Which game was the biggest disaster? No Man's Sky, Battlefront 2, Mass Effect Andromeda, Fallout 76

NMS is on an upward trajectory at least, and was made by a small team.

Andromeda... it's hard to say. ME3 was what made me stop caring about ME, but Andromeda certainly did not do anything to pull me back in.

Battlefront 2, I bought, which I regret, but it was probably still fairly profitable, and I'm enough of a sucker that I'd possibly get back into it, or Battlefront 3 later on.

FO76, it's too premature to call. It certainly SEEMS like the a huge disaster, but it could be recency bias. My vote still goes to Andromeda for now. If we do this poll again in 6 months, it may change.

too early to say on fallout 76. also a lot of recency bias since the game came out only two weeks ago. there is plenty of time to improve the game.

I never expected NMS to be good. I've yet to play a procedurally generated game with "emergent" gameplay that was any good. Bethesda is supposed to make curated worlds with bespoke quests.

Now I haven't actually played either game, but from what I understand, NMS dissapointed mostly because of unrealistic expectations. FO76's expectations basically boil down to "I want to co-op FO4." Reading about all the bugs in FO76 makes me feel as if the game is just a beta. Sure, some jankass bugfest got GotY noms in the past, like PUBG, but that was another "breaking new ground" type game. The expectation is that Bethesda has their base and is expected to get it out the game.

BFII sucked for MTX, but nobody liked BF, so that's a general industry/monetisation backslide, but not dissapointing in relation to the first game because no one was expecting much. So while it was a disaster, the surprise of it being a disaster was cushioned in my mind.

Andromeda, for another reason, we all knew it was being handled in a different studio, so we knew it was going to be different from the get-go. It failed too, but there's still that element of hindsight where we can say, "diff studio, makes sense."

What's the reason FO76 failed? It goes back to Bethesda adding MP. The reason it's such a disaster is because the game exists for this one feature. It's not the core feature (like being procedurally generated); it's not a feature people dislike (MTX); and it's being handled by the team with the most experience with the engine.

Which one caused world governments to look into lawmaking?

That one. The others are just bad games.

Giever said:

They can just be bad, and tons of people talk about tons of games just being bad. Some are a bit more of a disaster when it comes to how big the budget was, what the expectations are, whether people were flat out lied to, etc.

It's simply not true that people don't talk about games just being bad without blowing them up into disasters. It's an incredibly regular occurrence.

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You're right. They don't always turn into disasters. I guess I meant to say that it's weird that bad games have the potential to turn into disasters at all. Battlefront 2 was a horse of a different breed, but like, Fallout 76? Who cares? (And sure, the nylon bag thing is a bad look that Bethesda goofed up on, but I know in my gut that the vast majority of people talking about that did not purchase the Collector's Edition).

People might be forgetting the impact Battlefront 2 had. It literally pushed the lootbox problem to the forefront of the industry and governments/mainstream media started paying attention (even if they ultimately did nothing).

In comparison Fallout 76 is just another buggy and broken Bethesda game, even if its more broken then ever.

I picked Andromeda (killing off a franchise, making EA merge a studio, potentially putting Bioware on the chopping block if Anthem isn't successful), but in retrospect it's probably BF2.

I mean, it got countries into investigating it's micro transactions. What.

Recency bias is affecting it too but at the end of the day it's still Fallout 76.

The game is bad at a fundamental level. It also has the aggresive microtransactions that Battlefront 2 was called out too but since the game is a big buggy mess with lacking substance and content it ends up overshadowing those other issues.

Like look at what happened with the Collector's Edition fiasgo, they tried to compensate with 5$ of the game currency and that doesn't lets you afford a fucking paint job. That just shows you the kind of greed this game is going for. As an outside observer if it weren't for that incident I wouldn't have known about it but this is because the journalist didn't call out Fallout 76 enough for this.

Fallout 76 is the most recent, so of course it's going to win (and at Era it was always going to win). I think Battlefront 2 is truly the biggest fuckup. It is the unfortunate title that ended up the loot box scapegoat. Don't get me wrong, the lootbox aspect was shitty, but BF2 was timed to release right at peak hype for loot boxes.

No Man's Sky and Battlefront 2 both turned it around ultimately, even though both were disasters in their original form.

