Greetings fellow voaters of /v/gaming!
I've been thinking a lot lately after the launch of The Division on how some players feel they were let down by Massive/Ubisoft when the game launched and didn't match the ideal in their minds, when I had the thought that this isn't the first game we've seen suffer such a fate. Fallout 4 suffered a very similar launch, as did Dark Souls 2. The one common theme among these titles is that there seemed to be a massive, community-driven hype train surrounding each of their releases. Some random YouTube schmucks were given near deistic status simply for the sheer volume of speculation they published (cough coughVaatiVidya, ENBcough cough)Minute long teaser trailers spawned compendiums of theorycrafting and speculation; developer commentary was picked through with a fine toothed comb, screenshots were broken down to individual pixels, all to fuel rampant speculation and idealization over what communities like reddit expected out of the final product, and, largely, these games launched to a near universal outcry of "this is not the game we were promised!"
Am I on an island here in thinking that it's less the fault of the developers for not delivering what we expected, and more the fault of "the community" for setting an impossibly high bar for the final product to live up to?
view the rest of the comments →
[–] SkepticalMartian ago (edited ago)
I liked Fallout 4 and Dark Souls 2, so there was no negative for me. I don't yet have the division, mostly because it doesn't look appealing to me.
[–] RedditCEOEllenPao [S] ago
I did too (both FO4 and DS2), but then I excused myself from the hype train as I have been with Dark Souls 3. Going into DS2, I essentially knew nothing about the world I was stepping in to - not because I had some desire to "go in blind for da true dank sulz experinece rip sif i crie evry tiem," but because I simply didn't want to be let down because the game didn't live up to my imagined ideal.
I'm curious - how much game-related media would you say you digest?
[–] SkepticalMartian ago (edited ago)
If by "digest" you mean "own", I have well over 300 titles in my steam account, 4 consoles with a crapton of games (I haven't counted recently), and various handheld devices. If you mean "actually put meaningful time in to" I'd probably say half of it. Some games do a better job of holding my interest than others. I have about 70 hours in FO4 (pc), and about 40 hours in DS2 (console).
Or do you mean media as in reviews? I usually look for gameplay footage before I buy something.