When Anthem launched to much hype in 2019 and everyone realised it was fucking shit, player numbers tanked and the game was DOA, the gaming community could be forgiven for thinking that we wouldn’t see such a hyped game, from a mainstream publisher, feature such a botched release like it for a long time.

But wait. Here comes 2022 and three games that looked at Anthems release and said,

“Hold my bear……”

For one of these franchises to launch in the state they did would have been bad enough but for all three to launch like they did is a calamity and further proof that we are still suffering from “the curse of modern gaming”. From boring single player narratives, broken multiplayer, missing features, bad design, and too little content these games have got it all.

Today we are going to look at three game launches. The Bad, the Buggy, and the Bungled.

Stick around till the end because I’m going to talk about the future of the games industry and how these mistakes can be avoided.

Impressions It’s fair to say that at this point many players are suffering from COD fatigue. The yearly release cycle has put pressure on developers to release cookie cutter games without enough time to implement iterations on the core gameplay mechanics that would help keep the franchise feeling fresh. Nothing wrong with yearly releases you might think and for sports titles it makes more sense. There are always changes in team rosters, formations, player haircuts all that good stuff. But for FPS titles unless you are bringing the players something they haven’t seen before, in either the setting or the core gameplay what exactly are you selling them? Vanguard is the 5th time the series has visited the WW2 era and it feels stale.

Problems Is this a bad game? Yeah, I’d say it is. You must judge it in context and that is of a major publisher releasing a supposedly AAA game (with a corresponding price tag) with a built-in audience and core gameplay mechanics mapped out and well understood. To fuck that up by releasing a game with a lack lustre single player campaign with 9 missions, Zombies mode with one map and unpopular changes to weapons loadouts and shitty enemy AI, broken difficulty, and all the usual live service bugs and borked features points to a game with serious problems and not something long-time fans should have to put up with.

As you can see streaming player numbers are in the toilet with many staying in Warzone or leaving the franchise entirely until the next release. It’s fair to say that should the Activision purchase happen Microsoft’s stated intention of moving to a 2-year release cycle for COD is a welcome move! It will give the developers time to hone the story, gameplay and multiplayer experiences and hopefully offer long-time fans something fresh and well put together to play.

Much was promised for Battlefield 2042. Massive-scale 128 player battles* where dynamic storms, environmental hazards, total combat freedom, and Battlefield’s signature destruction spark a new breed of “Only in Battlefield” moments.

Problems Whilst 2042 suffers from some of the same poor design choices as COD Vanguard it went one step further by launching with never ending, game breaking bugs. Poor collision detection, server desync, LAG, hit detection, client crashes, visual glitches, all point to a game with minimal QA testing with the publishers happy for the players to beta test and call that experience a “live service”.

Just get it out the door lads – it’ll be fine!

To address the state of the game EA got so desperate they tried to blame Halo fans for the mess. Now we are a rowdy bunch and get pretty heated when it comes to the games we love but responsible for the EAs internal failure we are not.

Fan Reaction was similar to Vanguard. Long-time players are unhappy at the state of the game and justifiably annoyed that the trailers and concept art bear little resemblance to the featured gameplay alongside a host of other complaints.

Steam Charts / Twitch numbers
Player numbers and streaming numbers are the worst here with 2042 down to under 1000 players just last week and the games future the hanging in the balance. Dice have since paused all further development of the game until game breaking bugs have been fixed but by then it may be too late.

For any product to release in this state shows either a lack of integrity from the publisher with them happy to take their customers money in exchange for a broken product or a lack of technical leadership from the developer by over promising on what they could deliver. Either way this game needs a serious amount of work and fast!

In stark contrast to Battlefield Halo Infinite was universally well received in its beta pre-release. Fans knew they were playing a release preview and based on the quality of the gameplay Halo fans were excited.

Then it launched.

The gameplay was still fun, the new maps, limited as they are, were still fresh so it took some time for the complaints to surface but when the community realised the game that had been released wouldn’t see a significant update for at least 6 months to groans started to grow louder. The lack of fan favourite modes, already had the community disappointed so When Big Team Battle broke in December 2021 the floodgates opened and the complaining hit new heights. 343 industries inability to deal with technical problems because of “technical debt” (on a brand-new game with a six-year development time) was too much and the ground swell of noise became a cacophony of complaints summed up perfectly here.

Why a bungled launch? Because 343 have finally achieved what they failed to do in the two previous Halo instalments and make a game which feels like classic Halo. The gun play, game mechanics and art design are all on point. Yet they have failed to capitalise on that decent work and have released a live service game with no plan, no roadmap for delivering that service, or at least not one that has been communicated to the fanbase. When you make a live service game you must deliver content. And when you ship a game with core features missing you must have a plan to implement those features and effectively communicate that plan to the community. 343 have failed at both and many in the community, or at least my comments section has lost hope

Good job that cookbook hit the shelves when it did, or Halo fans would have gone full on lemming. When your biggest release in six months is a cookbook you know you’ve got problems.

Like the other games presented here the player numbers are through the floor and it looks like a long road back to relevancy for the Halo franchise.

Can these games be saved and if so, how?

It’s clear that all these games need attention in some key but different areas but the game plan for all three is the same at this point. Patch every bug you can find and quickly, and then proactively communicate your work to your community through every channel you have available to you. Add missing content and reward long term players for their support with well-run in game events and challenges. This may not be enough, and these games may never reach their full potential, but you may be able to create enough good will within the respective communities that long term damage may be limited, and you may learn lessons for future releases.

The FPS genre is full of well-polished games with dedicated player bases and huge reach on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. For Halo, mainline COD, and Battlefront to compete they need to release quality over quantity, build from the core audience and organically re-grow their audiences with compelling gameplay and in game events which cannot be replicated by the battel royal crowd.

Conclusion

I said at the start of the video that for 3 such large franchises to ship games so close together of such low quality, with such little content, with game breaking bugs, a lack of creativity and modes and features which seem to actively discriminate against their core audience fundamental questions need to be asked about the state of game development. If the Activision purchase is completed two of these franchises will shortly be owned by Microsoft. They are in danger of squandering one iconic franchise and buying another for an eye watering sum of money just as it declines in popularity. Why can’t developers and publishers get it right? Why do they press go before they are ready? Don’t they realise the reputational cost is damaging their long-term prospects?

Looking at another botched release Cyberpunk sales numbers appear to show that game as a massive success but dig beneath the numbers and no matter how good the game gets with post launch patches there are many who will see it as a failure.

Eventually this reputational damage will hurt the developer and impact future releases. But maybe studios don’t care as long as they get paid and can move on to the next money-making game, but this is short sighted and will lead to gamer (customer) distrust and apathy. The corporatisation of game creation is a game of diminishing returns currently being masked by the expansion of games to new audiences, devices and markets. As the market grows, revenues increase masking the dissatisfaction of gamers with their purchases. Is it any wonder that Game Pass is doing so well when AAA games cost upwards of $60 and are of such variable quality that gamers want to take the risk out of purchasing a game and would rather pay to stream or “rent” the game for less than the full price?

There are bright sparks all the time in gaming of course. Elden Ring has shown what an uncompromising artistic vision can do for a game, Forza continues to show what franchise releases should be about with its variations on a theme but upgrades in the right places, and there are plenty of highly anticipated games coming later this year from respected developers and publishers for gamer to be excited by. Will executives learn the lessons of these botched releases? Or are these games just collateral damage in an industry hurtling towards game streaming and subscription models, where games are mere content to be churned out, targeted towards a mass, casual player base, spending money on NFT cosmetic items in play to earn multiverse crypto farms.

Let’s hope not.