Monday, February 3All That Matters

Have you ever felt royally blue-balled from a game’s pre-release marketing campaign? I’ll start.

50 Comments

  • I don’t think I’ve ever felt a disappointment quite like what I felt with Halo 5, right after what I considered to be one of the best pieces of Halo media ever made. The complete shift was staggering during what we got pre-release up to what we got. What I thought would be a game that perhaps explored the darker human aspects of the Halo universe, with ONI fuckery and conspiracies to contend with, turned out nothing close to what I was expecting after Hunt the Truth, and those two trailers with Chief and Locke.

  • Holy shit, Hunt the Truth was SOOOOO good. I love that audio-drama. Was so hyped for Halo 5…

    and then the story took a complete “fuck you” and had basically nothing to do with any of the marketting. And it was really really really bad.

    So bad, Halo Infinite has to dedicate half of it’s story just retconning and removing all the terrible story choices made in Halo 5.

  • “Guild Wars 2 will be **everything** you loved about Guild Wars 1 in an open world.”

    As it turns out, the things that made Guild Wars 1 special may not even be *possible* in an open world.

  • Yes! YEEES! Hunt the Truth got me freaking hyped for Halo 5, it’s one of the greatest betrayals in video game history for the AD CAMPAIGN to have a better story than the base game.

  • Halo 5 is the reason I own a PlayStation now instead of an Xbox. Halo was the one reason I stuck around with the Xbox and Halo 5 was so goddamned bad that I just couldn’t bring myself to play another one.

  • The reboot of Amplitude. Kickstarter went very well. Harmonix touted all the artists they were looking to get. Game came out and while a competent remake, lacked most of the artists talked about, it launched with a bug that messed up keeping your streaks going. Harmonix also fired the few staff members who worked on it as soon as it shipped and said the project would not continue(again they never said it would but to just punish everyone involved is asinine).

  • Resident evil revelations promised a story, where chris was betraying the BSAA and would fight against Jill. In the real Game this storyline was cut and they just changed chris with a doll.

  • Meaning hyped up so much and the actual game was shit? That recent game from Bethesda, the one in space, I don’t care to even remember the name of that game anymore as it was so BLAH.

  • Any time marketing imagery includes polygonal mesh/grids, I immediately distrust it. It’s overused to the point that it’s lazy. It has become to science fiction at this point what Papyrus is to depictions of the ancient Middle East.

  • Borderlands 3.
    I was expecting the story to go on from Borderlands 2 and the pre sequel but instead it all got thrown in the trash.
    “Your will need the help of every vault hunter for the final battle” yeah, sure…

  • Destiny 2: Lightfall

    Marketed as the “beginning of the final chapter,” they showed off tidbits of cinematics for a crazy confrontation between the largest symbols of “light and dark,” and lauded it as some masterclass of story telling that would be meant to bring up the hype for the final expansion of this entire saga that was to follow.

    However when it released we found out that the “tidbits” of cinematics was literally all just the first and kind of only cinematic, so they just spoiled the whole opening and left it at that for most the rest of the expansion. The “master class” story was also some strange search for a mcguffin that all the characters inexplicably knew about but not a single one of them ever actually said what it was, right up until the end when we even find it and still don’t know wtf it was. We were also accompanied by an annoying tone-deaf NPC while the cool one was killed before we could even get to know him but it was treated like we’d care about him by that point anyways. When you get to the ending we also find out that it takes place literal seconds after the opening cinematic, meaning the entire time we spent on another planet searching for a mysterious mcguffin doesn’t even make any sense while also accomplishing absolutely nothing.

    The final kick in the nuts is that Bungie started releasing their typical slow and annoying amounts of story in their weekly mini-releases that were supposed to explain everything, which in and of itself is a stupid as fuck idea but they didn’t really accomplish that anyways, however a sizable portion of the community took it upon themselves to defend the shitty expansion by stating “see? There’s the story you wanted, stop complaining now!” The stupidity of which made it impossible to bear any further.

    So Tl;Dr, the Lightfall expansion was so unbelievably bad, especially when compared to their hype as fuck marketing, that after it all I gave up on even wanting to see the next expansion and no amount of good marketing is going to change that cause I no longer trust it.

  • Too Human.

    The trailers for that game was frankly great, seemingly really playing up the idea that Baldur as a cyborg god would have some genuine conflict relating with both the mechanical trolls and the… well, human mortals.

    And~ there’s basically none of that in the game proper from what little I recall. It’s just… basically 1 to 1 Nordic Mythology hack & slash, but with a sci-fi skin.

  • Damn Reddit skews young, no one has even mentioned Metal Gear Solid 2 yet. All the advertising, everything they said about the game in America, and the demo all showed more Solid Snake, then you get the game, play through the Tanker, and you’re Raiden for the whole game while ‘Plisken’ shows you up at every turn.

