Probably, I still remember people in Datablitz asking if I wanted to buy Wolfenstien: The New Order instead of Destiny. I did, and have no regrets.

I dunno. My candidate is Spore.

Aside for again using the fabled $500M figure, which was not the budget of this game, I say NO!

I think the most hyped game ever was:

John Romero's Daikatana!

But, since it came out before the age of Metacritic, we have no critical score to compare it. But it was a humongous financial failure that wiped out Romero from relevance in the gaming world...

I honestly think Titanfall fits that category (for this generation). Most people had a rough understanding of the core game from the Beta for Destiny.

Titanfall was hyped to the end of the universe.

There's a flaw with the ~500m figure as well, since that's not for a single game.

I do think both Titanfall and Destiny were hobbled by cross-gen/last-gen roots and tight release scheduling. Destiny seems like a great game that was released with 1/4 of the content that they envisioned, and honestly about the same for Titanfall. Budget/time, whatever, not having at least a competent single-player campaign is a significant disappointment. Titanfall's 'campaign' is a 1.5/10, even if the MP/overall game is a 7/10. Destiny's 'campaign' might be a 5.5/10, while the overall game is a 7.5 or 8/10.

Bringing a solid campaign to both would have brought their scores up. I think reviewers were also VERY generous to Titanfall, and perhaps a bit overly harsh on Destiny. I actually think excluding TV spots that I saw 10x more Titanfall advertising though, so sometimes it pays to butter the review sites up with blankets of ads.

A native 8th gen Titanfall and Destiny with complete campaign content? I can see either getting GOTY/9.5 of 10 kind of success.

If you are defining hype by the amount of money spent and the way the critics reviewed the game then your concept of hype is wrong.

Hype is creating an expectation of an experience and failing to live up to it. In that regard, I would say Destiny's "over-hyped" is actually very minimal. They did an Alpha and a Beta. They literally gave people every opportunity they wanted to see how the game played before the game was released. The majority of their marketing did not touch on the story or promise an amazing cinematic experience. We as a collective group just assumed it would have that. The marketing, like for so many other games nowadays, was vague and barely touched on anything beyond "this is a shooter, made by bungie, here is what a few websites had to say, go buy it please". It followed the same formula as many other games ads do at this point.

I think a few large reasons why people call Destiny the most over-hyped game ever are simple. First, it is the most recent game that grew a groundswell of anticipation and was met with good, but not great, reviews (yes, reviews in the 70s are actually good scores. Games do not need to be 90s to be good people). Second, despite the game not advertising a great cinematic experience, people assumed they might get one from Bungie because of the story they did get in Halo. Last one I will bring up, is the MMO elements of the game. This is the one area that I think Bungie dropped the ball in. They didn't want to call it an MMO because of the stigma of MMOs, but didn't want to not call it an MMO because that is essentially what it is.

Where is that gamers consensus? Or it is just your annedocatal evidence?

You need first shows proof that most gamers that bought it (consensus) are dispointed with the game... my annedoctal evidence shows more and more players are enjoying the game.

Actually, since the sequels of Destiny could have been in the game itself, it could have been for the game, before Activision split it into pieces.

That's true, some of Destiny's weaknesses can probably be traced to Activision mismanaging the situation somewhat.

They should have gone for a knockout with the first game, but seem to have held back a lot in hopes of stringing the content out over a period of time.

Pretty much.  I'm not sure about budget though, but I do remember games being way more hyped than Destiny and turned out to be ho-hum.