Use my code: Eruption at checkout or this link displate.com/promo/austineruption/?art=63e284c03f0d9 to get 20%off 2-3 Displates and 30% off 3+ Displates. Gonna order another soon! FRIENDS. IT IS TIME. Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games are EVERYWHERE. It's been a hot minute since I did a video going into something just inherently "bad" with little wiggle room, but I manage to toss a few personal disappointments in here too cause I'm a nut. Lemme know what other Bad AAAs you think of! There's ALWAYS more.
My buyers remorse was iron man 2 for the wii. I kept telling myself it was fun and had this bad feeling that the game didnt work. That being said it was very prophetic for how I would feel about the mcu as a whole.
I was going to comment about NMS not being a AAA game, but someone else already mentioned it, lol. So I will point out that Haze never proclaimed to be a Halo Killer. That was the media that wanted to have a console vs story, for when Haze was a PS3 exclusive. In fact, the devs hated that moniker because they felt that not only put unrealistic expectation on them, but was unfair, since Halo was at the time on the 3rd game, while they were barely developing the 1st on what they hoped to be a new series, but also were working with a new engine and a new console, so they would barely have time to bring it on par with Halo 1 if everything worked as planned, and in no chance to be on par with Halo 3.
That wall provided my childhood with great memories. I found DRIVER 2 on that wall. DRIVER is still my favorite series and I will forever be salty that the new driver game turned into Watch Dogs 😢. Even though I love Watch Dogs. Aiden Peirce is basically John Tanner.
Always love whenever I get to bring this factoid up: the Switch is probably one of if not the only console that actually lets you update games offline through other people, completely legitimately. It's the "match with local versions" option in the + menu. Very niche, I know, but it's genuinely great that there's an official way to share updates for games completely offline, and people very rarely talk about it.
Kind of unsurprising, since Nintendo had to figure out how to patch bugs in offline portable games way back in the early 2000s with the third generation of Pokemon. Nintendo might be weirdos sometimes, but they learn from their mistakes.
I still feel bad for John Romero in regards to the marketing campaign of Daikatana. Romero seems like a genuinely nice guy, and has said in multiple interviews after the fact that he didn't actually want that ad to run but was talked into it and has regretted it ever since.
he's not the only one either, there're a lot of stories of marketing going against the devs intentions with campaigns they didn't like, sometimes completely behind their back. it'd be nice to think that the marketing team knows the best way to market the game, but it's the devs that actually know the game, and unfortunately the marketing just (usually) aren't the developers.
I feel like if someone was able to actually rain in John’s ego that game could have been something special, because the ideas were there for the time when it started development, but his ego obviously screwed up the development similar to Ken Levine with bioShock infinite and it’s terrible DLC
He might be a nice guy now but that’s because Daikatana’s failure has humbled him. He was arrogant at the time. Admittedly, this could have been a facade covering up his insecurities, but a lot of gamers disliked him and were glad when Daikatana failed.
Tresspasser was meant to originally be a much different game from what we got, and the developers had something good in mind that they were going for... ambitious as it was. If you look into it, there's an explanation as to what went wrong. They were forced to cut it short and leave it off as a very unfinished and confusing mess.
It’s hilarious and sad that “AAA” being a label for quality means almost nothing now once they used patches and “live-services” as an excuse and crutch to release unfinished games.
they never meant anything. In the old days your buggy triple A game would remain forever broken. There was no real effort to release them less buggy, and both the consoles and programming were worse and more unstable than they are now.
That's the problem. People see the term 'AAA' and think it means quality when it actually only means how much money is being poured into an individual game. Even then, the amount of money spent to define a game as 'AAA' is vague. People put too much weight on 'AAA' games when hardly anyone knows what the term's usage says about the game. Also, crunch is not a new thing in game development whatsoever, the media simply reports on it more often and people actually pay attention now.
Funny thing about Angel of Darkness: Many say it's the game that killed the franchise, but I personally can pinpoint a singular moment within the game that killed it for me. There's a dev interview video in the menu and I watched it before playing the game (I know, kinda weird since it could have spoilers, but I was cleaning my room so figured I'd put it on to get hyped) There's a part in it where a guy goes "When we were working on this game, we wrote a book. The story of this game [dramatic pause] is only the first few chapters of that book." Then it shows him slowly closing a book and looking off into the distance in a "I'm so deep" way. I would give ANYTHING to get my hands on that book lol.
The book is something of a metaphor. Angel of Darkness was meant to be the start of several games and was billed as such. People didn't entirely buy into that, were put off that the game didn't deliver a complete story and as a result the rest became vapour ware. Or at least that was my understanding of it when it was released. Ironically I didn't play it but was surprised by the response and lack of follow up.
Hey Austin, it really shows you've been making videos for 10 years, your content is high quality and always fun to watch. I actually wouldn't mind even longer analysis of video games by you. For example, you spend about 3/4 minutes on each game in this video but I love the videos like the Balan Wonderworld and Kakarot videos where you REALLY dive in. In fact, I like your editing and personality to the point where I'd watch you talk about pretty much anything.
I'm gonna do some more videos in that style this year for sure! I've just had some weird circumstances that have prevented me from going into that but it'll come sooner rather than later! Thanks so much for the kind words!
The worst thing about Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness was the "experience" system. The game forced you to do a pointless parcour then said "you're stronger now, you can open the door". 😆
I remember getting soft locked at certain points because I neglected to do a certain thing and then later on when I needed the extra strength or jump height or whatever, couldn't do it, and couldn't go back to the spot where I needed to "level up". Neat concept, awful execution
The digression about day-one patches is really interesting with the announcement that FFXVI won't have any sort of day-one patch, the game you play is the game printed on the disc. Crazy how rare that is these days.
@Kamuro Tetsu from memory yoshi p stated that ff16 was finished either late last year or early this year, and the remainder of the time before printing was dedicated to bug testing and general polish. We shall see.
Trespasser has an active modding scene. Most of it is making the game run better and reintroduce cut content. Some of the game's original developers even contributed at points. The game is abandonware and downloads are all over the internet if anyone is interested.
Of all these terrible AAA botched releases, Trepasser is the only one that truely fascinates me due to how many of its ideas, physics, and mechanics became widely used in the future. Its truely ahead of its time and i can see it having a big modding community. Even the boob tattoo healthbar, despite being seen as a joke, could be a precurser for games with unconventional healthbars that very few games use. Very few games have the healthbar on the actual character and not as a U.I. on the screen. Plus a precurser to the ideas seen in current VR. Makes it very interesting compared to most awful games.
I worked in a "AAA" mobile game developer (w/ a AAA sister publisher-company) back in 2011, and they have been using the term way back then. They describe it as "A-tier" allocation of resources in 3 fronts, A-Time, A-Money, A-Marketing, hence AAA.
One of the funniest things I ever learned about Jurrasic Park Tresspasser was how the damage from melee was calculated. IIRC, it was based on the weight of the item, and one of the heaviest items that you could pick up and use was a human skull in the first area that, according to the game engine, weighed 1000 lbs and could theoretically 1 hit any dinosaur in the game... but it was awkward as hell to hold and held items didn't transition to new levels (iirc, no items transferred between levels). BTW, melee weapons were WORTHLESS in Trespasser because every "proper' melee weapon had a weight of 1. Meaning that you'd be swinging for days, since the most dinos had health in the hundreds. Another goofy thing was that they couldn't get the attack animations to tie with the damage, so they just put a "damage strip" inside the mouths of enemies that would damage you if it collided with your hitbox and would vanish if the dino had their mouth closed, but was ALWAYS present if the dinos' mouth was open, meaning you could die from accidentally walking a dinos' mouth. You could manually close a dead dinos mouth, which was strongly advised, because you never knew if you'd have to backtrack through an area for more guns.
