Sometimes, even before the release, it seems as if the game is so good that it simply cannot fail. Developers tell about plans neatly, screenshots and trailers are breathtaking, journalists and influencers report from exhibitions: everything is great! And suddenly – a failure. The higher the expectations, the more painful then the collision with reality. Examples are darkness. Duke Nukem Forever has been in development for years, but nothing came out. John Romero promised to make the players “his bitches”, and it turned out Daikatana. The Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning team recruited so many eminent people that you can’t remember all of them, and as a result, the game almost bankrupted an entire American state. We dug into history and remembered a few more similar episodes when everything should have been good, but it turned out very badly.
Godus
Once upon a time, Peter Molyneux was one of the most famous and popular game designers. It’s no joke – it is to him and his game Populous that we owe the emergence of the god simulator genre. But this is not Peter’s only project. Syndycate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, Fable, Black & White – he has a very rich track record. True, over the years, Molyneux also gained a reputation as a balabol who first promises with three boxes, and then forgets. But while the games were good, this trait was mostly perceived with a condescending smile.
In 2012, Peter’s 22Cans company announced Godus . According to the developers, it was supposed to be an innovative game, a triumphant return and evolution of the very simulator of God that Molyneux once invented. As usual in such cases, the team launched a Kickstarter campaign and raised over 500 thousand pounds. The users were promised advanced gameplay with tons of possibilities, several modes, multiplayer, the ability to inhabit the inhabitants of the virtual world and play in the first person, and much more. But something went wrong.
The game appeared in Early Access in the form of a buggy alpha, the promised features were constantly postponed without explanation. Instead of polishing the PC version that was initially considered the mainstream, the team suddenly released a mobile version of Godus – with blackjack and microtransactions. Moreover, the team signed an agreement with DeNA, which is known primarily for its mobile games. Initially, Peter and his associates assured fans that the partners would only help distribute Godus, but it soon became clear that everything was not so simple: elements of the mobile version began to slowly seep onto the PC.
Users rebelled, but the developers didn’t seem to be particularly impressed. They kept a proud silence for a long time, did not rush to update and generally behaved as if nothing was happening. Sources at 22Cans later told reporters what was happening inside the studio at the time. According to them, Peter constantly came up with new ideas and dismissed old ones, so that even the team members often had no idea in which direction the game was going. Some employees agreed that Molyneux lied to the people who supported him on Kickstarter: contrary to promises, he actually made the main bet on the mobile version, as it was possible to make money faster on it.
In the finale, Molyneux made Godus the lead designer of a man named Konrad Nazinsky, one of the game’s fiercest fan critics. Peter himself said that he would focus on another project – The Trail, and would try to communicate less with the press, because this would only harm the work. He denies all accusations of lies.
It’s been 7 years since the announcement of Godus. The Trail: Frontier Challenge was released on PC, iOS and Switch. The PC version of Godus, meanwhile, is still in Early Access and has received very negative reviews, as well as Godus Wars, a strategy game that spun off from the original game. When the final version will finally be released, and what it will be is unknown.
CLANG
Science fiction fans will probably be familiar with the work of Neil Stevenson, author of Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, and Avalanche. In 2012, Neil decided to try his hand at a new business – video game development. As he himself says, he was always interested in melee weapons and historical fencing, and he was offended that such things were greatly simplified in video games. To restore justice, Stevenson created the Subutai Corporation and announced a fencing simulator called CLANG .
Neal’s idea sounded good. At first, he and his team planned to create a simulator of medieval arena duels, and of course – with the support of motion controllers. Special attention was paid to a plausible recreation of how the fighting was actually fought in the Middle Ages. Neal wanted to create a combat system in which you would need to accurately block punches, use grabs and false attacks, and change stances. Having finished with the basic gameplay, the team planned to build an entire world full of adventure, in which the player could adequately apply their fencing skills. It was originally planned to recreate the European two-handed sword, gradually expanding the arsenal. In general, at first glance, the developers approached the issue as practical as possible, so both they and the people who donated half a million dollars to them on Kickstarter had hope for success.
But already in 2013, Neil, after a long silence, announced the closure of the project. According to him, the team focused too much on realism, and the gameplay turned out to be believable, but boring. Meanwhile, the company ran out of money, and Subutai could not find new investors. Here Neil could not resist from casually accusing the game publishers of being afraid of everything new, although it is possible that the studio was denied funding precisely because of the quality of the first prototype.
Superman: The New Adventures
It’s really sad when the game you’ve been waiting for either doesn’t come out at all like CLANG or stays in Early Access for years like Godus. But it can be even worse. Suffice it to recall the history of the infamous Superman: The New Adventures (also known as Superman 64) for the Nintendo 64.
