# Games Missing Major Advertised/Reviewed Features **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [August 29, 2016, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368 "2016-08-29T02:20:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/1 "2016-08-29T02:20:26Z")
No Man’s Sky is getting a lot of bad press lately for failing to deliver several modes of gameplay that the developers talked up in interviews, to the point that Steam and Sony are relaxing their normal refund policies to placate customers. But it’s far from the first game to come out advertising major functions/features that don’t exist. I’d like to discuss some of the more notable flops from the history of computer games, and keep the discussion to games that completely lacked major features, not just games that were a bit of a disappointment or that had problems with a feature. The earliest one I know of is Outpost from the the early 1990s. It was a game where a colony ship made it to another planet, lost contact with Earth, and split into two colonies. You controlled a colony and had to manage resources, build up your colony, and compete with the other colony (though not militarily). It was an amazing, engaging concept that a lot of people fell in love with. But the actual game lacked most of the functionality it was supposed to have - numerous things you were supposed to be able to just weren’t there, a lot of parts of the game just didn’t seem to work, what did work was so simple it wasn’t engaging, there wasn’t a game end, and there was a bug where your colony would sometimes just die off for no reason. The developers left a snarky note in the release notes about how ‘sometimes you have to let your baby fly’ as the only explanation for the incompleteness, and people got seriously pissed. Sierra actually offered rebates for years after the flopped release, but it hurt their reputation for a while. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/2 "2016-08-29T02:26:24Z")
Master of Orion 3 sounded absolutely amazing on the official forums pre-release. I don’t think I’ve ever played more than about six hours total of MOO3 because it was just so bad. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/3 "2016-08-29T02:59:31Z")
Fable for sure. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/4 "2016-08-29T13:26:43Z")
MOO3 is not the kind of game I’m looking for though - people didn’t like the way MOO3 , but it wasn’t lacking any major features AFAIR. It’s not like they talked about how it would have ship design and the ship design menu was greyed out, or they said there’s be a diplomacy system but all you could do was declare war on other races. Doesn’t seem like this is sparking a whole lot of interest from the forum though. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/5 "2016-08-29T15:01:14Z")
Spore is probably the poster child for this: Missing ocean evolution stage, skeletal structure means nothing (they suggested that you could have a stronger bite, run faster, etc), city design was watered down… really, it’s huge list. Before NMS was released, people were already comparing it to Spore. Peter Molyneux games (Black & White, Fable, Godus, etc) are notorious for having insane promises and goals that exceed what can practically be fit into a game with existing technology and then releasing a far watered down product. I assume we’re really looking for major game play features and not things like lighting and texture effects shown in early builds/demos and missing from the final product (Aliens: Colonial Marines, Watch\_Dogs, Witcher 3, etc) ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/6 "2016-08-29T15:13:01Z")
Remembered another. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was supposed to have functioning vehicles. People have also found additional missing levels and missing monsters within its files but the vehicles is the biggest thing (the released game has regions and monsters but no functioning vehicles). They’ve been added back in various mods with questionable levels of success since the required physics were never finished. ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/7 "2016-08-29T21:18:13Z")
Out of curiosity, what features were supposed to be in No Man’s Sky? I watched a friend play for a bit the other day, and while wandering around the planets was cool for about fifteen minutes, after that it did kinda seem like they’d forgotten to put a game in their game. ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2016, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/8 "2016-08-29T21:33:55Z")
Twilight 2000, developed by MicroProse and published by Paragon, belongs here. IIRC, even the manual acknowledges the fact that some of the skills from which one chooses when building characters ended up having no use whatsoever. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/9 "2016-08-30T01:48:31Z")
> [@](#): > > MOO3 is not the kind of game I’m looking for though - people didn’t like the way MOO3 , but it wasn’t lacking any major features AFAIR. It’s not like they talked about how it would have ship design and the ship design menu was greyed out, or they said there’s be a diplomacy system but all you could do was declare war on other races. That’s definitely overstating the case for MoO3; several major features were completely cut from the game for extremely dubious reasons, most notably the ethos system which was promised but never appeared. IN fact, I’m not sure if they ever even really planned to implement it beyond a vague wish to do so, since it doesn’t appear to have been an integral part of the game. Certainly the diplomacy system was a let down even when compared to the fairly simple system of MoO2 and in general the AI was worse. > [@Simplicio](#): > > Out of curiosity, what features were supposed to be in No Man’s Sky? I watched a friend play for a bit the other day, and while wandering around the planets was cool for about fifteen minutes, after that it did kinda seem like they’d forgotten to put a game in their game. Basically all the features ever, and no, I’m not joking. There are entire videos showing off interviews and promises that were sort of dropped. Most of these came in the form of vague statements which may skirt the thin edge of permissability under the law, but which were clearly unethical in the extreme. ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/10 "2016-08-30T04:07:46Z")
The poster child for this would be [Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing) It was advertised as a racing game, where you drive an 18-wheel semi-trailer to deliver illegal cargo while outrunning the police. Instead, there’s just a truck (no trailer), no police, and the “game” is just a simple race around a poorly-designed track. It’s not even a “race” _per se,_ since the AI opponents don’t move and the timer is merely cosmetic. Often cited as the worst video game of all time, it caused many game reviewers to re-design their rating systems in order to allow a zero-star rating. The same developers later released [The War Z,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infestation:_Survivor_Stories) a multiplayer open world zombie game which advertised many things that weren’t in the game, such as multiple large game worlds varying in size, a skill point based leveling system, player versus environment combat, hundred-player servers, and private servers. The ads were so deceptive that Steam took the unprecedented step of refunding everyone’s money. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/11 "2016-08-30T05:20:50Z")
