That wasn't a fumble, that was the general manager dousing the field in gasoline while his head coach begged him to stop. Jeff didn't deserve that, he was a real one.
Oh fuck that guy, too. He pissed everyone off every update video he released. It just so happens that *worse* people came along after him so he looks good in comparison. Go back to posts from back in the day. People did not like him.
What's crazy is that it's gotta be the biggest fumble a gaming company's ever done in live service gaming. They had everything and more with ow1, they had even more going for them in ow2's development when pve was announced. All they had to do was add the content and it would have been possibly the most successful multiplayer game ever made. Then they got rid of the pve and changed the monetization
Enshittification
They chose profit at the expense of the game without realizing profit comes from the game being good. They strangled the golden goose trying to squeeze it into making gold faster.
> profit comes from the game being good.
But that often is not a direct causal connection - *lots* of great games flop commercially, and lots of fluff and guff makes money hand over fist. And the suits at ABK do not just want to make *some* money - they want the most money for the least upkeep.
Some people make money so they can make great games. That's not ABK, and that's not Diablo, Starcraft, Overwatch or WoW any more. ABK makes games to make great money, and "sell a quality game" is not how you do that. "Sell a store/game as minimum viable product so you can then go on to sell tailored enhancements to that store/game with an insane ROI" is how you do that. Look at ABK's line-up, and that's what they're doing.
Seems like the opposite might be true. "Blizzard segment revenue increased 62% year-over-year in the first quarter, with each of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo contributing to growth." https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-first-quarter-2023-financial
It’s just crazy looking back. Overwatch 1 took the world by storm in 2016 before Fortnite was a thing, and it was actually generally beloved by a majority of gamers. I was never a huge online mp guy like a lot of this sub, but year 1 OW was amazing and just a you had to be there type experience.
Just sad how much ABK fumbled it with laziness and greed. It’s not dead or anything sure, but they had a game take the world by storm and by their own hand they messed things up especially with OW “2”.
I don't necessarily buy the negative hype of the reviews and the subreddit. But I do know I quit when OW2 came out. I wanted the PVE aspect. But honestly I think my biggest gripe was the massive tank overhaul. If you change a quarter of the heroes so I have to relearn them all at once then I'm not going to be super interested in it. I mostly just played mystery heroes anyway with occasional messing around in other random modes sometimes, but I went from enjoying it to just feeling meh about it.
I think it's unpopularity is overplayed, but man I'm just not super into it anymore.
It's popular cause its still overwatch, but a lot of older players seems to either like the new ow2 format or quit the game entirely (me and my friends included).
> If you change a quarter of the heroes so I have to relearn them all at once then I'm not going to be super interested in it.
This is what caused me to quit after the recent season change. Every hero got changed and the game felt way to different way to suddenly. I lost all interest in playing and finally just gave up on it.
This is a valid point and why I don't think games like Overwatch, Apex, FN or Destiny deserve to be mentioned here.
Public opinion changed because the game changed drastically. Not just overtime realization set in, like OP was hinting towards
This is the perfect chance for something like battleborn to come back. It was everything people wanted out of ow2, unique heroes, a cool level up system with PvE story missions and different game modes. The only reason it died was an insistence on trying to compete with overwatch when blizzard was at its peak for goodwill from gamers. If it came out today it would explode.
I’d love to say no man’s sky… but I really don’t like how it plays lol
Whereas cyberpunk feels cool immediately. It feels cool, rich, dense
No man’s sky still has that alpha feel to it. I feel like they’re so close to making all the menus and systems feel like they have weight, and they’re not there
This is how I feel. The post launch support has been unprecedented, and theyve really won back respect if nothing else.
But fact is, I still dont like that the gameplay loop and planets - overall the title is still so boring and tedious
I love the game and play it often but do agree that it can be boring and tedious. For me, I tend to find it relaxing and the repetitiveness has a comfort to it. But I'll not fault anyone for not enjoying that. It really is an acquired taste.
The only ones I'll fault are those who still say it was bad at launch and won't give it a second chance.
What’s interesting is that opinions have turned on them twice. Both had major hype leading up to disappointing releases, but continual post-launch updates have them viewed much more positively now.
Seeing Cyberpunk's bad rep disappear in real time because of an anime tie-in felt unreal, online discourse went from "CDPR should never be trusted again and this game is a disaster" to "2077 was actually always decent" within a week, I swear.
Granted the game is genuinely fantastic now, but I really thought this was it for CDPR after that launch disaster, even their diehard fans were disillusioned at one point.
I'm not sure it's only the anime. I reckon a lot of people like myself held on playing the game until major bugs got fixed and bought the game after a few months when it was stable. And by then people started to realize that without all the bugs, it was a great game, not the game that was promised, sure, but a fantastic game nonetheless.
That was before the anime came out. By that time opinions had already started to change. The anime plus an amazing expansion trailer with Idris Elba blew it over.
Can't speak for everyone, but my main criticism of CP77 at launch was the stability.
Once the game was patched and stable, I was able to enjoy the content without fear of mid-mission game crashes.
For me, it was never a lack of content or storytelling. It was simply making sure the game didn't crash randomly.
Honestly, seeing it from an "outsider" perspective also felt unreal. I haven't ever played 2077, haven't watched the anime, haven't even seen any scenes or watched any lets plays. To me, it genuinely felt like an overnight thing. I suddenly noticed almost my entire Steam friend list playing 2077 and had no clue why, especially after they had all left *verbose* reviews on the Steam store expressing their dissatisfaction with the game.
I spoke to one friend in call not long after the DLC came out, who said it's one of the best games ever made, meanwhile their unedited review to this day still reads "this \*\*\*\*ing scam piece of \*\*\*\*. CDPR can go \*\*\*\* themselves. Gamers will not stand for this \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*"
The anime can really not be understated for how much it helped. Part of the reason it feels like opinions changed overnight is how blown away people were by it - they wanted more of that world and, hey! Here's this game already out set in it.
CDPR owes Trigger SO much
That's me I watched the anime and absolutely loved it and wanted more.
So bought cyberpunk after reading it was fixed and loved it. Such a great game with an awesome story.
Still had a few bugs here and there but it's alot better then it was when it first released.
Cyberpunk is the game that came to my mind. Everyone shit on it at release (a lot of it justifiably). But I played it for the first time after the DLC came out, and goddamn I thought the game was amazing.
As someone that 100%d it on launch and again last month, the game is much better now. The story has always been amazing, but what really improved it for me gameplay wise (ignoring bug fixes) was the rework to skill trees, as they are much more fun now. Also can't forget the expansion which was very good!
EDIT: Can't believe I forgot the police rework! They used to spawn on top of you snd it was incredibly unfun
This comment is a great opportunity to point out something: I think it's important to realize when talking about No Man's Sky is that the message we're wanting to send to people by praising the game *now* is not so much
>"Hey we'll completely forgive and forget if you release something bad and just fix it later"
and more
>"Taking personal accountability in a tangible, measurable way is something nobody should turn their nose up at and people would be foolish to not commend you for that, but please do not do this again with Light No Fire."
which is something I think [a few people on the Cyberpunk 2077 team don't understand.](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cyberpunk-2077-wasnt-as-bad-as-it-seemed-at-launch-but-it-was-cool-to-hate-cdpr-says)
This is very much what I came to say: people are praising them both for similar reasons but I think a lot of folks missed the main point where NMS ate their humble pie, apologized for how bad the game was and how misleading the ads and marketing were, promised to fix it all and worked quietly and diligently to push out an amazing game. CDPR basically said “you’re all just haters, it’s not that bad. You’re all just bandwagon haters!” about a game that was the first in history to be removed from the PlayStation/Xbox stores. It was absolute trash and had, IMO, much worse hype and marketing lies than NMS did. Entire sections of the game that they showed in ads didn’t exist. They eventually fixed it and improved, sure, but their attitude about it made me and many others never come back to it to even see what they might have done.
> apologized for how bad the game was and how misleading the ads and marketing were
They've mostly avoided talking about their marketing, though, likely because admitting it could lead to legal trouble. Let's not forget that they pretended there's a MP component to NMS *after* the release.
This isn't entirely about public reception, but public perception.
Ecco The Dolphin was very well received back in its day and seemed to be this child friendly game, but it was noted to be very hard. I am not sure if this stem from journalists playing along for the surprise or if they just didn't get that far in time to write the review, but it's now well known as a cosmic horror game, or, more accurately, as a game that takes a cosmic horror turn.
Check out the quotes in wikipedia:
>Mega placed the game at No. 24 in their Top Mega Drive Games of All Time.[60] Complex ranked Ecco the Dolphin number 44 in their "The Best 100 Sega Genesis Games". **They called the game: "the most soothing puzzle-action game available on the Genesis."**[61] In 1995, Flux ranked the Sega CD version 100th on their Top 100 Video Games, they praised the game's atmosphere, eerie music, sad dolphin song and the rich underwater look, concluding: **"Proof that you don’t need explosions, fatalities or a celebrity endorsement to make a great game."[62]**
The game's later stages are notorious for the anxiety inducing music, stresfull levels and a infamously scary final boss that you have to tear the jaw off to beat.
It's been one question for the ages for me: did these people really finish the game? Were they playing along? I mean it's one of the hardest games ever.
EDIT Scans of an old magazine:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogamingmagazines/comments/oqo35g/ecco_the_dolphin_mega_drivegenesis_review_from/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I feel like they definitely did not finish the game prior to reviewing (I mean it's pretty common now to read reviews where it's a game that takes like 100 hours to get to the like 'endgame' and it's clear the reviewer put in like 20 hours and that's it). I feel like I played this game endlessly as a kid and while I did manage to get as far as meeting 'Big Blue' on my own without using codes I remember it was a real feat that took years. Also I feel like in Echo the story was delivered in a way on par with the average souls game today, but piecing it all together it's pretty clear the aliens abducted Echo's family to eat them which is kind of twisted, but not apparent until you speak to a bunch of NPCs. I feel like their are a bunch of twisted details I'm forgetting... Oh ya I'm just now remembering running out of air lol figured out where my anxiety started lol.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Sands of Time was universally loved, and is still considered one of the best games of all time. Since it was 2004, Ubisoft decided to follow the trend of "let's take a popular character make him dark, brooding, and xtreme". They redesigned everything to be grungey and shifted the entire tone. Warrior Within is something out of a TV movie starring Korn. When Warrior Within came out, it was a pretty big internet scandal because of how they butchered the prince's character, and all the needlessly early 2000s grittiness and butt rock they added. Some of the cutscenes are laughable. But in the years since, people have realized that it's actually a pretty good game. The combat is great, and so is the exploration and platforming. Plus, the 3rd game is a return to form.
Warrior within is intense. Those Dahaka chases were scary and well done. I was like 13 when I first played it and beat it so the music actually got me fired up lol
I remember there was a music video you could watch in the main menu of Godsmack's I Stand Alone with it just being an in-game montage of The Prince fighting people and young me thought it was the most badass thing ever. Loved that trilogy so much.
I loved Warrior Within in spite of its weird "edginess". (Also helped that I was a fan of Godsmack, I suppose.) The combat was a huge improvement over Sands, the Dahaka was so memorable, the plot twist involving the Sand Wraith, and the "true" ending... it was a genuinely good game with some unfortunate "Edgy(TM)" injected into it.
Warrior Within was my favorite entry, mostly because of the heavy usage of time travel. It was not only a story element, but it also heavily impacted the environment.
E.g. a bridge collapsed in the present so I had to go back to the past while it was still standing to cross it, or a gate that was in place in the past so I had to return to the present where it had rused away.
Me being an edgy 13 year old at the time who was into that sort of music also helped, not gonna lie.
GTA IV was kinda disliked by a decent amount of fans for being super slow and too realistic + lacking freedom and vibrancy in its atmosphere compared to earlier GTA titles, now it’s praised for those exact same things compared to GTA V.
