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.
The salt is real. (And the edits.)
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?
I get it. I said I didn’t think the expectations were unreasonable.
I think you’re pretty much proving my point, though, that the game is unfairly maligned due to unmet expectations. The game they released, while buggy, was fun. You’re pissed off about a lot of things that aren’t how fun the game is to play.
I’m not really pissed off, I’m just listing off things that were unmet based on the studios own desires and their own promotional materials leading up to release.
There’s still videos out there from when they were hyping wall-running and the Ghostrunner class. *shrugs
I really don’t think it’s unfairly maligned when those expectations were set by the studios themselves.
Fair enough, we can agree to disagree on the OP’s intent for this post. Thanks for the civil discussion regardless.
Ghostrunner class
I mean… sandy, optic camo/cool, blades? For some odd reason it took Edgerunners for people to give the sandy an honest spin, possibly due to “aw shucks doesn’t work with guns and I can’t hack”.
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.
Seemed to me you called the console version unplayable. You said they didn’t work. I was just correcting that statement for anyone who wasn’t aware that your were bending the truth to make a point.
Sony literally pulled the game from the PlayStation Store because of the low quality. At that point it’s not just a subjective opinion but fact, so I resent the claim that I’m bending the truth.
I recall it being hyped up as a Cyberpunk GTA, which is very much wasn’t and by the time I bought it and played it I knew that. I also waited until the first major patch and played on PC so overall my experience was pretty solid. I beat the game and enjoyed it, and I rarely make it all the way through a game these days.
I think for anyone who was expecting it to be a sci-fi open world sandbox it was probably a huge disappointment, but after that the only thing I felt let down by was just not enough interactivity with the world, which is something a lot of games don’t do well anyways.
It was a mess on last gen consoles. It’s it even purchasable on them anymore? I know Sony stopped selling it at one point.
I played it on GeForce Now so my experience was pretty solid from the get go. I dislike open world games and I still played the hell out of that game.
I just never thought the game was very good in what it’s pretending to be.
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.
I thought the protagonist was great. It was a man coming to the realization that he wasn’t so much a heroic renegade as he was a malicious bad guy.
The um, plot, was a little bare.
But very unique multiplayer.
Me 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.
Sure, but this post is not about 7/10 games on release, it’s about 7/10 games now vs their perception now.
Eh. NMS is unfair because it is literally a different game today then when it launched.
Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.
Metal Gear: AC!D
It was such a great adaptation of stealth-action, but people didn’t like that it had “Metal Gear” in the name. I absolutely adored the card collecting and deck-building, and the very deep, seemingly-emergent combos you could pull off.
I feel like Days Gone belongs in this conversation.
Man I loved Days Gone. I played through the whole game and deeply enjoyed it. I’m always surprised when I hear it getting shit talked online because it was really well done in my opinion. Maybe it was launch issues or something since I played it on PC long after release.
Unpopular opinion because it’s so recent, but I think Starfield is/will be in this category
It will be if they give it some TLC like CD PROJEKT and Hello did with their games. There’s a lot to like about Starfield, but it has problems that have a big impact on gameplay. I don’t want to deal with that inventory system for the hours it will take for me to enjoy the story. In general, the menus kinda suck. They really need to work on the ergonomics.
Bethesda never does that and from what I’ve heard the modding community still won’t switch away from Skyrim. They, too, are tired of Bethesda’s shit and they already invested so much time in Skyrim to fix it up they might just as well continue.
The problem with starfield is not technical but that the writing is pretty crappy in general. Technical or feature problems can be fixed (cyberpunk or no man’s sky did it) but the story can’t be extensively rewritten without making it a different game.
Is the story that bad? I played a few hours and I was into it. Does it get worse later? I set the game aside because it was buggy and didn’t exactly run well. I’m planning to pick it up again after it gets some updates.
In the 6 or so hours I played, it was the inventory and menus that drove me crazy more than anything else. They are so poorly designed and implemented that I wonder if anyone actually played the game during testing. I can’t see myself continuing the game until they are improved.
It’s the kind of thing that the more you think about it the more flaws you find. The stories from the different factions also feel very disconnected, like Skyrim’s. Everything seems to exist in a vacuum).