As Yahtzee recently said. We wonder why this happens when we always insist on the most brand new, untested, resource guzzling graphics engines Seriously, maybe we don't need perfect photorealism if games keep taking 19 years and coming out like this!
I remember a bizarre Twitter thread where the OP went on and on about how AAA games “need” to he over the top hyper realistic to justify their existence. Then immediately went “but wait! Games like Elden Ring and Zelda don’t focus on this trait despite similar budgets! It is an overseas design philosophy difference? 🤔🤔” like GEE WHAT COULD THE DIFFERENCE BE Even Japanese made games that to for super realism still don’t go ridiculously over the top with it. Stuff like RE4make & FF16 are still Games, and they’re better for it
@@Gatorade69 If they hadn't insisted on cutting edge graphics for the screenshots, maybe they'd have been able to use some of their crunch time to make sure their game worked.
I forgot about all of the weird product placement in Homefront. My friend was obsessed with that games and was very sad that our home state, NH, did not have any White Castles.
The single burning memory that I have of Homefront is the white phosphorus scene, because I swear it was an inspiration for Spec Ops The Line's WP scene
Fuse is the one that hurts the most for me. It’s important to note that the Overstrike trailer came out way before stuff like Overwatch and Fortnite were publicly revealed, so if Insomniac stayed the course, they would have one of the first games on the market with the now popular bright, slightly-cartoony aesthetic. Instead they ended up with a game that looked dated even when it was new.
Angel of darkness really was the first big bomb for alot of us. I remember playing it at my uncles house who got all the brand new games, playing 30 minutes of it and going “wow this doesn’t feel fun at all” and never touched it again.
I would recommend you giving it another try. I did so myself after putting it down years ago for probably the same reasons as you, but this time I got an entirely different view on it. I found Lara's movement to be slow, sure, this made it feel like there was weight to her, and she can do a surprisingly lot of stuff to the point where she feels like the epitomy of the classic series. I was also initially super against the stamina meter and Lara having to improve her strength, but upon my revisit I found that not just being able to climb, scale, and shimmey indefinitely added more difficulty to the game. I mean if you think about it, ain't it kinda boring and unchallenging how in ANY other game, past or future, she can hold on indefinitely? At that point it doesn't become a matter of "CAN I make it?" but "where does the game want me to climb?" I mean I like climbing around as much as the next guy, but if there is no limit to how much you can climb before having to rest, where is the challenge? Yes, the game is incomplete. The story has been cut down and several gameplay elements removed. But what IS here I still think is a flawed but solid experience. So again, try picking it back up with an open mind. Also keep in mind, I didn't experience any of the glitches that I hear plagued other people. Maybe because I played a PAL PS2 copy. Also also, if you own a legit PC copy of the game, some guy is making a Definitive Version you may wanna try out.
I played thru too human about 6times with a single character back when I was in college: its actually pretty sick and high octane once you get used to the weird controls despite how half baked the boss fights are. Could have actually become a decent cult series imo if it was allowed to continue.
@@adamking4246No thats just the original. Due to their dispute over UE3 with EPIC, the devs didnt last long after releasing Too Human and shortly after they lost their lawsuit against EPIC they had to delist both TOO HUMAN and that X-men Destiny game they made. Neither game is sold anymore unless you get a used copy somewhere through like Ebay or something
I’m not 100% sure on who owns the Overstrike / Fuse IP, but if it’s Insomniac I’d love to see them take a second crack at it after Spidey 2 and Wolverine are out and make the game they wanted to make in the first place. That’d be killer There’s also that multiplayer project they’re supposedly working on and while it’s definitely not gonna be a Fuse reboot, I can dream
I think the IP itself is own by Insomniac, given the main menu of the game credits the Copyright and Trademark to them. The publishing rights may've already reverted when EA closed the multiplayer servers a few years back. It would be a lot of work, given it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it's possible.
I'm fairly certain EA owns it, which would give credence to why they went with MS Studios for Sunset Overdrive. Insomniac does fully own the Sunset Overdrive IP.
Too Human was actually pretty good. I really liked how fast-paced it was, and how the storyline was like a 40k retelling of Norse Mythology. It would have been great to have seen a sequel.
Honestly, I'd love if we could buy physical copies of games with the patches on them. If I bought a brand new copy of Ratchet and Clank today, it would be undoubtedly printed after the patch, but wouldn't include it. A channel called CathodeRayDude showed a cool idea where there would be extra space on the disc where an update could be burned onto.
My first true buyers remorse...RE Operation Raccoon City. The CG trailer was hype and featured a bunch of HUNK esque characters for you to play as. I was very upset after playing it for the night.
I decided never to trust Nintendo again after I couldn't get a refund for Arms after an hour and a half. Never buying anything digital on a Nintendo console again (though I will probably never buy another one after the dust collector of a Switch).
Operation raccoon city on paper had a lot of potential but unfortunately it was not the hotness you know what could’ve been a lot better if they would have made what resident evil outbreak was in the early 2000s before co-op became really popular because it was ahead of its time
Homefront was the biggest disappointment of my life. I bought it from a game store after school, put the disc in my PS3, had a great time, and suddenly... it was over. I couldn't believe "and what? that's it?" I wanted to return this game in the store and the salesman asked me what was so bad about this game that everyone was returning it the next day. No wonder it only cost the equivalent of two dollars
Too Human is, to this day, the last game I ever preordered. 10-year-old me learned a hard lesson when he went to pick it up and the cashier gave me a chance to get store credit for my preorder, something they weren't actually supposed to do, but they clearly pitied my poor, uninformed, pre-adolescently stupid choices.
Angel of Darkness being bad makes me so incredibly upset. It was supposed to be so much more, and it seemed like it was the first game in years the original Tomb Raider team was actually passionate about making. They'd been so tired of Lara and having to meet yearly releases, which is why they tried to kill her two games earlier. AoD seemed like the team had actually gotten some sort of passion back for making an adventure for Lara, and it had so much potential...
You mentioned No Man's Sky, but the problem with the state it came in is that while the marketing was AAA courtesy of sony, NMS was anything but AAA, the team was absolutely indie and tiny.
Redfall was DOOMED the second it was announced to be a live service game requiring an internet connection being developed by a studio that excels at making offline single player immersive sims.
To be fair, I remember playing Trespasser as a kid and being absolutely mystified by the physics, regardless of how awkward the controls were. Now I look at it and see that it sucked, but in my memories I was mind blown
No, Austing, I did not fucking forget about the board game movie adaptation of Battleship, and I'd kindly like for you to not assume as such. I am going to snap
Kakuto Chojin has a special place in my heart as a gamer. When I was a child and had very few options, it was in the store for 3 dollars. I bought it, and played the shit out of it with a friend of mine. Didn't come close to the big names but I loved it because it was what I had.
There were barely any bugs on that game, sure the story was unfinished(Chapter 3) but the gameplay was cool unlike some of the "AAA" games that end up releasing with game breaking bugs nowadays.
Homefront is hilariously ironic in that it has you fighting back against Totalitarianism North Korea while also shoving American Capitalism in your face with how many advertisement deals it got during its development. Games like this and Call of Duty are probably the peak of propaganda in video games.
