Well, we’re still seeing new ideas in games today, but what’s perhaps more common are promising ideas that end up flopping. Whether it’s overpromising, poor execution, or trends chasing monetization, these games prove that a great idea alone isn’t enough.

Here are 15 revolutionary gaming concepts that sounded incredible on paper but then folded like a deck of cards with its execution.

Exploring A Full-Sized Galaxy – Starfield

Everything that Todd Howard presented to us about the then-upcoming open-galaxy Bethesda RPG seemed too good to be true. Skyrim in space was enough to get most of us in pre-order lines, but the promises went much further than that. There’s the hundreds of explorable solar systems with thousands of planets, sure, but the customizable space ship and ability to fly your ship and recruit crew members excited me the most. Unfortunately, when the game released, it was apparent that Todd’s promises really were too good to be true. There were practically no memorable characters, nearly every planet was devoid of interesting content, and ship navigation was frustrating and under-utilized. The game sold well enough due to initial hype, but a 97% player drop-off after six months and the broader damage to Bethesda’s reputation paint a clear picture of Starfield’s shortcomings..

Pirate Live Service – Skull and Bones

Just about everybody wanted a large open-seas pirate game where filled to the brim with tense ship battles and sea shanties, but the developer somehow managed to screw that up completely. The biggest failing with Skull and Bones was that it was a $70 title with a predatory live service model tacked on top of that. You had to grind for what seemed like hundreds of hours obtaining the ‘pieces of eight’ just to upgrade your hard-sought pirate ship equipment. The whole experience was just so bogged down in incremental monetization that even the few fans that were left had a hard time sticking with it for long. So much for the first ever AAAA game.

Hunters vs Hunted Multiplayer – Evolve

I wasn’t exactly the biggest Left 4 Dead fan in the world and even I was pretty excited about Evolve in the 2010s. Evolve pitted a group of hunters against a horrific Godzilla-like human-controlled opponent, differentiating Valve’s team-based shooter with an asynchronized matchup. The big distinction with Evolve is the colossal prey is just one human-controlled creature, resulting in a lopsided 4 versus 1 scenario. Matches were novel and hilariously fun … for the first couple hours. Running around as a hulking horror monster in search of four helpless little humans makes it hard to frown. But the novelty wore off pretty quick. The balance issues, very thin post-game offerings, and hefty price tag for what was essentially a repetitive game loop contributed to Evolve devolving to the husk it is today.

Open World Parkour – Forspoken

I remember being pretty hyped for Forspoken right before its demo released. It was made by the Final Fantasy XV studio using their in-house engine, all of which I’d been a big fan of. And the open-world parkouring just looked absolutely mesmerizing to top it off. Well, after playing the demo, I found myself frankly appalled. The best thing I can say about Forspoken is that it looks nice and has a serviceable soundtrack. The dialogue is perhaps the biggest culprit behind it’s failure, but the repetitive enemy encounters and throwaway isekai story don’t help sell the game either.

Your Choices (Don’t) Change Everything – Mass Effect 3

A lot of gamers want a good choice-driven narrative and plenty of games have attempted it over the years. Yet, carrying over those choices for a meaningful endgame remains an elusive accomplishment for many titles. Mass Effect 3 is perhaps the best example of this. Mass Effect 2 was noteworthy for carrying over key decisions made from the first game and branching those off into even more scenarios into the third game. Yet, Mass Effect 3 ended on a whimper with originally only three endings. The worst part about the narrow endgame funnel was just how paper-thin the different endings were. It’s like all the player-driven choices throughout the three games came to the same uninspired conclusion, albeit with a different color tacked on.

Mandatory Crafting – Metal Gear Survive, Fallout 4

I’m all for looting abandoned houses in open-world games, especially when paired with a robust crafting system. Yet, some games rely a bit too much on crafting to advance the main story. In the case of Fallout 4, crafting is absolutely essential no matter what you plan on doing in the game. The game’s big draw, other than being another Fallout, was its settlement creation system. Yet, to properly build up your settlement, you had to grind for loot and craft like crazy. And then on the extreme spectrum, you have Metal Gear Survive, which made crafting the core gameplay loop, and by extension, the only loop the game had to offer. Crafting is a fun aspect of gameplay, but there’s such a thing as too much of it, as is the case with these two games.

