The game is deep into development and the executives walk into the room. They point to the calendar, circle a date in red ink, yell out the word synergy to attract mates or something, and that’s that. What could have been great becomes we’ll fix it in a patch.
Hi folks, it’s Zaid and today on Aura Riot, 10 games that got messed up because of a deadline.
10. Final Fantasy XV
Ever since it launched back in 2016, fans have been endlessly speculating about how Final Fantasy XV eventually became that. I mean, you know what Final Fantasy XV is. That game was in development for over 10 years in one form or another. Originally, it was a Final Fantasy XIII spin-off and then it became a mainline Final Fantasy game. And for a while, it was going to be a trilogy that they were working on simultaneously before Square Enix came in and said, “Stop. You got all these random assets, guys. Just make a game out of them.”
I don’t want to say that what Square Enix did was smart or correct or good or anything. The final product is clearly a mess. It’s a hodgepodge of concepts and story threads that don’t connect. It’s a miracle it’s not a disaster. It actually has some solid memorable parts. I like a lot of it actually.
But one aspect of this game nobody is going to go to bat for, at least not in an ironic fashion, the absurd product placement. The amount of it is insane. Uh, the cup noodles side quest, most infamous, much as I like me some cup noodles. Come on, man. But beyond that, they had Coleman camping gear. The main character’s clothing was designed by Rowan. Luna’s wedding dress were designed by Vivienne Westwood. And they advertised American Express in this game. It was ridiculous.
Just the amount of product placement in this one game led fans to speculate. It was actually forced to come out in 2016, not because Square Enix wanted to finally get a product on store shelves, but because the product placement deals were about to expire. How exactly that would work, I have no idea. I don’t honestly believe that’s generally how that type of a contract worked either. But it would be pretty funny if it was true, would it not?
The most likely explanation is the game was in development hell for the better part of a decade. So eventually Square Enix got tired of waiting. But it’s funny to imagine the real reason was not troubled development or a scattered consolidation of nonsense, but in fact because Cup Noodle or American Express were like, “No, I don’t think that we can wait any longer for you to put our brand in front of millions of people.” Like really, they stand to benefit whenever that happens. So, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to believe this is the reason, but I really wish I could find something, anything corroborating those claims, cuz that’d maybe be the funniest version of rushing a game I’ve ever heard of.
9. Aliens: Colonial Marines
They had to release this game before the rights expired. This is more rumors and speculation. And one thing we came to discover putting this list together is that developers and publishers are really tight-lipped about why games get released when they do. Stuff like licensing deals and development timelines are only explained in the most broad way possible. So fans and people interested in the behind the scenes about what goes on with games usually just forced to speculate.
Overall, we know why Aliens: Colonial Marines sucks. Like right, the general mismanagement of the property is well known. But what we don’t know for certain is exactly why the game came out when it did. We know Sega acquired the rights to the Alien franchise in 2006, the same year they made a deal with Gearbox to develop a game. Seven years of chaotic development later, the game finally released in February of 2013 to abysmal reviews.
It was dull. It was ugly. It was nothing at the game that they’d confidently shown off years ago. The differences between the early trailers and the final game were so egregious, Sega was actually sued for false advertising. In response, Sega tried to throw Gearbox under the bus, saying they were at least partially responsible for the game’s possibly duplicitous marketing.
The bad blood between Sega and Gearbox started earlier than this, though. The long-standing rumor, which has been repeated by people within Gearbox and Sega, was that Gearbox had taken the money that Sega gave them to work on the Aliens franchise, and used that money on their own project, specifically Borderlands 2 and Duke Nukem Forever, which they’d recently acquired from 3D Realms.
Instead of actually working on the game they were contractually obligated to work on, they handed that game off to Timegate Studios and a few other smaller developers to actually make the game. Apparently, Sega found out about this temporarily, cancelled the game, and Gearbox took what was left. They were forced to put together something, anything, and to do it as quick as they could.
A lot of fans speculated that the reason Colonial Marines had to be out the door so quickly, I mean, relatively quickly, uh, from the point of inflection rather than the point of the beginning of development. Again, it’d been seven years. Uh, but they were about to lose the rights to the Alien franchise. Uh, which is one of those things that sounds kind of true, but actually isn’t.
Sega only made two games with the Alien license, but the second one, Alien Isolation, came out more than a year after Colonial Marines. I think it was less of an issue of the rights expiring and more about the deal Sega and Gearbox had made. Perhaps 2013 was when the Sega money spigot turned off completely. Maybe there’s some requirement the game had to be finished before Gearbox could move on to something else. I don’t know unless I can read the contracts. I literally cannot tell you.
