Topic of the Week: What games infected you with hype but lost you after launch?

Topic of the Week: Hype

Hype has become a bit of pejorative, these days, conjuring up images of some infernal marketing machine feeding on excitement, using hyperbole and big numbers to get folk drooling about the next big game launch. But it’s easy to get swept up in it all, because we want the hype to be true; we want to get excited about games and then to enjoy the reward of a game that lives up to our expectations. 

Sometimes they don’t, unfortunately. So with our Topic of the Week, we want to know what games got you salivating the most, until they actually launched and left you disappointed. Maybe you never even got the game. Maybe you picked it up, but found it to be a bit rubbish. We want to know, so feed us your memories. 

As always, I’ll get the ball rolling.

It was Fable. Of course it was Fable. It was back before the words that came out of Peter Molyneux’s mouth were expected to be nonsense. There was a mountain of promises and expectations fed to us by the man himself, and many of them fell by the wayside.

The reactive world where you could have a genuine impact on it and its citizens became a caricature where you farted and made some people laugh. Yes, you could buy property and get married and even grow old, but the world around you never really changed.

And throughout the three core titles in the series, there was very little done to live up to the expectations of the very first game. The third iteration really pushed the idea of having an impact on the world, but again, it did very little with it. In the end it boiled down to making promises and then making binary choices. And this was all wrapped up in the worst game in the series.

It was a bit of a shame, really. And now nobody listens to Peter Molyneux.

Alright, enough of me rambling on. It’s your turn.