Andromeda literally killed a mega franchise. 76 won't kill Fallout but it will damage Bethesda. Andromeda by far.

No Mans Sky. First game I ever returned in my twenty five years of gaming.

Asbsand said:

As for BF2 I mean... I already knew it was not going to be like the original Battlefronts. They added space combat and it wasn't great. They added a campaign (written by an IGN employee) and it was incoherent fanfiction storytelling.

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Fun fact - the lead writer on BF2 was the writer who did Spec Ops: The Line. Mitch Dyer worked under him.

Personally BF2

I have like NMS from the start and everything they have added has only improved it.
Andromeda wasn't as good as the others, but I still enjoyed it
Fallout 76 is exactly what I expected a multiplayer survival game, I've been playing it a couple days out of the week since launch and been having fun building bases, leveling up, and shooting things.

Battle Front's micro-transactions and cost to unlock heroes pissed me off a fair amount and I didn't play it for a long time.

Battlefront 2, by far, got in the news, killed EA's trust for major companies like Disney and created the everlasting debate for gambling over lootboxes I .many nations across the world.

Steroyd said:

Can we really call that a "disaster" when it scared developers and publishers into taking lootboxes out of their games (Shadow of War) or it now being a positive PR move announcing a game doesn't have lootboxes.

I'm going to have to go with Fallout 76 (pending) even though Mass Effect shuttered a studio it was EA, a matter of when not if and it was a core functioning game, F76 is a copy and paste job from Fallout 4 with no forethought in making it suitable for the game that it tried to be, and the reason I'm putting in pending is because Bethsada destroyed so much goodwill that I think any bugs in their future single player games will now be scrutinised instead of endeared even if it launches as buggy as Skyrim first did.

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Bioware Montreal was shut down but every employee still worked at EA. No one was out.

Not andromeda

Sebastopa said:

Battlefront 2, by far, got in the news, killed EA's trust for major companies like Disney and created the everlasting debate for gambling over lootboxes I .many nations across the world.

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Lmao what? Do you work at Disney and is part of the board of directors and along Bob Igger to know that? Please don't say that your only source is a rumor?

Like, let's not even consider that Disney and Lucasfilm were plenty aware of everything that was made there and that Disney has their own SW games on mobile.

wow the hatred for nms lives on. yeah it did not have MP, sure. was it broken? buggy? did it run 15fps on base ps4? some people here act like they got handed a broken game that had problems. nms' biggest issue was its PR, nothing else.

Fallout 76

Fallout is the only one without redeeming qualities.

Mass Effect went from my favorite franchise to one where im skeptical on buying the deluxe edition of the game for 10 bucks.

Andromeda might've tank Bioware, but Battlefront 2 prompted action from Disney and international legal action.

I think.. Fallout 76 takes the prize due to just how poorly executed the whole thing is and Bethesda's track record. I would call Andromeda an extremely close second due to how that game was hyped up and then was revealed to be just downright bad. Bad in terms of presenting believable NPCs, evolving on the Mass Effect universe, introducing new aliens that didn't look horrible, etc.

I know a lot of people are mentioning BF2 but I feel like it was just the perfect storm that had been building up for a while, it was either going to be BF2 or something else that caused that lootbox mess.

NMS definitely deserves a special mention for most annoying disaster on this list. Fuck me, the deranged hype for this game before it released was something else. I still remember all the comments of "stop asking what you do in the game! We know exactly what's in the game" and "oh yeah?! Well go back to Call of Duty then because this game's not for you!"

So...

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ho...-reporting-system-is-broken.84245/#navigation



for those that can't read the tweet, tl;dr wandering homophobic murder gangs.

fanboi said:

While true, I would still say not the same league.

So not a real indie development for sure.

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No, No Man's Sky was completely indie developed. Sony put money towards publishing the physical PS4 version and marketing, with no resources going towards development, IIRC.

If you havnt played No Mans Sky since launch, the jokes on you.

Everything about Fallout 76 is awful.

Battlefield did result in lootbox/gambling investigations but the game itself was okay. No Man's Sky wasn't terrible but mostly a result of poor PR. Andromeda...was mediocre. I'll grant that it did kill the Mass Effect series, which is a reasonable sin by itself.

But from concept to execution - and now PR mitigation - Fallout 76 is an absolute trainwreck. Whether they can salvage some of that so that it's viewed more fondly in the future...who knows.