They were just as common back then, the ones from back then just get forgotten about, the ones featured in this video are just the tip of the iceberg. Also, ever heard of indie games? there are much more of those being released nowadays than AAA games and you'd be surprised about the quality of some of them
worst thing about redfall is, after this video launched, we got more on behind the scenes and it was *rough* -Arkane did not want to make this game, zenimax mandated it prior to aquisition. arkane where hoping xbox would just cancel the project. -during its development 70% of arkane staff left the company, many moving on to new studios, to the point where arkane has almost no-one left from the Prey/Dishonored teams. and like... we probably should have known that was the case. Arkane makes immersive sims, not co-op looter shooters, so the descision to do one is stange at best.
Is No Man's Sky considered AAA? Or was it just illustrating the point? I was always under the impression that it was an indie game that got in over its head.
@@Matt_History Not much else is incorrect in this. The Haze game wasn't marketed as a Halo killer. It was just proclaimed to be one by media. Other than that, I don't see anything else. Both that and the NMS thing are minor
Some minor corrections NMS is not a AAA game. It is an Indie. At the time it was released, the game was developed by a small team of 15 to 20 devs. Internet Historian goes into full detail about this on his video. Also the people behind Haze never proclaimed to be a Halo Killer. That was the media that wanted to have a console war story, for when Haze was a PS3 exclusive. Think of it as clickbait, since it was more interesting to paint it that way rather than just talk about another new FPS. In fact, the devs hated that moniker because they felt that not only put unrealistic expectation on them, but was unfair, since Halo was at the time on the 3rd game, while they were barely developing the 1st on what they hoped to be a new series, but also were working with a new engine and a new console, so they would barely have time to bring it on par with Halo 1 if everything worked as planned, and in no chance to be on par with Halo 3.
A little game dev story of mine: I worked many moons back for a studio owned by Deep silver as a QA member, at the time we were quite light on work and our QA manager told us we're getting sent over a build of a new game being worked on by Volition. Excited to get a different game to test than what I'd been testing for the past 2/3 years i jumped right in. Low and behold it was Agents of Mayhem and it was quite far into development. I looked around the room as i was first to boot into the game and excitedly said "okay, so who's joining me then for some co-op" (not knowing any better at the time) We all spent the best part of 15 minutes looking around the menus to see how we invite each other into the game and saying to each other that there is 0 chance this game is single player only, it can't be. It's literal game suicide for this. When my manager over heard us, stood up and said: "Yeah, it's single player only" We played for about an hour or 2 max, made some notes and turned it off. I feel like this game genuinely could have been really good with multiplayer and a bit more depth. Ala Borderlands. Who ever made that decision to keep it SP must have genuinely been out of their mind...
I loved Too Human, it had some really great ideas.. Honestly wish some studio would pick up the IP and start the story from scratch but include the neat stuff we got.
The first time I got buyer's remors was litearlly Spiderman Web of Shadows on the PS2. As a kid I used to rent a lot rather than buying, so I started buying games on my own in the late PS2 era. So yeah, my sibling had a PS3, therefore, I would not get unlimited access to it, and I decided: "Ok, I'm getting WoS on PS2 instead" so I can play as much as I want. (also the PS3 was backwards compatible so it looked like a Win-Win, right?) What a mistake it was, not renting or investigatigating how the PS2 version was. It was the first time I came across a PS2 game that was a vast downgrade from the X360/PS3/PC versions. Most of the time the gameplay was basically the same, just took a graphical hit; at least the ones I played. Can't say I ever messed up that bad ever since. Thanks Activision! xD
I honest to god didn't realise that Redfall was meant to be a triple AAA game until recently. I saw ads and gameplay of it and was like "damn this looks like another of those Phasmophobia type games where the models look shit but it's silly and goofy co-op" but no it's a AAA looter shooter???
I found a full brand new copy of Agents of Mayhem for £10 on the year of release. The worst part is that it wasn't NECESSARILY a bad game, it didn't feel bad to play, it just made some bad decisions. It wasn't broken and unplayable, it was made on a good foundation. It just didn't choose to go as far as it wanted to go and left itself feeling shallow
I feel like a big problem with Agents of Mayhem was that it struggled to define itself as unique. Some of that was the developers' fault--it was very much NOT Saints Row, but the constant Saints Row imagery and characters forced the comparison--but in other parts it absolutely wasn't. People looked at its artstyle and thought they were getting a Fortnite clone, or at the diverse characters and thought we were getting an Overwatch-style hero shooter, and we got something that wasn't anything like those, or... really, anything else on the market. But people want comparisons, so they desperately tried to find them, and AoM falls short in all of them because it's just NOT those things. It's hard to blame anyone on any side for it; Volition released a perfectly fine game that, unfortunately, wasn't what anyone thought it was when they first looked at it.
The last few months I've been on the hunt for all those PS3 titles that got insane hype/budget but the studios barely knew what they were doing. Also so so many titles that were pushed hard only to end up kinda of average, would be interesting to see a video on that angle. Personally my first big AAA disappointment is one a lot of people only remember the good from; that being Fable. Following every single drip of news and eating it up made the actual release feel severely underwhelming, not helped at all by the same publications that initially acted as if it was the second coming just throwing out a generic 9/10 score and never really mentioning it again. General consensus among my friend group, who were all in the same boat as me, was extremely harsh at first eventually settling into "if I picked this up without knowing anything prior I would have had a solid time but all the misreporting and lies made it difficult to enjoy".
I think my first time having buyers remorse would probably be mario party island tour. I had other games I played that fell somewhat short but island tour was just not fun.
For me, it was Sonic Forces I even pre-ordered the deluxe edition of Forces and oooooh-boy, I regretted it, the only thing I liked from Forces was Fist Bump, Infinite's theme and the character creator but even then, it's not worth re-downloading for me
Gotta give credit to the Jurassic Park game the credit it's due. It was the first 3D game to have ragdoll physics. That was a huge achievement even if janky.
The moment I saw your name, I remembered I was supposed to check your videos out after listening to you on the Best friend's cast. Got too high, forgot and here I am kicking my self in the ass for forgetting. +1 sub and Bell.
my first buyer's remorse was Kingdom Hearts, definitely. trailers made it look like you'd like, do stuff with the FF characters other than talk to them super occassionally
I'm a massive Jurassic Park: Trespasser apologist, especially since it inspired Gabe Newell to put a huge focus on physics in Half-Life 2. Honestly I still really enjoy it to this day even.
It's always interesting seeing old unfinished games. It's too common now, but back then it was a rarity. Patches really did make gaming a lot worse on both sides
if you think unfinished games were rare back in ye olden dayes you must not have played many lol there have been plenty of broken video games since... well, the dawn of gaming. low quality games are what caused the original video game crash before Nintendo swooped in to save the day
@@KitterKatter-vv2rz at the Atari and maybe nes games, you're right. But later on, they weren't as common. Let's say the snes through ps2 era. Or at least the AAA scene didn't have as many broken, unfinished games. Dont count movie tie ins. They were their own strange thing
@@teneesh3376 why not count broken movie tie ins? if movie tie ins were unfinished messes and now there aren't as many movie tie ins, doesn't it stand to reason that there would be more broken non-movie tie in games? the companies didn't go anywhere, they just changed focus. there's an entire genre on RUclips of people critiquing stinkers from the SNES era and PSX, N64, and PS2 definitely have a lot of shovelware lol
@@KitterKatter-vv2rz mainly cause I want to focus on the AAA scene specifically. I should have made it clearer earlier. But I'm mainly talking about how the AAA scene has gotten so much more unfinished now compared to back then. We can talk about the many AA games. But come on, they had a much lower budget. I want to talk about how the high budget games have some how released more and more unfinished broken messes
@@teneesh3376 They aren't any more common now than back then, it's just that most of the bad ones from the past were forgotten about. If you assume the quality of a game based off the funding then there's your problem
That SNOOP DOG video game that was cancelled. (The one that we remember was on the cover story of game informer. )Cam only imagine how amazingly entertaining it couldbe been! ❤
AAA is just a shorthand at this point for "widely marketed and overhyped" Indie studios really are the future, Signalis and Pathologic 2 are some of the best games i've played in a while (although the latter is pretty cruel).
