CYBERPUNK 2077
Cyberpunk 2077’s failure is recent and fresh, so surely most don’t really need a reminder on what happened there. But it bears repeating – after the success of The Witcher 3, CD Projekt RED found themselves beloved by players around the world, and they developed a reputation for excellence and for being “pro-gamer”. Much like so many other developers behind the games on this list, CDPR tapped into this reputation hard, promising a game that would be every bit as defining as The Witcher 3 had been, and cashing in the goodwill they had earned with it to keep the hype going through innumerable delays. What they promised – a mix between GTA’s immersion and dynamic reactivity, and their own strong writing, excellent quests, and great RPG mechanics – was certainly exciting, to say the least. On almost every single front, however, Cyberpunk failed to deliver, at the very least to the extent that it promised to deliver. Even once you remove the shoddy state the game launched in, and just look at it for what it is, separate of all the hype, it’s simply not a particularly great game. Despite a few infrequent flashes of brilliance, on the whole, this was an average game hyped up to be the next milestone for the medium, and that, along with the literally unfinished state it launched in, tarnished its legacy, as well as that of its developer’s, in a way that will be really hard to recover from.