Detective Vision – Batman: Arkham Series, The Last of Us Part 1

Batman: Arkham Asylum made many of us fall in love with detective vision gameplay. Turning on the infrared goggles and snooping the environment for clues just added so much to the setting and gameplay. But then, it seemed like every other game out there started implementing it, and the novelty didn’t quite stick. The Witcher 3 had Geralt investigating hundreds of trails using his witcher sense, but fans generally like it there because of his fun banter. But the later Arkham games and The Last of Us Part 1 tended to overuse detective vision to the point where it slowed down not just the gameplay but story as well.

Procedural “Infinite Story” Generation – No Man’s Sky Launch, Daggerfall

I remember how skeptical a majority of gamers were when Sean Murray talked up his infinite galaxy filled with procedural generation in No Man’s Sky. The game released and, well, a majority of gamers felt correct in their initial skepticism. No Man Sky’s launch lacked the touted multiplayer component that it now enjoys, but it also felt barren and void of meaningful content, something procedural generation often struggles with. An earlier example of empty fields of infinite procedural generated content was Bethesda’s Daggerfall. Daggerfall boasts a staggering 62,000 to 80,000 square miles of traversable land with well over 10,000 towns. It was simply the largest game at the time of release, dwarfing most modern open-worlds today. Yet, the dungeon design was … well, absent. And the actual content within such mammoth maps were repetitive and shallow, even if other systems were novel and fun at the time.

Memory Editing — Remember Me

On paper, Remember Me’s mix of third-person action combat, platforming, and puzzles in the form of Memory Remixing should’ve been the beginning of a new hit franchise. DontNod had the budget and concept for a longlasting series and rewriting people’s past to influence an outcome in the plot was the big selling point. And you don’t just rewrite memories in cutscenes, you actively re-arrange objects called glitches in the subject’s mind like a puzzle. It’s a truly terrifying ability, and one that would’ve rivaled the Animus from Assassin’s Creed if it was used more fully in the game. In the end, Remember Me was known for its subpar combat encounters and underbaked story. If only Remember Me could’ve remembered the Memory Remix mechanic enough for gamers to remember it.

Possess Enemies On-the-Fly — Mindjack

Who remembers the Japanese cover shooter game from the early 2010s, Mindjack? Yeah, probably not many. Besides the generic third-person shooting mechanics and forgettable sci-fi story, it had an innovative mind-hacking mechanic thrown into the mix. Being able to possess enemies and convert them to your side on-the-fly sounds pretty dang fun, until you realize the AI is awful in Mindjack. The repetitive level design and bland missions didn’t help the promising mind-jacking concept either.

Open-World Live Service Campaign — Anthem

Bioware is still chugging along today even after lukewarm releases like Dragon Age The Veilguard and Mass Effect Andromeda, but Anthem was the signal that the  studio just wasn’t the same anymore. Despite building a reputation for rich storytelling and immersive character interactions, EA made Bioware go the live service multiplayer route with Anthem. That decision didn’t go well with longtime fans or newcomers. The launch was plagued by glitches, bugs, and crashes galore. And the long-term looter-shooter loop didn’t do enough to keep players around. This is alll despite a genuinely fun jetpack system that allowed players to fly around with their mechanized soldier through the environment with ease. It’s a fun game to fly around in, but was a chore to actually do anything else.

Superhero Looter-Brawler – Marvel’s Avengers

Marvel’s Avengers was another game that cashed in on the live service looter band-wagon, with the advantage of having the Marvel IP tied to it. There was actually quite a bit of hype building up for Crystal Dynamics’ huge new AAA superhero game. It came out during a time of Avengers high and within a game industry that hadn’t capitalized on it yet. Needless to say, many gamers desperately wanted to pick their favorite Avenger and fight some baddies in a high quality action game. But the aggressive repetition within the mission design and lack of a post-game severely hindered what was supposed to be an ever-evolving game. If you’re going to make a game with the kind of structure of Marvel’s Avengers, at least build it around a compelling story and interesting gameplay.