The way that people talked about NMS on GAF like it was the second coming was absolutely ridiculous.

Any sort of doubt or question towards the content really being there was immediately batted away by a brigade of fanboys going "they'll show it in due time!".

It's amazing how anyone could fall for that same shit with SoT and F76. What you see (not what you hear) is almost always what you get.

DJ_Lae said:

Whether they can salvage some of that so that it's viewed more fondly in the future...who knows.

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I am at the point where I believe mods are the only saving hail mary throw they have.

But this is a devil's bargain as it might crater their atom shop sales. BGS has shown over the last year or so, modders outshine their own "mini DLC" whatever. So it won't save them financially, just help them save face a little on the franchise for the future.

I'll say this much, I'll look at Fallout 76 with an open mind if and only if the modders come in and work their magic.

I'm going to say Mass Effect because that series one of last gen's best new IPs. The Bethesda Fallouts have always been kind of jank, ugly games with poor gameplay mechanics. FO76 is just the first one that got called out for it because it didn't deliver on the other strengths of the series.

Demacabre said:

I am at the point where I believe mods are the only saving hail mary throw they have.

But this is a devil's bargain as it might crater their atom shop sales. So it won't save them financially, just help them save face a little.

BGS has shown over the last year or so, modders outshine their own "mini DLC" whatever.

I'll say this much, I'll look at Fallout 76 with an open mind if and only if the modders come in and work their magic.

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Mods are the only thing that would make me pick up the game too, and if nothing else, Bethesda games have a good history of attracting mods. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

No Mans Sky is amazing now, completely different game and the Visions update make it even better. The developers have taken all the criticism on board and actually listened and have come out better as a result. Sure launch buyers got screwed but you guys should give it another shot. This is FF14: A Realm Reborn level of stuff here.

I really don't see how anyone can say anything other than F76. MAYBE Star Wars because of the MTX that forced lawmakers to get involved.

Battlefront 2 - basically an event that EA handled so badly that the impacts it had on loot boxes are still being felt/looked at. They basically ruined loot boxes for other games that were handling them better than they were.

Andromeda - Did not really ruin the franchise for me. It was a mediocre game at best. It did make me lose faith in BioWare as a developer because they have EA standing over them as a publisher. Summary: EA sucks and thus infects all of its' other studios.

Fallout 76 - Buggy and a mess and a skeleton of a game from what I have seen of the it and read. However, the customer service response to their misleading advertising of the canvas bag - them merely responding with 'we do not plan to do anything about it' or 'here is 500 atoms so you can benefit our in-game economy from our mistake' - is what really got to me. I have lost faith in Bethesda. All of the jokes Todd made came off as mocking during their past E3 presentation. I still like Todd and respect that the development team is not to blame - it is their sue-happy parent company ZeniMax. But I still feel like Todd at least comes off now as jaded AF. I know getting told your games are buggy and being mistreated by some fans sucks. But there is no denying that engine is just crap. I am playing through remastered Skyrim (a remaster! and years of bug fixes and re-releases after the fact) and it runs like absolute garbage. NPCs glitch everywhere, some quests are still bugged, etc. I mean enough is enough.

The other ones had good games there they were just below expectations or loot box.

Fallout 76 is just pure trash

Cyclonesweep said:

The other ones had good games there they were just below expectations or loot box.

Fallout 76 is just pure trash

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Nah NMS was pure trash too at launch.

Should leave NMS off of this list.
Bad launch, but they kept on improving everything the game month after month after month.

And beside...NMS had like 10-20 people working on that game as an indie studio?
While everything else on that list has hundreds of workers and millions of dollars backing them up...and yet, they gave up and didn't improve on their game after launch.

No Man's Sky is good enough now, but I think people are really forgetting how betrayed and angry people were after launch. Personally, I was wary of the hype machine, but I think it had a worse launch than Fallout 76 and the other games overall.

Fallout 76 will win the poll now, but that's just because it's fresh in people's minds.

Hey said:

Nah NMS was pure trash too at launch.

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It was fine, just empty. It wasn't literally broken

Seems like some recency bias is going on in the poll.

I picked Star Wars Battlefront 2 because it was the only one of those that really got picked up by mainstream media.

I only played NMS out of any of those and it was more funny than anything else because my friend was the ass that actually purchased it.

