Hype, its the most dangerous word for consumers. It is dangerous because it can be a lie. A lie that takes our money. This has become a real problem in the gaming industry with the concept of Pre-orders. Pre-ordering is where consumers willingly purchase a game ahead of its release. The reason for this started back when games were mostly bought physically and you may not be able to secure a hard copy the day of release and end up waiting days or weeks for the supply to catch up with the demand.
But this is the digital age, we simply download games to our computers from digital distribution platforms such as Steam, Origin, and several others. And so now we pre-order simply to be able to have it already downloaded the day it is released for play, to receive extra content (this can be its own rant for another time), or some other gimmick that the publisher came up with to get your money without you seeing a single review of the game.
This leads me to the 4 times my heart has been broken by the hype for a video game and the dangers of pre-ordering that can lead to buying a pile of crap someone may pass off as a game. Lets go in order of least to most painfully disappointing.
4: SIMCITY (2013)
One of the oldest pc games that I remember playing was Simcity 2000. Simplistic by today’s standards it was revolutionary in its day and defined the city building genre. From there I went on to buy Simcity 3000 and Simcity 4, all of which got bigger and better. You were able to make an entire city from scratch and see it fall into decay if you played terrible like me or turn into a utopia if you actually had some skill at these things. I love them for the feel of scale and ease of use one could build a city. Easy to learn but difficult to master perfectly describes these games and is always a good way to design a game.
So in 2012 i heard they were going to make a new one with modern graphics and all sorts of regions interconnected for multiple cities I was super excited. Just look at that exciting poster!!!
little did i know this is actually to size on the cities
So of course I preordered it for no good reason. I just had such faith in the company MAXIS I was willing to lay money down ahead of time. The day of its release came and thanks to the digital age I downloaded the game while I was away at work (the only smart thing I did). When I got home I was greeted by the same problem nearly everyone had on release date, the game had been designed to always be online only and the servers could not handle so many logging on. WHY OH WHY is a city building game forced into some bull crap online system. And if the developer or publisher demanded such a system why not give a play offline function.
Then days later it worked and I was made witness to the smallest city building sim I have ever seen. This is a real problem when people want to build CITIES, not small hovels. The size of the city you can build is not fit to be even called a hovel, just a small collection of buildings. It was just terrible. The interface and game in general looked dumbed-down, I appreciate ease of use but this felt like they wanted to make a IOS phone game not a full fledged PC release.
Honestly I tried and built some cities but after a short while I moved on from this embarrassment. I also think that the development teams post game responses were disappointing when they stated it had to be online at all times for it to work at all, when it was proven by others that dug into the code it only needed to be online to assist the social features for online mode and some intercity interactions. They lied to push a bad idea for some grand online community scheme.
In the end this one does not sting too bad as the game Cities: Skylines made by Colossal Order came out around the same time and is everything I every wanted in a city building game and more. Seriously it is pinnacle of this sub-genre in my opinion, see the image below of a small glimpse of what can be done in it.
And this is a really small city! Thanks Cities:Skyline for being all that Sim City never could be.
3: TOTAL WAR: ROME 2
Rome 2 by Creative Assembly had a lot to live up to. Fans of the Total War series have been spoiled (in the best way possible) by a series of games that continues to shine after every new release. I have been with the series since the very first one, Shogun Total War. These are grand strategy games on a turn based campaign map that then goes to real-time strategy battles. In fact these games are so great it got to the point I was sure they could do no wrong, especially when making a sequel to arguably one of the best games in the series.
Just consider the walls my hopes and dreams and the battering ram harsh reality.
True they had a major hiccup in the formula with Empire Total war when they reached for the clouds and fell short. But it was fun and perhaps being the first disappointment in the series it was forgiven or seen as an anomaly. It at least tried lots of new ideas, for better or worse.
But then Total War: Rome 2 was announced. It would show to have modern graphics and be a gorgeous new take on the Rome time period that a great many history buffs adore. So i willingly preordered, especially since it gave me access to playing as the Greek city states which I would have to pay extra for after release if I didn’t preorder. This is the first warning sign of bad preorder practices, they held back finished content to make you take a gamble on their product. It is something I have been fighting against giving money for, but I will be honest I have fallen into this preorder trap more than once like a mouse to cheese.
Once i fired this game up for the first time I was so excited I could hardly stand it. I got into the game, picked Rome faction (of course) and played through the tutorial, then it crashes. Get back in and it crashes even sooner. I had just upgraded my pc hardware and met the requirements but this game was bugged to hell. Once I go in and turned off half the graphical settings I get it to run smoothish and learn quickly that the A.I. is handicapped, and I don’t mean I set it to easy. It literally is incapable of making any kind of a coherent strategy on the battlefield. Glitches are everywhere, and when units hit they feel less like groups of men slamming into each other and more like ice cubes sliding on a marble counter around each other. Everything is wrong. Then on the campaign map a turn takes over five minutes or more to get through. These are the large problems, their are many many smaller problems I could go into.
The moral here is they rushed this game out, without doing enough play testing. A bug riddled experience with half finished features (a civil war features that is not even fully implemented), and factions that feel hollow. It doesn’t even really try to bring anything new to the table, only take some steps backwards on a lot of features.
