• Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.

MauroNL

What Are Ya' Buying?
Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,253
The Netherlands


10. Final Fantasy XIV
9. Street Fighter V
8. Metal Gear Solid V Phantom Pain
7. Assassin's Creed Unity
6. Dragon Age 2
5. Battlefield 4
4. Star Wars Battlefront
3. Mass Effect Andromeda
2. Anthem
1. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

5 out of 10 from EA, disgusting.
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,033
Milwaukee, WI
Can we take a moment and acknowledge how significant it is that mainstream (by youtube standards) listical channel WatchMojo is highlighting crunch as a bad thing? I can not stress how reassuring of a sign this is.
 

Yuntu

Prophet of Regret
Member
Nov 7, 2019
10,671
Germany
Crunch or rush? Are they really similar?

Nah they are different. Most of these have the issue of either beeing poorly planned as a project with no clear direction or are literally rushed. But rushing can also mean your devs have to crunch, so while they are different they can come into existence due to the same reasons.

Atleast thats my view on it, but I am not a developer so what do I know.
 

Deleted member 9241

Oct 26, 2017
10,416
I think the last World of WarCraft expansion , Battle for Azeroth, is a serious contender. Leveling was fantastic, but once you hit max lvl all the problems were revealed. Going from Legion to that was like *record scratch*
 

IIFloodyII

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,963
Can we take a moment and acknowledge how significant it is that mainstream (by youtube standards) listical channel WatchMojo is highlighting crunch as a bad thing? I can not stress how reassuring of a sign this is.
It's getting out there more I feel. My 15 year old brother randomly brought it up the other day, basically talking about how it's a really bad job because of how much overwork (he didn't know it had a name) happens. I guess one of his teachers told him about it, but really surprised he was aware of it. It's usually fantasized by people his age.
 

SofNascimento

cursed
Member
Oct 28, 2017
21,288
São Paulo - Brazil
Andromeda was ruined by lack of vision and the same talent that made the orirignal trilogy possible, not crunch.

ME3 on the other hand suffered massively from lack of development time.
 

mclem

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,449
I think the last World of WarCraft expansion , Battle for Azeroth, is a serious contender. Leveling was fantastic, but once you hit max lvl all the problems were revealed. Going from Legion to that was like *record scratch*

I'm not sure I've seen indications that they crunched on developing it, though, I'm not sure you can peg crunch as the culprit. Unless you mean "Should have had more time spent on it", which is a rather different issue (and basically would mean either more crunch or a postponed release date, and the latter is a very different issue for an MMO than it is for a standard release).

I think it's less that crunch ruins games, and more that crunch is occasionally a last-ditch attempt to try to *salvage* games, and in some cases that doesn't work.
 
Oct 25, 2017
6,033
Milwaukee, WI
It's getting out there more I feel. My 15 year old brother randomly brought it up the other day, basically talking about how it's a really bad job because of how much overwork (he didn't know it had a name) happens. I guess one of his teachers told him about it, but really surprised he was aware of it. It's usually fantasized by people his age.

That's exactly the demographic that I was thinking of. So many kids and teens watch these sorts of shows and absorb a lot of the ideas into extremes. Which is natural, we were all that age once. But I am so happy the myth of undue stress and unnecessary work is being torn down. Even if a channel like the one above won't be able to give nuance and a broader scope as to why worker's rights are important.
 

JahIthBer

Member
Jan 27, 2018
10,377
I think the last World of WarCraft expansion , Battle for Azeroth, is a serious contender. Leveling was fantastic, but once you hit max lvl all the problems were revealed. Going from Legion to that was like *record scratch*
The system design & class design is what sucks about BFA, the content itself was pretty good.
Speaking of MMO's, i don't know if XIV was really rushed, it just wasn't a very good product with a lot of poor decisions by people who didn't really know how to make an MMO in the 2010's.
 

Y2Kev

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,838
I don't agree that a lot of these were ruined by crunch. Having a very limited scope at the outset is different. I don't think Star Wars Battlefront was crunched, for example (or maybe it was, but that's not why it had no single player). At least I think.
 

Mahonay

Member
Oct 25, 2017
33,316
Pencils Vania
Uhhhh Tony Hawk 5 was ruined by being developed by fucking Robomodo. Lol. If there was no crunch/rush that would still be a bad game.
 

Servbot24

The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
43,070
There's no way for us to tell if a game was ruined by crunch. Crunch is when people are working too hard and spending too much time at work. These are games that were ruined by being rushed out before they were ready, or by just being poorly planned from the start.
 

The Unsent

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,426
Kotor 2 is rather famous and I think Deus Ex Mankind Divided, it felt like Adam Jensen's resurrection is not satisfyingly explained and the whole Janus plot point is underwhelming. Shenmue 3 wasn't a big budget but could have done with another act, a town was cut.
A band of characters help you at the end, but didn't really get much time to know them and it feels like they had stories cut.
 

zswordsman

Member
Nov 5, 2017
1,771
Battlefield 4 had server issues and stuff at launch but I'd say that it doesn't deserve to even be on this list. Game was legit. It's not even the most rushed battlefield. That's clearly BFV this gen.
 