I know I already mentioned Molyneux but I’d be remiss to not bring up perhaps the greatest example of this: _Curiosity_. [Wired](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/game-bundle-to-aid-godus-winner) explains it… > [@](#): > > In 2012, Peter Molyneux founded his new games company 22Cans and released the experimental game app Curiosity (adding the subtitle to avoid confusion with the Mars rover). Presenting a massive cube comprised of billions of smaller cubes, users tapped away each layer, with a prize for whoever reached the centre. According to Molyneux, the prize was “life-changingly amazing by any definition”. > > That prize turned out to be a starring role in Godus, 22Cans’ next game, and a small financial stake in the games’ success. Won by the Edinburgh-based Henderson, then 18, he was to become the game’s “God of Gods”, a standing that was to be battled over by players in the god-sim’s multiplayer modes. However, those features never launched, and two years after Curiosity ended, Henderson had been forgotten. Essentially the only feature to Curiosity was that the person reaching the center would get an awesome prize. Not only did THAT not happen, it didn’t happen because features from Molyneux’s next game ALSO weren’t ever implemented. It’s a cascade of broken promises. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/12 "2016-08-30T05:32:47Z")
bioshock infinite was going to have had a bunch of stuff that if it was implemented would of been like the gang territory sub game in saints row … didn’t they make an outpost 2.0 which fixed a bunch of things ? ---
**Author:** ![Infovore](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/infovore/32/420_2.png) [@Infovore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Infovore)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 6:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/13 "2016-08-30T06:07:07Z")
One of the early WoW expansions advertised a Dance Studio, and people are _still_ bitching about the fact that it hasn’t appeared yet. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/14 "2016-08-30T06:24:38Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Remembered another. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was supposed to have functioning vehicles. People have also found additional missing levels and missing monsters within its files but the vehicles is the biggest thing (the released game has regions and monsters but no functioning vehicles). They’ve been added back in various mods with questionable levels of success since the required physics were never finished. same with the the 2nd knights of the old republic game… ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/15 "2016-08-30T07:16:26Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Peter Molyneux games (Black & White, Fable, Godus, etc) are notorious for having insane promises and goals that exceed what can practically be fit into a game with existing technology and then releasing a far watered down product. Yep, Every Peter Molyneux game ever after he founded Lionhead. Does anyone remember Battlecruiser 3000AD? Was also promising all kinds of unbelievable stuff for years and the main developer Derek Smart was infamous for publically getting in pissing matches on forums about the game. Was eventually released, buggy and not having anywhere near what was promised: > **[Battlecruiser 3000AD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD)** > > Battlecruiser 3000AD is a space trading and combat simulator video game developed by 3000 AD. It was designed by 3000 AD president and lead developer Derek Smart as the studio's first project. > Announced in 1992, the game underwent a lengthy and troubled development history. It was first released against Smart's wishes in 1996 by publisher Take-Two Interactive for MS-DOS and Windows and negatively received for its incomplete nature. A patched version was later released for Windows by publisher In... I’d also put Daikatana in this category, John Romero made all kinds of promises about the AI of the computer players that help you out, and of course they were dumb as a sack of buffalo shit when it was released, constantly getting stuck on walls etc ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/16 "2016-08-30T17:46:33Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > That’s definitely overstating the case for MoO3; several major features were completely cut from the game for extremely dubious reasons, most notably the ethos system which was promised but never appeared. OK, I don’t remember much of the release of Moo3 (I was a big fan of 1 and 2, but never even started interest in 3) and remembered it as just a bad game, not one missing whole sections. Since that’s the case, it certainly qualifies. ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/17 "2016-08-30T17:57:57Z")
> [@nightshadea](#): > > didn’t they make an outpost 2.0 which fixed a bunch of things ? Outpost 2 was a completely separate game from a different developer, with a new new box and new purchase price that wasn’t really much like the first game. IIRC it was a decent RTS with a building focus, not a colony sim like the first one was expected to be. > [@coremelt](#): > > Does anyone remember Battlecruiser 3000AD? Was also promising all kinds of unbelievable stuff for years and the main developer … was infamous for publically getting in pissing matches on forums about the game. That’s a good example, I remember the multi-year flamewars about it. The game was so late and so completely missing features, and he was so arrogant about it. I don’t know if he still looks for Battlecruiser discussions, but he does troll the web for his name on current discussions so he may visit here since you spelled it out. There was a big multi-forum flamewar with him just last year over some new game. > [@](#): > > I’d also put Daikatana in this category, John Romero made all kinds of promises about the AI of the computer players that help you out, and of course they were dumb as a sack of buffalo shit when it was released, constantly getting stuck on walls etc Yeah, I remember the hilarity around that game. The computer players were supposed to be a major feature and everyone thought they were absolutely terrible. On a similar but lesser failure, I remember Galactic Civilizations advertised and had reviewers talking about a super amazing AI that was way better than anything ever done, but it turned out to be pretty much the same as every other 4x AI when released. It wasn’t a failure like Daikatana’s suicidal companions, but it definitely didn’t revolutionize single player game opponents. ---
**Author:** ![GESancMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gesancman/32/2923_2.png) [@GESancMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GESancMan)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2016, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/games-missing-major-advertised-reviewed-features/764368/18 "2016-08-30T18:50:24Z")
I remember around ten years ago there was some big game in a series that was promised to include multiplayer, but was initially released without it. I think it was Civ 4, but maybe it was one of the Heroes of Might and Magic games. I don’t care about multiplayer, so it didn’t bother me a bit, but I remember there was a huge uproar over it at the time. Multiplayer was later introduced in a patch or expansion. I’m not finding anything about this in the respective Wiki pages.