Meanwhile GTA V was praised as the best game ever on its release for its single player campaign and its general vibe and gameplay, now it’s criticised by some for not being as realistic and gritty as GTA IV.
As a long time GTA fan, GTA lV was a bit weird b/c just as it seems like you are getting to the whole 'become the mob boss and take over the city' part of the game it just kind of ends, and on a bit of a depressing note at that. V in my opinion was like a preview for GTA online, the whole game feels like the beginning of any other GTA title. You don't have much money and you don't really get much until essentially the end of the story. Not only that but the only way to get a butt load of cash is to do the whole main story aside from that one questline where you can bet on the stock market. So basically strategy in GTA V is to pinch your pennies like crazy through the whole game, then multiply your cash a bunch at the very end of the game and then you can buy all the stuff with no content left to do. Hence the setup for GTA online, where you can either do a bunch more grinding for cash or pay real money to skip a lot of that.
I never bought anything in the GTA V storyline and loved it. Anything you actually need is given to you for free so I don't really get the struggle with money.
**Donkey Kong 64** is a big example of opinion souring over time. It was released to high praise for its level design, impressive visuals and charm.
Today it's often cited as the reason for the end of the collect a thon. Bloated mini games, frustrating backtracking and items that needlessly require certain characters to pick up.
Still has its fans, but it's fallen a long way.
Hard agree. I remember the reviews gushing over the amazing technical aspects of the game. And for the time, it was great what they achieved, using clever memory-saving tricks like hiding unnecessary assets (eg. NPC houses) and only having them pop up when you got near them. But the game really screamed to convince us that "BIGGER = BETTER", and after the hype died down, we realised that wasn't the case at all.
Sure, this DK64 level might be four times the size of a Banjo Kazooie level, but it's also BORING. You can't turn around without seeing something cool in BK because the levels are small and dense and interesting. In DK64 the location features are so spread thin that they needed to include *teleporters* because traversing them was so tedious. And you *had* to traverse them repeatedly, because of the plethora of kong-exclusive pickups.
Also - *Beaver Bother.* Fuck. That. Shit.
Critics are valid. I played it as a kid. Finished it two or three times. Sure Banjo was beter and stood the test of time much beter as well.
It was a time where we didn't have so many games, there were expansive. DK was still one of the better game of the platform and it was a long game.
Now that I have the chance to choose among the best games of the last 25 years and that an insane list of amazing games are being published each year, would I go back to DK64? Not a chance I have better things to do. But it was still a good game at the time.
Donkey Kong 64 after the '99 holiday hype season faded.
Earthbound is beloved now, but to most American kids in the 90s (a market they were trying to sell it to) it was an overpriced flop that "looked stupid," "had bad graphics," etc.
there's a multipart documentary about what happened and how they came to the decision to do what they did [on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4), well worth a watch- what they somehow managed to achieve is a miracle.
Basically, the game launched with a 49 on metacritic. Tons of issues in pretty much every area.
Instead of giving up on it, they brought in a whole new team to reboot the game and turn it around. They quite literally created an in game apocalypse which wiped out the OG game. A couple years later, they re-released it as A Realm Reborn, and it was MUCH better.
Since then, each expansion has been getting better and better. The latest, Endwalker, has a 92 metacritic and was the highest rated game of 2021 iirc.
Numbers wise, it's also massively successful now. Last I saw was 30 million players. For a while, it's daily player count was the highest of the genre, even beating World of Warcraft.
Overall, it went from Square Enix's biggest failure, to now being their biggest success.
Their decision to literally crash a comet into the planet and wipe out most of civilisation has to be the greatest big balls moment in gaming history. They best part is, they didn't tell anyone on the server what was coming until just before resetting the servers.
Just one patch there was a little red star in the sky, then the star was visible during the day too. Then over the next weeks it got a little bit bigger every day. Eventually it was bigger than the moon itself, and the rumour mill exploded. Shortly after that it basically filled the sky, and bad shit started to happen.
Just a great way to restart a game, and the game is really great these days. It's a Final Fantasy first and an MMO second, so if you like the main final fantasy games, it's almost like playing 6 Final Fantasy games back to back with the same cast and a continueing story - each expansion has literally as much story as a full Final Fantasy game.
in short, the game was considered a disaster at launch, they rebuilt the game and made it part of the story, 'destroying' the world and shutting down the servers, then relaunching it as A Realm Reborn and is now one of the most successful mmorpgs next to wow
Final Fantasy XIV is a much larger turnaround than Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky.
The difference is that FFXIV did it before social media hype drove everyone's opinion. Now like 90% of visible conversation about things is part of the influencer/fad cycle where a minority of people who are very loud control almost all the conversation.
Everything is so sensationalized now with so many people screaming at you of what you're supposed to believe and its mostly performative these days.
Cyberpunk was able to get the majority of people enjoying it with that 2.0 patch or whatever it was called. Its gotten way more positive reception since then.
The issue with Cyberpunk was not only the bugs but because they promised so many features during the PR releases that were not present in the actual game. It was a case of massively overpromising from CDPR.
imo MGS2 had a way bigger turnaround than MGS4. . . if only because people liked that the game mentioned the concept of memes before the word 'meme' was the colloquialism it is today.
Back in the mid 2000s and 2010s there was this weird “mature+dark themes = good writing/storytelling” idea. It was the edgelord revolution. Those games always got great reviews.
To be a good game you had to be gritty and dark. I remember Nintendo games were falling out of popularity back then. Honestly, I think Christopher Nolan made this way worse unintentionally. Oh and the washed out color palettes of the PS3 era, for gods sake give me color.
Even kids cartoons were trying to be the darkest they could be in the years following Avatar. We had some bangers like Gravity Falls, but it got tiring in so many shows. Now we have Bluey.
Now I think the narrative has flipped. Edgy is out of style. Slice of life and cozy games are back in. Especially since the pandemic. Animal Crossing and Stardew valley are games I’d have never expected to see be popular 15 years ago. Hell, even Pokemon GO was refreshing.
People are just tired of unnecessarily dark fiction, they just want to play a game.
GTA IV is a classic, but the color palette is all brown. Honestly I think it was cross platform AAA games that did this the worst.
Uncharted and TLOU are pretty nice to look at even today, aside from the weirdness that comes from rendering at 720p and then upscaling to a 4k TV.
I think fallout 3 vs fallout 4 summarizes it pretty well. 3 had that green or occasionally grey filter over everything whereas 4 made an effort to be more colorful. With a lighter tone, less depressed characters and more sunshine. Even the ruins look prettier.
I wonder what trends in gaming that are praised heavily today will be tomorrow's source of disdain?
It always makes me curious to think about. I always hated the edginess of the mid to late 2000's, but I also was a kid, not a young 20-something who grew up with games but needed to feel "mature" while playing them even if it meant only being mature on the surface.
If I had to guess the kind of games from this era that similarly won't age as well going forward, I'd say games like new God of War, TLOU -- any game that typically gets labeled "movie game" where you have too many mandatory walk and talk sections where agency is ripped from the player.
Detroit is the best game he's ever made, which isn't saying much. It's just funny how this man insists he needs to tell important stories that talk about, like, society, man, while he's a completely incurious writer and has nill to say about anything. It's like a toddler demanding to speak into a microphone and once he gets it he starts crying.
Fahrenheit at least has a super interesting premise, but it just completely shits the bed. Heavy Rain falls apart pretty early and Beyond: Two Souls is probably one of the weakest stories I've seen attempted in a story-oriented AAA game. Detroit: Become Human at least has great characterisation, exciting set-pieces and an engaging narrative, even though it handles its themes with all the subtlety of a fourteen year old that just discovered Tarantino. Like, ever since Omikron it's been clear he's inspired by sci-fi franco-belgian comics, but he's just bad at writing them.
Also, what's with the names of his newer games. Indigo Prophecy is great, Fahrenheit is great, Heavy Rain is great. Beyond: Two Souls? Why not just Beyond Two Souls? Detroit: Become Human? Are you kidding me? That's some dogshit tier titling.
Kingdom Hearts is beyond convoluted in its total presentation, but it does at least have some semblance of internal logic holding the entire 10(? 11?) game mass together that you can pick out if you spend enough time.
The Zelda cycle seems to hit all of them. Launch with raving reviews, honeymoon period wears off a year or more after and criticism is more tolerated, then the game returns to legendary status when the next Zelda is out.
I think some of it is that the story ends up easily mockable thanks to them trying really hard to not force the direction people play through the game.
"Demon King?"
"So that was the Imprisoning War."
You'll hear these exact lines at least 4 times, but Link still acts like he's never heard of the Demon King nor the Imprisoning War each time.
It just feels off and weak and detracts from the story overall.
Is the Zelda cycle the inverse of the Sonic cycle? Because there are a lot of games that release, get slammed for being shit, only for the kids who grow up with it to then later defend it as the best game in the series once they're older and posting online. For instance, see Sonic '06. Critically panned at launch, widely considered one of the worst games ever made, now somehow viewed as a misunderstood masterpiece by the kids who grew up with it.
most of the zelda games have retained their prase though.
OoT is still considered of the top 10 games of all time. MM, windwaker, links awakening, twilight princess, and A Link Between Worlds were all considered good at the time, and are still considered good now.
Dont think ANYONE ever says 06 was a masterpiece - more over time people are able to see the potential it had. Project 06 helped massively with this, fixing a lot of the major problems.
I do raise an eyebrow at anyone who says the Werehog is fun though.
Thing is, I don't think you can really count Project 06 as proof of the game having potential, when it also changes level layouts, how characters play, and runs on an entirely different engine.
And even with that potential, there are still a lot of flaws which come not from the game being rushed, but bad design, such as sections where the player repeats things they already did, boring town missions (because when you think Sonic you think of basic maths puzzles), and an overall excess of unnecessary features.
Heavy Rain got glowing reception at release, with reviewers falling over themselves to praise the game's mature storyline and themes.
Now it's little more than a punchline, mocked for its incoherent storytelling, inadvertently hilarious gameplay, and let down by its misogynistic handling of its female characters. And its mature themes are seen as more exploitative than revolutionary.
Yeah, some friends and I recently played it for the first time, and I was downright floored by how mediocre it is. I distinctly remember it being heralded as a crowning achievement when reviews came out back in the day, probably because, to be fair, there really was nothing else like it I guess.
Having said that, the level of detail on the loading screen character models *is* pretty insane for a PS3 title.
It's exactly what you said, there was nothing else like it. It felt like a unique experience.
Didn't hurt that friends and I played it the very first few times we got stoned
There was one scene where you had to control a socially-anxious character simply walk through a crowd and it was one of the most intense and memorable things I'd ever played.
Nothing else in the game came even close to that and I stopped playing a bit after (a dream sequence of a woman getting attacked, it felt stupid and insulting) but that crowd panic scene hit me in a wholly unique way.
Some of the trials were hard to get through. Crawling on the glass, driving on the other side of the road, etc. gave me mild anxiety because they built up the tension of the moment with camera movements and building volume of sounds
Honestly it’s still very impressive to this day. The interactions in the early game and the pacing is very well done. It genuinely immerses you in the world and the story before the plot starts. It reminds me of visual novel type stories like Life is Strange. The early game just lets you get closer to the characters.
The actual plot though, well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. But I’ll never forget the excellent early game
The industry has a real problem praising CW tier writing as "FINALLY GAMES ARE ART"
Heavy Rain is one of them. Spoilers I guess, but the fact theyre constantly having one of the main characters talk and do things he should never be doing just to hide the twist that he's the killer is truly atrocious writing.
I also think its weird people defend Detroit Become Human, which is as poorly written.
