as much as we love video games it's easy to end up feeling
disappointed when developers let us down in some ways and with a cyberpunk 2077
fiasco fresh in everyone's mind let's have a look back at some other times
when game devs infamously got egg on their faces
starting out duke nukem forever if you think cyberpunk had an absurdly long
development cycle duke nukem forever took 15 years or practically forever to
get to the market so what the heck happened there although
the original plan was to get the game out in mid 1998 about a year after
development started it quickly started running into delays the developer 3d
realms licensed the quake 2 engine because the build engine used for the
1996 success duke nukem 3d was dated by
this point but after about a year of development they switched to the unreal
engine since the studio was unsatisfied with the quake engine's rendering
performance meaning a huge amount of work they did based around the quake
engine was nuked but this was only the start of the drama the lead developer
george brassard kept wanting to make changes to the game to make it more
similar to other hot titles of the day and to be fair it looked like this
strategy might have paid off as people were impressed with the trailer that was
shown at e3 in 2001 however with such a
small development team progress was still slow and broussard continued to
ask for more changes to keep up with the rest of the gaming industry which of
course just set things back further it took so long to finish that the studio
ran out of money in 2009 and laid off its staff leading to a different
developer picking up the game and finally releasing it in 2011. after some
of the original dev team had worked to complete the game on their own time at
home unfortunately the final game was disappointing in large part because
ironically despite broussard's efforts to keep placing modern features into the
title the game felt dated by the time it was released let's move on to a
different sort of game that was arguably just as infamous sonic the hedgehog for
the ps3 and xbox 360 or as fans typically call it sonic 06 by the time
2006 rolled around sonic's foray into the world of 3d gaming had been marked
by disappointment but sega was hoping the technological advances built into
the much belly hood ps3 and xbox 360 could help turn their fortunes around
the idea was relatively simple put sonic in a more realistic setting complete
with actual human beings and use cutting-edge graphics to produce a hit
although sonic team used a new game engine that did look much better than
older titles thanks to the console's more powerful hardware the studio
ultimately put out a game that had a now familiar problem it was visually
pleasing but not very fun to play during
development yujinaka head of sonic team and one of the key forces behind the
original 2d sonic games left sega altogether reportedly unhappy with his
managerial responsibilities which suddenly left the dev team a rudderless
ship after naca left sega split the dev team
in two so that they could push out a separate title for the nintendo wii so
now a much smaller team without the programmer responsible for much of
sonic's greatness in the first place had to rush out a game in time to hit store
shelves by you guessed it the christmas season and the result was an unmitigated
disaster there seemed to be consensus that sonic was just dropped into a
role-playing game that didn't suit the playstyle gamers were used to and the
sequences that did feel more like classic sonic games were hopelessly
broken and unfairly difficult combined with a convoluted storyline and an
incredibly uncomfortable human on hedgehog kiss
the game went down as probably the worst in sonic's history oops let's wrap this
episode up by talking about admittedly a piece of low hanging fruit 2017's star
wars battlefront 2. like the aforementioned sonic 06 the developers
set out to make a good looking game and that's exactly what they did
and the multiplayer was received as being actually pretty fun too gamers
might have been able to forgive a short and disjointed single player campaign as
the focus was mostly on multiplayer but what they couldn't forgive was the
horrendous progression system that required an absolutely insane amount of
gameplay in order to unlock playable characters like luke skywalker and darth
vader that ea had heavily marketed in
fact it would take 40 whole hours of grinding just to unlock one underpowered
hero if you saved your credits or over 100 times that amount to unlock
everything in the game unsurprisingly players were also given the option of
buying ding ding ding loot boxes with
real money in order to unlock characters and items more quickly but ea asking
players to sink large amounts of money into an already expensive game did not
sit well with the community leading to the now notorious post from an ea
employee about how the system was designed to give players a sense of
pride and accomplishment that became the most downvoted comment in the history of
reddit at the time we shot this video that record still stands without a close
second at all the situation became so egregious that it attracted mainstream
attention outside of the gaming world and led to government efforts to
restrict loot boxes as a form of gambling ultimately ea admitted that
they botched the situation but battlefront 2 was left for the ignominious title of possibly having the
worst launch of any game of all time but do you think there's an
even worse example of developers making us mad let us know down in the comments
if you'd like to see another episode in this series and which games we should
feature this episode was brought to you by freshbooks freshbooks is the easy to
use accounting software designed specifically with you in mind the small
business owner freshbooks has everything you need to manage your books it's
designed to be easy to use with built-in automation so you can spend less time
invoicing expensing and tracking projects and more time doing what
matters most growing your business whether you're a tradesperson creative
agency or a youtuber you can choose a plan that's right for you and they have
an award-winning toronto-based support team who are always happy to help if you
need it so try freshbooks free for 30 days today no credit card is required at
freshbooks.com techquickie so thanks for watching guys
if you liked this video give it a like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comments sections with your suggestions
for topics that we should cover in the future