Battlefront 2 worked fine, and was a polished product that sold really well. It just had poor progression and monetization.

No Man's Sky worked as intended, but had to deal with people's completely imagined pie-in-the-sky expectations. They had a poorly managed PR campaign that allowed things to get out of hand, and a developer who never wanted to admit the game's limitations. At the same time people were foolhardy enough to think that a procedural infinite universe was something that might actually make a game fun, when all it does is bloat scope.

Mass Andromeda was a poor RPG without a lot of polsh, that tarnished a good brand. It seems like there were a lot of immersion-breaking technical issues, but nothing that made it unplayable or hindered progression.

Fallout 76 though, is clearly not working properly, is tarnishing a good brand, and has little-to-no polish or effort behind it.

Fallout 76 seems like the clear loser here, though I'd give them a few more weeks to see if they can somehow magically turn it around. It seems like what people want out of the game though is something they can't just whip up in a matter of weeks.

On what metric are we deciding if a game is a disaster? Sales? Critical Reception? Overall lasting effect?

Well.


Sales:

1. Battlefront 2 - Sales took a huge drop over Battlefront 2015, and without DLC sales, and with the microtransactions ripped out for so long, I get the feeling this didn't make nearly what was expected.
2. Mass Effect Andromeda - Sold way under expectations, and killed the developer

A. No Man's Sky - Sold waaay over expectations, and made everyone involved a lot of money.
B. Fallout 76 - Too recent to know.


Critical Reception:
1. Fallout 76 - People hate this game, that much is clear. [Metacritic: 49/52/54]
2. Mass Effect Andromeda - Not only did people find it mediocre, but it became an internet joke. [Metacritic: 71/72/76]
3. Battlefront 2 - While the loot box system was completely lambasted, a lot of people thought the core game wasn't bad. [Metacritic: 65/66/68]
4. No Man's Sky - At launch, a lot of people were totally disappointed in this game, but over time, a lot of people have come back to liking it. [Metacritic: 61/71/77]


Overall Lasting Effect:
1. Mass Effect Andromeda - Was supposed to be the start of a new series, but instead put the entire IP on ice, killed the developer, and soured a lot of people on Mass Effect.
2. Battlefront 2 - Despite them pulling out the _even worse_ lootbox system in the original release, the damage was already done, this game will forever be known by their horrible launch system.

A. Fallout 76 - It's too soon to know.
B. No Man's Sky - While a lot of people remember it for it's disappointing launch, the numbers on steam and other platforms took a nosedive, only to come back up after some of the updates. Despite some lasting negativity, it seems this game found a niche, and those people like it.


So what does this mean? There isn't really a definitive answer to the question, I'd say.

Hopefully this saves some time and discussion. ;P

My vote goes to Mass Effect A just because it might have jeopardized one of my favorite devs :(

No matter how crappy 76 is, BGS is going to be churning ES and FO games for a long time.

I'm voting Fallout 76 because this will be the first Bethesda RPG title I haven't excitedly bought at launch.
I am primarily a single player person, and the news that 76 was going to be an online title put me off.
Add to that no NPC quest givers, and what is there for me to care about? Just run around shooting shit ad infinitum?

BF2, by far. None of the other games caused a country to introduce legislation.

The poll is between:

A souless sequel that ended all future plans (ME:A)

A space exploration "Fable" (NWS)

A good game overshadowed by a PR/ethics disaster (BF2)

And a conceptually broken game (F76).


To me, the biggest disaster is Battlefront 2. Not because it's the worst game of the bunch (that will always be Fallout 76), but because it's the BEST game of the bunch.

And EA still royally fucked it up.

Mass Effect is different than the others I think. It was immensely disappointing and a step down, but it was not really a disaster. It just wasnt up to par.

Meanwhile Fallout is lacking content and has numerous PR blunders, No Mans Sky was a disappointment and failed to deliver on some promises, and then Battlefront was so bad that it legitimately caused national governments to investigate microtransactions and start processing regulations, resulting in EA drastically changing the way they did business and changing the plans for Star Wars going forward.

I voted BF2.

I feel like there's a bit of recency bias in these poll responses. You guys may have forgotten how bad it was at both no man's sky and andromeda's launch, significantly worse than reactions to 76.

I think FO76 is only winning because it's currently front of mind for a lot of people.