What I can say is that the game was pretty obviously rushed. It was buggy. They felt incomplete in a lot of significant ways. Uh so certainly possible there were some hard deadline hang over the game’s head, but it’s also possible Sega was just tired of Gearbox’s consistent delays and set a hard date they had to follow through on to get a return on investment. Possible Gearbox just didn’t want to work on the game and they were being forced to complete it. They just got it done as quickly as sloppily as possible.
Any of these possibilities could be true, but unless Randy Pitchford decides to stop putting his foot in his mouth about other stuff and set the story straight, we’re never really going to know.
8. Cyberpunk 2077
Management had to get this game out by 2020. Cyberpunk in its current state is one of the all-time greats, but when it originally came out back in 2020, it was clearly a compromised product that was pushed out the door long before it was ready. The PC version had its problems. But the PS4 and Xbox One releases really felt halfbaked. They were so bad Sony actually pulled the last gen version for PSN for 6 months until CD Projekt Red could get it into a more stable, less broken condition.
Unlike a lot of other games we’re covering on this list, the fault can be placed on the studio’s joint CEO and the management board as a whole, who straight up said in a conference call after three delays, we as the management board were too focused on releasing the game. They wanted the product out by 2020, and come hell or high water. But even after a six-month delay in 2020, it wasn’t enough to get the game into the place it should have been.
Board members were surprisingly candid about all this, saying they didn’t spend enough time looking at the performance of the game in last gen, or really at the time, current gen consoles. Fans around the release date were also pointing a finger at shareholders, along with the studio’s upper management for forcing the game out before it was ready. But there’s less concrete evidence of that. It’s clearly possible, but if shareholders were really trying to make the most money possible and were applying pressure to release a product that was going to get literally just roasted for years straight, as it was worked on to develop into something that wasn’t a disaster, the shareholders would have had grounds to sue the company for doing the thing they wanted the company to do, which is just there’s enough of a logic loop here that I think it just sounds wrong to me.
I don’t know. Bottom line is that they had a hard deadline of 2020. Studio management obsessed over it. It hurt the game’s reputation when it launched because even though the game had been delayed three times, it should have been delayed again. I don’t think there’s anything else we could possibly say. There’s more truth than that. It just shouldn’t have been released when it was released.
7. Street Fighter V
They had to release something before the Capcom Pro Tour, I think, is probably what’s going on here. It did end up being a pretty solid fighting game by the end, but it took a while to get there. The original release version from 2016 felt like the free-to-play version of itself, missing even basic features like a versus CPU option. If it had been a free-to-play game, that probably would have made some of this understandable, but it wasn’t a free-to-play game.
It was a full-priced game that uh I don’t know, these threadbare fighting games were just not acceptable anymore. We are in a world where games like Soulcalibur 2 exist and have tons of content and features just to keep casual players engaged. There’s actually a lot of reasons why Street Fighter V came out in the state it did. A major one is actually pretty similar to what happened with Monster Hunter Wilds.
Capcom wanted a major game out before their end of fiscal year, which is March. They also wanted to release the game to coincide with their upcoming Capcom Pro Tour series, and that was planned to start just 2 weeks after the February launch. The game is a poster child for why you shouldn’t try to plan a bunch of stuff around an upcoming game, especially if that game isn’t already locked and ready to go ahead of time.
Street Fighter V was a game that through its own development um hell, only the core fighting game features were even close to being finished by the time it was released in 2016. And that’s precisely what launched, the core features. Capcom tried to justify how basic the game was by saying it was going to be a live service. It would be updated constantly, which it did happen. To be fair, the game did improve a lot over time. It just took a long time to get there, and the game’s rough initial release really did hurt its sales in the long run.
6. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
The late 2000s and early 2010s were a rough time for LucasArts. They used to be one of the top publishers and developers in the industry, but the seventh generation of consoles was not kind to them. The Force Unleashed was one of the few bright spots for them when it came out in uh 2008. It sold over six million copies as of July 2009. Game was a little rough around the edges. It had a couple of ropey parts, but it was fun. It also had potential to be, you know, something serious.
If a sequel could take the less refined elements from the first game and make them shine alongside the already refined elements that were already there, that could have been a big hit. It would take time, though, and developers were not given time. Reportedly, Force Unleashed II was made in just around 9 months. LucasArts was in a bad place in 2010, and they were so desperate for some kind of hit, they fast-tracked this game to get it out as quickly as possible simply to capitalize on the first game’s success rather than building on what they had.
This approach uh forced developers to scramble and put together whatever they could. Uh and all that mattered was that it kind of worked. There wasn’t room for innovation or expanding the story. They just had to do the most basic thing possible and hope and pray that there were no major issues that popped up during development. And surprise surprise, the final product was underwhelming. It’s about half as long as the original. Fewer enemies, fewer bosses, fewer locations. Basically, everything fans would want in a sequel was not there.