One bombshell that IMO should've been mentioned was Driver 3. It's basically a game in need of day-1 patch in the age before day-1 patches. They threw all of their budget into marketing, which made the bad'ish game seem even worse next to the humongous expectations.
I was one of those 50,000 people who bought Trespasser. It was hilariously worth the money. We used to have a bunch of friends over and try and live the longest while laughing our butts off. When the 3dFX patch came out it got even more hilarious at 50-60fps. Edit: Oh yea, you should do a video on HellGate London, that was another big game that was supposed to be amazing. It bombed but was still actually pretty good. Edit 2: Oh man AC Unity hahah, watching those day one bug videos on RUclips and Twitch was an amazing time!! I remember one video where the main character was just a pair of eyeballs and boots running around. I was laughing so hard I had to step out of the building because all my co-workers were staring at me. Also my biggest gaming purchase regret was Diablo III. It was a shell of a game when it first came out. It was my last box purchase for the PC. Luckily Blizzard became a horrible place to work so I never have to buy their games again!
On your point about day 1 updates going away after companies pull the plug on digital stores, the counter to that is literally piracy and eventually also emulation. Backup all your media and have ways to load and play them and you solved the preservation issue completely. It's the only way to own your media and also preserve games as works of art.
Narc in 1988 was enjoyable to play, because of its absurdity. The government in game ad "Winners Don't Use Drugs" slogan shown on the title screen. That was the cherry on top.
Hello, Austin, for your tenth anniversary, you should either do a quick review of your 10 personal favorite games, or, take a quick look at your ten most popular videos along w/some other ppl from RUclips appearing in the video.
It's interesting how at the end of the video you said that you were going to play Jedi Survivor, but even that game has been having major performance issues on modern and high end hardware since launch
I will never forget Angel of Darkness. It came free with the first PC my family got and I played it over and over again with my sisters watching me. I legit thought the jankiness was just be being shit 😅 not too long ago we remenicensed about this and even though the game is not well thought of or remembered, it gave us some great memories. I particularly enjoyed the Louvre section. I dunno... It just holds a special place in my heart!
I remember being 11 and letting the advertising campaign talk me into saving my money for The Urbz: Sims in the City. I know that game has a following these days but despite being a huge Sims fan, I remember being hugely disappointed with that game and realising for the first time that not every game I saved my money for was going to be good. It was a crushing realisation.
From what I recall Haze wasn't really pushed by the devs as a Halo killer and they disliked it, it was the marketing and the publisher Ubisoft that added that, not sure how true that is but also wouldn't be surprised lol, great video though Austin
Use my code: Eruption at checkout or this link displate.com/promo/austineruption/?art=63e284c03f0d9 to get 20%off 2-3 Displates and 30% off 3+ Displates. Gonna order another soon!
FRIENDS. IT IS TIME. Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games are EVERYWHERE. It's been a hot minute since I did a video going into something just inherently "bad" with little wiggle room, but I manage to toss a few personal disappointments in here too cause I'm a nut. Lemme know what other Bad AAAs you think of! There's ALWAYS more.
My buyers remorse was iron man 2 for the wii. I kept telling myself it was fun and had this bad feeling that the game didnt work. That being said it was very prophetic for how I would feel about the mcu as a whole.
Just one minor correction.
NMS is not a triple A game. Is literally an idie game made by less than 20 people, at least at the time of the og release.
I was going to comment about NMS not being a AAA game, but someone else already mentioned it, lol.
So I will point out that Haze never proclaimed to be a Halo Killer.
That was the media that wanted to have a console vs story, for when Haze was a PS3 exclusive.
In fact, the devs hated that moniker because they felt that not only put unrealistic expectation on them, but was unfair, since Halo was at the time on the 3rd game, while they were barely developing the 1st on what they hoped to be a new series, but also were working with a new engine and a new console, so they would barely have time to bring it on par with Halo 1 if everything worked as planned, and in no chance to be on par with Halo 3.
I can't remember buyers remorse, but I remember Renters Remorse with The Tick for SNES.
It's not good, but I enjoyed its' stupidity.
This video is just a retrospective on which games flooded GameStop's used game wall
And Walmart bargain bins
Nothing quite like the classic 3-for-1 deal on 3 shit games
That wall provided my childhood with great memories.
I found DRIVER 2 on that wall. DRIVER is still my favorite series and I will forever be salty that the new driver game turned into Watch Dogs 😢.
Even though I love Watch Dogs.
Aiden Peirce is basically John Tanner.
You're not wrong.
Or a Goodwill
Always love whenever I get to bring this factoid up: the Switch is probably one of if not the only console that actually lets you update games offline through other people, completely legitimately. It's the "match with local versions" option in the + menu. Very niche, I know, but it's genuinely great that there's an official way to share updates for games completely offline, and people very rarely talk about it.
Neat. Didn't know this was a thing. Kinda ironic coming from a company like Nintendo which is historically awful about preserving their games
Kind of unsurprising, since Nintendo had to figure out how to patch bugs in offline portable games way back in the early 2000s with the third generation of Pokemon. Nintendo might be weirdos sometimes, but they learn from their mistakes.
Yo you mean I’m wasted so much time downloading patch’s on switch lite that weir on my Maine switch dang I feel stupid
First I’m hearing of it, thanks for sharing.
I still feel bad for John Romero in regards to the marketing campaign of Daikatana. Romero seems like a genuinely nice guy, and has said in multiple interviews after the fact that he didn't actually want that ad to run but was talked into it and has regretted it ever since.
he's not the only one either, there're a lot of stories of marketing going against the devs intentions with campaigns they didn't like, sometimes completely behind their back.
it'd be nice to think that the marketing team knows the best way to market the game, but it's the devs that actually know the game, and unfortunately the marketing just (usually) aren't the developers.
I feel like if someone was able to actually rain in John’s ego that game could have been something special, because the ideas were there for the time when it started development, but his ego obviously screwed up the development similar to Ken Levine with bioShock infinite and it’s terrible DLC
Yeah, I am so glad someone said this and it is getting recognized
He might be a nice guy now but that’s because Daikatana’s failure has humbled him. He was arrogant at the time.
Admittedly, this could have been a facade covering up his insecurities, but a lot of gamers disliked him and were glad when Daikatana failed.
@@sadmarinersfan8935 that marketing campaign was the 90s ewuicalent of Mighty No. 9's "anime fan on prom night" ad.
Interestingly a young developer played Trespasser and really liked the physics part of knocking crates over.
His name was Gabe Newell.
Team Fortress 2 for Switch would be dope.
Tresspasser was meant to originally be a much different game from what we got, and the developers had something good in mind that they were going for... ambitious as it was. If you look into it, there's an explanation as to what went wrong. They were forced to cut it short and leave it off as a very unfinished and confusing mess.