Oh and before I forget early on they had flags you could capture on every battlefield that would end the combat instantly! This makes the dumb A.I. focus on getting to those instead of facing your army, causing dumb A.I. to be even dumber. They took those out of the game in the first patch I believe. Truly a terrible decision to include something so counter to the spirit of the game.
It only ranks 3rd because thankfully they released a massive update called the Empire edition for free that addresses nearly all of the bugs and unfinished parts of the game. It is still a slug of a game at times but it is now a decent Total War game. They redeemed themselves with the release of Total War: Warhammer so I am back in love with Creative Assembly after a brief break up. (the lead of the company also released a full apology and said they are dedicated to making sure they will never release a game in that state again.)
2: NO MAN’S SKY
Pretty isn’t it. Well its all a lie! Seriously this is 90percent lies in this picture.
No Man’s Sky is one of the most epic stories in gaming history for all the wrong reasons. Hello Games is the creator of this game and they started out as a small studio of only a few guys making games that are just small time wasters. Then for reasons beyond comprehension they decided to make one of the most ambitious games of all time. An interstellar space open world game that has procedurally produced planets with all sorts of biomes and lifeforms.
The real sins of this game begin with the marketing. Somehow this small indie studio got the marketing power of Sony Entertainment behind them and had this PR campaign that started selling this as the second coming of Christ. It was hard not to get drawn in. Then Hello Games had one of its founders Sean Murray going on television, even late night shows like Stephen Colbert to sell this game, I have never seen a game sold like a movie before in my life, and honestly I hope I never see it again. And the worst part of it was that for some reason Sean Murray was going around promising that this game did everything, the possibilities were endless according to him. For a more expanded look into all it promised look at this link to a well put together list of all that did not show up in the finished product https://www.vg247.com/2016/08/17/everything-missing-from-no-mans-sky-list/.
Please compare this image to the first image and you tell me what is wrong.
Where I failed personally was I listened to the hype man and did not stop and think for one second if what he was saying was possible. When games have procedural generated maps they tend to be repetitive, boring, and empty. This is because a creative mind is not tailoring the place to have real stories. What makes our Earth so amazing or even the Moon is that they have real history. They are real places that have been formed and altered over billions of years. Now how can anyone convey that in a game, book, or movie? Well it takes world building and a personal touch to give character and life to a place. Now the global hit MineCraft is procedural and works because you shape the story by building up, usually in one place. It holds your attention because you are the story teller.
This game does not even come close to this, you zip from world to world, on your journey to the center of this galaxy only briefly exploring as you have to keep moving if you want to make it to the center in your own life time. I won’t deny I had some brief wonderful moments, and the game is getting better with updates but it just was such a crap fest on release. I never ran into any major bugs personally but it looked like garbage, had bad mechanics, and had nearly nothing to do besides keep hopping to the next planet to reach the center of the galaxy. Which I never personally did once I was warned it was a waste of time (Spoiler: nothing happens at the center you are simply reset back to the start with nothing to show for hours and hours of play).
It is neat seeing a planet rise on the horizon, but just look at those ugly textures, sweet moses.
I was just so disappointed by everything. Nothing was even great, the alien life on planets is just random with nothing making any sense. Doctor Seuss looks more plausible than some creatures I encountered. Planets did not exhibit any real physics and the ship flying is nothing more than a loading screen hidden in the game. One day after many updates and addons this game may be worth something, but at its core it is flawed so I think it will never live up to the hype.
This game was one of the most recent on this list and has made me promise myself to never buy a game that has not been released and reviewed. It hurts to think I gave anyone money for this mess.
1: SPORE
The creators of Spore are a company we have already had grace this list, MAXIS. This was, to my knowledge, to be their first major disaster and from my memory it was the first time I let a game get over hyped in my head to the point that when it came out I felt actual sadness upon playing it. It was more painful because for the first hour or so it was fun. Then it became not fun. Unlike the other games on this list it was not bug ridden, or plagued with any major issues in the technical sense. But it suffers from a similar problem to No Man’s Sky in that it tries to do lots of different concepts and fails to deliver fully on any of them. Its better to have a single well done main course than a hundred bland appetizers.
Spore is a game about evolution and the rise from single cell organism up to space-faring sentient being. If that seems overly ambitious that’s because it is.
Creature Creation: best part of the game, and it is just a model building sim
This is the most personal and nitpicky selection on here and to be honest the game scored pretty good reviews at release. I did not preorder or buy before reviews came out. Which makes my disappointment in it all that much worse.
The game promised several phases to play in, you would start out fighting for survival as a microorganism and as you complete each phase of the game you would evolve up and get to alter and change the physical attributes of your life form. This meant the game took you through a half a dozen mini games. Which is the problem because I expected well fleshed out segments that made me feel the test of time. Instead I got shallow arcade style experiences that were hollow shells of other great games. The city building phase and conquering the planet was an especially tedious grind in my memory.
I also had a friend that for an entire summer we talked about this game, we talked about all that you would be able to do and how it would outdo so many other games. I think this is where the problems began, the hype train at a personal level where for hours we thought about something we could not see and only dreamed up. Our imaginations took over and soon the game was something more than we could imagine.
All these games have made me a more cautious consumer. And so when it comes to dealing with the entertainment industry I have learned it is better to remain a skeptic and hold on to your wallet until you see the goods!
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