Video Games Great Games That Were Ruined by Ambition

[BakaTheIdiot]

Reading that title out loud makes me sad, but the fact of the matter is that some games truly are squandered by trying too much. It happens: sometimes a studio just bites off more than it can chew. The rational studios would then look into what needs to go, such as a mechanic that doesn't fit the theme, or a level that most people won't bother with.

But some studios... they double down, and they double down hard. No compromises! No cuts! Keep all the features! Give the people what they demanded! It's honestly admirable, I gotta say, but it's also a horrible idea. Nobody wants to cut features out of a game, but even fewer people want a no-compromises approach riddled with bad design choices or game-breaking bugs - such is often the fate of these studio's moxy.

What were some of your favorite games that were ruined by the scope or the ambition of the project? It doesn't necessarily have to be a video game, just a game in general!

For me it was hands-down Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. For the uninitiated: Elite Dangerous is the game that beat Star Citizen (remember the meme how it's never coming out?) to the punch, by a mile. While Star Citizen dug its way into Development Hell and a $900M hole, ED actually got released - and did quite well, among its audience. For a time, at least.

But then... Odyssey happened.

Game-crashing bugs. Network errors every 20 minutes. Such poor optimization that even an RTX 3090 - formerly the most powerful graphics card in existence - cries in pain trying to run the game at 1080p low. A terrible grind. No new ships. No ship interiors. Bad AI. Bad markets. Broken missions. I could go on, but the number one most egregious flaw of this expansion is that it put the final nail in the coffin for the Console releases: PlayStation 4 and XBox 1 users were marooned, for good. Odyssey was supposed to be the magnum opus of Elite: Dangerous. You could finally get out of your ship's cockpit and walk around on planets! That sounds absolutely awesome! But unfortunately, Frontier succumbed to their own ambitions, and released a half-baked, unfinished project that actually led to a great deal of people walking away from Elite: Dangerous for good. Odyssey didn't breathe new life into Elite: it put a knife in its heart and twisted it.

 

[Malphaestus]

The Witcher series, all of the games. I know many fawn over the third, but ultimately, it was merely another Red Dead Redemption; it wasted it's potential only so that the player could have a 'living, breathing world' to explore.

Cyberpunk falls into the same categorization. I would venture, even, to say that all of the Elder Scrolls games fell prey to ambition, promising too much, delivering far too little in response. In general, every RPG is a disappointment if one compares it to the promises made.

 

[Lianashae]

I think Fable 1-2-3 are a must have in threads like these. Unfortunately.

But for me it has got to be FFXV. I know a lot of people ended up loving the game, but I'm sad that Versus XIII was massacred and turned into this. They had too many big ideas and Nomura also kinda just flipped flopped trying to make it too grand.
Eventually what we got was a terrible game that wasn't worth the FF name.

 

[Onmyoji]

Can't speak for everyone, but for me it was definitely Guild Wars. I realize a lot of people like Guild Wars 2 but to me it was totally ruined compared to its predecessor with all the open world and class system nonsense and new PvP systems that weren't even remotely as fun as the first game. I played the first game for years, couldn't stand the new game for more than a few months.
Progress is good, I get it there is new standard in MMOS now. New graphics is always welcome, new movement options were cool. New types of activities, sure. Yeah. But apparently it doesn't match with what I enjoy.