Continuing our article:
5. Battlefield 2042
The 12th main installment of the Battlefield series was expected to revive the franchise after its predecessor, Battlefield V released in 2018, disappointed commercially and faced criticism for lack of content and innovation. However, the development team of Battlefield 2042 made significant mistakes and released a game that received widespread criticism for being uninspiring and making unwanted major changes to the traditional gameplay style.
Completely abandoning the single-player campaign mode, the game focused entirely on multiplayer gameplay, introducing a list of hero characters that players could choose from, a departure from the concept of the lone soldier that characterized previous games, which did not sit well with many fans.
If that wasn’t enough to anger the gaming community, the situation worsened with the removal of features like the traditional scoreboard, as well as numerous technical glitches and a lack of story content, leading players to abandon the game collectively.
The simplistic story didn’t help either, revolving around a futuristic world war between Russia and other elements in a context that some found inappropriate due to the existing tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
In less than a month after release, Battlefield 2042 lost around 70% of its players on Steam, likely also losing their money. While EA blamed development disruptions and work conditions from home during the Covid-19 pandemic, they seem to need to give this series a break.
4. Anthem
When Anthem was announced, it promised to be a new masterpiece, bringing Bioware back to its usual standard after failing to please players with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Then Anthem was released.
The game heavily focused on combat using mechanized flight suits, few recent releases were as shallow in all aspects as Anthem. It was another game that relied solely on multiplayer gameplay, which could have benefited from a true single-player campaign. Players who were drawn to the description of the game as an action RPG shooter quickly realized there wasn’t much behind it, leading to a sense of regret among buyers due to the inevitable repetitive nature that emerged.
Anthem lacked significantly in the expected level of technical and narrative polish from Bioware, likely due to major restructuring of the game that occurred less than two years before its final release. Without a clear identity and sense of direction, the version that reached players became a mere bland flight simulation.
Initially, plans were announced to improve Anthem in the long term. However, the content plan that included “Acts” to add new narratives quickly turned into proposed seasonal updates, which in turn became plans to reboot the game, and ultimately these plans were canceled.
The live servers are still operating as of July 2022, but in 2021, Bioware announced that development on Anthem had been completely halted, killing the game and players’ hopes before it truly took off.
3. No Man’s Sky
For many of us, No Man’s Sky has become an enduring example of “overhyped promotion and false promises leading to a disastrous launch.” While the game came from a small studio with big ideas and a budget backed by Sony, it quickly became apparent that the developer Hello Games had overpromised more than they could deliver.
During the promotion phase, the team fell into the trap of promising many features they hoped to include in the game, but were not yet implemented. This delicate entity crumbled before launch when a fan managed to get a review copy on Ebay, only to discover that the game’s world, described as a fully procedurally generated and planet-filled exploration wonder, was actually a barren wasteland.
Numerous contradictions in the promotion were discovered post-launch, along with technical glitches and frequent crashes. The feedback from fans and critics was harsh, with many feeling that the misleading advertising might warrant a lawsuit. Everyone thought No Man’s Sky was dead. But was it?
Like many developers who came after, the Hello Games team immediately committed to fixing and improving the game. Founder Sean Murray took all the complaints personally so the team could focus solely on updates and began releasing them gradually. Technical fixes came first, but expansions, additional content, and the promised multiplayer gameplay followed quickly. As of July 2022, No Man’s Sky has received 20 free post-launch updates, flipping its Steam reviews from Overwhelmingly Negative to Mostly Positive.
No Man’s Sky has become famous as a game of almost universal regret for those who preordered it at launch. However, it deserves praise as a rare example that when a studio makes a mistake and truly commits to fixing it, regret can turn into a reward as long as you haven’t refunded your purchase.
2. Fallout 76
In contrast to its predecessor, Fallout 76 falls on the other side of false developer promises, as Bethesda was happy to take fans’ hard-earned money in the beginning and continue to do so through paid downloadable content and in-game purchases. Oh, unfortunately!
Fallout 76 was highly anticipated as the next installment in the award-winning Fallout series from Bethesda, but it quickly went “nuclear”, not just because of its post-apocalyptic environment. The divisive multiplayer gameplay experience quickly disappointed buyers who shelled out £60 to buy the game.
“16 times the detail,” Todd Howard promised at E3. “Four times the size of the Fallout 4 map!” But what did we get? A lot of unprecedented technical glitches that made the game almost unplayable. It was complete chaos, and things didn’t get better.
Of course, refund requests began to flow in, and the initial refund policies were so conflicting that Bethesda almost decided to stop them altogether. Tough luck for the players! Fans who preordered special editions of the game were particularly angry, as the “Canvas” bag included with one of those special editions turned out not to be from canvas. Bethesda had no plans to rectify that, except to offer £5 of in-game currency as compensation.
At this stage, lawsuits started pouring in. Unfortunately, the game hasn’t improved much since then, and with dwindling player numbers and rising microtransaction costs, it’s safe to say that almost everyone who preordered Fallout 76 feels dissatisfied with it.
1. Cyberpunk 2077
You probably expected this. While No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 are among the most regretted games people bought in this century so far, Cyberpunk 2077 surpasses them significantly.
No one wanted Cyberpunk to fail, but the earliest signs of trouble came with multiple delays in the game’s release, causing frustrations among those who preordered it and putting immense pressure on the studio’s employees.
When it finally released in December 2020, the world was shocked by the state of the game. While some bugs were humorous, like the infamous incident that made customizable body parts of characters appear through their clothes, many players found the game barely functional on their systems.
It quickly became evident that the game only ran properly on high-end computers and was almost unplayable on older consoles, to the point where PlayStation decided to completely withdraw the game from its store and make it unavailable for purchase until June 2021.
CD Projekt Red faced numerous class-action lawsuits for the deception regarding the game’s technical performance, which were eventually settled at a cost of $1.85 million. The developer committed to fixing the game’s performance, which they largely achieved through a year-long series of updates, with a promise of adding new content in the future.
However, the game is still not deserving to be played on eighth-generation consoles, and as the company announced new projects in The Witcher series, it seems that the magnitude of Cyberpunk’s failure is trying to be quietly buried.