    Great game still but lol that threw me for a loop.

  • In 2015 Star Citizen released an aggressive marketing campaign called “Answer the call 2016!” releasing a trailer in which a digitized Gary Oldman delivered a stirring speech, and suggested that “Squadron 42,” Star citizens single-player campaign (and original game that was pitched in kickstarter) was nearing completion and would be released the following year in 2016.

    A year goes by, no Squadron 42. Hell, hardly any actual updates even to Star Citizen game out in that period of time. Then, at Citizencon 2016, Chris Roberts announces that Squadron 42 will be “Delayed.” that was almost seven years ago. Somehow a game that was, supposedly, only months away from release has barely been heard from in six years.

    Now they just released a new trailer for Squadron 42 saying its “feature complete” and just needs to be polished, so it should be released… in two years. People have been clamoring about it because the trailer is pretty. The problem is that’s their answer for everything. Ther whole business model is convincing people that a finished, polished game is just around the corner. Star Citizen has been “Two years away from release” for six years now. So you can pretty much guarantee that in two years Chris Roberts will announce something along the lines of “Squadron 42 needs to be re-worked to bring it in line with current graphics standards, it’ll be released in two years.”

  • Dead Island.

    Trailer made it seem like a gritty depressing story was going to be at the forefront in this game. What we got was Left 4 Dead with item customization.

  • Destiny. Was a fun game, but the marketing led us to believe it would be some huge expansive, deep MMORPG with amazing customisation, exploration and world building. Instead, it was some open levels with good gin play. I’ve never been so disappointed.

  • Dishonored 2 was originally marketed as a semi-open world version of the first game, with tons of new stuff and improvements.

    What we got was still good, but more of a polished version of the first game, with just somewhat larger and slightly more open maps.

  • (Maybe) controversial opinion but they should have just stuck with whatever story they were trying to do with Halo 4. It seems really obvious to me they had a plan set out, saw the reaction of Halo old heads to 4’s story and decided to pivot to something more simplistic and safe, because I guess a Halo game can’t have that kind of story. The result was the last 3 games feeling more like loosely connected standalones than part of some new saga.

  • The failure of the Halo franchise makes me sad on a deep personal level. I feel betrayed and will forever harbor resentment toward Microsoft for it. The fans deserved so much better.

  • Same thing happend with Hyrule Warriors: Age of calamity, everyone tought we where going to get a prequel with one of the most interesting settings seen yet in the franchise where you literally lose and everyone dies, and the trailers never depicted something else.

    Its was funny seeing how all the discusion and theories about the game totally stopped when it came out

  • The Callisto Protocol marketing campaign painted the game as a successor to Dead Space and the next true installment in interstellar horror. What we actually got was mediocre gameplay and a series of jump scares with little to no atmosphere

  • When Blizzard first saw thr trailer for Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, they were intimidated, as their own seemingly lacking project, a little game called StarCraft, couldn’t compete. Within a matter of months, StarCraft was salvaged and became one of the best RTS games of all time. Meanwhile, it turned out that Dominion looked so good because it wasn’t the actual game. The real Dominion turned out to be a grossly outdated mess that spelled doom for John Romero’s Ion Storm.

  • It’s probably the most misleading marketing campaign ever made. Even the books that were being released prior to Halo 5 coming out were hinting at an AI Uprising. Here was my theory about the story for Halo 5…

    Locke and Co were hunting down the Master Chief and Blue Team because they were awakening large Forerunner Gaurdians to assist in the fight against the AI/Forerunner threat. Unable to explain this and convince the UNSC of the threat, they went rogue to save humanity and lead to Locke and Co hunting them down.

    Instead, we got…

    “I think Cortana is alive and trying to warn us. I want to take Blue Team and go check out the source of the signal”

    “No fuck you”

    “I’mma go anyway”

    “TRAITOR, THIS MAN WHO SAVED HUMANITY AND GAVE HIS ENTIRE LIFE FOR THE CAUSE IS A TRAAAIITOOOR FOR NOT FOLLOWING MY ORDERS, GET HIM DISCOUNT NOBLE SIX”

    I hate 343I so much.

  • Destiny 2 Lightfall’s marketing presented the campaign as this grim, Infinity War-esque narrative where we would finally get the answers we were looking for, but lose everything in the process.

    Instead, we got something akin to a poorly written Borderlands campaign where every second line is a terrible joke and we only “lose” because all the characters in the cutscene just decided to stand around and watch as something happened.

    Also, the first cutscene and the final cutscene can literally be smushed together with no regard what happens in the middle and it would be completely fine. You can literally watch the first cutscene, go play Mario Odyssey for 12 hours, and then watch the last cutscene and your understanding of the story would be nearly unchanged.

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