The list is not comprehensive, but represents the most visible examples of games principally recognized for their enduring negative reception, or in the case of titles such as Final Fantasy XIV and No Man's Sky, at their original launch before they were reworked with content updates through patches. The list mostly omits licensed tie-in games for films or television shows, which are generally accepted by the industry as shovelware and not expected to have high production values as they are typically produced by non-AAA development studios. With certain exceptions, this list also omits controversial video games whose negative reception revolves around the controversies they started and is not related to the quality of the game itself, including those that were subject to review bombing by users for non-gameplay related issues. For similar reasons, the list mostly omits indie games, which are developed by smaller teams that typically lack the ability for full quality control of their product, as well as mobile games, of which there are countless developers with the ability to self-publish on app stores and frequent copycats of more successful games driven by unpopular microtransactions.
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a racing game developed by Stellar Stone and published by GameMill Publishing. The player competes in road races with semi-trailer trucks. Big Rigs was released in a pre-alpha state: most objects lack any type of collision detection, allowing players to drive through other vehicles and obstacles. Its physics system is so problematic that it allows players to drive up a vertical incline or accelerate to a maximum speed of 1.231037 miles per hour (1.981037 kilometres per hour; 5.81020 light-years per second) while driving in reverse before a floating-point arithmetic overflow occurs, then coming to an immediate halt once the accelerator is released. The launch version lacks computer artificial intelligence, meaning computer-controlled vehicles do not move at all during the race, thus making the game impossible to lose; a patch was released in an attempt to solve the problem but only enabled computer-controlled vehicles to race until they reached the finish line where they simply stopped without crossing it.[139][140] It also has a number of grammatical and typographic errors, most notably the message to the player on finishing a race, "YOU'RE WINNER !".[141]
Busywin EM 3.9 (f 11) [Crack Or Patch]l
Final Fantasy XIV is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in Square Enix's Final Fantasy series, developed as a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy XI. The game was released for Microsoft Windows on September 30, 2010, with plans for a PlayStation 3 port. However, the initial release of the game was met with poor reviews, with critics describing grind-heavy gameplay, poor controls, and a confusing user interface.[197][198] The game holds a Metacritic score of 49/100.[199] According to Naoki Yoshida, who took on overseeing the game's remake, the original version of Final Fantasy XIV suffered in production as there had been too much focus on the graphics quality, and little understanding of the fundamentals of a good MMORPG with the expectation that problems could be fixed with updates and patches later.[200]
Just prior to No Man's Sky's August 2016 release, early-released copies revealed that some of the expected gameplay features did not appear present in the game, and were still missing following a day-zero patch. Specifically, there appeared to be no multiplayer, and other features demonstrated in promotional videos and Murray's interviews were absent.[312] Atop this, players found the game lacked a quality of procedural uniqueness (in that there was little overall variation in the planets relative to the scale of the game), and the gameplay elements necessary to explore were tedious. Though Murray had tried to set expectations prior to release, the game received a wide range of reviews[313] and generally negative reviews from players.[314] Negative player reception was compounded by the apparent lack of communication from Hello Games towards these issues, with the team only reporting on bug fixes and performance improvements that they released. Murray later admitted that their initial silence post-release had come about due to drastically underestimating the player size they had to support at the start.[315] Hello Games has since released several major updates to the game in the five years after release to incorporate most of these missing features, including multiplayer modes, as well as other significant additions which have been met with praise, bringing the game up to and beyond the state expected prior to its launch.[316][317] By the time of its five-year anniversary, No Man's Sky's user reviews on Steam had swung to "mostly positive" after initially starting at "overwhelming negative" at the time of its release.[318] The game is considered a key reminder of what to avoid in marketing a game, with many commentators discussing the proper means to generate interest in games "in a post-No Man's Sky world".[319][320][321][322]
A 2022 report from Kotaku based on interviews with former developers and QA testers on the game asserted that a number of issues in management led to the game having a problematic start, even with added crunch time to make it ready for the scheduled launch.[338] The game shipped with a large number of bugs and glitches, and Bethesda's early patches to fix these were large and at times, reintroduced bugs that had previously been fixed.[339][340][341] Other complaints from players focused on the expensive pricing of in-game cosmetics,[342] as well as introducing items that gave gameplay advantages which could similarly be bought with real money.[343][344][345] Additionally, there was criticism for Bethesda's attitude towards players using mods, regardless of whether their intentions were harmful or not,[346][347][348] as well as the game's lack of sufficient anti-cheat protection due to large-scale examples of hacking.[349][350][351][352] Like No Man's Sky, Bethesda had not been as communicative of its efforts to improve the game following release, leading to further consternation within the player base.[353] Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda, said in 2021 "When [Fallout 76] launched, the litany of issues we had, we let a lot of people down. There was very little we didn't screw up, honestly."[354]
Warcraft III: Reforged is a remastered edition of the 2002 real-time strategy video game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and its expansion Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, and was developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment and released on January 28, 2020. The game was released as an update to the existing Warcraft III product on Battle.net; this provided new character models and other improved graphic features, but most other engine changes were patched over the original Warcraft III for all owners of this product. The game received aggregated mixed reviews from critics and as of 2021 is the lowest rated Blizzard game on Metacritic.[392] Additionally, the game received a very negative reaction from players; it is "overwhelmingly disliked" according to user reviews on review aggregator Metacritic, and received the lowest user score of any video game on the site shortly after its launch.[393][394] Users complained of the lack of promised features as well as losing features that were in the current Warcraft III product, lack of updated cutscenes with the updated character models, and other issues related to the confusion whether the product was to be a remaster or a remake.[395][396] The game has also been compared unfavorably to EA Games' Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, which was better received for its improvements over the source material.[397] According to a report from Bloomberg News, the remaster had a troubled history from the start due to Activision pressuring Blizzard to move away from these remasters and staying to new games, along with internal management problems that hampered development. The game was only decided to be released to fulfill pre-orders and avoid having to refund those orders. Additionally, Blizzard's internal Classic Games team was disbanded about eight months after release, making resolving issues with the game difficult.[398]
According to CD Projekt developers, management was aware that the game was not ready for release but refused to listen to their warnings.[403] The game's launch has been described as "a shambles",[403][411] and the company's stock fell by 9.4%.[412] CD Projekt has also been subject to at least one lawsuit for fraudulent claims made to investors related to the state of the game.[413] In a January 2021 open message outlining the company's plans to patch and improve the game, CD Projekt's co-CEO Marcin Iwiński stated that they had "underestimated the task" of taking a game that was optimized for personal computers to work well on the older consoles, and their testing had not revealed the problems that players had seen on release; he further affirmed it was the management's decision to release the game and not the developers' fault.[414] As CD Projekt began releasing major patches for the game in March 2021, the company stated that in future games, they will avoid announcing any new titles until they are "much closer" to a launch state.[415]
CD Projekt continued to patch and improve the game through 2022, and in partnership with Netflix released a limited anime series, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners in September 2022. The series was well-received, and the game itself saw a resurgence in players and new purchases; its concurrent player count on Steam exceeded one million users within weeks of the series' launch, and surpassed records set by The Witcher 3, another CD Projekt title. One developer, who had intended to quit after the initial launch of the game due to the poor reception, said in light of the Edgerunners boost, "So to have this moment, of people liking something that we did, it's really feeling a bit unreal. That finally people are appreciating it."[416][417] 2ff7e9595c
Comments