It seems to me that one of the biggest things current-gen gaming has contributed thus far to the gaming community is massive amounts of hype. Sure hype has been around since the dawn of video games, but it seems that every non-indie game produced is carrying with it unprecedented levels of hype.
The Video Game Industry is thriving at the moment and pre-order sales are higher than they have ever been so an effective marketing campaign is essential to publishers and makes up a considerable portion of the total budget spent producing a game. Nothing sells video games like Hype and it’s something that publishers will continue to encourage in order to sell millions of copies of a particular game. Unfortunately when expectations are so high, very few games meet that level of expectation. So with that in mind here are three games that in my opinion, talked the talk but failed to walk to walk in a big way.
Titanfall
Right from the initial reveal there was this nagging feeling that Titanfall was in the path of the Hype Train. Microsoft did it no favours either by promoting it as the very reason to buy an Xbox One. Gone was the single player campaign replaced with online only multiplayer that was going to redefine how we thought about a multiplayer shooter. We wouldn’t miss the single player campaign because a story driven multiplayer experience would satisfy the single player fans whilst adding an extra bit of context into the more popular multiplayer arena. Mix in some basic NPC’s that give even the most inexperienced FPS gamer a chance to feel like they were contributing and a massive Titan to call upon during the course of battle and it sounded like we were getting something that was going to blow us away.
Titanfall did deliver good, functional maps with solid FPS gameplay and the Titans are awesome, however, it really does miss the single player campaign. The supposed story and I use that term story loosely, was terribly written and rushed to the point where even after several playthrough’s most gamers will admit they have no idea what this war is really about. This is where Titanfall fell apart, the Hype promised something that revolutionised the FPS genre but what we got was a multiplayer only game that was entertaining but without any real context, which led to gamers leaving Titanfall in droves pretty quickly after release. In fact I think some of the dedicated servers have tumbleweed rolling through them now.
Watch Dogs
When I think what next/current-gen was supposed to deliver I immediately think of Watch Dogs. Even at the initial E3 reveal before the PS4 & Xbox One were confirmed you just knew this would inevitably be on the next-gen consoles and you knew, from the look of the game that the only way to truly experience Watch Dogs would be to get it on Xbox One or PS4. This was the next evolution of a genre that was mastered by GTA and it was going to be huge. An open world set within a massive fictional hyper-connected cyber Chicago that was yours for the taking, all from a cell phone. From spying on the citizens of the city to hacking into every form of city and privately controlled database, no one was safe from you. Then, it all started to unravel.
As release date got closer we discovered that those gorgeous next gen visuals were actually rendered on high end PC’s not the consoles we thought they were filmed on. The ground-breaking hacking ended up being too ambitious for even the developers and we ended up with a watered down version of what we had seen at numerous gaming expo. The City ended up being smaller than expected and the supposed seamless multiplayer hacking sub missions ended up being annoying and buggy to say the least. Worse still was the fact that this game was delayed, I mean, I don’t mind if you’re going to delay a game but only if it means delivering a better final product. In this instance the delays seemed to have just been to take out some of the more ambitious aspects of the game and leave it with bugs that at times proved an unwelcome distraction, not to mention the fact that our protagonist was extremely one dimensional. Don’t get me wrong I played this from start to finish and lost many a night’s sleep playing but I always felt let down by Ubisoft. When you take out many of the things that got people hyped you have no chance of being able to live up to the hype.
Destiny
I’m just going to come right out and say it… Arguably the biggest let down in video game history. Not only did the Hype run over Destiny but it did a full loop and came back to run it over again. Yes Destiny sold faster than Donuts at Fat Camp but that was because of the hype. Bungie was reinventing the First Person Shooter genre, these guys gave us Halo so there was no way they would let us down and they didn’t…
No, instead of letting us down they gave us a Tombstone, climbed the top ropes, gave us a Five Star Frog Splash then finished us off with a People’s Elbow. Destiny is the biggest selling flop of all time. An FPS that combines MMO elements and lets us obliterate aliens whilst seamlessly travelling between distant planets sounds awesome and it would be if Destiny delivered what it set out to do. The MMO elements are laughable to fans used to MMO games and the seamless transporting between planets is replaced with a system that requires us to go into orbit sit through at times, painfully long load screens before we are finally sent to another planet to do exactly the same thing we just did on the last planet. That last point is essentially what’s wrong with Destiny, the FPS mechanics are rock solid but the game is horrendously repetitive with a passable but unimaginative story.
No matter where you go in Destiny it can be summed up in one word, Repitition. Kill some aliens, kill some more aliens then waste a huge amount of time and ammo on a boss that refuses to lose energy regardless of what type of artillery you throw at them. Some of this is offset by joining a fireteam which, when done with friends is a true highlight of the game but nonetheless, doesn’t change the fact that you just do the same thing over and over again. If I could go back in a time machine I would slap myself in the face and tell myself to wait until Destiny hits the bargain bin before buying it.