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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
funny thing about Colonial marines is that the alien sections would have been pretty good(for the most part) if someone hadn't fuck up a single character in a plain text config file that broke the aliens pathfinding causing them to just bum rush the player and that never got fixed(and can only be fixed by consumer on PC litteraly a single character in a text file). The sections with the human enemies would still be awful though
I have to say you went from a youtuber that I subscribed to off of one video I had seen of yours a long time ago. Didn't watch anything else of yours for a long time after that. To now jumping for joy damn near when you upload lol and has gone through 90% of your back catalogue within roughly the past 2 years. Keep up the good work Austin. You're easily becoming one of my favorite content creators. P.S. - It wasn't anything Austin was doing or not doing. I'm just weird like that lol!
The first time I felt buyer's remorse was after playing Rise of the Robots on Snes for 10 minutes...it was also one of the first times I bought a game from my own money 😅
I had a paper route and I'd buy 1 game every month. Can't remember getting any stinkers. Maybe prince of Persia for Xbox 360. But I actually had an alright time playing that game when it came out.
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! ❤
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.
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.
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.
I still maintain that Saints Row should have pivoted into becoming a Mass Effect parody. The potential within Gangsters in Space still hasn't been realized.
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
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".
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.
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
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 RU-vid appearing in the video.
Imagine judging assuming the quality of a game based off of how much funding it has in the first place. Also, it's still outrageous for them to be buggy, there's a reason why many others complained about this too
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).
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.
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 RU-vid 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
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
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 RU-vid 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!
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???
My first buyers remorse game was Power Move Pro Wrestling…Within ten minutes, on Xmas morning, I knew I made a huge mistake talking about endlessly for months.
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.