It’s just like a lesser version of the first game. I’m not going to lie and say that like nothing was fun about it. I like the second game, but doesn’t mean that it was satisfying or did what it needed to do. I mean, I like coffee with artificial sweetener in it, but it doesn’t do what sugar does, does it?
The release of this game was a desperate hail mary to save LucasArts, but it didn’t. Studio was basically undead by 2011, and by 2012, they got bought out by Disney along with the rest of the Star Wars Lucas Empire. And it didn’t even matter. The studio was doomed whether The Force Unleashed II got rushed out or not. But that didn’t stop management from forcing the teams to work on the game like Crunch, get it out like crazy in hell.
Like, here’s the thing. If they had put in the time, maybe two years, and released the game in 2012, just before getting bought out by Disney, and had a hit game with incredible reviews on the books just as that was happening. Could they have survived? It’s certainly more possible than in the scenario that happened, at least.
5. Star Fox Adventures
Another one of those entries where there isn’t a lot of fire, but there’s a whole lot of smoke. Star Fox Adventures released for the GameCube September 23rd, 2002 in North America. Literally one day before it was announced that Rare was acquired by Microsoft for $375 million. The long-standing rumor is that their Star Fox game was rushed out in order to get this deal finalized.
Rare couldn’t be developing a game with Nintendo characters on a Nintendo platform when they were owned by Microsoft. I mean, that would be heresy. That kind of cross-platform contamination just wasn’t a thing back then. Nowadays, these lunatics are—I mean, they’re still talking about releasing another generation of consoles, but I can’t really imagine why. If they’re not the future. That’s another discussion altogether.
It could be the case that Star Fox Adventures just came out when it came out and the Microsoft deal didn’t really have anything to do with the release date, but the game does feel pretty incomplete in a lot of ways. So, it’s easy to see the connection even if it is possible that Star Fox was Rare’s uncompromised vision for the game. I don’t know. I think the Microsoft deal played a big part. It’s an easy thing to point at when talking about why this game feels half finished-ish.
It’s another game that was in development for years and still came out feeling rushed. And the most obvious reason for that is Rare was getting out of the Nintendo business. They just didn’t care anymore or they figured that it was a bad use of resources. Nobody from either side has confirmed any of this, but come on. Microsoft announced the purchase a day after the game came out. What are you supposed to think here?
4. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Skate fans were desperate for just about anything back in 2015, but Pro Skater 5 was so insultingly bad that even the most desperate extreme sports fan wanted nothing to do with it. The game is a disaster, honestly. Like, you have to curse. This thing was so buggy and incomplete. It was an online-focused mess with graphics that looked slightly upscaled from a PlayStation 2 game.
I mean, Silent Hill 3. If you looked at Silent Hill 3 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 side by side, there’s no controversy in saying they look like they’re from the same console generation. And arguably, Silent Hill 3 has better graphics because it at least has art direction.
I mean, with games like Tony Hawk Ride and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD coming from Robomodo, it’s not a surprise Tony Hawk 5 sucked.
Activision had been lowering the budgets for each new game, so it’s not surprising that five ended up being bad at all. But there actually is another reason for the game’s poor quality. It’s pretty possible that the game was rushed out because Tony Hawk’s contract with Activision was going to end in 2015.
Again, we don’t have a full confirmation, but this one is at least not entirely fan speculation. Back in 2002, Activision put out a press release saying they extended their contract with the Birdman through 2015. So, it’s likely they had to release Pro Skater 5 before the end of 2015 cuz that’s probably when it was going to end unless there had been some kind of negotiations prior, which it’s hard to believe that there was.
It’s not completely certain. Like I said, it’s possible Activision may have quietly extended their deal, but it explains why the game came out in the abysmal state it did. It was meant for the next big mainline entry in the series, modern-day reinvention, and it was a buggy and clearly unfinished disaster. It was hard to believe Activision would just burn down its franchise for no reason. So, the contract expiring in 2015 at least kind of makes sense.
It’s fairly reasonable to say this is why though. In 2017, Tony Hawk mentioned somewhere that he was in talks to continue the franchise, which would mean he was in talks over the contract. So, to me, it just seems like there was a serious deadline hanging over this one that didn’t just ruin the game. It about ruined the entire franchise.
Thankfully, we have what we have now. And I wonder if somebody can take what’s there in Tony Hawk 5 and make it into a decent game or if they want to just pretend it didn’t exist and release a new Tony Hawk 5. I don’t care one way or the other. Honestly, I’m happy we’ve got one and two and three and four.
3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
Most of these games have come out all right despite all the inner turmoil. But one game that didn’t work, did not come together was 2023’s Modern Warfare 3. Specifically talking about the campaign, the rest of this game is clearly cobbled together, reusing assets from previous games or unreleased but already constructed maps. The campaign is where the game is so obviously a shadow of your average Call of Duty game. Though it’s short, it reuses sections of Warzone maps in a desperate attempt to pad out the campaign, and the story is so rushed and halfbaked that it just it really makes the whole thing worse.