AAA Episodic Storytelling – Telltale Games

Where’s Telltale Games been, by the way? Episodic interactive game dramas just aren’t the same since Telltale’s reign in the 2010s. Telltale’s The Walking Dead fomented a revolution in the episodic potential for smaller-scale video games. But it seems that ever since Telltale’s Game of Thrones, the formula just hasn’t seen the same kind of success. The stagnant cell-shaded art style contributed to gamers just getting tired of Telltale games, but the realization that choices were largely illusory or at least highly bottlenecked also likely played a role in the genre’s decline.

Time-Manipulation Shooter — TimeShift

Everyone loves a good bullet-time Matrix moment in movies or TV, especially so when we get to control it. TimeShift leaned into the slow-motion cool factor and then cranked it up a notch with full control over time itself. Centering a first-person shooter on time manipulation abilities just seems limitless in its potential. But despite the ability to freeze time in the middle of firefights, the game just felt lackluster to play. Like Anthem, the game had one cool thing going for it: the time-bending abilities, with nothing else to compliment that. The story, while told within a cool dieselpunk setting, was awkwardly paced and surrounded by forgettable characters. And the enemies were bullet-sponges without much thought put into their encounter design. We all love a good time-bending mechanic, but TimeShift just didn’t make a good game around it.

Cloud-Powered, Fully Destructible Cities — Crackdown 3

Gamers were surprisingly delighted by the chaotic sandbox that Crackdown 2 provided and hyped up the next game beyond what it was capable to deliver. The third game executed on the sandbox action hero concept about as well as MindEye did the GTA formula (okay, maybe not quite that bad). Where the second Crackdown delivered on laughs and mindless fun, the third drilled repetitive urban landscapes and bland mission design into our tired hands. Even the advertised cloud-powered destructible environments didn’t make the final cut into the game, except for the now-dead multiplayer mode that nobody played. Crackdown 3 failed to iterate or improve on the chaotic sandbox formula that fans loved about the second one, so much so that even Terry Crews couldn’t save it.

Anthem

Following the underwhelming release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, fans were expecting a redemption arc from developer Bioware with Anthem. The game looked really promising with all the markings of a great action-adventure game, but the final product was anything but. A rushed development cycle and poor management from higher-ups meant that much of the game’s creative parts were crushed under the weight of business decisions, and Anthem ultimately became a massive flop. There were plans to revive the game under the Anthem NEXT banner, but those efforts were also canned due to growing costs.

Skull and Bones

Skull and Bones was the developer’s effort to translate its adrenaline-pumping naval combat gameplay mechanics into a live service format. The game spent years and years in development hell, surviving multiple changes and differing creative directions before finally releasing just a few days ago. And suffice to say, the reception has been poor. It might be too early to call the verdict on this one, but the chance of Skulls and Bones’ sinking ship reaching the shores of live service success is looking pretty slim at the moment.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League

When Rocksteady announced Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, it felt like a natural evolution of the ideas we saw in the Batman: Arkham games. The prospect of playing as the anti-villains and engaging with the game over the long term was pretty tantalizing, but the first look at the uninspired gameplay more or less set the course for what was ultimately going to be a trainwreck. And to not much surprise, Suicide Squad also launched recently, and most fans have already lost interest in the game just a couple of weeks after launch.

Marvel’s Avengers

A live service game that lets you play as some of the most famous superheroes on the planet would be a formula ripe for success, right? Well, that’s what the developer thought when it laid down the blueprint for what would ultimately become Marvel’s Avengers. The live service elements felt shoehorned into the final product, and a lack of engaging endgame portion and grindy progression mechanics didn’t really help either. And to top it all off, the game released in an extremely buggy state making it one of the biggest flops in recent memory. While the developer did make some effort in turning it around into a success with post-launch DLC, it eventually became clear that many of its biggest problems were rooted in the foundational elements of the game and that wasn’t really something they could repair with a finished product.

Knockout City

Knockout City was a really fun multiplayer game with an interesting art direction and unique mechanics, and developer Velan Studios was able to accrue a sizable player base through those aspects. But player interest, unfortunately, waned over time due to a variety of reasons, and the developer started to withdraw support with falling player counts – resulting in a slow death of this once-promising multiplayer IP.