But don’t take me for my word, if you already have it play the game and see if you enjoy it, that’s what’s important.
Liked the main story well enough. Not as good as Morrowind but on par with FO3/4 and Skyrim which I grade as mediocre. Starfield does have some of my most enjoyed faction quests though.
Biggest failings to me were the repetitive POIs and half finished sub systems that while functional could have been so much better. I’m still happy with my purchase and see myself playing again over the coming years but it’s understandable why so many people walked away from it.
I’ll throw my hat into this ring with Monster Hunter Rise. I often spend my time browsing monster hunter content and almost every time Rise gets brought up it’s just to talk about how much worse it is than World. I’ll say it now, yes I also prefer World to Rise, but holy fuck do I still love Rise.
To start with, let’s compare the two. Monster Hunter is developed by 2 teams who take turns making games. World was developed by the mainline team who are known for more grounded and polished games. Rise was developed by the portable team who are known for flashier and more experimental games. Most players started the Monster Hunter series with World (it’s Capcom’s #1 best selling game of all time after all) and so going from the high detail immersive World to the action packed fast paced Rise was extremely jarring. A massive portion of the hate just comes from the fact that it was different.
Also, as you can probably guess from the name, the portable team makes games for portable systems, such as the Switch, which immediately gives them less power to work with system-wise. Couple this with the fact that Rise was developed during the pandemic, and Rise was really dealt a rough hand. Graphically it’s a massive downgrade from World, and it even ended up releasing without an ending or any non-scripted elder dragon fights.
In spite of all this, even though Rise lacks a ton of the personality and charm of World, it’s still an absolute blast to play! The combat is stellar, and while it may not have the weight World had, its fluidity and high adrenaline action makes it some of the best in the series. The sunbreak expansion especially really improved the game in every single way, fixing a ton of the issues people had with the base game. I feel that most players already moved on after base Rise and so didn’t get to experience that improvement unfortunately.
TL;DR play Monster Hunter Rise. It’s really good. Just don’t go in expecting the same experience as World.
Resident Evil Revelations 2 never gets talked about since it’s a ‘mediocre’ spinoff but i very much enjoyed it
I think Castlevania : Lords of Shadow’s IP kind of worked against it. It’s useless to non- fans of the series, and it’s jarring to those who are.
It’s like it is constantly wondering if it’s a new take on the universe, or just a whole new one with useless, random references thrown in. There are lots of people completely displaced from their original time and background, and I am not talking about the game’s big spoilery reveal, but completely random ones with no point.
One example among many : in the main series there is a character who is a 20th century German artist who tragically turned mad because he lost his family during WW2. He is “reimagined” into a random bat-faced vampire general in the 11th century. His name is just mentioned in narration before a short fight and he’s never seen again.
Despite all of that, the game is great. Mostly linear, definitely has some pacing issues, but it’s pretty good at telling its story, it’s a decent spectacle fighter, and the environments are great.
Sequels… Yeah, not so much. But I really liked the first one. I just feel the Castlevania name only set it for something it wasn’t though.
Would games that ride on to their ancestor’s titles count?
It’s reasonable to not expect final-for-real-fantasy <N> to not be the same as final-for-real-fantasy <N-1>. But since it is marketed this way, is it the norm to expect great things?
Games that don’t explicitly use numbers can be considered in this scheme too. Example: A game called “Barcraft: Burps and Germans: Oktoberfest” would count.
Definitely No Man’s Sky
It was bad at launch, sure, but the expectations of the game were way outta proportion to what a game could deliver on
The problem I had with no man’s sky is that a large amount of the out of proportion expectations were a direct result of the developers over promising, rather than consumers just being over hyped.
No Man’s Sky, but they vastly redeemed themselves.
Fallout 76.
The game is really fun now. Only downside is the monetization (subscription model for infinite storage space)
Even better with friends in my opinion.
Unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed the hell out of Redfall. It wasn’t what most people wanted from Arkane and I completely agree, but it was still a lot of fun and didn’t deserve all the hate it got. It isn’t perfect and had a ton of bugs, but the scores it received made no sense and it seemed like it was just fun to jump on the hate bandwagon.