@@jameslawrenson1208 What a total paedo.
In fact, it was the exact reason why Half-Life 2 had a focus on physics.
If this fact is true at least this means in a mass of disasters, something fantastic can spawn from it.
It’s hilarious and sad that “AAA” being a label for quality means almost nothing now once they used patches and “live-services” as an excuse and crutch to release unfinished games.
they never meant anything. In the old days your buggy triple A game would remain forever broken. There was no real effort to release them less buggy, and both the consoles and programming were worse and more unstable than they are now.
That's the problem. People see the term 'AAA' and think it means quality when it actually only means how much money is being poured into an individual game. Even then, the amount of money spent to define a game as 'AAA' is vague. People put too much weight on 'AAA' games when hardly anyone knows what the term's usage says about the game. Also, crunch is not a new thing in game development whatsoever, the media simply reports on it more often and people actually pay attention now.
You must be playing some bad games because every AAA I've played has been top tier.
It's actually kind of funny, a game being AAA is a borderline red flag for me nowadays. This sort of stuff is also why I never preorder games anymore.
@@Robospy1 Again you are playing and paying attention to BAD games just to say any AAA is a red flag because the minority is really dumb.
Funny thing about Angel of Darkness: Many say it's the game that killed the franchise, but I personally can pinpoint a singular moment within the game that killed it for me. There's a dev interview video in the menu and I watched it before playing the game (I know, kinda weird since it could have spoilers, but I was cleaning my room so figured I'd put it on to get hyped) There's a part in it where a guy goes "When we were working on this game, we wrote a book. The story of this game [dramatic pause] is only the first few chapters of that book." Then it shows him slowly closing a book and looking off into the distance in a "I'm so deep" way. I would give ANYTHING to get my hands on that book lol.
Shadow Histories by Murti Schofield, the writer of AoD would be the closest you can get.
The book is something of a metaphor. Angel of Darkness was meant to be the start of several games and was billed as such.
People didn't entirely buy into that, were put off that the game didn't deliver a complete story and as a result the rest became vapour ware.
Or at least that was my understanding of it when it was released.
Ironically I didn't play it but was surprised by the response and lack of follow up.
Pretty sure he was speaking metaphorically 😂
eidos killed that game and I'll never forgive them, Core deserved better
Hey Austin, it really shows you've been making videos for 10 years, your content is high quality and always fun to watch. I actually wouldn't mind even longer analysis of video games by you. For example, you spend about 3/4 minutes on each game in this video but I love the videos like the Balan Wonderworld and Kakarot videos where you REALLY dive in. In fact, I like your editing and personality to the point where I'd watch you talk about pretty much anything.
I'm gonna do some more videos in that style this year for sure! I've just had some weird circumstances that have prevented me from going into that but it'll come sooner rather than later!
Thanks so much for the kind words!
@@austineruption hey Austin can you be my dad
@austineruption please bring back your intro and theme song. I miss it 😢
The worst thing about Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness was the "experience" system. The game forced you to do a pointless parcour then said "you're stronger now, you can open the door". 😆
"I feel stronger now"
Angel of darkness is pretty much the point I left TR for a few years.
In the early PS days Tomb Raider was one of the games to have.
I remember getting soft locked at certain points because I neglected to do a certain thing and then later on when I needed the extra strength or jump height or whatever, couldn't do it, and couldn't go back to the spot where I needed to "level up". Neat concept, awful execution
As a game developer I appreciate that Austin criticizes "disaster games" in a way that doesn't directly disparage the people who made it.
I mean sometimes a game is bad BECAUSE of the people who made it. Sometimes the devs just...make a shit game.
The digression about day-one patches is really interesting with the announcement that FFXVI won't have any sort of day-one patch, the game you play is the game printed on the disc. Crazy how rare that is these days.
This is wonderful for physical users. A complete and polished 1.00 on the disc. It certainly has been a while.
That sounds like a miracle considering FFXV had so many patches to fix how unfinished it felt on release.
@Kamuro Tetsu from memory yoshi p stated that ff16 was finished either late last year or early this year, and the remainder of the time before printing was dedicated to bug testing and general polish. We shall see.
Ah yes, as if videogame corpos haven't been lying and spouting bullshit to us for years, sure
It's rare because it's pretty much pointless
Trespasser has an active modding scene. Most of it is making the game run better and reintroduce cut content. Some of the game's original developers even contributed at points. The game is abandonware and downloads are all over the internet if anyone is interested.
I am and I will. Thank you good sir.
Edit: Looks like the page has been taken down 😢
Tresspasser seem like the first ever VR game, if they ever mod it into one people will go crazy
Of all these terrible AAA botched releases, Trepasser is the only one that truely fascinates me due to how many of its ideas, physics, and mechanics became widely used in the future. Its truely ahead of its time and i can see it having a big modding community. Even the boob tattoo healthbar, despite being seen as a joke, could be a precurser for games with unconventional healthbars that very few games use. Very few games have the healthbar on the actual character and not as a U.I. on the screen. Plus a precurser to the ideas seen in current VR. Makes it very interesting compared to most awful games.
This Jurrasic Park to MK "chest" transition is godlike
Was thinkin da same thangg 😂
I worked in a "AAA" mobile game developer (w/ a AAA sister publisher-company) back in 2011, and they have been using the term way back then. They describe it as "A-tier" allocation of resources in 3 fronts, A-Time, A-Money, A-Marketing, hence AAA.
One of the funniest things I ever learned about Jurrasic Park Tresspasser was how the damage from melee was calculated. IIRC, it was based on the weight of the item, and one of the heaviest items that you could pick up and use was a human skull in the first area that, according to the game engine, weighed 1000 lbs and could theoretically 1 hit any dinosaur in the game... but it was awkward as hell to hold and held items didn't transition to new levels (iirc, no items transferred between levels). BTW, melee weapons were WORTHLESS in Trespasser because every "proper' melee weapon had a weight of 1. Meaning that you'd be swinging for days, since the most dinos had health in the hundreds.
Another goofy thing was that they couldn't get the attack animations to tie with the damage, so they just put a "damage strip" inside the mouths of enemies that would damage you if it collided with your hitbox and would vanish if the dino had their mouth closed, but was ALWAYS present if the dinos' mouth was open, meaning you could die from accidentally walking a dinos' mouth. You could manually close a dead dinos mouth, which was strongly advised, because you never knew if you'd have to backtrack through an area for more guns.
As Yahtzee recently said.
We wonder why this happens when we always insist on the most brand new, untested, resource guzzling graphics engines
Seriously, maybe we don't need perfect photorealism if games keep taking 19 years and coming out like this!
Zelda tears of the kingdom is a great example. Even elden ring. It’s graphics weren’t the greatest but the art direction in both games is outstanding
I remember a bizarre Twitter thread where the OP went on and on about how AAA games “need” to he over the top hyper realistic to justify their existence. Then immediately went “but wait! Games like Elden Ring and Zelda don’t focus on this trait despite similar budgets! It is an overseas design philosophy difference? 🤔🤔” like GEE WHAT COULD THE DIFFERENCE BE
Even Japanese made games that to for super realism still don’t go ridiculously over the top with it. Stuff like RE4make & FF16 are still Games, and they’re better for it
Yeah, damn Redfall using that cutting edge, untested Unreal Engine 4 !
@@Gatorade69 If they hadn't insisted on cutting edge graphics for the screenshots, maybe they'd have been able to use some of their crunch time to make sure their game worked.