Superman is one of the most recognizable superheroes in history, but making a good game about him is not easy. After all, if your character is an almost invulnerable demigod, then very few people can oppose him with something. Nevertheless, games about Superman came out periodically, and sometimes they were even good. But none of them was expected with the same awe as The New Adventures. Its creators promised at that time almost a revolution: a huge open world, destructibility, the ability to use all the superpowers available to Superman, including the ability to fly anywhere.
And then the game came out. It turned out that the lion’s share of it takes place in tiny closed locations, and open spaces are shrouded in impenetrable fog, because the resources of the Nintendo 64 were not enough to properly draw Metropolis. The optimization was terrible, and the game was literally teeming with bugs, due to which Superman, for example, was constantly stuck in textures. The controls turned out to be wildly uncomfortable, which made flying – one of the main features of The New Adventures – turned into torture. In general, to complete the game, one had to show real heroism himself.
The head of the development studio Titus later blamed Warner Bros., which owned the license, for all the problems. Say, WB did not let the team work calmly and constantly nagged at the smallest details, as if deliberately trying to sabotage the project. In particular, they say that the representatives of Titus had to search and show the license holders fragments of comics proving that Superman can not only fly, but also swim. In addition, it was thanks to the WB that the game was set not in the real Metropolis, but in its virtual copy, which was created by Lex Luthor. Allegedly at Warner Bros. did not want the hero to destroy real buildings, throw real cars and bludgeon living people, although in comics, and in the movies, and in the animated series that was coming out just then, he did all this without problems.
In the end, according to Titus, precious time was wasted on empty arguments about little things, and in the end it turned out what happened. Such a problematic game would likely fail these days due to a barrage of negative reviews. In the late 90s, the Internet was still not for everyone, so Superman: The New Adventures sold very well. But of course, it did not receive a continuation, and is still considered one of the worst video games in history – the 23% rating on Gamerankings speaks for itself.
SimCity (2013)
Before the authors of the last part of SimCitythere was an ambitious task: to restart the most famous city-building simulator in the world. And for a while it seemed that things were going well – especially since the development was carried out by the Maxis studio, which once created the original game. The first unpleasant bell was, perhaps, the news that the new SimCity will require a constant Internet connection. Many users suggested that in this way the developers were trying to fight piracy, but Maxis rejected this assumption. According to the authors, constant online was vital for the game, because in a sense they created an MMO, and interaction with neighboring cities built by other players played an important role in it. Also, Maxis representatives said that they achieved an incredible level of simulation, in which each inhabitant of the virtual city has its own life, and the player will be able to follow it almost in real time. For this, the studio emphasized, a very large computing power is needed, and therefore the game transfers part of the load to the servers.
True, all these arguments did not really reassure the fans, who paid $ 60 for SimCity, and on the day of release they found that the game did not work due to problems with the very servers. It was impossible to play normally for about a week, and all this time the developers fed the users with breakfast and promised that everything would be fine soon. In the end, we managed to bring the servers up, but here we found other interesting points.
For example, it turned out that very little space was allocated for one city in SimCity, so pretty soon there was simply nowhere to build. And after watching the game, some users came to the conclusion that the claims of an unprecedentedly advanced city simulation are most likely bullshit. It turned out that in the morning the Sims go to work in the nearest institution where there are unoccupied places, and in the evening they go to sleep not to their home, but, again, to the nearest house, where there are free beds.
Today SimCity is alive but almost forgotten. The only addition to it came out in November 2013, after which the project was abandoned. But now it has no problems with servers. And the offline mode, which the developers once called “impossible”, was finally officially added to the game almost a year after the release.
APB: All Points Bulletin
This is now GTA Online – just the name of the game, and once these words were a description of a pipe dream, an obvious idea that is very difficult to translate into reality. But the studio Realtime Worlds was not afraid of difficulties and decided to offer players their own version of the online Grand Theft Auto. The game, which the authors called APB: All Points Bulletin, was supposed to be an MMORPG for those who prefer machine guns and grenades to swords and sorcery. There were gangs, robberies and cars, and the action took place in a modern metropolis.
At that time, everything sounded very ambitious, but the developers were far from newbies. Realtime Worlds has already released Crackdown, a highly successful open world action game. And the chief designer of APB was David Jones, who had previously worked on the first two parts of the GTA.
It’s just that while the new game was in development, the industry has changed a lot. In particular, paid subscription MMORPGs were replaced by shareware online games, and against this background, APB, with its old-fashioned business model, seemed like a real dinosaur. There were also many complaints about the game itself – the gameplay came out unfinished, and there were enough bugs. As a result, no one wanted to play at All Points Bulletin, and its servers closed just 3 months after launch. A little later, they tried to revive the project, renamed APB Reloaded, by getting rid of the subscription, but this did not help either.
The moral of all these stories, perhaps, is that the promises of the developers should be treated more calmly. Sometimes people make mistakes, incorrectly assess their own capabilities, do not take into account some things. Sometimes they just lie. And in order not to get upset later, it’s better to follow a simple motto: hope for the best, but prepare for the worst .