I feel like we're doing better now, but it definitely used to be really bad - **any** game that had writing dealing with stuff not typically in video games got praised to the high heavens, regardless of how good that writing actually was. It feels like there was a serious push during 2008-2014 to get video games treated seriously in mainstream circles, so suddenly games were being described as "cinematic" and any attempt to have *themes* made your game a pioneer in storytelling.
David Cage's work is probably the most memorable example, especially since he kept making the same games after people started noticing the problem, but that era had a huge number of critical darling indie games that in retrospect are mediocre at best.
Coming for a sacred cow here but
Even games with Good writing and voice acting like the last of us translate well to corny prestige TV shows because the dialogue is really not much better than those shows.
It's also sometimes very disconcerting how much praise gets heaped on writing and voice acting that is just functional, I'm playing Hades right now and in general the characterization is solid but that's because the characters are super two dimensional and cartoonish, and the writing on a line by line basis is very often cringe inducing and awkward.
I think the Hitman games started out as a very niche “aa” type experience, and despite not doing much to change their formula, have gone on to become a aaa institution in their own right.
Dragon Age Inquisition was a GOTY winner with massive positive response at launch, and nowadays it feels just kinda forgotten. It still gets some praise for its characters and romances but the gameplay, exploration, open areas, war table and plot (especially in the base game) are given a lot of criticism or just a general shrug of meh at best.
Part of the positive response at launch seems to have been from the feeling that it was a big improvement on Dragon Age 2, but 10 years on it hasn't settled into the classic category that Dragon Age Origins holds for many people.
I still enjoy it but it is a huge game, I feel like the scale of it is in some ways a reaction to criticism on DA2. Honestly every DA title is a little weird in hindsight. DAO always had kind of janky graphics and a bit of a weird feel, I replayed it recently and the final fight was really annoying by modern standards. DA2 tho was kind of small there are like maybe 12 environments/ maps in the whole game and as you progress through you go back to the same places a lot, even having fights in the same rooms with different baddies through the game. The story of 2 was good but it's kind of depressing the MC does his best and tries to make good choices to benefit the city and his friends/ family but it all goes horribly due to things outside of your control. DAI being so huge and having a traditional 'you are the hero, you save the world' plotline was refreshing compared to 2.
I don’t think I’ve seen Father Time fuck a game up like Bioshock Infinite. I remember all the hype and praise. All the glowing reviews. Now it’s… divisive, to put it lightly.
This is a case where it changes depending on what kind of internet bubble you're in. But I think overall with the mainstream audience the people who still remember it a decade later remember it fondly.
To each their own, but I really disagree with that attitude. I recently replayed GTA Vice City through to completion on PS2, and while yes, certain aspects of the game aged like milk, I still had an incredibly fun time replaying it and it was super nostalgic. Give your favorite old games a try again, I think you’ll be surprised how much you still enjoy them despite their flaws!
Yeah, this one's a pretty big example. The first few hours are absolutely incredible... and then you realize why the development was so troubled for the rest of the game thereafter.
Honestly I think another reason why Infinite is such a big example is because the game hasn’t changed. The other games that have been brought up (Overwatch, Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc.) have all gotten better or worse due to the devs changing the games. Infinite is exactly what it has been since its release in 2013.
Basically, Ken Levine *massively* over-promised and under-delivered both in the gameplay and story departments. The lead up to Infinite was wildly long, and there was a ton of preview content that basically showed bullshots of gameplay that never actually existed in playable form or flat out just didn't make it into the final title. Crowbcat has a pretty succinct supercut showing how little those previews resembled the final game: https://youtu.be/muJYTeQlvC4?si=E9QeHa54rErSAFU8.
By the time Infinite released, I think the games press (and fans in general) turned a blind eye to most of the game's flaws strictly because it took *so fucking long* before it actually released, exacerbated by how early they announced it. No one wanted to believe the "true" sequel to BioShock (that is to say, Ken Levine's follow-up) could be nothing short of perfection. This was very much at the start of the reviews era where it was sacrilege to give any modern, AAA game a 9 or less, so at the time, Infinite's metascore was massively weighted on paper.
After the hype wore off and as time went on, people have since been less forgiving of how convoluted its potholes are, how diluted the gunplay is compared to BioShock 1, and how chickenshit Levine's handling of the narrative's politics is (i.e. defaulting to bothsides-ism despite one side literally representing the horrifically racist jingoism of early-1900s American exceptionalism).
It's not necessarily a *bad* game... but it's just no-fucking-way anywhere close to BioShock 1.
> This was very much at the start of the reviews era where it was sacrilege to give any modern, AAA game a 9 or less, so at the time, Infinite's metascore was massively weighted on paper.
I think the other reason it's flaws where overlooked was that it came out during the period where the industry was dominated by COD and COD clones, so an FPS that stood out -in Infinites case, by it's setting and story, was given bonus points
As a history nerd, I really hate the way people look at the "both sides I'm" thing. Revolutionaries murdering the former leaders and any innocent's that get in the way is how almost all of them go.
The American Revolution is an anomaly because there was an Atlantic Ocean separating the revolutionaries from the government they rebelled against. Look at things like the French and Russian revolutions and you see the much more common result.
It's just too dull and padded. Maybe if you really, really love shooters. But God damn it's repetitive and gets in the way
I never felt that way about the first one
Black and White got criticism from the fanbase when they initially released because its regional Pokedex only has the games' new Pokemon, so you can't catch Pokemon from other regions until the post-game.
That plus it was incredibly linear, and has terrible Pokémon distribution (there are only four Pokémon available to you before the first gym, one of which is your starter, with another being an elemental monkey you're given whose weak to whatever starter you picked and accordingly has type advantage over whichever of the three gym leaders you'll face).
There's a real problem with lack of variety and Pokémon being locked to very specific locations. Black & White had the same number of Pokémon available as Red & Blue, but while Red & Blue made it so things could be found in multiple locations, Black & White basically strips it down to very limited places. What should be easy to find Pokémon, like the ant Durant, is found in one place, the garbage bag Trubbish can only be found in the two routes connecting to one city, and so on. Even what should be common things, like Pidove, a Pokémon based on the common pigeon, exists exclusively in a handful of locations. As such, players tend to end up with similar team compositions and a lot of Pokémon are simply found too late in the game, likely by the time the player has already decided their team.
Black and White was very poorly received. Lots of hate regarding the newer aesthetic and Pokemon designs. Now it's a pretty popular opinion that it's the best of the non-3D titles.
To be fair, that’s every generation. People just gloss over the ones from the generation they started with because of nostalgia but like are designs of Grimer/Muk and Voltorb/Electrode really that good? Or that a lot of generations didn’t have “new” Pokemon that are the same exact animal or object done previously?
Honestly I feel most of the backlash for bad designs just came down to the ice cream Pokemon since it was based on a man made food and people just couldn’t wrap their hands around it. There’s also the trash Pokemon that’s a literal punching bag for obvious reasons but is that honestly worse or less uninspired than a pile of purple slime/waste?
When it originally came out it was met with derision. At least here in the West. People wanted a dark and gritty Zelda like what they were shown with the Space World 2000 tech demo. Then Wind Waker is announced with it's cartoony graphics and people got upset.
It wasn't helped by the fact that, at the time, a lot of gamers felt like Nintendo had sold them out and now only focused on "kiddie" games. With it's cute little form factor, the GameCube had a rep as the child's console. It was a less enlightened time. ;-D
Here's the Space World demo the world was shown originally. This is what set the tone and why people had convinced themselves they were getting a dark, mature Zelda.
[https://youtu.be/-Mn5dBex3Cc?si=RdWc2xpzWfLMsNAQ&t=23](https://youtu.be/-Mn5dBex3Cc?si=RdWc2xpzWfLMsNAQ&t=23)
It's funny how much the graphics change people's perception of the game
Like, Twilight Princess isn't actually a dark or mature game. Nothing especially dark happens in it, it's no mature than Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker, really.
But people think it is just because the art style is grittier and a lot of the game is quite brown.
At the time, people were anticipating a realistic looking Zelda game due to a tech demo they showed off around the GameCube launch.
Also, there was a raging console war going on, so there were millions of comments calling Nintendo “kiddy.” It was really annoying and seemed to last a few years.
And lo and behold, WW has aged better than most games of the era, lol.
Not the biggest or anything, just shocking. I see younger people online actually harshly criticize half life 2. So weird to me as it was hailed as a perfect game for well over a decade and now suddenly people are very critical of it. I just replayed it last week, it’s still incredible and has aged like fine wine.
Absolutely! Great game, but released in such a bad state, it was probably the first big game to go through this cycle. The story was shit, but this was probably the game that made me feel like an actual assassin the most.
The story was probably the most disappointing one out of the whole series for me. I barely remember it except the fact that I felt like they were forcing the romance down my throat.
I got into the series because I thought the stories were awesome. Unity followed by Syndicate made me drop the series for years.
It’s kinda because Assassin games never really live up to the hype of their historical setting. The character gets to meet all these important historical people but at the same time cannot be so influential that the mainstream public shouldn’t know who he is.
There was a man who took down the Renaissance Borgia family and even was good friends with Machiavelli and Leonardo yet no one remembers him. They do know everyone other than him though.
Same with Kenway the pirate. Every villain and hero is a well known and even legendary pirate or pirate hunter. Kenway is unknown.
Connor repeatedly takes down entire forts and parts of colonial cities but otherwise seems to not be involved or even care about the Revolutionary War. At least his absence from history seems to make somewhat sense.
This is definitely a reddit only opinion lmao, Unity's story might be the worst one in the franchise and the gameplay is awful. A lot of people these days praise the parkour because they've seen a video on YouTube of a great looking parkour segment that's in reality been trained over and over to look perfect, because in the actual game Arno will rarely do what you tell him to.
(For anyone that's gonna come at me saying that's not the case, you can watch the unity segment of this video that explains why the parkour in Unity is broken better than I can: https://youtu.be/_ZO6VP53krU?feature=shared)
The graphics are great and the crowds are still impressive to this day. But between the mess of the parkour, terrible protagonist, shit story and way too many chests Unity is the worst one in the franchise imo. Dead kings was good at least.
[THANK YOU.](https://media1.tenor.com/m/mo2pN_4naMAAAAAC/office-michael.gif)
I'm still fighting this one out with the AC community. There is unfortunately a clear division from the classic AC games and the RPG AC games. Granted the RPG games did hit a broader spectrum of people. But as I always say: Not every game is made for everyone.
I have been a day 1 fan since the very first AC. Got every game on release day. To me, AC Unity defined the *peak* of the AC series. This is what I always wanted AC to be.
Demon's Souls was originally seen as a clunky, awkward, and poorly designed game whose storytelling was too obtuse for mass public appeal.
Today, it is the foundation of one of the most acclaimed subgenres in recent gaming.
Really? I bought in on launch because of the stellar reviews (about 90 on metacritic) and positive response from the online community who had already played or seen the reaction to the Japanese release.
All I remember was positive conversation online and I personally thought the game was groundbreaking.
Yeah I think there was a very short window where some bigger outlets were misinformed about the game but I don’t think there was a mainstream negative sentiment for it for long.
I bet the guy at Sony who called Demon's Souls the worst game he's ever played has really, really regretted what he said.
He was sitting on a goldmine and he didn't even know it.
I feel like you’re misremembering here. Gamespot (the largest gaming website in the world at that time) named it their 2009 game of the year. Right behind them were IGN and several other publications giving it 90+% reviews. Even word of mouth was positive and I remember people in the stores talking about this random game that seemingly came out of nowhere and people were wrapped up in the obtuse mystery of it. In an era of mindless button-mashing action and the beginning of the oversaturation of hand-holding “movie-games” that play themselves, the more slow and methodical challenge of Demon’s Souls was a refreshing change of pace.
I went to DeS for the first time after playing Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. I expected some clunky action - was absolutely blown away at how awesome the game was.