Hyper Scape

Yet another developer trying to capitalize on the battle royale hype train with Hyper Scape, a game that combines fast and fluid movement mechanics with unique features that were specifically catered towards streamers. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with Hyper Scape’s set of mechanics, and it did gain some success on an initial level but the game just wasn’t able to sustain that success in the long run.

Evolve

Evolve was one of the first games in the asymmetrical multiplayer space, and developer Turtle Rock Studios’ title had quite a number of fans waiting with bated breath for its release. It had some fun ideas going for it, but the developer failed to capitalize on the potential with underwhelming DLC content. The idea of killing fantastically designed monsters in a eerie atmosphere certainly was a great idea on paper but the execution left much to be desired.

Foamstars

Foamstars was a decent attempt at cashing on the popularity of Splatoon’s gooey splatterfest mechanics and taking those concepts to a new platform, but a rough execution meant that much of the potential therein was put to waste. Foamstars does have a few good things going for it, but the lack of engaging content and uninteresting progression mechanics give players more than enough reason to not be in it for the long run. Player counts haven’t been the best as of late, and Foamstars is looking to be on a downward spiral just a couple of weeks after launch.

Lawbreakers

Lawbreakers was an interesting attempt at creating a hero-based first-person shooter, and while some of its ideas could be traced back to Overwatch – Lawbreakers was anything but a ripoff. There were plenty of reasons why Lawbreakers never got the love that it deserves which range from poor marketing to uninspired art direction and high skill requirements among others. There was a dedicated group of players who enjoyed what Lawbreakers had to offer, but that group wasn’t nearly enough to sustain the game’s continuous development and maintenance costs – eventually leading to servers being shut down.

Radical Heights

The insane success of Fortnite caused a lot of developers to quickly rush into the battle royale genre and grab a piece of this newly discovered pie, and developer Boss Key Productions’ Radical Heights was one of those shameless attempts. It was a game that could barely pass off as a minimum viable product, and the fact that it lacked any sort of creativity meant that it was dead as soon as it launched.

Paragon

Epic Games tried to capture the lucrative MOBA market with Paragon, but failed to create much impact in the long term. The game managed to earn some faithful players when its early access version was first released in 2016, but complaints regarding its mechanics and quirks weren’t addressed in a feasible manner. There was a very clear distinction between the direction that the developers took with Paragon and what players wanted out of it, and with no common ground achieved – player counts trickled down and developers started to withdraw support, eventually causing servers to shut down.

Red Dead Online

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an undisputed masterpiece, and it continues to stand as a towering achievement for storytelling in video games. It’s pretty sad then that the online component of the game can’t be praised on a similar level, and a lot of that could be blamed on the developer’s inability to drop meaningful content updates to keep players hooked in the long run. The runaway success of Grand Theft Auto 5’s online component meant that RDO was mostly kept on life support, and that eventually led to player counts dropping and it ultimately turned out to be a failure.

Rocket Arena

Rocket Arena was yet another attempt by EA to cash in on the popularity of gaming trends, and the developer tried to take on the team-based mayhem of Overwatch with a few tricks up its own sleeve. Rocket Arena had somewhat of an interesting art style and compelling mechanics, but it also had an equal share of glaring issues ranging from game balance to progression and lack of content among others. Players quickly lost interest in the game soon after its release, causing a premature end to what could have been a promising IP.

Battlefield 2042

Battlefield 2042 was an ambitious project that tried to turn its multiplayer model into a live service format, but a less-than-stellar execution plan made it one of the biggest failures that the long-running genre has seen to date. A missing single-player campaign, basic communication features, and a general lack of content are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Battlefield 2042’s buffet of problems – and players quickly took note. Sales were obviously much lower than projected numbers, and those who did get into the game didn’t stick around for much longer.

The Culling

The Culling is yet another attempt by a developer to capitalize on the battle royale hype, but developer Xaviant Games clearly put out the game well before it was even ready. It suffered from a bevy of issues ranging from technical inefficiencies to half-baked mechanics and much more. It was a laughing stock of a game, and it continues to serve as an example for developers to not blindly rush towards hot trends.

