These were not pretty
CYBERPUNK 2077: You knew this was gonna be here, so let's get it out of the way. Cyberpunk 2077 is perhaps the most hyped video game there's ever been. At least it feels that way now that it's become such a disaster. It would be much easier for you to read all about Cyberpunk 2077 in great detail than it would be for us to sum it up in a couple sentences here. (Credit: CDPR)
NO MAN'S SKY: When we said "perhaps the most hyped video game ever", the first contestant for that title that came to mind was No Man's Sky. To their credit, Hello Games dug in and improved the game a lot since 2016, but boy was it a boring, bug-ridden, empty waste of space back at launch. (Credit: Hello Games)
ANTHEM: Anthem heard us talking of empty space and felt like it's been summoned. EA learned the hard way that sometimes you need actual content and can't go just by visuals and flying around aimlessly. Anthem isn't headed towards a No Man's Sky type of development. Or any development for that matter. (Credit: BioWare)
STAR WARS: BATTLEFRONT 2: Oh, EA. You f@#$ing idiots. Can't lie, I also thought there's nothing publishers can't get away with by the time Battlefront 2 rolled its microtransactions around in 2017. In a surprising twist of fate, people were not pleased. Very much not pleased. At all. Which gave us this historical Reddit moment. (Credit: EA)
FALLOUT 76: We'll admit to cheating a little. This isn't a set ranking, but we all know best, or in this case worst, is usually kept for last. Hense the cheating. We're not convinced Fallout 76 was the worst launch per se. However, everything since that launch has raised this Bethesda trademark of a buggy mess into the stratosphere of what the actual f@#$ were you thinking while doing this. Seriously, we can't make that s@#$ up. No room to speak of it all here sadly, but this Jim Sterling feller does a good job of it. (Credit: Bethesda Softworks)
Video game launches aren't always smooth. It takes just the right balance of hype, development, release, functionality, gameplay and all that good additional sauce like a good story and characters and you know, stuff to do in general. These five games had none or close to none of that upon launch. Some overcame their issues with time, others vanished into thin air. But all of them without exception were a complete mess upon launch.
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