Normally, the story of a Call of Duty game barely matters, but it’s so bad and halfass that it completely negatively affects everything around it. It’s easy to chalk this thing’s failure up to the yearly release schedule, but there’s a little more to it. At least for a while, there wouldn’t be a Modern Warfare 3. Originally, we were going to skip a year and continue supporting Modern Warfare 2 throughout 2023. The original plan was an add-on campaign with add new maps, new modes, but there wouldn’t be a Modern Warfare 3.
Then Microsoft acquired Activision in a landmark deal. And suddenly things changed cuz Activision had an advertising agreement with Sony that didn’t run for so many years, but had so many games. And basically, they had to release a mainline Call of Duty in 2023 to wrap up their deal so that Microsoft could take over the marketing of Call of Duty going forward. If they had skipped a year, the marketing would still be in Sony’s hands.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal now, but back in 2023, Xbox was at least toying with the idea of using this as a means to leverage console exclusives. Call of Duty was a possibility. It may not have come out on Sony consoles, but I mean, that’s not what shook out, but it does make sense. They wanted marketing for their most lucrative franchise to go in-house, and that’s exactly what happened.
Got your back. Got more debris in your area. Look around. Roger that.
2. 007 Legends
We’ve made it this far into the list, and only now is there a proper movie tie-in game. There’s so many games that were cut up, rushed, and slapped together because they had to come out at the same time as a movie. And while that practice was mostly gone by the Seventh Generation, there’s still the occasional game trying to follow these ways.
Meant to be released alongside Skyfall, 007 Legends was a game with a fun concept, but a botched execution. Even Eurocom, who were more than capable of putting out a pretty good game under a tight deadline, were unable to save this one. The entire reason this game was coming out as a tie-in to the most recent James Bond movie wasn’t even addressed in the game. Like the game didn’t include any of the planned Skyfall content until after the movie came out. They had to put the Skyfall stuff as a DLC bonus. It was supposed to be the actual final part of the game, but that never happened.
The game also only managed to be available for only a year or so. It was released in uh 2012 in December and pulled from all digital storefronts in January 2013, a little over a year.
1. Sonic ’06
I don’t think you can make a list like this and not mention this game. I think you’re engaging in pretty extreme oversight in doing so. This is an infamous game. It is the bad game. It has been such an easy punching bag for so long that it has generated actual honest to goodness Sonic ’06 Defender. It’s been 15 years since this game came out. So, people who play this game as clueless children have grown up having nostalgic memories of this game.
I mean, it’s still bad. I don’t think anybody is going to say that it’s good, but there are places in the game I’m willing to give it slack. It had a great soundtrack for one thing. It’s impressive that the game managed to come out at all given how rushed the development of this game really was.
For whatever reason, Sega absolutely had to get this game out by the 2006 holiday season. Not because they wanted to get that sweet Christmas gift bump, but actually because they wanted to get the game out with the 15th anniversary of Sonic 1. That’s why the game is officially just called Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s a big reboot that brings a series into the next generation.
To their credit, it was an ambitious game, just far too ambitious given the time and manpower they had assigned to work on it. Basically, everything came out wrong. And I don’t think anybody’s going to argue with that. But I can at least appreciate what they were trying to do. There was just no way they were going to pull it off in around a year, though.
The game began development right after Shadow the Hedgehog came out November 15th, 2005. So that’s less than a year for their big reboot game that was meant to completely reinvent the franchise. Even as far back as 2006, games generally took like two years or so to get made. The added fidelity of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and having to develop both versions at the same time, which keep in mind these were two very different sets of hardware. It’s not like porting games now is a lot more complicated and time-consuming back then.
So, they had all that to worry about and they still somehow were able to release a game. Kind of an accomplishment even if the game was a barely functional glitch fest with unbelievably bad load times. If Sega had any sense, they would have delayed the game. Cuz who cares about Sonic the Hedgehog 1’s anniversary? No one really other than like maybe somebody goes today on this day. 15 years ago, Sonic the Hedgehog was released and people were like, “Wow, a platformer can be fast.”
I would just release the game when it’s finished, right? Anniversaries come and go for Mario or Samus or Crash Bandicoot or Gex. I don’t know. Nothing happens though. Like somebody mentioned something a lot with Mario, I guess, but again, it’s like a social media post, guys. And it wasn’t bigger back then.
I mean, this game threatened to kill the entire franchise. It was that bad. Thankfully, it didn’t. And they made much better games later, but you know, it was a real rolling momentum problem with bad Sonic games there for a while, and this one was the big daddy of them all. That’s a big one.
That’s all I got for you today. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. And as always, I thank you very much for reading this blog.