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 the 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 Broussard,
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
ballyhooed 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, Yuji Naka, 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 Naka 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 unminigated disaster.
There seemed to be a consensus that Sonic was just dropped into a role-playing game
that didn't suit the play style 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
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. 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.