CypherSignal

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,064
Can we take a moment and acknowledge how significant it is that mainstream (by youtube standards) listical channel WatchMojo is highlighting crunch as a bad thing? I can not stress how reassuring of a sign this is.
Does it really count when they're (watchmojo in this case) not aware of what the effect on crunch actually is? They're just referring to games that were not well received and for the most part would not have benefited from just another few months in the oven -- occasionally proven out specifically by having another few months of updates for code and content.

  • FF14 had a couple-year-long reworking and practically had an entirely different philosophy on world design and game design. That's not a failure of "the team bit off more than they can chew and overworked themselves, and the game would have benefited from a few months of work."
  • Street Fighter V went right into service-mode after ship, and the game was not radically different with another 3 months. What you see with another year of work is what they had released a year after the game was released, etc.
  • MGSV maybe would have been different with some more time, but it's not like a few missions being cut meant it was ruined. It functioned fine, played great, and it still a 50+ hour long action-stealth open world game-of-the-year. What, Venom Snake was quiet a lot of the time, so codec cassette conversations were often one-sided? That was because it's hard to book time with actors in LA when you have a director in Tokyo, not because it was rushed out the door. It's not like Reedus is always a highly engaged character in every one of Death Stranding's conversations.
  • AC Unity you could argue because it shipped with some noteworthy bugs and technical issues, many of which were then fixed shortly after...but there are still larger issues with content and story that may not have been addressed with another few months of fullscale development?
  • Dragon Age 2 was going to be an expansion and got blown up to the size of a $60 game. Another few months of production doesn't radically change that game.
  • Battlefield 4 you could argue because it shipped with some noteworthy bugs and technical issues, many of which were then fixed shortly after.
  • Star Wars Battlefront was...not radically changed after ship, aside from having more content? The video just goes "It didn't have much content, and had disappointing combat" but it's not like the combat was changed significantly after it was released, so...how did a rushed production fit into a large part of that?
  • ME:A you could argue because it shipped with some noteworthy bugs and technical issues, many of which were then fixed shortly after...but there are still larger issues with content and story that may not have been addressed with another few months of fullscale development?
  • Anthem you could argue because it shipped with some noteworthy bugs and technical issues, many of which were then fixed shortly after...but there are still larger issues with content and story that may not have been addressed with another few months of fullscale development?
  • And then Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5...largely didn't ship with noteworthy bugs and technical issues? It was clearly under-budgeted and under-resourced, and ostensibly put out to maintain an active licensing deal, but ruined because of a rushed production? What?

So...it's just some bullshit of "Check out these games that made headlines about how bad they were" 🤷‍♀️ ?? Simply amazing that they didn't throw No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, SimCity 2013, WWE 2K20, Sonic Boom, or Warcraft 3 Reforged into the melange.
 
Last edited:

The_R3medy

Member
Jan 22, 2018
2,840
Wisconsin
I....... I don't agree on Anthem or Mass Effect Andromeda. If you guys read the Kotaku articles in those, EA gave each of those games seven and five years respectively. It's not like they gave them a year like DA2 or anything.

At a certain point, the game's gotta ship, ya know?
 

Araujo

Banned
Dec 5, 2017
2,196
So it seems another WatchMojo list manage to get those clicks afterall...

Those are clickbaity trash people, c'mon.... what next? Whatculture threads?
 

IMCaprica

Member
Aug 1, 2019
9,419
MGSV is a weird one given what we know. I don't know that you can really call that crunch, nor do I think you can say that the game was "ruined".

Honestly I think this kind of video is counterproductive. I think a GOTY contender like RDR2 deserves a deeper look, because the story of that game's production revealed how worthless and excessive crunch can be, and how the game being yet another success for Rockstar will just perpetuate that crunch going forward.
 

Cactuar

Banned
Nov 30, 2018
5,878
How bout a list of the Top 10 Buzzwords Watchmojo Doesn't Understand the Meaning Of? Based on this list I'd put "crunch" somewhere around No. 2 or 3.
 

EvilBoris

Prophet of Truth - HDTVtest
Verified
Oct 29, 2017
16,680
I think they've just got someone new who likes videogames.

We just had PS5 vs.Xbox SX

PS5 won on console design
And for it's selection of games.

Impressive considering nothing has been shown and nothing has been announced. 😂
 

djplaeskool

Member
Oct 26, 2017
19,736
XIV 1.0 was not so much a victim of crunch as it was uneven execution on an incomplete vision built on a foundation of poor infrastructure and game design.
The game didn't need a few extra months, it had to be rebuilt from the ground up over the span of multiple years with brand new leadership.
 

Reinhard

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,592
MGS V main failures were using a Hollywood TV/movie Actor for Snake and insisting that there be a part 2 to the game with 50 missions, plus the online shenanigans post launch where they were trying to shove microtransactions down your throat. Using Kiefer was a huge mistake due to the limited time they had to work with him, he barely interacted with anyone in game and was especially egregious during the finale of part 1 where Snake sat there silent while Skullface ranted. The whole insistence of 50 missions was also stupid, part 1 should have been the main game with Part 2 listed as epilogue chapter and completely reworked into far fewer missions that got straight to the point without having to do a ton of side missions to progress the epilogue. Having near identical missions from Part 1 but remixed made absolutely 0 sense, should have put those missions into a separate VR section. And of course mission 51 should have been included since it resolves major plot points. Maybe have a total of 36-40 missions or so.