DEAD RISING 4

The Dead Rising series had already suffered a bit of a dip with its third instalment, but Dead Rising 4 turned out to be the final nail in the coffin for what had at one point seemed like a major Capcom franchise. Unfortunately, it seemed like the game just never got what it was about the series that fans liked. From the questionable changes made to Frank West’s character to the ridiculously over-the-top tone that tried too hard to be funny, from poor design decisions (like the removal of timers) to disappointing boss fights, there was too much about the game that just didn’t work out.

PREDATOR: HUNTING GROUNDS

Illfonic’s asymmetrical multiplayer title Predator: Hunting Grounds was a flawed game in more ways than one, but for fans of the property, there was some fun to be had in getting to play as a Predator. With multiple different Predator types to play as and unique abilities to make use of with each of them, the game certainly had some interesting mechanics up its sleeve- even though not all of them were as well executed as they should have been.

But that success, as we now know, was awfully short-lived. Things progressively got worse and worse for Evolve once it had released, and in spite of the best efforts of Turtle Rock and publisher 2K, ultimately, nothing could save it from dying an untimely death. Evolve is little more than a memory now, not even playable (unless you’re looking for peer-to-peer matches). All that promise, all that potential- all of it, gone to waste. But how did we get to this? How did one of the most exciting new releases of its time end up being the failure that Evolve is now known to be?

Turtle Rock Studios was re-established as an independent studio by some of its original staff after Valve shut them down, and for their first project, they decided to swing for the fences. With their experience on properties like Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead, they knew they had the experience and pedigree to make another big multiplayer game, but this time, they wanted to do something new and different. Evolve was a concept that the studio had finalized way back in 2005, putting it on the back-burner at the time because they felt the technology of the time couldn’t do it justice. But with the advent of the PS4 and Xbox One, the newly reformed Turtle Rock decided that Evolve could be the perfect debut game for the studio.

Development was- let’s call it eventful. Turtle Rock had a hard time finding a publishing partner who would help fund and distribute their game. In spite of the studio’s pedigree, the 4v1 concept of Evolve was viewed as too niche and ambitious. Sure, asymmetrical multiplayer titles have become quite common in today’s day and age, but that was far from true back when Evolve was starting development (or even when it first launched), and there weren’t too many publishers who wanted to take a chance on it. The developer did eventually strike a deal with THQ- but THQ, of course, ended up going bankrupt. Thankfully for Evolve and for its developers, Take-Two Interactive ended up picking up the property, and 2K was assigned as the game’s publisher.

Officially unveiled in 2014, for a year until it came out, Evolve generated plenty of buzz and even more hype. A unique new multiplayer game offering an experience that can’t be found in many other games, all of it coming from the people who created Left 4 Dead no less- how could one not be excited by that elevator pitch? Its showings at events and showcases drew plenty of excitement as well, and pre-launch alphas and playtests suggested that the game was shaping up to be something special. 2K, too, put its whole weight behind the project, and decided to hype it up as its next big franchise. The stage was set for Evolve to take the world by storm.

Everything after the game’s launch was more complicated than its pre-release hype would have suggested. Evolve had plenty going for it, of course. The 4v1 framework, the tense atmosphere of its multiplayer matches, the uniquely atmospheric and excellently realized setting- all of these were just a few of the game’s highlights, and Evolve was rightly praised by no few people for all of these reasons. But it wasn’t perfect, of course- far from it. Its maps were too samey in their visual design and aesthetic, and playing as the monsters, disappointingly enough, quickly got repetitive.

The game’s balancing across its many maps and characters was also criticized. Most flagrant among its flaws was its progression system- new characters were unlocked at a torturously slow pace, and since the little morsels of the game’s story were tied to playing as new characters, that, too, felt slow as molasses to most who played the game. Like so many online games have done over the years, Evolve tried to artificially pad out its content by making its progression incredibly grindy, which led to repetition, and in turn, boredom. Unsurprisingly, plenty of criticism was reserved for this aspect of the game when it released.

Another major thing working against the game was its ridiculous DLC model. Coming out at a time when most developers and publishers still hadn’t found the right balance for how to structure post-launch support for their games, Evolve took things a little bit too far. Several characters and monsters were locked as DLC behind paywalls, even though the maps were all free. Even at launch, the game had well over 40 – yes, four-zero – paid DLC packs available. Predictably enough, Evolve was lambasted by a large number of players upon launch for its ridiculous DLC model, and in hindsight, it’s clear that that was one of the biggest factors leading to the game’s downfall.