I don't want perfect photorealism anyway tbh
Jurassic Park Trespasser looks like it was supposed to be a modern VR game...which could be really cool
Honestly, it would be nice if they remade it for VR.
That and Black and White, as well as any arcade railshooter by Namco.
I forgot about all of the weird product placement in Homefront. My friend was obsessed with that games and was very sad that our home state, NH, did not have any White Castles.
The single burning memory that I have of Homefront is the white phosphorus scene, because I swear it was an inspiration for Spec Ops The Line's WP scene
@@0uttaS1TE But homefront is older than spec ops .
@@kuriankeralaIndia That's why I say it was an inspiration for that scene, not inspired by that scene
@@0uttaS1TE got his ass
BURNING memory about WP, you say?
It's going to be a real good Matt McMuscles video of "What Happened" on Redfall.
Lol. He literally has no muscles though
@@seanhearn9616yeah, and Austin didn't erupt one time in this video. it's a fuckin name man who gives a shit lmao
@@seanhearn9616 well duh, he is a skeleton haha
Fuse is the one that hurts the most for me. It’s important to note that the Overstrike trailer came out way before stuff like Overwatch and Fortnite were publicly revealed, so if Insomniac stayed the course, they would have one of the first games on the market with the now popular bright, slightly-cartoony aesthetic. Instead they ended up with a game that looked dated even when it was new.
“NARC…where you play as…a NARC.” Idk why but that had me laughing
Right? 😂
Considering Daikatana's concept was cool, I think it needs a reboot. A good one.
i could see john romero allowing that.
literally i wonder how your videos are always this high quality at this length consistently. thanks for all your work.
I actually liked Red Steel. The controls where a little wonky but it was a really good time.
Angel of darkness really was the first big bomb for alot of us. I remember playing it at my uncles house who got all the brand new games, playing 30 minutes of it and going “wow this doesn’t feel fun at all” and never touched it again.
I would recommend you giving it another try. I did so myself after putting it down years ago for probably the same reasons as you, but this time I got an entirely different view on it.
I found Lara's movement to be slow, sure, this made it feel like there was weight to her, and she can do a surprisingly lot of stuff to the point where she feels like the epitomy of the classic series.
I was also initially super against the stamina meter and Lara having to improve her strength, but upon my revisit I found that not just being able to climb, scale, and shimmey indefinitely added more difficulty to the game. I mean if you think about it, ain't it kinda boring and unchallenging how in ANY other game, past or future, she can hold on indefinitely? At that point it doesn't become a matter of "CAN I make it?" but "where does the game want me to climb?" I mean I like climbing around as much as the next guy, but if there is no limit to how much you can climb before having to rest, where is the challenge?
Yes, the game is incomplete. The story has been cut down and several gameplay elements removed. But what IS here I still think is a flawed but solid experience. So again, try picking it back up with an open mind.
Also keep in mind, I didn't experience any of the glitches that I hear plagued other people. Maybe because I played a PAL PS2 copy. Also also, if you own a legit PC copy of the game, some guy is making a Definitive Version you may wanna try out.
I played thru too human about 6times with a single character back when I was in college: its actually pretty sick and high octane once you get used to the weird controls despite how half baked the boss fights are. Could have actually become a decent cult series imo if it was allowed to continue.
It did continue though, I was just playing it not long ago on Gamepass.
For some reason my Comment isn't showing? Can anyone hear me? Lol
@@adamking4246No thats just the original. Due to their dispute over UE3 with EPIC, the devs didnt last long after releasing Too Human and shortly after they lost their lawsuit against EPIC they had to delist both TOO HUMAN and that X-men Destiny game they made. Neither game is sold anymore unless you get a used copy somewhere through like Ebay or something
I’m not 100% sure on who owns the Overstrike / Fuse IP, but if it’s Insomniac I’d love to see them take a second crack at it after Spidey 2 and Wolverine are out and make the game they wanted to make in the first place. That’d be killer
There’s also that multiplayer project they’re supposedly working on and while it’s definitely not gonna be a Fuse reboot, I can dream
I think the IP itself is own by Insomniac, given the main menu of the game credits the Copyright and Trademark to them. The publishing rights may've already reverted when EA closed the multiplayer servers a few years back.
It would be a lot of work, given it would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, but it's possible.
personally id like another deadpool game
I'm fairly certain EA owns it, which would give credence to why they went with MS Studios for Sunset Overdrive. Insomniac does fully own the Sunset Overdrive IP.
@@BigBossultrastealthThat was Activision and High Moon I believe who are now under Xbox but I too would like another one
Too Human was actually pretty good. I really liked how fast-paced it was, and how the storyline was like a 40k retelling of Norse Mythology. It would have been great to have seen a sequel.
It's been on Gamepass for month's.
@@adamking4246its been completely free long before that since they cant legally sell it anymore
That Mortal Kombat transition, the stuff of beauty!
Was seeing if anyone else commented this. That was a great transition
Honestly, I'd love if we could buy physical copies of games with the patches on them. If I bought a brand new copy of Ratchet and Clank today, it would be undoubtedly printed after the patch, but wouldn't include it. A channel called CathodeRayDude showed a cool idea where there would be extra space on the disc where an update could be burned onto.
Love the videos man. Can't wait for the next one. Have a lovely day.
With a title like that I'd have expected this to be at least 6 hours long
My first true buyers remorse...RE Operation Raccoon City. The CG trailer was hype and featured a bunch of HUNK esque characters for you to play as. I was very upset after playing it for the night.
I decided never to trust Nintendo again after I couldn't get a refund for Arms after an hour and a half.
Never buying anything digital on a Nintendo console again (though I will probably never buy another one after the dust collector of a Switch).
Operation raccoon city on paper had a lot of potential but unfortunately it was not the hotness you know what could’ve been a lot better if they would have made what resident evil outbreak was in the early 2000s before co-op became really popular because it was ahead of its time
Homefront was the biggest disappointment of my life. I bought it from a game store after school, put the disc in my PS3, had a great time, and suddenly... it was over. I couldn't believe "and what? that's it?" I wanted to return this game in the store and the salesman asked me what was so bad about this game that everyone was returning it the next day. No wonder it only cost the equivalent of two dollars
Yeah, everyone calls it a bad game... but it wasn't, it was great, it was just too short
I'll always remember seeing the What Happened episode on Too Human and thinking that everything that could've gone wrong, did.
and yet they still managed to make a good game imo. Sucks that there will never be a 2&3 as originally planned :(
I loved this game
2003: I can’t believe they made a bad game!
2023: I can’t believe they made a good game!
"What is bad is subjective"
I don't think any same human would consider a game that bricks your console as "good".
Too Human is, to this day, the last game I ever preordered. 10-year-old me learned a hard lesson when he went to pick it up and the cashier gave me a chance to get store credit for my preorder, something they weren't actually supposed to do, but they clearly pitied my poor, uninformed, pre-adolescently stupid choices.
Angel of Darkness being bad makes me so incredibly upset. It was supposed to be so much more, and it seemed like it was the first game in years the original Tomb Raider team was actually passionate about making. They'd been so tired of Lara and having to meet yearly releases, which is why they tried to kill her two games earlier. AoD seemed like the team had actually gotten some sort of passion back for making an adventure for Lara, and it had so much potential...
You mentioned No Man's Sky, but the problem with the state it came in is that while the marketing was AAA courtesy of sony, NMS was anything but AAA, the team was absolutely indie and tiny.
Redfall was DOOMED the second it was announced to be a live service game requiring an internet connection being developed by a studio that excels at making offline single player immersive sims.
