestiny didn’t quite live up to its expectations.
Video games that fall short of their expectations are nothing new to the industry. Although most of these games aren’t necessarily bad, they’ve just had the misfortune of having way too much pre-release hype that would end up being impossible to meet. The following are eight of the best examples of games that have failed to live up to their ridiculously high expectations.
8. Bioshock Infinite
Irrational/2K Games
Bioshock Infinite was a really, really good game. Heck, gamers can all agree that it was one of the most memorable games in the last 10 years. Unfortunately, the game was burdened with being the sequel to one of the greatest games ever made, 2007’s Bioshock. Infinite had large shoes to fill, and the ridiculous amount of hype that surrounded the game soared through the roof when fans were first introduced to the game’s debut trailer:
Unfortunately, after numerous delays and a cancelled multiplayer mode,Infinite developer Irrational Games had to hire outside help to get the game finished.
When the game was finally released to the world, it was… good. Fans liked it. However, it failed to recreate that unforgettable feeling players got when they first walked through the underwater city of Bioshock’s Rapture.
7. Red Steel
Ubisoft
Do you remember the very first time you saw the Wii debut trailer?Specifically the section featuring Ubisoft’s Red Steel?
It looked revolutionary at the time. The game looked like it was going to forever change the way we play games. Gone were the days in which we mindlessly press buttons to shoot guns—that’s so boring compared to what we saw in that trailer! Gamers can now jump, dive, and take cover behind living room sofas during an on-screen gun fight. You can even point and shoot the Wii remote sideways, if that’s your thing. It was a new and exciting concept and Red Steel quickly grew in popularity as one of the must-have titles for the Wii.
When the game launched alongside the Wii in 2006, it had what most launch titles typically suffer with: mediocrity. No sane person would do flips and dives behind their sofas like the trailers showcased, and the controls were just awkward and unintuitive. Just give us our regular old buttons to shoot guns, we’ve always been fine with those.
6. Grand Theft Auto IV
Rockstar Games
The greatest thing about the Grand Theft Auto series has arguably been about the goofy, over-the-top shenanigans that players are able to pull off in an open environment. That's why the series has always been so successful—it was always a blast to mindlessly do stupid things that you can never do in real-life (without the risk of getting arrested or killed, that is).
Developer Rockstar Games decided to take the series in a different direction with the fourth installment of the series. They took away all the silliness of from the past games and replaced it with a mature story with more in-depth characters. They wanted Grand Theft Auto to grow up.
What they got was a gritty game filled with interesting characters with individual wants, needs, and ambitions. Silly things such as airplanes and jetpacks were replaced with bothersome things like an in-game social life. Although Grand Theft Auto IV was a great game that pushed the series in a new direction, the fans were looking for something a bit more... dumb.
5. Titanfall
Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts
Fans of shooters were really excited when they first heard of Titanfall. On paper, the game sounded like a dream come true: It took the best parts of multiplayer Call of Duty and added more movement options and giant, badass robots. There was a potential hit here. People even called Titanfall a Call of Duty killer.
When the game released in early 2014, it certainly was a blast. It was possibly the most fun anyone can have playing a video game at the time. It was balanced, polished, the multiplayer battles were a refreshing change of pace, and it looked gorgeous. However, all the excitement and fun seemed to have trickled down just a month or so later.
For one reason or another, players simply moved on. Perhaps it was the low number of gun options or lack of a traditional single player campaign, but the game didn’t have quite enough steam to keep the hype train going. Players have returned to the comfortable warzones of Call of Dutyand Battlefield 4, and Titanfall has since been forgotten.
4. Spore
When Will Wright, the creative mind behind the classic SimCity, announced that he was working on a game in which players builtuniverses instead of cities, the project instantly became a hype magnet.
Players believed that they were in for an experience unlike anything else. Players were promised civilizations that would start from mere cells, and would eventually grow to be advanced enough to explore other regions of space.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as exciting as everyone had hoped. The game was good, but players seemed to have lost interest in the game after creating silly penis-shaped monsters (which you can see right here). It didn’t have the same kind of magic that SimCity or The Sims had.
3. Fable
Big Blue Box/Lionhead Studios/Robosoft Technologies
Peter Molyneaux, the creative madman behind the Fable series, is infamous for having over-the-top ideas and ambitions for his video games. The industry needs more designers with said level of ambition—we often get experiences that truly push the boundaries of what’s possible in video games with a mind like his. A downside to these crazy promises, however, is that it generates way too much hype that the finished product can never live up to.
The world of Fable was designed to be dense. For example, your actions shape the way your character grows up. Corrupt individuals would become ugly and hated, whereas players with good ethics would be loved by all. You can get a house, start a family, get a dog, and even contract STDs.
For every grand idea in Fable that came to fruition, there were a dozen that never made it past the chopping block. Molyneaux’s acorn example is often used here, in which an acorn that the character shoots off a tree would eventually grow to another tree. Let's just say I’m still waiting for my tree. Perhaps we can one day get a game that is as rich and dense as what Fable originally sought out to become.
2. Final Fantasy XIII
Square Enix
The Final Fantasy brand used to mean something. Whenever players saw the name on a product, they knew what they were getting themselves into: a game packed with a rich story, a dense and beautiful world to explore, memorable characters designed by legendary artist Yoshitaka Amano, and beautifully composed music by Nobuo Uematsu. Final Fantasy XIII was another eagerly anticipated installment in the now long iconic series, and fans were waiting for the flagship RPG series to finally make the jump to HD.
The game went through numerous revisions and suffered six years of troubled development.
When the game was finally released in 2010, it was flat out disappointing to long-time fans of the series. Everything that made Final Fantasy so iconic was stripped away. Instead of a vast world to explore, we got linear corridors. Instead of beautifully designed characters, we got typical anime nonsense. Uematsu’s music wasn’t used in the final game either.
What we got was not the Final Fantasy that fans have grown to adore, and many believe that Final Fantasy XIII was the start of the series being a shell of its former self.
1. Mass Effect 3
BioWare/Electronic Arts
Ask just about any gamer what the best series in the past decade was, and the majority of them will say Mass Effect. The trilogy of games was more ambitious than any other game at the time. The outcome of just about every decision you make will have an impact on your own personal story over time. Characters that you sacrifice in the first game, for example, won’t be around as you complete your final mission in the third game. That hot blue alien that you slept with in the first game will get jealous when she sees you with another hot alien later on in the series. The consequences of almost every action you make will have surfaceyears after you make them.
The problem with the Mass Effect series is that it was too ambitious. There is no way in hell developer Bioware can account for the hundreds of different variables in every player’s experience. They would never finish making the game! Instead (be warned: spoilers ahead), the final outcome of the universe during the game’s grand finale basically boiled down to “pick any ending you want: choose the blue, green or red door.” Each of the three outcomes were basically the same, except with a hue of blue, green or red tint depending on the “door” you selected. So lame.
This pissed off just about every Mass Effect player. So pissed, in fact, that EA had to make a minor revision to the ending to stave off angry fans. There was even a complaint filed to the Federal Trade Commission, in which a false advertising complaint was made:
After reading through the list of promises about the ending of the game they made in their advertising campaign and PR interviews, it was clear that the product we got did not live up to any of those claims.
Fans of Mass Effect hold the series very dear to them. Each player’s story was unique and was crafted to reflect his/her ethical choices and play style. Nobody, however, talks about that half-assed ending with any love.
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