Old school gamers, what game that was over hyped made you question ALL future games?

[RobertoCarlos]

Hey,

Was noticing lately a few threads/discussion about how pre-ordering games and being excited for upcoming games in general is a bad idea and I agree with this sentiment. Gaming in general is quite a unique business and an expensive one that needs to cover costs at the end of the day and its easy to get lost in the world of marketing and talented designers over hyping their products.

For me it was the game Fable on xbox 1 and also Jade Empire on xbox 1 that made me realize its silly to get lost in the grandeur of gaming and promises from the developers that made me look at all future games differently and its better expect less and then be surprised if it turns out well.

Thoughts?

[Dhrizzle]

Robocop 2 on the Spectrum.

[Arrashi]

Honestly, back in a day "hype" wasn't the same as it is now. I don't really remember any game being as everpresent as for instance overwatch is and as such the "hype" was more of regular anticipation. If i were to name games that disappointed me or didn't deliver on promises than i have to agree with fable 1. It was good, but nothing more. Another one would be neverwinter nights 2, that while also good just wasn't...."great". Also all dungeon sieges after first one.

Other than that, there were many games that turned out to be 8 instead of 9/10, 7 instead of 8 etc.

That being said, the massive shakedown and disappointment came quite recently with Fallout 4. I don't think i ever been so underwhelmed by the game, and it definately not only reinforced my "never preorder" rule but also made me wait 1-2 weeks on recent releases.

Edit: And heroes of the might and magic after 3rd one. Especially latest ones.

[Deleted]

Spore was superhyped but didn't live up to said hype (I've never played it, just from reading reviews and opinions)

[Aeula]

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

[Bushtuckrman]

I can't honestly remember. Things weren't really hype like they are now because there was not much in the way of internet, mostly just magazines. I thought Bubsy 2 on the snes was a real let down. Legend of Zelda, wind waker to me was a let down because I hate the cartoony graphics, I wanted nice next gen graphics.

[Pull My Finger]

I can't relate to that at all. I have no problem with "hype" and I don't think it's something bad. I don't know, even as a child, it was always clear to me that when you're a business and you have a product to sell, you're gonna advertize it and make it shine, create a buzz around it and obviously try to get people excited for it. That's completely legitimate. On this forum, a lot of people tend to talk about hype as if it was this really despicable, borderline criminal malicious practice that you can't resist, which is completely ridiculous and childish.

I also always understood that as a customer, it's your right and also your responsibility to stay objective and level-headed, and that doesn't have to conflict with curiosity and excitement at all. Keep cool and form your own opinion, it's not that hard of a concept. It never happened to me that I expected a game to be the second coming of Christ because of a few ads and some super-enthusiastic reviews, and then got my heart crushed after finding out it was "just" OK or sucked.

[Deleted]

Well, there were many failed games that were promising but failed to deliver, but when it comes to hype...

Black&White and Daikatana ;] That's 2000 - 2001, so not super old school, but those games had modern-style marketing and hype. Both were total flops. In the 1990s I was perhaps to young to be very critical, and the industry wasn't so insane with hype and marketing yet.

[Zoibert the Bear]

Diablo 3

What a disgrace...

[Deleted]

W.O.D all hype and nothing else...the one thing it did learn me, don't believe anything they tell you about a game till it's is out!

[Ausr]

Games from back in the day... not games you currently hate just to hate. Fucking christ...

Final Fantasy 7. God, the hype for that game.

[axell]

I guess it would be Diablo 3, which i didn't even consider bad, just underwhelming. But most of the games i actually was hyped for did deliver so i'm glad i didn't have any major disappointments.

[OrcsRLame]

Honestly, back in a day "hype" wasn't the same as it is now. I don't really remember any game being as everpresent as for instance overwatch is and as such the "hype" was more of regular anticipation. If i were to name games that disappointed me or didn't deliver on promises than i have to agree with fable 1. It was good, but nothing more. Another one would be neverwinter nights 2, that while also good just wasn't...."great". Also all dungeon sieges after first one.

Other than that, there were many games that turned out to be 8 instead of 9/10, 7 instead of 8 etc.

That being said, the massive shakedown and disappointment came quite recently with Fallout 4. I don't think i ever been so underwhelmed by the game, and it definately not only reinforced my "never preorder" rule but also made me wait 1-2 weeks on recent releases.

Edit: And heroes of the might and magic after 3rd one. Especially latest ones.

I pretty much agree with this, but for me it was Mass Effect 3. Everything just seemed off about that game after the masterpiece that was ME2. The shooting was off, the class balance was even worse than usual, the only hard parts of the game were due to instant kill teleporting enemies, the game world just felt so small and all the resources you gathered didn't do squat. All that capped off by a truly horrendous ending that honestly didn't get any better with the extended cut or whatever it was called.

I will say though that I do preorder, but only from companies that I truly trust. Right now the only companies that have that trust for me are From Software and Blizzard. Also I'll be preordering Kingdom Hearts 3 day one, but that's only because I've been waiting for this game for over 10 years and my inner child will not be denied.

