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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Most memorable launch disasters of the past ten years.

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With online functionality for the Xbox version of WWE 2K22 failing to work after five days I am reminded of some of the other launch disasters from the past ten years.

In Australia and New Zealand Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles remake was removed from sale due to the online mode not working.  It returned many months later.

What are some of your favourite disasters from the past ten years?

Were any of them fixed?  Did it break the game’s chances of becoming popular or were they able to regain momentum?



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Cyberpunk 2077. Coming from the huge hype train, an open world cyberpunk RPG game made from the developers of The Witcher series and years in the making. People were naturally excited as hell for it. Sadly, it ended up being a train wreck when it finally arrived. Numerous delays, and the game still incomplete or straight up broken on consoles; several months after launch. It even got removed from PlayStation store, due to horrendous bugs and launched in a near unplayable state. And only got put back a year later once most major bugs were fixed, with performance; that didn't run like complete arse. I played the game on PC and it was still buggy as hell, but it wasn't nearly as bad as on consoles.

I haven't got around to replaying it but I read some that a lot stuff was fixed. As for sales and recovery of said botched launch.. it sold quite well iirc (some analysts estimate near 20M or thereabouts) though the bad launch did certainly put a dampener on its overall sales potential.

Really enjoyed playing through it. Despite the awful launch and sorry state it released in.

Last edited by hinch - on 15 March 2022

Elder scrolls Skyrim had many game breaking bugs. The list is extensive. I know a person who worked in the call center for their helpline. It was hell for people who were depended on to fix their broken games. I personally only ran into an issue with entering a place I wasn’t supposed to enter yet. So when the story caught up and I was supposed to go there, nothing happened. Years later a bug patch was released and I was able to finish the story, 10 years after I bought it.

Devil’s third is a game I regret not playing. It was such a mess the release got delayed. Coincidentally I fell out of interest with Wii U when it finally came out. I think Itagaki’s previous work with team ninja is some of the best in the industry. I just want to know what the game was like but apparently it had massive problems. I don’t know what those were.



Devil’s Third single player mode was dumb silliness with some mild frame drops.

The multiplayer mode had some ridiculous ambitions for the platform with some ideas that were great in theory, but in reality were a bizarre technical mess. The modes that did work well were cool though.

They relaunched the multiplayer component a couple of times under different names and both times it failed and was taken offline again.

The Devil’s Third multiplayer footage is fascinating.



Wii U

Xbox One

Cyberpunk 2077

Evolve

No Mans Sky

Anthem

Fallout 76

Nosgoth

Lawbreakers

Radical Heights

Culling 2

WWE2k20

Halo MCC Online

Bleeding Edge

Avengers

Stadia

Ouya

Battleborn

Mass Effect Andromeda

Balan Wonderworld

Babylons Fall

Various reasons from poor marketing. Bad game. MTX practices. Broken. Rushed. Collectors editions shipping the wrong stuff. Wrong Place Wrong time. No one cared. etc. This past decade I've seen more big disasters than any other generation and the 90s had a number of them but not this bad.



Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

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I'm going to limit myself to one or two launches per year, and focusing on things like technical issues over things like level design or uninteresting gameplay:

  • 2012 (After Q1) - Diablo 3, Silent Hill HD Collection
  • 2013 - SimCity
  • 2014 - Halo: Master Chief Collection
  • 2015 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
  • 2016 - No Man's Sky
  • 2017 - Star Wars Battlefront II
  • 2018 - Fallout 76
  • 2019 - Anthem
  • 2020 - Cooking Mama: Cookstar, Cyberpunk 2077
  • 2021 - Battlefield 2042

These were the examples I could come up with without trying too hard to think about it.



Love and tolerate.

2015: Metroid Prime Federation Force



Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky, Anthem, and Fallput 76 are the ones that come most readily to mind.



Diablo III. At launch the servers buckled under the pressure, the unnecessary always online requirement was heavily criticized since it meant you couldn't even play offline as you waited for the servers to get back up. Then when you actually got to the game, the loot system was terrible, designed to push players to use the Auction House (fake and real money), unique item were incredibly rare and lackluster when you got one, set items were even more scarce.

Thankfully, the Reaper of Souls expansion, the scraping of the auction house and a completely redesigned loot system saved the game.



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Batman Arkham Knight 

"Warner Bros. knew for months that the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight was broken, yet still chose to release it.  One of their anonymous sources was quoted saying: I will say that it’s pretty rich for WB to act like they had no idea the game was in such a horrible state, It’s been like this for months and all the problems we see now were the exact same, unchanged, almost a year ago.  Two sources spoke with Kotaku over the past week to explain the release of the broken PC version of Arkham Knight. Both of them stated that Warner Bros. knew that there were many issues facing Arkham Knight on PC but still chose to ship the game, believeing that it was good enough."

https://www.gameskinny.com/cub5y/warner-bros-knew-that-arkham-knights-pc-version-was-broken

Assassin's Creed Unity

"The various versions of Unity had hundreds of bugs, some nearly game-breaking, when the game came out on Nov. 11.... Issues at launch included protagonist Arno Dorian falling through the ground and getting stuck in hay carts, problems with the in-game currencies, and characters with missing faces ... but not eyes."

https://www.polygon.com/2014/11/26/7294993/assassins-creed-unity-is-broken-so-ubisoft-is-giving-players-free-dlc

Mighty No. 9

"some users have said that Mighty No. 9's Wii U version is causing freezes on that console, and that the game's lone downloadable content extension (an extra villain) "apparently breaks the game."

Mighty No. 9 had a rough launch day

"Mighty No. 9 was a broken mess when it came out and the developer tried to fix it but they really didn’t. It still had a lot of issues and it looks like Microsoft took it upon themselves after the game was abandoned by the team. Today, Microsoft released a patch for Mighty No. 9 which the Xbox Team created themselves."

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-patches-mighty-no-9-developer-practically-abandons-game/ 

Aliens:  Colonial Marines

"Five years after the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines, a modder has discovered that a simple typo in the enemy A.I. code had a major, negative impact on gameplay...  Sadly, the Aliens: Colonial Marines that was released after many years of delays for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC wasn’t the title promised in those initial previews. In fact, it was an incredibly mediocre shooter littered with bugs, glitches and terrible enemy A.I. The xenomorphs, in particular, were far from the intelligent, lightning fast enemies from the movies, often getting caught on scenery and moving in sluggish, jerky steps that made them easy prey for Pulse Rifle fire... Some fans have spent years modding the game to improve the A.I, lighting effects and other glitches, but now a modder named James Dickinson (via PCGamesN) has discovered the erratic xenomorph A.I. may have been caused by a single typo in their coding.  Dickinson discovered that by looking in Aliens: Colonial Marines games config file, that a piece of code reading 'AttachPawnToTeather' really should have been spelt 'AttachPawnToTether.' Since this has been discovered, many players have found that correcting the code makes a big impact on how the Aliens respond. They’re much more aggressive, and actively hunt the player and try to flank and ambush them."

https://screenrant.com/aliens-colonial-marines-typo-broke-discovered/