Commercially, too, the game failed to make the kind of mark that many had thought it would. Oh, things looked more than a little rosy in the days and weeks immediately following Evolve’s release, with Take-Two Interactive saying that the game had enjoyed an incredibly successful launch, and lauding the 2.5 million copies it had managed to ship within just a couple months of launch. The company even famously said at the time that it now considered Evolve to be one of its flagship franchises, right up there with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. It’s fair to say that that comment hasn’t aged too well.

That initial burst of sales fizzled out very quickly. Evolve bled players like a faucet, criticisms for its balancing and progression and its DLC model (among other things) coming together to quickly turn the tide against the game’s favour. Before its release, Turtle Rock had said that Evolve would have the best and most consistent post-launch support for a game ever, but by October 2016, less than two years after release, things had turned so sour for the game that 2K and Turtle Rock ended up announcing that they would no longer support it with new content.

Briefly, the game even experimented with the free-to-play model, but that, too, enjoyed little more than initial success. When it transitioned to becoming a free-to-play game, dubbed Evolve: Stage 2, it attracted over a million new players- but that success was also short-lived. People didn’t stick around for long, and in September 2018, 2K shut down the game’s dedicated servers, officially calling time of death.

Evolve is unequivocally dead now. Its fate is a far cry from the lofty promises that were made in the lead-up to its launch. There was a good idea in there, and even a good game, but some bafflingly bad decisions buried it all, and now, what had once been proclaimed to be a new flagship franchise for Take-Two, is barely even something that people think about. It’s hard to imagine Evolve ever having a future even in the most far-flung and optimistic scenario- and sadly, Turtle Rock and 2K only have themselves to blame.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Unlimited SaGa

There are probably worse criticisms that a game could receive than “ruined the SaGa franchise” but that’s what Unlimited SaGa did. You wouldn’t know based on the game’s elegant box art with its butterflies and flowers, rendered in gorgeous water colour. It was all the more disheartening at the time because Square was releasing classics like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Drakengard, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Kingdom Hearts. Unlimited SaGa stands as proof that even Square could mess up big time (and not for the last time either).

General Mikiel – Strider

General Mikiel has no qualms about attacking from afar and then retreating when Strider approaches. And you can kind of respect that strategy but as a boss fight, having to chase him through several rooms before he finally hops in his tank and stands his ground? It’s…interesting, that’s for sure.

Changing Soldiers’ Names – Heroes and Generals

Free to play titles generally tend to make their money back through microtransactions, whether they’re cosmetic or pay-to-skip the grind. Heroes and Generals in 2016 decided to go an entirely new and dumb route however. When players would recruit new soldiers, they had to pay to change their names. It’s one thing if this is a user profile name or Gamertag but in-game soldier names?

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

“Killing monsters” is Geralt’s calling and while The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt didn’t have dragons or other monsters on the scale of previous games (with some DLC exceptions), there were still a number of beasts to fell. The creepy Leshens, hulking Fiends, Wraiths, Wyverns and much more await your blade. Fair warning though – the combat isn’t nearly as compelling as Monster Hunter, you can’t mount monsters, and much of the preparation falls to blade oils, potions and skills. It’s still fun though and the various side quests feel unique and interesting.

Microsoft has revealed the free Games of Gold coming to Xbox Live Gold subscribers in March and once again, it’s quite the impressive selection.

Xbox One users get the impressive first person horror title Layers of Fear from March 1st to 31st. From March 16th to April 15th, asymmetrical multiplayer shooter Evolve will be available. It doesn’t seem to be the free to play Evolve: Stage 2 that brings re-balanced mechanics, free content and other nifty additions. Unfortunately, Turtle Rock has moved on from the franchise to its next big game.

Meanwhile, Xbox 360 users get Borderlands 2 from March 1st to 15th with Heavy Weapon being available from March 16th to 31st. Thanks to backwards compatibility, these titles will also be available for Xbox One users. Though Borderlands 2 isn’t the Handsome Jack Collection version with improved visuals, it’s nonetheless an excellent addition to one’s library.

What are your thoughts on March’s free Games With Gold? Let us know in the comments below.