Replace "immersive sims" with "RPGs" and you can recycle this sentence for Anthem.
@@KarmikCykle sad but true
To be fair, I remember playing Trespasser as a kid and being absolutely mystified by the physics, regardless of how awkward the controls were. Now I look at it and see that it sucked, but in my memories I was mind blown
Shadow the Hedgehog and Assassin's Creed 1 were actually my 1st and 2nd major buyer's remorse games, so that was kinda wild to hear you say that
No, Austing, I did not fucking forget about the board game movie adaptation of Battleship, and I'd kindly like for you to not assume as such. I am going to snap
Bad and unfinished AAA games? Seems like a long title for “Ubisoft games as a whole.”
Kakuto Chojin has a special place in my heart as a gamer. When I was a child and had very few options, it was in the store for 3 dollars. I bought it, and played the shit out of it with a friend of mine. Didn't come close to the big names but I loved it because it was what I had.
I think MGSV is the only good unfinished AAA-game.
There were barely any bugs on that game, sure the story was unfinished(Chapter 3) but the gameplay was cool unlike some of the "AAA" games that end up releasing with game breaking bugs nowadays.
Homefront is hilariously ironic in that it has you fighting back against Totalitarianism North Korea while also shoving American Capitalism in your face with how many advertisement deals it got during its development. Games like this and Call of Duty are probably the peak of propaganda in video games.
"Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games"
Which is, sadly, most releases nowadays.
Yep. So sad to have come so far yet fallen so far too lol
They were just as common back then, the ones from back then just get forgotten about, the ones featured in this video are just the tip of the iceberg. Also, ever heard of indie games? there are much more of those being released nowadays than AAA games and you'd be surprised about the quality of some of them
worst thing about redfall is, after this video launched, we got more on behind the scenes and it was *rough*
-Arkane did not want to make this game, zenimax mandated it prior to aquisition. arkane where hoping xbox would just cancel the project.
-during its development 70% of arkane staff left the company, many moving on to new studios, to the point where arkane has almost no-one left from the Prey/Dishonored teams.
and like... we probably should have known that was the case. Arkane makes immersive sims, not co-op looter shooters, so the descision to do one is stange at best.
were*
Is No Man's Sky considered AAA? Or was it just illustrating the point?
I was always under the impression that it was an indie game that got in over its head.
You're right. That threw me off, too.
@DontYouLaugh okay haha
Glad I'm not nuts
90% of this guy's video is just... Wrong. You're not crazy
@@Matt_History Not much else is incorrect in this. The Haze game wasn't marketed as a Halo killer. It was just proclaimed to be one by media. Other than that, I don't see anything else.
Both that and the NMS thing are minor
For whatever reason Brink is the first game that comes to mind whenever this topic comes up. I was so disappointed when it came out lol
Some minor corrections
NMS is not a AAA game.
It is an Indie.
At the time it was released, the game was developed by a small team of 15 to 20 devs.
Internet Historian goes into full detail about this on his video.
Also the people behind Haze never proclaimed to be a Halo Killer.
That was the media that wanted to have a console war story, for when Haze was a PS3 exclusive.
Think of it as clickbait, since it was more interesting to paint it that way rather than just talk about another new FPS.
In fact, the devs hated that moniker because they felt that not only put unrealistic expectation on them, but was unfair, since Halo was at the time on the 3rd game, while they were barely developing the 1st on what they hoped to be a new series, but also were working with a new engine and a new console, so they would barely have time to bring it on par with Halo 1 if everything worked as planned, and in no chance to be on par with Halo 3.
A little game dev story of mine:
I worked many moons back for a studio owned by Deep silver as a QA member, at the time we were quite light on work and our QA manager told us we're getting sent over a build of a new game being worked on by Volition.
Excited to get a different game to test than what I'd been testing for the past 2/3 years i jumped right in. Low and behold it was Agents of Mayhem and it was quite far into development.
I looked around the room as i was first to boot into the game and excitedly said "okay, so who's joining me then for some co-op" (not knowing any better at the time)
We all spent the best part of 15 minutes looking around the menus to see how we invite each other into the game and saying to each other that there is 0 chance this game is single player only, it can't be. It's literal game suicide for this. When my manager over heard us, stood up and said:
"Yeah, it's single player only"
We played for about an hour or 2 max, made some notes and turned it off. I feel like this game genuinely could have been really good with multiplayer and a bit more depth. Ala Borderlands.
Who ever made that decision to keep it SP must have genuinely been out of their mind...
I loved Too Human, it had some really great ideas.. Honestly wish some studio would pick up the IP and start the story from scratch but include the neat stuff we got.
Same here. It was janky, but a good time.
5:58 I wasn't ready for the S-Tier gameplay!!!
*pool noodle fight with a raptor commences*
Nice to see some Sunset Overdrive appreciation!
The first time I got buyer's remors was litearlly Spiderman Web of Shadows on the PS2. As a kid I used to rent a lot rather than buying, so I started buying games on my own in the late PS2 era. So yeah, my sibling had a PS3, therefore, I would not get unlimited access to it, and I decided: "Ok, I'm getting WoS on PS2 instead" so I can play as much as I want. (also the PS3 was backwards compatible so it looked like a Win-Win, right?)
What a mistake it was, not renting or investigatigating how the PS2 version was. It was the first time I came across a PS2 game that was a vast downgrade from the X360/PS3/PC versions. Most of the time the gameplay was basically the same, just took a graphical hit; at least the ones I played. Can't say I ever messed up that bad ever since. Thanks Activision! xD
And now Arkane and Tango are dead....
Arcane Austin*
6:40 bro just casually pulled out the most seamless transitions of the decade and thought we wouldn't notice
First buyer's remorse? Dino Crisis 3
I honest to god didn't realise that Redfall was meant to be a triple AAA game until recently. I saw ads and gameplay of it and was like "damn this looks like another of those Phasmophobia type games where the models look shit but it's silly and goofy co-op" but no it's a AAA looter shooter???
I will never unhear Jimquisition saying "TrIpLE A"
I found a full brand new copy of Agents of Mayhem for £10 on the year of release. The worst part is that it wasn't NECESSARILY a bad game, it didn't feel bad to play, it just made some bad decisions. It wasn't broken and unplayable, it was made on a good foundation. It just didn't choose to go as far as it wanted to go and left itself feeling shallow
"Necessarily" isn't an acronym
I feel like a big problem with Agents of Mayhem was that it struggled to define itself as unique. Some of that was the developers' fault--it was very much NOT Saints Row, but the constant Saints Row imagery and characters forced the comparison--but in other parts it absolutely wasn't. People looked at its artstyle and thought they were getting a Fortnite clone, or at the diverse characters and thought we were getting an Overwatch-style hero shooter, and we got something that wasn't anything like those, or... really, anything else on the market. But people want comparisons, so they desperately tried to find them, and AoM falls short in all of them because it's just NOT those things.
It's hard to blame anyone on any side for it; Volition released a perfectly fine game that, unfortunately, wasn't what anyone thought it was when they first looked at it.
