Overhyped Games That Totally Flopped Hard
There’s no bigger embarrassment than hyping up a game, whipping an audience into a an excited frenzy ready to preorder away, and then disappointing everyone. We know what it’s like to listen to the flashy marketing schemes and promising trailers, load up the game and find that in reality, the anticipated title is at best just okay and at worst, a total flop.
It’s no fun for anyone involved when a game flops. Players feel deceived, even betrayed, and the developers that promised the world have the burden of failure to shoulder. It’s worse when the trailers look so sleek and the demo is so cool. Yet somehow, the game winds up impressing absolutely no one upon release. What happened? The unfortunate fact is that things go wrong along the way. Here’s some games that we hyped up, hoped, and prayed would be good. But then they just weren’t.
Final Fantasy 14 Online was killed by graphical quality
The world of "Final Fantasy" is beautiful and detailed. Just look at how many belt buckles the average player sports! Despite this careful crafting that developers pour into the games, it’s this "unhealthy obsession with graphical quality" that effectively killed "Final Fantasy 14 Online." This MMO was Square Enix’s second, and had seemed promising at first. It was definitely easy on the eyes. However, it’s beauty turned out to only be skin deep.
Upon its 2010 launch, the game was an all-around failure. With constant crashes and a hard limit on the number of players on screen at a time, the MMO failed basic MMO requirements. There had been a marked dichotomy in priorities by devs: they put the same number of shaders on potted plant as they did a playable character, limiting what the game could support. After the disaster, Square Enix gave a presentation at the Game Developers Conference on exactly what went so horribly, horribly wrong. They acknowledged that the game had an unfriendly user interface, an extreme lack of content, a broken battle system, and unstable servers. They said that even with eight years of experience running "Final Fantasy 11," they were unable to recognize changes in the MMO market and user needs. It turned out that "creating a successful MMORPG sequel is harder than it looks."
Fortunately, Square Enix was able to learn from their mistakes and relaunch the game in a far better incarnation.
Epic Mickey 2 didn’t fix the mistakes of the past
Before "Bendy and the Ink Machine," there was "Epic Mickey," a series of games featuring Disney’s favorite mouse, a magical paintbrush, and globs of malicious ink. The first game was a hit on the Wii, selling 1.3 million copies in about a month as it sketched out the story of Mickey in a world of forgotten Disney creations. It had interesting mechanics, nostalgic platforming, but despite positive reception, had some glaring gameplay issues that took it from a ten to a seven.
People were also disappointed that the premise wasn’t as dark as it was hyped up to be, but "Epic Mickey 2" gave Junction Point Studios another chance to clean up the camera controls, vary the missions, and make the characters more charming. But they didn’t.
2012’s "Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two" definitely added some flair and charm, but failed to erase the wonky controls that marred the first game. The sequel didn’t have nearly the success of the first, and flopped hard. "Epic Mickey 2" made less than a quarter of the sales of its predecessor and had largely mixed reviews. Cutscenes were cool, but they didn’t make up for broken AI. The characters were more fleshed out, but tasks were mind-numbingly repetitive and boring. The good name of Disney couldn’t save this bellyflop of a game or Junction Point Studios, which was shut down by Disney in 2013.