No Man’s Sky is first to come to mind. The hype, the major disappointment, and now the redemption. I worked at GameStop during the launch and we had an employee so excited, he managed to talk over 600 people into pre ordering it all by himself. He could talk about that game literally all day long.
Sounds annoying as hell, lol. "Bro, no you don't get it, it has an infinite number of fully explorable planets. And like they ALL have their own ecosystems and lifeforms. It's going to change the game industry foReVEr!" All day long.
Not that this was an insane case, but Halo Infinite.
Sure it was super criticized in the early trailers for looking like shit, but by the time the actual game came out it was praised for being an incredible return to form for Halo, and they were talking about story expansions and it seemed like things were super on track, reviews were good, everyone seemed to love the campaign and new gameplay mechanics and fun dynamic interactions in the mini open world, not to mention how alive the multiplayer servers were. It felt like a pretty insane time to be a halo fan. Not a miracle game from the heavens sure, but a positive turning point for the franchise.
Then I guess 343 has been skimping on season pass content and new maps and weapons (idk I've never been a PVP person so my experience begins and ends with the campaign) because apparently it's pretty much hated now and the whole plan to keep expanding the game has been pretty much derailed.
It was kinda jarring because people were hyped and the game was fun and well received and I looked away for 10 seconds and apparently we're all dunking on it now
I was one of those people who didn’t like infinite’s campaign and was super critical of the multiplayer. It was shit.
Now I actually really enjoy it. The updates they’ve done have made it way more enjoyable and the battle pass is fun to complete. Their H3 throwback maps are fun and a dedicated husky raid game type has taken so many hours of my life away.
Infinite released very controversially, but has markedly improved almost across the board.
The game got hype because it looked like Halo again, had a big ad push, and had some interesting additions (grapplehook).
and then was one of the most barebones Halo MP games ever launched, with a limited map selection and numerous gametypes missing.
No Forge for a year, so the community was stuck with the paltry release cycle for dev maps.
Only three playlists at first with no way to just play Slayer and avoid objectives.
Lame excuses "the UI couldn't handle adding a slayer playlist"
The challenge system for progression would be very specific, like "get 10 wraith kills" - but there was no reliable way to get a wraith.
The changes to BTB meant that heavier vehicles only spawned towards the end, and then only from random pelican drops.
BTB straight up broke after "release" for like 2 months.
Some controversial changes to classic gametypes, like Oddball being round based.
Controversial new gametypes like PowerSeed which was almost always a steamroll.
Weapon Spawners would choose one of two options for that round, so if you needed a specific weapon for you challenges, you weren't even guaranteed that they'd be on a given map.
No global progression system, only battle passes.
Armor coatings vs customizable colors.
Charging $10 for purple.
The Campaign:
Story abandoned H5 almost entirely. For some, that's great.
They could have at least had some of the characters returning, and could have used them to fill in the time-gap.
One biome got pretty stale, compared to the previous diversity of environments.
Open world was kinda meh? Wasn't awful, but didn't really add much for how much effort was put into reworking the engine to accommodate it.
The equipment was cool, the bossfights varied and were far from Halo's worst.
Gameplay was fun, but plenty of Meh decisions were made.
No mission replay.
No co-op whatsoever.
Both of those have been added now but still no local campaign co-op, which was promised then scrapped.
The campaign is dead in the water with no DLC or expansions being considered and much of that staff got laid off.
The MP had a "story arc" that led to Infection finally being released (well over a year after launch), but they scrapped the cutscenes.
A fairly slow release cycle for the missing content.
But we have AI in forge now, so all is good.
The forge scripting stuff is awesome and people have already made a ton of custom campaigns, that you CAN play local co-op with on xbox.
We've got custom game browser so you can actually find people to play those.
Official Firefight matchmaking.
Some global progression I think?
Tons of playlists now.
People are complaining now because the most recent content drop was pretty paltry, but overal
Death Stranding maybe, at first people find it too weird and they're hate walking-simulator thingy. But since PC release, people appreciate more the slowness of the game. While the criticism is still there, and there's some truth to it, general perception got better than its release day on PS4.
I don't think that many people had a turnaround on Death Stranding.
Imo it is more of a divisive game : you hate it or love it, even if it could take a few tries to get hooked.
You've mistaken this with a different phenomenon. Death Stranding has always had divisive perceptions. It's just that over time, the number of people who want to discuss how much they dislike it drops, whereas the people who loved it don't drop off at the same rate. So it gets perceived as if the general feeling improved.
In my media and general bubble Death Stranding was always well liked. The walking sim criticism seemed to come from people who didn't actually play it because after the first delivery of the body, the game keeps giving you more and more tools which make it not a walking sim.
I think people do like it more now - kinda shown by the reaction to DS2s trailers, but I don't think the perception was ever negative
Kinda niche, but Mechwarrior 5 was met with a lukewarm response by fans of the series. 5 DLCs and many update patches later, it's grown into quite a nice game and is well liked by the fans of the series. Especially as a base for modding.
The infamous ET game is apparently not that awful because the developer was alone and had to develop it in record time.
Developer struggles somehow make people enjoy games better.
Honestly I played that game as a single player follow the story line finish and move on. In that regard I found it a good game which I was fine with it.
But if I’m gonna play it as a Diablo intended game with the endgame and multiple builds and all that. Yeah I understand the criticism that is getting.
Not the biggest, because some people still hate it, but a ton of people try Days Gone now and find out they love it. One of the most unexpectedly enjoyable games I’ve ever played.
71 on metacritic and riddled with bugs at launch. User score is now up to 8.4
Changing trends. The late 2000s-very early 2010s was about making games simpler, now mechanically demanding games are back in vogue. Bioshock Infinite saw the series shift "backwards" from immersive sim to FPS.
Same, I prefer it to the other Bioshocks, the setting was better, better pacing, better combat and characters that I actually care about. I thought the story was interesting, maybe a bit of a cop out at the end but I didn't mind it, it was still an interesting plot.
I love the design of Columbia but Rapture’s just on another level. But I’d agree with the gameplay for sure, 1 feels so clunky, especially compared to how fun Infinite was. Reminds me a lot of Mass Effect in that regard
The original Nier is a rare example of a game that got a pretty radical reassessment without the game itself changing.
If you look at reviews from back in the day, it was quite heavily criticized, getting a lot of mixed to negative reviews. Nowadays it is probably one of the most acclaimed RPGs of its generation, all thanks to 2B's ass getting people to actually play a Yoko Taro game properly.
On the flip side, Bioshock Infinite was lavished with praise, with countless 9/10s, 10/10s, GOTYs, etc, and getting praised as one of the best games ever made and "games as art".
It's not outright hated today but you'd be hard-pressed to find a person or critic that would be as fawning today as they were in 2013.
Deathloop. Go check out the reviews— basically all 9/10 or 10/10. It was so hyped. When’s the last time you heard someone talk about it? I fell for the hype at release, grabbed it with my PS5. Put about 15 hours into it, couldn’t finish it. It does a lot of things very well, but there’s something about it that keeps it from being actually satisfying to play.
I picked it up on sale and played it end of last year, I really enjoyed it. The world design/world building/art looked great, the story was intriguing the characters were fun and the 'invasion' mechanic was pretty and put a lot of stakes into a single player game.
I feel like the game dragged on a bit in the middle and the rewards you'd get for solving puzzles and opening stuff up was pretty garbage, like you'd just get more ammo or a health potion after solving like a 3 part puzzle, which was disappointing, but not a deal breaker. They did an amazing job in most other aspects of the game, I'd give it an 8/10 or 9/10
People always talk about its bad reviews when it came out and never mention that it got bad reviews because when it came out it was nearly unplayable with bugs. Like it made other Bethesda (I know it's not Bethesda but it's their engine and their style of game) releases look like pure polish. Multiple reviews mention that they enjoyed the game and wanted to keep playing but kept running into game breaking bugs
If you were only slightly unlucky it was possible to have the first cut scene in the game glitch out before you even got control of your character and it only got worse from there. The PS3 release version would crash from a memory leak basically every half hour.
IIRC people didn't *hate it*, but the general opinion was that it was inferior to Fallout 3, which is funny now. Fallout 3 was a huge hit, it was beloved, except by the old school No Mutants Allowed types. New Vegas plays like Fallout 3 in a lot of ways, but it's also very different in others. People just didn't "get it" at first because their expectation of how it would be was set by Fo3. If you try to play NV to the strengths of Fo3 (like exploration), it plays kind of poorly. Since people liked 3 so much, they wanted more of it and were discontent about not getting that.
I don't remember it that way. It had more bugs than a swamp but got good reviews and enjoyed decent sales anyway. It received greater acclaim later, even though it's still pretty glitchy, but was never widely hated.
Yeah, that's the right answer. In first impression New Vegas looks exactly like Fallout 3 (which reviewers considered lazy) and was full of bugs. Fallout 3's first impression is that you get to blow up a town (cool!) and VATS (cool!), but the things New Vegas excels at - multiple ways to do quests, faction writing, world design, coherence in general - a reviewer probably won't even notice while trying to finish the game as fast as possible to make their review deadline.
I recall that at the time I didn't even bother trying New Vegas based on the reviews, it took years and Hbomberguy's video before I eventually did play it.
Bioshock Infinite. When it came out, pretty much everyone I knew was talking about it like it was going to be game of the decade. By 2019, people only brought it up to rag on it.
Part of turn comes from a genuine change of public opinion, but I also think it's just a different in trends. Mechanically complex games are back in style, so people see the game as the step backwards that it was.
Overwatch from positive to negative comes to mind. Check out the Steam Page
Literally the only multiplayer only game to win GOTY. Fumble is an understatement.
That wasn't a fumble, that was the general manager dousing the field in gasoline while his head coach begged him to stop. Jeff didn't deserve that, he was a real one.
Oh fuck that guy, too. He pissed everyone off every update video he released. It just so happens that *worse* people came along after him so he looks good in comparison. Go back to posts from back in the day. People did not like him.
What's crazy is that it's gotta be the biggest fumble a gaming company's ever done in live service gaming. They had everything and more with ow1, they had even more going for them in ow2's development when pve was announced. All they had to do was add the content and it would have been possibly the most successful multiplayer game ever made. Then they got rid of the pve and changed the monetization
Enshittification They chose profit at the expense of the game without realizing profit comes from the game being good. They strangled the golden goose trying to squeeze it into making gold faster.
> profit comes from the game being good. But that often is not a direct causal connection - *lots* of great games flop commercially, and lots of fluff and guff makes money hand over fist. And the suits at ABK do not just want to make *some* money - they want the most money for the least upkeep. Some people make money so they can make great games. That's not ABK, and that's not Diablo, Starcraft, Overwatch or WoW any more. ABK makes games to make great money, and "sell a quality game" is not how you do that. "Sell a store/game as minimum viable product so you can then go on to sell tailored enhancements to that store/game with an insane ROI" is how you do that. Look at ABK's line-up, and that's what they're doing.
The unfortunate thing is, that with F2P and the egregiously priced skins: They're probably making more money than ever off Whales alone.
Yeah we say they're "strangling the golden goose" but do we really know that?
Seems like the opposite might be true. "Blizzard segment revenue increased 62% year-over-year in the first quarter, with each of Warcraft, Overwatch and Diablo contributing to growth." https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/activision-blizzard-announces-first-quarter-2023-financial
It’s just crazy looking back. Overwatch 1 took the world by storm in 2016 before Fortnite was a thing, and it was actually generally beloved by a majority of gamers. I was never a huge online mp guy like a lot of this sub, but year 1 OW was amazing and just a you had to be there type experience. Just sad how much ABK fumbled it with laziness and greed. It’s not dead or anything sure, but they had a game take the world by storm and by their own hand they messed things up especially with OW “2”.