@@the_motherfuckeryou're so cool 🤓
@@zombiegone2073 I'm just correcting a mistake
@@EinDose "Not" isn't an acronym either
That transition to mortal kombat is pure magic lmao
The last few months I've been on the hunt for all those PS3 titles that got insane hype/budget but the studios barely knew what they were doing. Also so so many titles that were pushed hard only to end up kinda of average, would be interesting to see a video on that angle. Personally my first big AAA disappointment is one a lot of people only remember the good from; that being Fable. Following every single drip of news and eating it up made the actual release feel severely underwhelming, not helped at all by the same publications that initially acted as if it was the second coming just throwing out a generic 9/10 score and never really mentioning it again. General consensus among my friend group, who were all in the same boat as me, was extremely harsh at first eventually settling into "if I picked this up without knowing anything prior I would have had a solid time but all the misreporting and lies made it difficult to enjoy".
Fable was a really fun game back in the day. I'm sure it doesn't hold up to modern games. But I remember having fun playing it.
Never preorder, never buy day 1, and never purchase microtransactions.
I think my first time having buyers remorse would probably be mario party island tour. I had other games I played that fell somewhat short but island tour was just not fun.
For me, it was Sonic Forces
I even pre-ordered the deluxe edition of Forces and oooooh-boy, I regretted it, the only thing I liked from Forces was Fist Bump, Infinite's theme and the character creator but even then, it's not worth re-downloading for me
Pulling out the Tazz FFX-2 in the opening is a power move and I'm here for it
Gotta give credit to the Jurassic Park game the credit it's due.
It was the first 3D game to have ragdoll physics. That was a huge achievement even if janky.
The moment I saw your name, I remembered I was supposed to check your videos out after listening to you on the Best friend's cast. Got too high, forgot and here I am kicking my self in the ass for forgetting.
+1 sub and Bell.
my first buyer's remorse was Kingdom Hearts, definitely. trailers made it look like you'd like, do stuff with the FF characters other than talk to them super occassionally
I'm a massive Jurassic Park: Trespasser apologist, especially since it inspired Gabe Newell to put a huge focus on physics in Half-Life 2. Honestly I still really enjoy it to this day even.
It's always interesting seeing old unfinished games. It's too common now, but back then it was a rarity. Patches really did make gaming a lot worse on both sides
if you think unfinished games were rare back in ye olden dayes you must not have played many lol there have been plenty of broken video games since... well, the dawn of gaming. low quality games are what caused the original video game crash before Nintendo swooped in to save the day
@@KitterKatter-vv2rz at the Atari and maybe nes games, you're right. But later on, they weren't as common. Let's say the snes through ps2 era. Or at least the AAA scene didn't have as many broken, unfinished games. Dont count movie tie ins. They were their own strange thing
@@teneesh3376 why not count broken movie tie ins? if movie tie ins were unfinished messes and now there aren't as many movie tie ins, doesn't it stand to reason that there would be more broken non-movie tie in games? the companies didn't go anywhere, they just changed focus. there's an entire genre on RUclips of people critiquing stinkers from the SNES era and PSX, N64, and PS2 definitely have a lot of shovelware lol
@@KitterKatter-vv2rz mainly cause I want to focus on the AAA scene specifically. I should have made it clearer earlier. But I'm mainly talking about how the AAA scene has gotten so much more unfinished now compared to back then. We can talk about the many AA games. But come on, they had a much lower budget. I want to talk about how the high budget games have some how released more and more unfinished broken messes
@@teneesh3376 They aren't any more common now than back then, it's just that most of the bad ones from the past were forgotten about. If you assume the quality of a game based off the funding then there's your problem
Mercenaries 2 had me hot in a bad way. I was gonna say tron, but that really don't count by a long shot
That SNOOP DOG video game that was cancelled. (The one that we remember was on the cover story of game informer. )Cam only imagine how amazingly entertaining it couldbe been! ❤
Man, I knew about Battleship movie, but didn't realize it was adapted into a video game.
Bold of you to assume that I can forget the Battleship film. I mean, I didn't see it even to this day. But still, I'll never forget it.
AAA is just a shorthand at this point for "widely marketed and overhyped"
Indie studios really are the future, Signalis and Pathologic 2 are some of the best games i've played in a while (although the latter is pretty cruel).
32:03 weirdly that's the only one I've played and it's pretty good
First video of yours I watch, you've got that RWJ energy, amazing content!
One bombshell that IMO should've been mentioned was Driver 3. It's basically a game in need of day-1 patch in the age before day-1 patches. They threw all of their budget into marketing, which made the bad'ish game seem even worse next to the humongous expectations.
I was one of those 50,000 people who bought Trespasser. It was hilariously worth the money. We used to have a bunch of friends over and try and live the longest while laughing our butts off. When the 3dFX patch came out it got even more hilarious at 50-60fps.
Edit: Oh yea, you should do a video on HellGate London, that was another big game that was supposed to be amazing. It bombed but was still actually pretty good.
Edit 2: Oh man AC Unity hahah, watching those day one bug videos on RUclips and Twitch was an amazing time!! I remember one video where the main character was just a pair of eyeballs and boots running around. I was laughing so hard I had to step out of the building because all my co-workers were staring at me.
Also my biggest gaming purchase regret was Diablo III. It was a shell of a game when it first came out. It was my last box purchase for the PC. Luckily Blizzard became a horrible place to work so I never have to buy their games again!
Man wasn’t it a miracle back then to get Trespasser running at 30 fps?
@@zackarysullivan9019 It really was! Luckily a bunch of my good friends loved PCs and 3D Acceleration back then. Looking back we were really lucky!
Anachronix is a masterpiece. It has aged, but it was one of the best games of its time.
kinda crazy that a video called "Bad and Unfinished AAA Video Games" isn't 600 hours long
"LOTR: Gollum has entered the chat."
On your point about day 1 updates going away after companies pull the plug on digital stores, the counter to that is literally piracy and eventually also emulation. Backup all your media and have ways to load and play them and you solved the preservation issue completely. It's the only way to own your media and also preserve games as works of art.
Dunno what IGN was smoking when they rated god hand that low tbh.
Narc in 1988 was enjoyable to play, because of its absurdity. The government in game ad "Winners Don't Use Drugs" slogan shown on the title screen. That was the cherry on top.
The Arkham game really does get a lot of undeserved shit thrown at it. From what i've heard, its pretty fun.
Hello, Austin, for your tenth anniversary, you should either do a quick review of your 10 personal favorite games, or, take a quick look at your ten most popular videos along w/some other ppl from RUclips appearing in the video.
I saw that Brink gameplay. That game always comes to mind when talking about failed games.
the madden final fantasy photoshop has me in tears lmao
Where is the bioshock infinite clip at 0:37 from? I’ve played that game 7 times and never seen that scene before
Yes! New Austin video. Dude, I love Austin’s videos.
It's interesting how at the end of the video you said that you were going to play Jedi Survivor, but even that game has been having major performance issues on modern and high end hardware since launch
I will never forget Angel of Darkness.
It came free with the first PC my family got and I played it over and over again with my sisters watching me. I legit thought the jankiness was just be being shit 😅 not too long ago we remenicensed about this and even though the game is not well thought of or remembered, it gave us some great memories.
I particularly enjoyed the Louvre section. I dunno... It just holds a special place in my heart!
I remember being 11 and letting the advertising campaign talk me into saving my money for The Urbz: Sims in the City.
I know that game has a following these days but despite being a huge Sims fan, I remember being hugely disappointed with that game and realising for the first time that not every game I saved my money for was going to be good. It was a crushing realisation.
I came to see Haze be publicly shamed, and I was not disappointed. They ended the TimeSplitters series for THIS!
From what I recall Haze wasn't really pushed by the devs as a Halo killer and they disliked it, it was the marketing and the publisher Ubisoft that added that, not sure how true that is but also wouldn't be surprised lol, great video though Austin