Summary
When someone buys a video game, they generally expect an entertaining experience. This is not be everyhing, though. They also have expectations set by marketing and all the exposure they got of the game from posters and TV spots to the box art itself.
When a game throws a curveball of any sort, it makes it a lot harder to depend on these materials in the future for any release. The titles below broke gamers' trust in a variety of ways. Most of them still ended up being incredible games. Others, however, were universally panned.
Metal Gear Solid 2is widely considered one of the best games of all time, but it also pulled one of the largest pranks on fans when it came out in 2001. The marketing materialslargely featured Solid Snake. Even the demo that came packed withZone of the Enderslet players control Snake on the tanker without hinting at another character.
Then, the full game reveals Raiden, who is the main character for the majority of the journey after the short tanker mission. It upset some fans who were looking forward to playing as Solid Snake, but it still ended up being a fantastic game. As time went on, people became less frustrated with Raiden as a character.
The Nintendo GameCubelacked a lot of great horror games, but it still had heavy hitters likeResident EvilandEternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. The latter goes to great lengths to mess with gamers' heads. Sometimes, the screen will randomly appear to have shut off or the game will mimic a corrupt memory card notification, leading players to believe their files were all erased.
This was before the age of cloud saves, so if a memory card was corrupted it meant the destruction of countless gaming hours. This was a truly traumatic experience for gamers of the early 2000s.
Fans had to wait seven years to playThe Last of Us Part 2and were really looking forward to anotheradventure with Joel and Ellie.The trailers seemed like it would be a joint journey once again, just with players controlling Ellie more. Then, a massive leak happened and shocked gamers with certain scenes that revealed the game’s unique structure.
Not only does Joel die in the first hour or so, but halfway through, players control a new character, Abby. The game is specifically about the cycle of violence and revenge that destroys lives and entire communities, but the protagonist switch and early death of Joel really rubbed some gamers the wrong way.
The naysayers could not stopThe Last of Us Part 2from being revered as one of the best modern video games. Its metacritic score sits at a staggering 93.
Players recall how the firstRed Dead Redemptionended withJohn Marsden’s tragic demiseand the epilogue where his Jack avenges his father’s death.Red Dead Redemption 2breaks gamers' trust not only by once again killing the main character, but by giving him such an undignified ending.
The game’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan, is beaten to a pulp and left to die on a cliff. In terms of structure, the epilogue betrays players by basically being the length of a full game all on its own. This isn’t a simple bow to a story; it is a whole other chapter that shows John Marsden building up his life before the events of 2010’sRed Dead Redemption.Those who thought they could wrap it up quickly were in for a big surprise when the game went on for another four to six hours.
Bad games come out all the time and it is not necessarily a tragedy. However, sometimes it feels like the game is lying in the trailers and shows something that is not representative of the final product. This is the case withAliens: Colonial Marinesfrom Gearbox.
The trailers seemed like an intense FPS where players battle against Xenomorph hordes. The final game was indeed a shooter in theAlienseries, but it looked way uglier than anything shown in the trailers and barely functioned as a game. It was so egregious that there was alawsuit against the developer for false advertising.
The PS3’s early showcasesbecame infamous for false advertising. Very little of what was shown in those early trailers was actually running on a PlayStation 3 or was even anything a PS3 could feasibly run.Killzone 2was a particular standout because the demonstration was from the first-person perspective and looked the most like actual gameplay.
To be fair toKillzone 2, the final game was no visual slouch, but the graphics on display in the announcement trailer are maybe only just now possible with the PS5. Presenting such unrealistic expectations for the PS3 was a huge mistake on Sony’s part that damaged the console’s reputation for years.
Motostormwas another game shown at the presentation with a similarly outlandish trailer. Though the final presentation did not match what the trailer showed, it was still a great game.
Long development times do not equal great games.Duke Nukem Foreverhad an infamously long development cycle where it changed engines, added new features, and took out chunks of the game. It was supposed to come out in the late 1990s and did not come out until 2011.
Duke Nukem Foreveris not a terrible game, but the final product does not reflect more than a decade of hard work. It is not as if all that time was spent polishing the gameplay. The final release ultimately feels like something that was patched together with duct tape and pushed out the door.