[Raiju]

Shadow the Hedgehog taught me not to give into hype. The game was alright. Prior to that I never really had a big disappointment.

[tankbug]

Well, things were very different back in the days, depending on how "old school" you mean.

When I was very young, the choice was Atari/c64 or very crude PC games, like snake. Nintendo was not out at the time. Games were amazing no matter how shitty they were. You could control something, and the box art alone set your gameplay into a context, a fantasy. I don't think that any games sucked, but I had my favorites. I grew up in a rural area in Norway, which meant that unless you had a satellite dish, you could only get the state channel (and swedish if you were lucky), which was commercial free. I never heard about new games until I visited someone that happened to own some I didn't know about.

PCs became better, and Nintendo consoles came out, but still there was little criticism, it was all good. We didn't have 500 games, we had like 10-15 among us, so anything different was awesome. There was little marketing, but we bought game magazines to catch up on new stuff. They didn't really review games, they only presented them to us, together with screenshots. Based on this, we imagined how the games were. Somehow, even if they turned out to be totally different from what we imagined, they were still pretty awesome.

It wasn't until we started reading about games on the internet, going to LAN parties and pirating a million games that our critical sense developed. It happens when you have sooo much choice, and there are some guiding stars out there that set high standards for the industry. The first game that I was really hyped about was Duke Nukem Forever, because I loved DN3D so much, and at this time, both q1 and q2 were out. Sadly, it didn't come out before like ...18 years or something later, and it was a mediocre game at best. This is the closest I've come to distrust the ability of game developers to get their products out, but I've never felt robbed by them, because I've never paid for something that I was promised to be awesome, but then it turned out to be a turd.

I guess I could mention that I was disappointed when I found out Blizzard had scrapped Titan, because I thought mmorpgs had such potential, but I think it turned out for the best. Overwatch is a damn fine game, yet I don't care for the lore, so I could never feel immersion at the same level as with WoW.
(I was never interested in SC:Ghost, so that's something I didn't care about at all)

[Deleted]

Hey,

Was noticing lately a few threads/discussion about how pre-ordering games and being excited for upcoming games in general is a bad idea and I agree with this sentiment. Gaming in general is quite a unique business and an expensive one that needs to cover costs at the end of the day and its easy to get lost in the world of marketing and talented designers over hyping their products.

For me it was the game Fable on xbox 1 and also Jade Empire on xbox 1 that made me realize its silly to get lost in the grandeur of gaming and promises from the developers that made me look at all future games differently and its better expect less and then be surprised if it turns out well.

Thoughts?

Well. i have suffered from hype a lot of times, but the hype was generated by me, it is more wanting to play the next installment of a game i have enjoyed a lot, and it has sometimes been a complete dissapointment.
The hype generated by gaming industry has like no effect on me, because i am also well aware,that they are just trying to sell their product, so i never fall for it.
The pre-ordering thing, is a concept i am afraid i will never be able to understand, maybe i am too old for that, specially when nowadays you can very well buy a supposed finished game, that takes 1 zillion patches to reach that finished state it should have had when released.

[Kalmakk]

Until a few years ago I never actually got burned by any games badly enough that I remember it. Aside from the Fable series. Every Fable after the Lost Chapters, they all got progressively worse

Recently, however?

MGS5 was catastrophically mis-advertised and botched.

Fallout 4 was bland, uninspired, tedious and lacked any emotional investment in any aspect. This coming from someone who adored first Fallout 3, and then put over 400 hours in New Vegas.

Warlords of Draenor, obviously

Far Cry 4 was a let down compared to 3, but I don't think I'd call that a hype issue. Just Ubisoft being lazy as hell and repackaging the same game.

Bioshock Infinite. Considerably less interesting to me than the previous games. I'm one of the rare people who thinks Bioshock 2 was the best in the series, though, so I'm probably not a representative opinion.


On the whole I think I enjoy my games far more than I'm disappointed by them. Partly because I'm extremely picky in what I buy, but also because I know what I like and what I don't. It's only when a developer takes something I already enjoy and switch it's direction that I'm put off.

[dope_danny]

Around the time media stopped going "games are for shut in nerds" to "OH EM GEE IM SUCH A NERD XDDDDDD". That was a change in climate to put it mildly. Videogames overtook movies in revenue percentages and now bob in marketing could smell the money. Definitely around the time dead space came out. Not a bad game but that was when devs started to become talking heads telling you why the creation of the game was amazing rather than show the game. That was the start of a slippery slope.

Now we live in the age where you can visit the front page of mmochampion and it straight up calls youtubers "influencers", hard not to be cynical about anything and everything that tries to get you excited when its so hard to trust anything but the final product, and its been like this since at least '07.

[unholytestament]

Thy name is Peter Molyneux...

Outside that particularly special case I suppose the first real hype-based disappointment I can think of is King's Quest 8. But I didn't really learn my lesson until Fable 2.

[Symphonic]

Remember when we could just play Atari games and be happy?