Hype has become the subject of the day, and I will contribute two repeats to the discussion.
First, You Are Judged Against Your Hype. Doing something modest very well gives you Portal or perhaps Torchlight. Take your pick on “shooting for the stars and not even delivering all the features on the box.”
Second, the example that always comes to mind on “failed to meet explicit promises” is Warhammer Online, as Zoso points out. If you ask me about WAR and I just mutter, “bears bears bears,” that is what I am talking about. Not only did developers explicitly identify a problem, identify a solution, then implement the problem exactly as described, but you were reminded of it constantly. Every time a quest sent you back to where you just came from, “bears bears bears.” Every time you killed a named enemy then got a quest to kill that named enemy, “bears bears bears.” Every time you saw a kill collector, the half-arsed version of the solution, “bears bears bears.” Then later tiers had such content/leveling curve issues that they added a bunch of kill ten rats quests as an improvement, and it was an improvement. Bears bears bears.
I am ambivalent about hype. I am skeptical, but I am gullible enough to take what people say at face value. It is not as though I am hurt if they fail to meet expectations they explicitly set; I just don’t trust the company or anyone who was identifiably a factor in lying to me.
: Zubon
Note that there is a separable issue for just doing badly. Alganon is a game that delivered everything it promised [Carson says no] badly. Earth Eternal seems to have had a similar problem.
[Update]
Ahh Derek Smart….everything you touch turns to ash and blows away…
Let’s be fair, it was like that when he got there. The metaphor may hold in its second half.
I’ve been culturing my ignorance of foretellings of games to come so I can be uninvested when 95% of games turn out not to be worth my time, and happy to find the other 5%.
“Alganon is a game that delivered everything it promised badly”
No it isn’t. At the time that QOL first started collecting money for pre-orders, there were many, many features listed on their website which were not in the game, would not be in the game for launch, and indeed are not in the game now.
Now, obviously, they didn’t sell any copies to anyone other than the deeply invested fans, who were active on the forums and in beta and knew what was implemented and what wasn’t, but still, the website promised a lot of novel features and delivered almost none of them.
I’ll downgrade Alganon comments on your say so, sure. It delivered the features I paid attention to, but I stopped looking after getting to see how the game was turning out.
I stopped playing the beta a month from launch when – despite having talent trees – they claimed to still have not coded their listed effects.