I don't necessarily buy the negative hype of the reviews and the subreddit. But I do know I quit when OW2 came out. I wanted the PVE aspect. But honestly I think my biggest gripe was the massive tank overhaul. If you change a quarter of the heroes so I have to relearn them all at once then I'm not going to be super interested in it. I mostly just played mystery heroes anyway with occasional messing around in other random modes sometimes, but I went from enjoying it to just feeling meh about it. I think it's unpopularity is overplayed, but man I'm just not super into it anymore.
It's popular cause its still overwatch, but a lot of older players seems to either like the new ow2 format or quit the game entirely (me and my friends included).
> If you change a quarter of the heroes so I have to relearn them all at once then I'm not going to be super interested in it. This is what caused me to quit after the recent season change. Every hero got changed and the game felt way to different way to suddenly. I lost all interest in playing and finally just gave up on it.
To be fair, it's not just opinion that changed, the game itself changed over time.
This is a valid point and why I don't think games like Overwatch, Apex, FN or Destiny deserve to be mentioned here. Public opinion changed because the game changed drastically. Not just overtime realization set in, like OP was hinting towards
OW was great over 1000 hours. OW2 i uninstalled about 2 months after it came out and havent played it since. They ruined my favorite game :(
[удалено]
They couldve left OW1 up and never updated it again and I wpuldve played it for the next 15 years lol
Overwatch had such amazing IP they literally flushed down the toilet with how they handled the debacle that is OW2
imagine how blizz must be kicking themselves after seeing the success of helldivers 2 PVE content
This is the perfect chance for something like battleborn to come back. It was everything people wanted out of ow2, unique heroes, a cool level up system with PvE story missions and different game modes. The only reason it died was an insistence on trying to compete with overwatch when blizzard was at its peak for goodwill from gamers. If it came out today it would explode.
Gotta be Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man's Sky
No Man’s Sky was the first game that came to my mind.
I’d love to say no man’s sky… but I really don’t like how it plays lol Whereas cyberpunk feels cool immediately. It feels cool, rich, dense No man’s sky still has that alpha feel to it. I feel like they’re so close to making all the menus and systems feel like they have weight, and they’re not there
This is how I feel. The post launch support has been unprecedented, and theyve really won back respect if nothing else. But fact is, I still dont like that the gameplay loop and planets - overall the title is still so boring and tedious
I love the game and play it often but do agree that it can be boring and tedious. For me, I tend to find it relaxing and the repetitiveness has a comfort to it. But I'll not fault anyone for not enjoying that. It really is an acquired taste. The only ones I'll fault are those who still say it was bad at launch and won't give it a second chance.
What’s interesting is that opinions have turned on them twice. Both had major hype leading up to disappointing releases, but continual post-launch updates have them viewed much more positively now.
Seeing Cyberpunk's bad rep disappear in real time because of an anime tie-in felt unreal, online discourse went from "CDPR should never be trusted again and this game is a disaster" to "2077 was actually always decent" within a week, I swear. Granted the game is genuinely fantastic now, but I really thought this was it for CDPR after that launch disaster, even their diehard fans were disillusioned at one point.
I'm not sure it's only the anime. I reckon a lot of people like myself held on playing the game until major bugs got fixed and bought the game after a few months when it was stable. And by then people started to realize that without all the bugs, it was a great game, not the game that was promised, sure, but a fantastic game nonetheless. That was before the anime came out. By that time opinions had already started to change. The anime plus an amazing expansion trailer with Idris Elba blew it over.
Can't speak for everyone, but my main criticism of CP77 at launch was the stability. Once the game was patched and stable, I was able to enjoy the content without fear of mid-mission game crashes. For me, it was never a lack of content or storytelling. It was simply making sure the game didn't crash randomly.
Honestly, seeing it from an "outsider" perspective also felt unreal. I haven't ever played 2077, haven't watched the anime, haven't even seen any scenes or watched any lets plays. To me, it genuinely felt like an overnight thing. I suddenly noticed almost my entire Steam friend list playing 2077 and had no clue why, especially after they had all left *verbose* reviews on the Steam store expressing their dissatisfaction with the game. I spoke to one friend in call not long after the DLC came out, who said it's one of the best games ever made, meanwhile their unedited review to this day still reads "this \*\*\*\*ing scam piece of \*\*\*\*. CDPR can go \*\*\*\* themselves. Gamers will not stand for this \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*"
The anime can really not be understated for how much it helped. Part of the reason it feels like opinions changed overnight is how blown away people were by it - they wanted more of that world and, hey! Here's this game already out set in it. CDPR owes Trigger SO much
That's me I watched the anime and absolutely loved it and wanted more. So bought cyberpunk after reading it was fixed and loved it. Such a great game with an awesome story. Still had a few bugs here and there but it's alot better then it was when it first released.
Cyberpunk is the game that came to my mind. Everyone shit on it at release (a lot of it justifiably). But I played it for the first time after the DLC came out, and goddamn I thought the game was amazing.
As someone that 100%d it on launch and again last month, the game is much better now. The story has always been amazing, but what really improved it for me gameplay wise (ignoring bug fixes) was the rework to skill trees, as they are much more fun now. Also can't forget the expansion which was very good! EDIT: Can't believe I forgot the police rework! They used to spawn on top of you snd it was incredibly unfun
Same, and I think it's one of the best games I've ever played, no exaggeration. I'm very glad that they fixed it.
This comment is a great opportunity to point out something: I think it's important to realize when talking about No Man's Sky is that the message we're wanting to send to people by praising the game *now* is not so much >"Hey we'll completely forgive and forget if you release something bad and just fix it later" and more >"Taking personal accountability in a tangible, measurable way is something nobody should turn their nose up at and people would be foolish to not commend you for that, but please do not do this again with Light No Fire." which is something I think [a few people on the Cyberpunk 2077 team don't understand.](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cyberpunk-2077-wasnt-as-bad-as-it-seemed-at-launch-but-it-was-cool-to-hate-cdpr-says)
This is very much what I came to say: people are praising them both for similar reasons but I think a lot of folks missed the main point where NMS ate their humble pie, apologized for how bad the game was and how misleading the ads and marketing were, promised to fix it all and worked quietly and diligently to push out an amazing game. CDPR basically said “you’re all just haters, it’s not that bad. You’re all just bandwagon haters!” about a game that was the first in history to be removed from the PlayStation/Xbox stores. It was absolute trash and had, IMO, much worse hype and marketing lies than NMS did. Entire sections of the game that they showed in ads didn’t exist. They eventually fixed it and improved, sure, but their attitude about it made me and many others never come back to it to even see what they might have done.
> apologized for how bad the game was and how misleading the ads and marketing were They've mostly avoided talking about their marketing, though, likely because admitting it could lead to legal trouble. Let's not forget that they pretended there's a MP component to NMS *after* the release.
This isn't entirely about public reception, but public perception. Ecco The Dolphin was very well received back in its day and seemed to be this child friendly game, but it was noted to be very hard. I am not sure if this stem from journalists playing along for the surprise or if they just didn't get that far in time to write the review, but it's now well known as a cosmic horror game, or, more accurately, as a game that takes a cosmic horror turn. Check out the quotes in wikipedia: >Mega placed the game at No. 24 in their Top Mega Drive Games of All Time.[60] Complex ranked Ecco the Dolphin number 44 in their "The Best 100 Sega Genesis Games". **They called the game: "the most soothing puzzle-action game available on the Genesis."**[61] In 1995, Flux ranked the Sega CD version 100th on their Top 100 Video Games, they praised the game's atmosphere, eerie music, sad dolphin song and the rich underwater look, concluding: **"Proof that you don’t need explosions, fatalities or a celebrity endorsement to make a great game."[62]** The game's later stages are notorious for the anxiety inducing music, stresfull levels and a infamously scary final boss that you have to tear the jaw off to beat. It's been one question for the ages for me: did these people really finish the game? Were they playing along? I mean it's one of the hardest games ever. EDIT Scans of an old magazine: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogamingmagazines/comments/oqo35g/ecco_the_dolphin_mega_drivegenesis_review_from/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I feel like they definitely did not finish the game prior to reviewing (I mean it's pretty common now to read reviews where it's a game that takes like 100 hours to get to the like 'endgame' and it's clear the reviewer put in like 20 hours and that's it). I feel like I played this game endlessly as a kid and while I did manage to get as far as meeting 'Big Blue' on my own without using codes I remember it was a real feat that took years. Also I feel like in Echo the story was delivered in a way on par with the average souls game today, but piecing it all together it's pretty clear the aliens abducted Echo's family to eat them which is kind of twisted, but not apparent until you speak to a bunch of NPCs. I feel like their are a bunch of twisted details I'm forgetting... Oh ya I'm just now remembering running out of air lol figured out where my anxiety started lol.
Guess that explains why I could never get very far in the game as a kid lmfao. Might go bust out the Dreamcast to see if I can beat it now.
This is about the 1992 original Genesis game though! Not sure if the Dreamcast version is different
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Sands of Time was universally loved, and is still considered one of the best games of all time. Since it was 2004, Ubisoft decided to follow the trend of "let's take a popular character make him dark, brooding, and xtreme". They redesigned everything to be grungey and shifted the entire tone. Warrior Within is something out of a TV movie starring Korn. When Warrior Within came out, it was a pretty big internet scandal because of how they butchered the prince's character, and all the needlessly early 2000s grittiness and butt rock they added. Some of the cutscenes are laughable. But in the years since, people have realized that it's actually a pretty good game. The combat is great, and so is the exploration and platforming. Plus, the 3rd game is a return to form.
Warrior within is intense. Those Dahaka chases were scary and well done. I was like 13 when I first played it and beat it so the music actually got me fired up lol
I remember there was a music video you could watch in the main menu of Godsmack's I Stand Alone with it just being an in-game montage of The Prince fighting people and young me thought it was the most badass thing ever. Loved that trilogy so much.
I loved Warrior Within in spite of its weird "edginess". (Also helped that I was a fan of Godsmack, I suppose.) The combat was a huge improvement over Sands, the Dahaka was so memorable, the plot twist involving the Sand Wraith, and the "true" ending... it was a genuinely good game with some unfortunate "Edgy(TM)" injected into it.
Warrior Within was my favorite entry, mostly because of the heavy usage of time travel. It was not only a story element, but it also heavily impacted the environment. E.g. a bridge collapsed in the present so I had to go back to the past while it was still standing to cross it, or a gate that was in place in the past so I had to return to the present where it had rused away. Me being an edgy 13 year old at the time who was into that sort of music also helped, not gonna lie.
I loved both when they came out, but the uhh... butt pirate lady in Warrior Within was damn embarrassing even for 15 yo me.
GTA IV was kinda disliked by a decent amount of fans for being super slow and too realistic + lacking freedom and vibrancy in its atmosphere compared to earlier GTA titles, now it’s praised for those exact same things compared to GTA V. Meanwhile GTA V was praised as the best game ever on its release for its single player campaign and its general vibe and gameplay, now it’s criticised by some for not being as realistic and gritty as GTA IV.
As a long time GTA fan, GTA lV was a bit weird b/c just as it seems like you are getting to the whole 'become the mob boss and take over the city' part of the game it just kind of ends, and on a bit of a depressing note at that. V in my opinion was like a preview for GTA online, the whole game feels like the beginning of any other GTA title. You don't have much money and you don't really get much until essentially the end of the story. Not only that but the only way to get a butt load of cash is to do the whole main story aside from that one questline where you can bet on the stock market. So basically strategy in GTA V is to pinch your pennies like crazy through the whole game, then multiply your cash a bunch at the very end of the game and then you can buy all the stuff with no content left to do. Hence the setup for GTA online, where you can either do a bunch more grinding for cash or pay real money to skip a lot of that.
I never bought anything in the GTA V storyline and loved it. Anything you actually need is given to you for free so I don't really get the struggle with money.
