In the last decade, video games have become a world-changing force in more ways than one. They
are not only part of our occasional hobbies, but our culture, our lifestyle, and even some of our
jobs. Every video game launch divides or unites the entirety of the internet in unique ways and
sends shockwaves throughout the Zeitgeist but when a big game launches and things don’t go according
to plan, it can get pretty crazy. Look, with the last year having some of the most controversial
game launches in recent memory, Nutty History is bringing you the worst game launches in history.
Microtransactions were nothing new to the gaming industry in 2016. In fact,
a lot of successful games were riding pretty high with their core mechanics centered around
the practice games like Overwatch, FIFA, Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2. We’re only getting
bigger and better press at the time. Despite the practice still having some detractors but
when EA introduced the microtransactions plan in the long-awaited Battlefront II.
The gaming community went ballistic and EA already had a pretty terrible reputation to begin with.
Fans of both Star Wars and Online gaming joined forces to launch massive online protests against
the company for overpopulating the game with pay to win microtransactions which if it isn’t
obvious means you gotta slide EA a little green to get an edge on the competition. Battlefront
II was already a top-tier priced game which made the expense of unlocking the game with all the
bells and whistles hundreds of dollars. The wrath of gamers even reached the European parliaments.
Investigations were launched to determine if loot boxes, the primary method of microtransaction,
can be classified as gambling or not. Belgium even went ahead and banned them all together.
Between Battlefront II and The Last Jedi, 2017 was a really stressful year for Star Wars fans.
After the hurricane of controversy, Battlefront II retracted its business model and reworked most
of the commercial aspects of the game. They made loot box requirements easier. They released tons
of free content and worked tirelessly to regain a decent reputation within a few years after launch,
so happy ending right? Yeah, not exactly. EA’s other IPS such as FIFA, Sims, and Madden still
have a heavy reliance on microtransaction economy. Moreover, the success of Fortnite, PUBG and
NBA 2K20 proves that the loot box feature isn’t going anywhere soon no matter how much they feel
like gambling. But on the other hand, a lot of games have flopped because of microtransactions.
You don’t see a lot of people playing Marvel’s Avengers these days.
Before release No Man’s Sky made some bold promises of redefining open world and sandbox
gaming. 17 quintillion different worlds that were procedurally generated, it would take you
thousands of years to explore the game. You could be a space pirate, a mercenary or just mine a
bunch of ore. I guess the industry had their ears perked up for its release. Even Steven Spielberg
asked to get a private session with the game. If No Man’s Sky had delivered on those promises,
it would have changed the industry forever. Alas! It all turned out to be a massive disappointment.
No Man’s Sky was repetitive, non-immersive and boring, it offered minimal interactivity. Far from
the claims of unlimited possibilities and endless variety. Those procedurally generated animals,
it all looked like weird randomized computer models because that’s what they were. The ship
combat was described as difficult to control and sloppy. The game was criticized heavily
for its inventory system where you could barely hold enough of anything in your backpack while
exploring. And even while the series creators hinted quite a bit at being able to see your
friends while being a super cool space explorer, a couple intrepid gamers ended up finding out that
wasn’t the case either. Everyone was just kind of locked into their own instance of the game.
The backlash was heavy. No Man’s SKy was described as a scam and gamers returned their copies in
droves. Despite being shamed and ridiculed, NMS’s developers, Hello Games decided to keep working.
They offered free expansion packs after the months and years after the problematic launch
modifying the game to feedback of its players. And hey, they finally let you see your friends
too. The game reshaped and redrafted itself to become a rousing success in the gaming industry.
Even though it never really got into the ambitious dream it sold us, No Man’s Sky went
from being one of the worst launches in gaming history to one of its greatest comeback stories.
The Mass Effect franchise is a genre-defining series among games. It’s another game where
you play a space badass doing space badass things and it’s developed by Bioware, who made arguably
the best Star Wars game ever. Mass Effect lets you make choices and be who you wanted to be, and your
choices affected all the characters around you. You felt like everything you did mattered and then
there is ME3 and ME Andromeda. The ending of Mass Effect 3 left a bad aftertaste in gamer’s mouth.
The game lacked coherence and the players’ decision had no impact on the game’s final
sequence. A feature that was a cornerstone of the first two mass Effect games. The ending while a
fan based up, it got so bad that many of them organized a campaign to contact better business
bureau. The BBB ended up giving Bioware’s parent company the title of worst company in America.
Which company was that again? Yeah that checks out. However, when Mass Effect Andromeda hit
the market in 2017, it went straight into the meme folder. Goofy animations, jarring graphics,
and less cohesive immersion than previous games, made it infamous on the Internet in ways that
only doubled down on a troubled reputation. A sexist controversy made things even more
disastrous for the whole gaming community and ME Andromeda went down as a black chapter for gaming.
Yes, this is recent and yes it’s that big of a deal. Cyberpunk 2077 was hyped for 8 years with
fans getting anxious as it was delayed over and over again. And when it was finally launched at
the end of an awful year, gamers were ecstatic. Until… they launched the game on their console.
While the PC and the next gen console versions could at least run the game,
if you played it on a base PlayStation 4, which a majority of people were going to do,
the game was nearly unplayable. The frame rate during major action moments would drop to 10
frames a second like you were playing with a strobe light. Speaking of strobe lights,
during the game’s much lauded brain dance sequences, some gamers actually experienced full
on seizures due to the flashing light sequence being a specific sequence designed to induce
seizures. Okay, that’s about as bad as it got. Oh wait no, I’m lying because look at the glitches.
The game had a plethora of game breaking glitches. Not just on consoles but on PCs that were running
the game as well. Characters would blip out of existence, guns would disappear, cars would drop
through the game world. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the company behind Cyberpunk refused
to let reviewers show any gameplay footage of the game running on consoles. Thereby,
hiding a lot of the major issues that a majority of players would experience. You want to know how
it was? The game was pulled from the playstation store. An unheard of step for Sony who offered
refunds to unsatisfied customers. CD Projekt Red, the publisher of the game had to issue a formal
apology to the gamers as well as refunds. As their stock tanked and we’re not even mentioning the
working conditions that went into making this one-hundred-and-twenty-million budgeted game,
crunch, a heavily criticized practice in the games industry where your employees work stress induced
long overtime hours was implemented near the end of the cycle despite previous claims. The studio
would never do such a thing and still the game just wasn’t finished. Hopefully, CD Projekt Red
can turn it around like Witcher 3 and not let it go down like Daikatana. And that’s a whole other
story. Would you like to see more gaming history on this channel? Let us know in the comments.
Also, do tell us about the games that disappointed you personally on the launch.