This industry is one that deals mainly in the indirect re-shoveling of hype. Publishers dump the hype on us, we shovel it onto to masses, the masses ask for more, we shovel some more. By the time a game releases, it's rare for anticipations to be met, and even after all these years we're not immune. We still fall for it. We let our hopes dictate the quality of an unreleased game in our over-stimulated little brains.
These are two games that had legendary levels of hype and were destined for record-breaking sales sight-unseen but did not match the hype.
While not a terrible game, and in some aspects almost revolutionary, Assassin's Creed is not the game we thought it was going to be. The brazen, well-crafted executions we expected weren't there, instead we got to tediously repeat the same set of actions over and over to reach a series of uninteresting kills. The rich and dynamic story we were expecting was also alarmingly absent. The advertisements that seemed to show the fringes of a very deep story turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with the game, and one of the most interesting periods of history was, as I said in my "
What I Hate About Assassin's Creed" feature, used as the backdrop for a Dan Brown novel. A bad Dan Brown novel, with a completely indiscernible plot and atrocious voice acting.
Halo 3 was burgeoning with hype the second Halo 2 hit the shelves. The epitome of an inevitable sequel, Halo 3 rampaged through its development cycle with a cyclone of marketing and hype (two words: "Gamer Fuel"). This game had so much hype that it had to have swept up many people who haven't played a Halo game before, and what did those people get? Confusion. And a mediocre product. If you set aside the multiplayer mode, the single player campaign is not what you expect from a mega-ultra-blockbuster. If you aren't intimately versed in the Halo universe, the story will make no sense whatsoever. If you've played games such as Gears of War and had your idea about what a "next gen" shooter can be, you'd probably find Halo 3 an almost mundane experience.
Lesson Learned: Gaming journalists have been slapping themselves on the wrist for years now for being part of the hype machine, and it seems that we'll never learn our lesson. If these two disappointments get us a bit closer to that (hopefully) eventual realization, all the better. We've got to stop elevating games in our minds into shrines of amazement before we actually see a product on the shelves and in our hands. Some of the best games of 2007 were the ones that not a lot of people were so anxious about, like Call of Duty 4 and The Orange Box. Perhaps these are games where the money was put into
development instead of
marketing.
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