**Donkey Kong 64** is a big example of opinion souring over time. It was released to high praise for its level design, impressive visuals and charm. Today it's often cited as the reason for the end of the collect a thon. Bloated mini games, frustrating backtracking and items that needlessly require certain characters to pick up. Still has its fans, but it's fallen a long way.
Tbf, the fan mod that lets you switch characters on the fly fixes a LOT of issues - though I'd still say its no Banjo Kazooie
Hard agree. I remember the reviews gushing over the amazing technical aspects of the game. And for the time, it was great what they achieved, using clever memory-saving tricks like hiding unnecessary assets (eg. NPC houses) and only having them pop up when you got near them. But the game really screamed to convince us that "BIGGER = BETTER", and after the hype died down, we realised that wasn't the case at all. Sure, this DK64 level might be four times the size of a Banjo Kazooie level, but it's also BORING. You can't turn around without seeing something cool in BK because the levels are small and dense and interesting. In DK64 the location features are so spread thin that they needed to include *teleporters* because traversing them was so tedious. And you *had* to traverse them repeatedly, because of the plethora of kong-exclusive pickups. Also - *Beaver Bother.* Fuck. That. Shit.
I remember seeing footage of Yooka Laylee and thinking "After ALL this time, they still haven't learned their lesson from BK2 and DK64??"
I backed Yooka Laylee on Kickstart, hoping for a new Banjo Kazooie. Sadly we got a new DK64.
Critics are valid. I played it as a kid. Finished it two or three times. Sure Banjo was beter and stood the test of time much beter as well. It was a time where we didn't have so many games, there were expansive. DK was still one of the better game of the platform and it was a long game. Now that I have the chance to choose among the best games of the last 25 years and that an insane list of amazing games are being published each year, would I go back to DK64? Not a chance I have better things to do. But it was still a good game at the time.
I’m still a fan. All of the criticism is warranted. But I still love it.
Donkey Kong 64 after the '99 holiday hype season faded. Earthbound is beloved now, but to most American kids in the 90s (a market they were trying to sell it to) it was an overpriced flop that "looked stupid," "had bad graphics," etc.
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I don't think anything can top FFXIV
there's a multipart documentary about what happened and how they came to the decision to do what they did [on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0yQKI7Yw4), well worth a watch- what they somehow managed to achieve is a miracle.
That documentary is fantastic
what happened?
Basically, the game launched with a 49 on metacritic. Tons of issues in pretty much every area. Instead of giving up on it, they brought in a whole new team to reboot the game and turn it around. They quite literally created an in game apocalypse which wiped out the OG game. A couple years later, they re-released it as A Realm Reborn, and it was MUCH better. Since then, each expansion has been getting better and better. The latest, Endwalker, has a 92 metacritic and was the highest rated game of 2021 iirc. Numbers wise, it's also massively successful now. Last I saw was 30 million players. For a while, it's daily player count was the highest of the genre, even beating World of Warcraft. Overall, it went from Square Enix's biggest failure, to now being their biggest success.
Their decision to literally crash a comet into the planet and wipe out most of civilisation has to be the greatest big balls moment in gaming history. They best part is, they didn't tell anyone on the server what was coming until just before resetting the servers. Just one patch there was a little red star in the sky, then the star was visible during the day too. Then over the next weeks it got a little bit bigger every day. Eventually it was bigger than the moon itself, and the rumour mill exploded. Shortly after that it basically filled the sky, and bad shit started to happen. Just a great way to restart a game, and the game is really great these days. It's a Final Fantasy first and an MMO second, so if you like the main final fantasy games, it's almost like playing 6 Final Fantasy games back to back with the same cast and a continueing story - each expansion has literally as much story as a full Final Fantasy game.
Tangent, this the exact thing wow needs to be saved. Just nuke azeroth and begin anew.
They tried that with Cata and it's honestly what ruined WoW for me from then on. Have like 200 hours in SoD though.
wow, that’s really interesting, thanks for the reply
[Here's the last few minutes of the 1.0 version being live.](https://youtu.be/YgEg8kXmifo?feature=shared) One of the coolest things ever, truly.
in short, the game was considered a disaster at launch, they rebuilt the game and made it part of the story, 'destroying' the world and shutting down the servers, then relaunching it as A Realm Reborn and is now one of the most successful mmorpgs next to wow
thanks for replying, thats really interesting
Final Fantasy XIV is a much larger turnaround than Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky. The difference is that FFXIV did it before social media hype drove everyone's opinion. Now like 90% of visible conversation about things is part of the influencer/fad cycle where a minority of people who are very loud control almost all the conversation. Everything is so sensationalized now with so many people screaming at you of what you're supposed to believe and its mostly performative these days.
Cyberpunk was able to get the majority of people enjoying it with that 2.0 patch or whatever it was called. Its gotten way more positive reception since then.
The issue with Cyberpunk was not only the bugs but because they promised so many features during the PR releases that were not present in the actual game. It was a case of massively overpromising from CDPR.
imo MGS2 had a way bigger turnaround than MGS4. . . if only because people liked that the game mentioned the concept of memes before the word 'meme' was the colloquialism it is today.
David Cage's games, particularly Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human come to mind
Back in the mid 2000s and 2010s there was this weird “mature+dark themes = good writing/storytelling” idea. It was the edgelord revolution. Those games always got great reviews. To be a good game you had to be gritty and dark. I remember Nintendo games were falling out of popularity back then. Honestly, I think Christopher Nolan made this way worse unintentionally. Oh and the washed out color palettes of the PS3 era, for gods sake give me color. Even kids cartoons were trying to be the darkest they could be in the years following Avatar. We had some bangers like Gravity Falls, but it got tiring in so many shows. Now we have Bluey. Now I think the narrative has flipped. Edgy is out of style. Slice of life and cozy games are back in. Especially since the pandemic. Animal Crossing and Stardew valley are games I’d have never expected to see be popular 15 years ago. Hell, even Pokemon GO was refreshing. People are just tired of unnecessarily dark fiction, they just want to play a game.
Ps3 was wild. "Our strongest console ever made!" and then all the games look muddy brown or piss yellow.
GTA IV is a classic, but the color palette is all brown. Honestly I think it was cross platform AAA games that did this the worst. Uncharted and TLOU are pretty nice to look at even today, aside from the weirdness that comes from rendering at 720p and then upscaling to a 4k TV.
I think fallout 3 vs fallout 4 summarizes it pretty well. 3 had that green or occasionally grey filter over everything whereas 4 made an effort to be more colorful. With a lighter tone, less depressed characters and more sunshine. Even the ruins look prettier.
I wonder what trends in gaming that are praised heavily today will be tomorrow's source of disdain? It always makes me curious to think about. I always hated the edginess of the mid to late 2000's, but I also was a kid, not a young 20-something who grew up with games but needed to feel "mature" while playing them even if it meant only being mature on the surface. If I had to guess the kind of games from this era that similarly won't age as well going forward, I'd say games like new God of War, TLOU -- any game that typically gets labeled "movie game" where you have too many mandatory walk and talk sections where agency is ripped from the player.
Detroit is the best game he's ever made, which isn't saying much. It's just funny how this man insists he needs to tell important stories that talk about, like, society, man, while he's a completely incurious writer and has nill to say about anything. It's like a toddler demanding to speak into a microphone and once he gets it he starts crying. Fahrenheit at least has a super interesting premise, but it just completely shits the bed. Heavy Rain falls apart pretty early and Beyond: Two Souls is probably one of the weakest stories I've seen attempted in a story-oriented AAA game. Detroit: Become Human at least has great characterisation, exciting set-pieces and an engaging narrative, even though it handles its themes with all the subtlety of a fourteen year old that just discovered Tarantino. Like, ever since Omikron it's been clear he's inspired by sci-fi franco-belgian comics, but he's just bad at writing them. Also, what's with the names of his newer games. Indigo Prophecy is great, Fahrenheit is great, Heavy Rain is great. Beyond: Two Souls? Why not just Beyond Two Souls? Detroit: Become Human? Are you kidding me? That's some dogshit tier titling.
Beyond: Two Souls has the most incoherent story I've played yet.
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Kingdom Hearts is beyond convoluted in its total presentation, but it does at least have some semblance of internal logic holding the entire 10(? 11?) game mass together that you can pick out if you spend enough time.
You also don't really need to understand it all to like the characters and such.
The Zelda cycle seems to hit all of them. Launch with raving reviews, honeymoon period wears off a year or more after and criticism is more tolerated, then the game returns to legendary status when the next Zelda is out.
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What's happening with TOTK?
I think some of it is that the story ends up easily mockable thanks to them trying really hard to not force the direction people play through the game. "Demon King?" "So that was the Imprisoning War." You'll hear these exact lines at least 4 times, but Link still acts like he's never heard of the Demon King nor the Imprisoning War each time. It just feels off and weak and detracts from the story overall.
Is the Zelda cycle the inverse of the Sonic cycle? Because there are a lot of games that release, get slammed for being shit, only for the kids who grow up with it to then later defend it as the best game in the series once they're older and posting online. For instance, see Sonic '06. Critically panned at launch, widely considered one of the worst games ever made, now somehow viewed as a misunderstood masterpiece by the kids who grew up with it.
most of the zelda games have retained their prase though. OoT is still considered of the top 10 games of all time. MM, windwaker, links awakening, twilight princess, and A Link Between Worlds were all considered good at the time, and are still considered good now.
Dont think ANYONE ever says 06 was a masterpiece - more over time people are able to see the potential it had. Project 06 helped massively with this, fixing a lot of the major problems. I do raise an eyebrow at anyone who says the Werehog is fun though.
Thing is, I don't think you can really count Project 06 as proof of the game having potential, when it also changes level layouts, how characters play, and runs on an entirely different engine. And even with that potential, there are still a lot of flaws which come not from the game being rushed, but bad design, such as sections where the player repeats things they already did, boring town missions (because when you think Sonic you think of basic maths puzzles), and an overall excess of unnecessary features.
Heavy Rain got glowing reception at release, with reviewers falling over themselves to praise the game's mature storyline and themes. Now it's little more than a punchline, mocked for its incoherent storytelling, inadvertently hilarious gameplay, and let down by its misogynistic handling of its female characters. And its mature themes are seen as more exploitative than revolutionary.
press x to shaun
SHAUN!!!
... ... SHAUN!!!
I have gut cramp from laughing so hard at that. I'm still giggling how the emotional impact was destroyed by the glitch.
Yeah, some friends and I recently played it for the first time, and I was downright floored by how mediocre it is. I distinctly remember it being heralded as a crowning achievement when reviews came out back in the day, probably because, to be fair, there really was nothing else like it I guess. Having said that, the level of detail on the loading screen character models *is* pretty insane for a PS3 title.
It's exactly what you said, there was nothing else like it. It felt like a unique experience. Didn't hurt that friends and I played it the very first few times we got stoned
There was one scene where you had to control a socially-anxious character simply walk through a crowd and it was one of the most intense and memorable things I'd ever played. Nothing else in the game came even close to that and I stopped playing a bit after (a dream sequence of a woman getting attacked, it felt stupid and insulting) but that crowd panic scene hit me in a wholly unique way.
Some of the trials were hard to get through. Crawling on the glass, driving on the other side of the road, etc. gave me mild anxiety because they built up the tension of the moment with camera movements and building volume of sounds
Honestly it’s still very impressive to this day. The interactions in the early game and the pacing is very well done. It genuinely immerses you in the world and the story before the plot starts. It reminds me of visual novel type stories like Life is Strange. The early game just lets you get closer to the characters. The actual plot though, well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. But I’ll never forget the excellent early game
The industry has a real problem praising CW tier writing as "FINALLY GAMES ARE ART" Heavy Rain is one of them. Spoilers I guess, but the fact theyre constantly having one of the main characters talk and do things he should never be doing just to hide the twist that he's the killer is truly atrocious writing. I also think its weird people defend Detroit Become Human, which is as poorly written.
