I’m just sitting here thinking about all the hoopla around palworld right now and I was wondering what other titles out there have been in the controversy filled category in the past few years/decade? I can think of a few, but my game interests are kinda narrow.
What are some of your picks?
Kinda feels like any big release has some kind of controversy added to it, be it poor performance, bugs, riddled with mtx/day1 dlc/seasonpass-nonsense, denuvo/horrid-drm-in-general, invasive anticheats, unnescessary launcher apps… you name it.
Off the top of my head the few “hooplas” I can remember. Also I’m not claiming to remember 100% correctly on the reasons/details
Fo76 basically was a shitshow to the point it was false advertising. (Fucking canvas bags)
and moldy powerarmor helmets, which were a potential health hazard.
But even bigger issue, IMO, is the pvp/“mmo” aspect of it, which I don’t care one bit. If anything I’d like p2p coop Fallout.
Wasn’t Colonial Marines the game that gearbox “stole” budget from so they could fund Borderlands 2?
Iirc, it also had absolutely abysmal AI, with Alien(s) standing perfectly still in clear view, not reacting until they had been shot multiple times.
Then someone found that there was a single value in one of the game’s ini configuration files you could change from 0 to 1, and the AI would become competent. The switch had been there since release, over multiple years the game was never updated to flip the “make the AI not braindead” switch. As far as I know, it still hasn’t been updated to flip it.
Not a clue about budget stuff.
Iirc the config value key was mistyped, it was supposed to read “tether” (like, alient ai “tethers” to player, so it can find a path to the player, or somesuch), but it was mistyped in the config. ref: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Aliens:_Colonial_Marines#Improved_Xenomorph_AI
haven’t tried the fix myself yet, not THAT keen on replaying it. :D
Good points, but a few of these are mixing up controversy with genuine critics.
Did they actually fix the performance of AK or did we just get better hardware to run the game better? And I’m also recalling some gameplay trailer which was sped up to seem like the game was running at 60 fps. But, yea, horrid performance is mostly genuine critique.
With Fallout 4, I think the biggest issue with roleplay was the dialogue options, not the voice acting per se. Basically each dialogue selection was 4 options: “Yes”, “Yes (but snarky)”, “No”, and some non sequitur… give or take, it’s been a hot minute since I last played it.
They actually pulled it from Steam for a while, and re-released it properly a few weeks later. But yes, they ended up fixing it properly, and it’s probably one of the best-looking games of its generation on PC. The photo mode, in particular, is stellar.
Ooh, right. Completely forgot about that. And, yea the game is definitely a looker.
Back when the game was fairly new I did get it as a bundled game with my 2nd gpu. My SLI setup was quite the stutterfest with it, and I don’t think it even supported SLI well, or at all. So I shelved it until several years later, and played it through with a lot beefier pc.
Same: I got both Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 with my 980! That’s actually one of the reasons I bought one: I had planned to buy both games anyway, it made me “save” (as in, not spend) that much money. And given that it was NVIDIA’s flagship at the time, it worked quite well with that GPU and I wouldn’t have noticed the performance issues if I had not read so much backlash about them.
Don’t think I ever heard something bad about the Starcraft remaster.
The Yakuza Kiwami games are supposedly good too, but I never played them or the originals.
The Resident Evil games are more like remakes, the only bad thing I heard is about 4. But that was from the perspective of challenge runners, apparently some weirdness going on there. But supposedly absolutely fine for casual gaming, but I never played any of these either.
Off the top of my head:
From what I recall, most of these were criticized for lacking the hand-crafted textures and lighting that the originals had. For obvious reasons, since most remasters are AI-enhanced textures, upgraded engines and little to no handcraft ever comes into play.