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?
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[–] RedditCEOEllenPao [S] ago
I think the first time I fell for the hype train and disappointed myself was Saints Row 3. I had spent hours and hours and hours playing Saints Row 2, hyped myself on all available media for Saints Row 3, came up with this "ideal" version of Saints Row 3 in my mind, and when it wasn't just "Saints Row 3: It's Actually Just A Shinier Version of Saints Row 2," I felt disappointed. I eventually came around and realized that it was my own perceptions of what the game was going to be that it wasn't living up to, and since then haven't done the hype train thing. I've not been disappointed with a game since.