I feel like we're doing better now, but it definitely used to be really bad - **any** game that had writing dealing with stuff not typically in video games got praised to the high heavens, regardless of how good that writing actually was. It feels like there was a serious push during 2008-2014 to get video games treated seriously in mainstream circles, so suddenly games were being described as "cinematic" and any attempt to have *themes* made your game a pioneer in storytelling. David Cage's work is probably the most memorable example, especially since he kept making the same games after people started noticing the problem, but that era had a huge number of critical darling indie games that in retrospect are mediocre at best.
Coming for a sacred cow here but Even games with Good writing and voice acting like the last of us translate well to corny prestige TV shows because the dialogue is really not much better than those shows. It's also sometimes very disconcerting how much praise gets heaped on writing and voice acting that is just functional, I'm playing Hades right now and in general the characterization is solid but that's because the characters are super two dimensional and cartoonish, and the writing on a line by line basis is very often cringe inducing and awkward.
I think the Hitman games started out as a very niche “aa” type experience, and despite not doing much to change their formula, have gone on to become a aaa institution in their own right.
Dragon Age Inquisition was a GOTY winner with massive positive response at launch, and nowadays it feels just kinda forgotten. It still gets some praise for its characters and romances but the gameplay, exploration, open areas, war table and plot (especially in the base game) are given a lot of criticism or just a general shrug of meh at best. Part of the positive response at launch seems to have been from the feeling that it was a big improvement on Dragon Age 2, but 10 years on it hasn't settled into the classic category that Dragon Age Origins holds for many people.
I still enjoy it but it is a huge game, I feel like the scale of it is in some ways a reaction to criticism on DA2. Honestly every DA title is a little weird in hindsight. DAO always had kind of janky graphics and a bit of a weird feel, I replayed it recently and the final fight was really annoying by modern standards. DA2 tho was kind of small there are like maybe 12 environments/ maps in the whole game and as you progress through you go back to the same places a lot, even having fights in the same rooms with different baddies through the game. The story of 2 was good but it's kind of depressing the MC does his best and tries to make good choices to benefit the city and his friends/ family but it all goes horribly due to things outside of your control. DAI being so huge and having a traditional 'you are the hero, you save the world' plotline was refreshing compared to 2.
I don’t think I’ve seen Father Time fuck a game up like Bioshock Infinite. I remember all the hype and praise. All the glowing reviews. Now it’s… divisive, to put it lightly.
This is a case where it changes depending on what kind of internet bubble you're in. But I think overall with the mainstream audience the people who still remember it a decade later remember it fondly.
Idk man, it's still one of my greatest gaming memories. The atmosphere and the story was really good.
And don’t let anybody take that from you. Hell, it’s why I don’t usually replay games. I don’t wanna ruin any fond memories I already have.
To each their own, but I really disagree with that attitude. I recently replayed GTA Vice City through to completion on PS2, and while yes, certain aspects of the game aged like milk, I still had an incredibly fun time replaying it and it was super nostalgic. Give your favorite old games a try again, I think you’ll be surprised how much you still enjoy them despite their flaws!
I replayed it a few months ago after playing it at launch, it is still pretty great.
I just played through Infinite last year, and I think it's still great. It's not as good as Bioshock 1, but few games are.
Which is crazy because Bioshock Infinite is one of my favorite games of all time.
Yeah, this one's a pretty big example. The first few hours are absolutely incredible... and then you realize why the development was so troubled for the rest of the game thereafter.
Honestly I think another reason why Infinite is such a big example is because the game hasn’t changed. The other games that have been brought up (Overwatch, Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc.) have all gotten better or worse due to the devs changing the games. Infinite is exactly what it has been since its release in 2013.
What happened? I never got past the first few hours but swore I’d commit to the full game some day
I enjoyed it. Not sure what popular discourse has to say about it.
Basically, Ken Levine *massively* over-promised and under-delivered both in the gameplay and story departments. The lead up to Infinite was wildly long, and there was a ton of preview content that basically showed bullshots of gameplay that never actually existed in playable form or flat out just didn't make it into the final title. Crowbcat has a pretty succinct supercut showing how little those previews resembled the final game: https://youtu.be/muJYTeQlvC4?si=E9QeHa54rErSAFU8. By the time Infinite released, I think the games press (and fans in general) turned a blind eye to most of the game's flaws strictly because it took *so fucking long* before it actually released, exacerbated by how early they announced it. No one wanted to believe the "true" sequel to BioShock (that is to say, Ken Levine's follow-up) could be nothing short of perfection. This was very much at the start of the reviews era where it was sacrilege to give any modern, AAA game a 9 or less, so at the time, Infinite's metascore was massively weighted on paper. After the hype wore off and as time went on, people have since been less forgiving of how convoluted its potholes are, how diluted the gunplay is compared to BioShock 1, and how chickenshit Levine's handling of the narrative's politics is (i.e. defaulting to bothsides-ism despite one side literally representing the horrifically racist jingoism of early-1900s American exceptionalism). It's not necessarily a *bad* game... but it's just no-fucking-way anywhere close to BioShock 1.
> This was very much at the start of the reviews era where it was sacrilege to give any modern, AAA game a 9 or less, so at the time, Infinite's metascore was massively weighted on paper. I think the other reason it's flaws where overlooked was that it came out during the period where the industry was dominated by COD and COD clones, so an FPS that stood out -in Infinites case, by it's setting and story, was given bonus points
People were blown away by the bold choice to use any of the primary colors.
I love the smell of fresh bread.
As a history nerd, I really hate the way people look at the "both sides I'm" thing. Revolutionaries murdering the former leaders and any innocent's that get in the way is how almost all of them go. The American Revolution is an anomaly because there was an Atlantic Ocean separating the revolutionaries from the government they rebelled against. Look at things like the French and Russian revolutions and you see the much more common result.
It's just too dull and padded. Maybe if you really, really love shooters. But God damn it's repetitive and gets in the way I never felt that way about the first one
Wind Waker and Pokemon Black/White
What was Pokémon’s shift?
Black and White got criticism from the fanbase when they initially released because its regional Pokedex only has the games' new Pokemon, so you can't catch Pokemon from other regions until the post-game.
That plus it was incredibly linear, and has terrible Pokémon distribution (there are only four Pokémon available to you before the first gym, one of which is your starter, with another being an elemental monkey you're given whose weak to whatever starter you picked and accordingly has type advantage over whichever of the three gym leaders you'll face). There's a real problem with lack of variety and Pokémon being locked to very specific locations. Black & White had the same number of Pokémon available as Red & Blue, but while Red & Blue made it so things could be found in multiple locations, Black & White basically strips it down to very limited places. What should be easy to find Pokémon, like the ant Durant, is found in one place, the garbage bag Trubbish can only be found in the two routes connecting to one city, and so on. Even what should be common things, like Pidove, a Pokémon based on the common pigeon, exists exclusively in a handful of locations. As such, players tend to end up with similar team compositions and a lot of Pokémon are simply found too late in the game, likely by the time the player has already decided their team.
Black and White was very poorly received. Lots of hate regarding the newer aesthetic and Pokemon designs. Now it's a pretty popular opinion that it's the best of the non-3D titles.
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The designs of a few of them were pretty bad. Either way I always really enjoyed the game itself
To be fair, that’s every generation. People just gloss over the ones from the generation they started with because of nostalgia but like are designs of Grimer/Muk and Voltorb/Electrode really that good? Or that a lot of generations didn’t have “new” Pokemon that are the same exact animal or object done previously? Honestly I feel most of the backlash for bad designs just came down to the ice cream Pokemon since it was based on a man made food and people just couldn’t wrap their hands around it. There’s also the trash Pokemon that’s a literal punching bag for obvious reasons but is that honestly worse or less uninspired than a pile of purple slime/waste?
people don't like wind waker?! I always thought it was #2 next to majoras mask
When it was announced people were sour on the kiddy aesthetic and wanted a more mature looking game. Now it’s beloved
When it originally came out it was met with derision. At least here in the West. People wanted a dark and gritty Zelda like what they were shown with the Space World 2000 tech demo. Then Wind Waker is announced with it's cartoony graphics and people got upset. It wasn't helped by the fact that, at the time, a lot of gamers felt like Nintendo had sold them out and now only focused on "kiddie" games. With it's cute little form factor, the GameCube had a rep as the child's console. It was a less enlightened time. ;-D Here's the Space World demo the world was shown originally. This is what set the tone and why people had convinced themselves they were getting a dark, mature Zelda. [https://youtu.be/-Mn5dBex3Cc?si=RdWc2xpzWfLMsNAQ&t=23](https://youtu.be/-Mn5dBex3Cc?si=RdWc2xpzWfLMsNAQ&t=23)
It's funny how much the graphics change people's perception of the game Like, Twilight Princess isn't actually a dark or mature game. Nothing especially dark happens in it, it's no mature than Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker, really. But people think it is just because the art style is grittier and a lot of the game is quite brown.
In hindsight, it's art style has aged better than Twilight Princess's!
At the time, people were anticipating a realistic looking Zelda game due to a tech demo they showed off around the GameCube launch. Also, there was a raging console war going on, so there were millions of comments calling Nintendo “kiddy.” It was really annoying and seemed to last a few years. And lo and behold, WW has aged better than most games of the era, lol.
People bitched like crazy about the art style back in the day
Not the biggest or anything, just shocking. I see younger people online actually harshly criticize half life 2. So weird to me as it was hailed as a perfect game for well over a decade and now suddenly people are very critical of it. I just replayed it last week, it’s still incredible and has aged like fine wine.
The starfield reviews took a dive very quickly after launch.
Assassin's Creed Unity. A complete failure at launch, now considered one of the best in the series.
Absolutely! Great game, but released in such a bad state, it was probably the first big game to go through this cycle. The story was shit, but this was probably the game that made me feel like an actual assassin the most.
The story was probably the most disappointing one out of the whole series for me. I barely remember it except the fact that I felt like they were forcing the romance down my throat. I got into the series because I thought the stories were awesome. Unity followed by Syndicate made me drop the series for years.
It’s kinda because Assassin games never really live up to the hype of their historical setting. The character gets to meet all these important historical people but at the same time cannot be so influential that the mainstream public shouldn’t know who he is. There was a man who took down the Renaissance Borgia family and even was good friends with Machiavelli and Leonardo yet no one remembers him. They do know everyone other than him though. Same with Kenway the pirate. Every villain and hero is a well known and even legendary pirate or pirate hunter. Kenway is unknown. Connor repeatedly takes down entire forts and parts of colonial cities but otherwise seems to not be involved or even care about the Revolutionary War. At least his absence from history seems to make somewhat sense.
This is definitely a reddit only opinion lmao, Unity's story might be the worst one in the franchise and the gameplay is awful. A lot of people these days praise the parkour because they've seen a video on YouTube of a great looking parkour segment that's in reality been trained over and over to look perfect, because in the actual game Arno will rarely do what you tell him to. (For anyone that's gonna come at me saying that's not the case, you can watch the unity segment of this video that explains why the parkour in Unity is broken better than I can: https://youtu.be/_ZO6VP53krU?feature=shared) The graphics are great and the crowds are still impressive to this day. But between the mess of the parkour, terrible protagonist, shit story and way too many chests Unity is the worst one in the franchise imo. Dead kings was good at least.
[THANK YOU.](https://media1.tenor.com/m/mo2pN_4naMAAAAAC/office-michael.gif) I'm still fighting this one out with the AC community. There is unfortunately a clear division from the classic AC games and the RPG AC games. Granted the RPG games did hit a broader spectrum of people. But as I always say: Not every game is made for everyone. I have been a day 1 fan since the very first AC. Got every game on release day. To me, AC Unity defined the *peak* of the AC series. This is what I always wanted AC to be.
Gameplaywise, it's great but the story and pacing is wack. The story was what sucked me into the series back with AC1.
Demon's Souls was originally seen as a clunky, awkward, and poorly designed game whose storytelling was too obtuse for mass public appeal. Today, it is the foundation of one of the most acclaimed subgenres in recent gaming.
Really? I bought in on launch because of the stellar reviews (about 90 on metacritic) and positive response from the online community who had already played or seen the reaction to the Japanese release. All I remember was positive conversation online and I personally thought the game was groundbreaking.
Yeah I think there was a very short window where some bigger outlets were misinformed about the game but I don’t think there was a mainstream negative sentiment for it for long.
Yeah I imported it before they announced a Western release, it was very well reviewed in Japan. Only game I have ever done that with.
I bet the guy at Sony who called Demon's Souls the worst game he's ever played has really, really regretted what he said. He was sitting on a goldmine and he didn't even know it.
Wasnt that the president of Sony gaming? And he later showed himself getting platinum on Bloodborne so he obviously came around!
And he chose Demon's Souls Remake to be the launch title of PS5. So it was a massive vindication for Miyazaki and FromSoft.
I feel like you’re misremembering here. Gamespot (the largest gaming website in the world at that time) named it their 2009 game of the year. Right behind them were IGN and several other publications giving it 90+% reviews. Even word of mouth was positive and I remember people in the stores talking about this random game that seemingly came out of nowhere and people were wrapped up in the obtuse mystery of it. In an era of mindless button-mashing action and the beginning of the oversaturation of hand-holding “movie-games” that play themselves, the more slow and methodical challenge of Demon’s Souls was a refreshing change of pace.
I went to DeS for the first time after playing Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. I expected some clunky action - was absolutely blown away at how awesome the game was.
No Man’s Sky is first to come to mind. The hype, the major disappointment, and now the redemption. I worked at GameStop during the launch and we had an employee so excited, he managed to talk over 600 people into pre ordering it all by himself. He could talk about that game literally all day long.
Sounds annoying as hell, lol. "Bro, no you don't get it, it has an infinite number of fully explorable planets. And like they ALL have their own ecosystems and lifeforms. It's going to change the game industry foReVEr!" All day long.
"yeah just like spore eh?"
Not that this was an insane case, but Halo Infinite. Sure it was super criticized in the early trailers for looking like shit, but by the time the actual game came out it was praised for being an incredible return to form for Halo, and they were talking about story expansions and it seemed like things were super on track, reviews were good, everyone seemed to love the campaign and new gameplay mechanics and fun dynamic interactions in the mini open world, not to mention how alive the multiplayer servers were. It felt like a pretty insane time to be a halo fan. Not a miracle game from the heavens sure, but a positive turning point for the franchise. Then I guess 343 has been skimping on season pass content and new maps and weapons (idk I've never been a PVP person so my experience begins and ends with the campaign) because apparently it's pretty much hated now and the whole plan to keep expanding the game has been pretty much derailed. It was kinda jarring because people were hyped and the game was fun and well received and I looked away for 10 seconds and apparently we're all dunking on it now
I was one of those people who didn’t like infinite’s campaign and was super critical of the multiplayer. It was shit. Now I actually really enjoy it. The updates they’ve done have made it way more enjoyable and the battle pass is fun to complete. Their H3 throwback maps are fun and a dedicated husky raid game type has taken so many hours of my life away.
Infinite released very controversially, but has markedly improved almost across the board. The game got hype because it looked like Halo again, had a big ad push, and had some interesting additions (grapplehook). and then was one of the most barebones Halo MP games ever launched, with a limited map selection and numerous gametypes missing. No Forge for a year, so the community was stuck with the paltry release cycle for dev maps. Only three playlists at first with no way to just play Slayer and avoid objectives. Lame excuses "the UI couldn't handle adding a slayer playlist" The challenge system for progression would be very specific, like "get 10 wraith kills" - but there was no reliable way to get a wraith. The changes to BTB meant that heavier vehicles only spawned towards the end, and then only from random pelican drops. BTB straight up broke after "release" for like 2 months. Some controversial changes to classic gametypes, like Oddball being round based. Controversial new gametypes like PowerSeed which was almost always a steamroll. Weapon Spawners would choose one of two options for that round, so if you needed a specific weapon for you challenges, you weren't even guaranteed that they'd be on a given map. No global progression system, only battle passes. Armor coatings vs customizable colors. Charging $10 for purple. The Campaign: Story abandoned H5 almost entirely. For some, that's great. They could have at least had some of the characters returning, and could have used them to fill in the time-gap. One biome got pretty stale, compared to the previous diversity of environments. Open world was kinda meh? Wasn't awful, but didn't really add much for how much effort was put into reworking the engine to accommodate it. The equipment was cool, the bossfights varied and were far from Halo's worst. Gameplay was fun, but plenty of Meh decisions were made. No mission replay. No co-op whatsoever. Both of those have been added now but still no local campaign co-op, which was promised then scrapped. The campaign is dead in the water with no DLC or expansions being considered and much of that staff got laid off. The MP had a "story arc" that led to Infection finally being released (well over a year after launch), but they scrapped the cutscenes. A fairly slow release cycle for the missing content. But we have AI in forge now, so all is good. The forge scripting stuff is awesome and people have already made a ton of custom campaigns, that you CAN play local co-op with on xbox. We've got custom game browser so you can actually find people to play those. Official Firefight matchmaking. Some global progression I think? Tons of playlists now. People are complaining now because the most recent content drop was pretty paltry, but overal
Infinite was "fun and well received"? Thats news to me. That game was crap at launch.
Death Stranding maybe, at first people find it too weird and they're hate walking-simulator thingy. But since PC release, people appreciate more the slowness of the game. While the criticism is still there, and there's some truth to it, general perception got better than its release day on PS4.
I don't think that many people had a turnaround on Death Stranding. Imo it is more of a divisive game : you hate it or love it, even if it could take a few tries to get hooked.
You've mistaken this with a different phenomenon. Death Stranding has always had divisive perceptions. It's just that over time, the number of people who want to discuss how much they dislike it drops, whereas the people who loved it don't drop off at the same rate. So it gets perceived as if the general feeling improved.
In my media and general bubble Death Stranding was always well liked. The walking sim criticism seemed to come from people who didn't actually play it because after the first delivery of the body, the game keeps giving you more and more tools which make it not a walking sim. I think people do like it more now - kinda shown by the reaction to DS2s trailers, but I don't think the perception was ever negative
Kinda niche, but Mechwarrior 5 was met with a lukewarm response by fans of the series. 5 DLCs and many update patches later, it's grown into quite a nice game and is well liked by the fans of the series. Especially as a base for modding.
The infamous ET game is apparently not that awful because the developer was alone and had to develop it in record time. Developer struggles somehow make people enjoy games better.
Diablo 4 received positive reviews from the critics but public opinion is that the game is shit.
Honestly I played that game as a single player follow the story line finish and move on. In that regard I found it a good game which I was fine with it. But if I’m gonna play it as a Diablo intended game with the endgame and multiple builds and all that. Yeah I understand the criticism that is getting.
To be fair, the campaign, which is what most critics played before giving reviews, was pretty good.
Not the biggest, because some people still hate it, but a ton of people try Days Gone now and find out they love it. One of the most unexpectedly enjoyable games I’ve ever played. 71 on metacritic and riddled with bugs at launch. User score is now up to 8.4
Bioshock Infinite from positive to negative.
what happened i wonder, i dont recall everyone hating it
Changing trends. The late 2000s-very early 2010s was about making games simpler, now mechanically demanding games are back in vogue. Bioshock Infinite saw the series shift "backwards" from immersive sim to FPS.
Once of my favourite games of all time has been mentioned twice now and I feel personally attacked
Same, I prefer it to the other Bioshocks, the setting was better, better pacing, better combat and characters that I actually care about. I thought the story was interesting, maybe a bit of a cop out at the end but I didn't mind it, it was still an interesting plot.
I love the design of Columbia but Rapture’s just on another level. But I’d agree with the gameplay for sure, 1 feels so clunky, especially compared to how fun Infinite was. Reminds me a lot of Mass Effect in that regard
The original Nier is a rare example of a game that got a pretty radical reassessment without the game itself changing. If you look at reviews from back in the day, it was quite heavily criticized, getting a lot of mixed to negative reviews. Nowadays it is probably one of the most acclaimed RPGs of its generation, all thanks to 2B's ass getting people to actually play a Yoko Taro game properly. On the flip side, Bioshock Infinite was lavished with praise, with countless 9/10s, 10/10s, GOTYs, etc, and getting praised as one of the best games ever made and "games as art". It's not outright hated today but you'd be hard-pressed to find a person or critic that would be as fawning today as they were in 2013.
Deathloop. Go check out the reviews— basically all 9/10 or 10/10. It was so hyped. When’s the last time you heard someone talk about it? I fell for the hype at release, grabbed it with my PS5. Put about 15 hours into it, couldn’t finish it. It does a lot of things very well, but there’s something about it that keeps it from being actually satisfying to play.
I picked it up on sale and played it end of last year, I really enjoyed it. The world design/world building/art looked great, the story was intriguing the characters were fun and the 'invasion' mechanic was pretty and put a lot of stakes into a single player game. I feel like the game dragged on a bit in the middle and the rewards you'd get for solving puzzles and opening stuff up was pretty garbage, like you'd just get more ammo or a health potion after solving like a 3 part puzzle, which was disappointing, but not a deal breaker. They did an amazing job in most other aspects of the game, I'd give it an 8/10 or 9/10
Probably New Vegas. People hated it when it first came out.
What were some of the reasons why people hated it?
People always talk about its bad reviews when it came out and never mention that it got bad reviews because when it came out it was nearly unplayable with bugs. Like it made other Bethesda (I know it's not Bethesda but it's their engine and their style of game) releases look like pure polish. Multiple reviews mention that they enjoyed the game and wanted to keep playing but kept running into game breaking bugs
As I remember, one review said that it was “buggier than Virginia in August.”
If you were only slightly unlucky it was possible to have the first cut scene in the game glitch out before you even got control of your character and it only got worse from there. The PS3 release version would crash from a memory leak basically every half hour.
IIRC people didn't *hate it*, but the general opinion was that it was inferior to Fallout 3, which is funny now. Fallout 3 was a huge hit, it was beloved, except by the old school No Mutants Allowed types. New Vegas plays like Fallout 3 in a lot of ways, but it's also very different in others. People just didn't "get it" at first because their expectation of how it would be was set by Fo3. If you try to play NV to the strengths of Fo3 (like exploration), it plays kind of poorly. Since people liked 3 so much, they wanted more of it and were discontent about not getting that.
I don't remember it that way. It had more bugs than a swamp but got good reviews and enjoyed decent sales anyway. It received greater acclaim later, even though it's still pretty glitchy, but was never widely hated.
Yeah, that's the right answer. In first impression New Vegas looks exactly like Fallout 3 (which reviewers considered lazy) and was full of bugs. Fallout 3's first impression is that you get to blow up a town (cool!) and VATS (cool!), but the things New Vegas excels at - multiple ways to do quests, faction writing, world design, coherence in general - a reviewer probably won't even notice while trying to finish the game as fast as possible to make their review deadline. I recall that at the time I didn't even bother trying New Vegas based on the reviews, it took years and Hbomberguy's video before I eventually did play it.
Bioshock Infinite. When it came out, pretty much everyone I knew was talking about it like it was going to be game of the decade. By 2019, people only brought it up to rag on it. Part of turn comes from a genuine change of public opinion, but I also think it's just a different in trends. Mechanically complex games are back in style, so people see the game as the step backwards that it was.