When they spend large sums of money sending their customer relations team to other countries to show off their slightly relatable game.

xD

Doesn't surprise me, the idea works.

After visiting that site, I must do something to make myself sane again...

Generally if a game trailer or page starts purely selling 'features' most of the time it is a game not worth playing. Features are not the reason people play games, they play them because they're fun and well crafted.. so show them that. I see it so many times 'x, y z-lite in a ABC setting'. Nope.

There are exceptions to this, but for me it is a huge recurring theme in videogames I've avoided over the years. The same with the first Anthem demo they released back in the day, it was so obviously scripted I knew marketing was taking over. A good game can speak for itself. I already knew it would suck when it was announced on the spot purely because of the way they presented the game. It happens so often they try to mask something and if you've seen so many trailers and played so many games you sort of get an eye for it. You'll never be 100% right but it's helped me avoid countless games such as the menial-shopping-list open world AAA games that release dime in a dozen nowadays.

Another big thing is the bandwagon games, I don't remember when it really started happening a lot but I believe after League started getting big these trend-following games started cropping up more and more. I avoid pretty much all of them because most of the time they provide something that already exists and are just in it for the money.

Looking through the comments, it seems my opinion is pretty similar to a bunch of you all. I always hope to be disappointed but generally when I find out a game releases that made me feel this way the posts start flooding in day 1. The same with Fallout 76, saw that coming from miles away.

Do you happen to be a random game journalist playing, say, Cuphead?

lol, lord no., but i sympathize. ive watched some lets play of cuphead and there is no way my fumble fingers could get thru one stage, lovely art tho :)

The game has more middleware logos than actual permanent programmers.

It is developed by some studio you've never heard of, or even moreso, the developers are massively downplayed.

Sometimes like in boxing, a developer is a jobber. It's their job to be bad. Take Arzest, Game Loft, and Data Design Interactive.

Rather than standing on the merits of the actual product, the marketing refers to it as an X-Killer or directly dunks on some other game.

This is subjective; but if you look up the dev team and find either: An alarmingly high ratio of dyed to undyed hair or a fursuit, one may wish consider this a red flag.

An easy one is refusal of interviews, sit downs, or conferences.

Whenever an old brand logo appears, and yet none of the old talent is there. Say anyone invoking the name of Acclaim, Atari, or so on. Moreso when the studio was a questionable name in the first place.

If you need a spreadsheet to figure out what the preorder bonuses/special editions are, that's a sign that there was more effort put into by marketing than the developers.

When you get the feeling that hypothetically you could run the game on only 256 colors and most of them are the same exact tints and shades of gray/brown/murk.

During the previews, they show the map ingame, and you can't actually see any of the map contents due to a plethora of tags.

The website for the game either doesn't exist, is grossly overfilled with marketing buzzwords, or is something absurdly vague, like a countdown. If you're proud of a product and want to pump people up, you'll show it live, warts and all.

Attempting to puff up map size as an indication of anything. Minecraft smashed the vase years ago, let it rest.

A delayed game can be fixed. A rushed game will have a forever tainted release, even if it eventually gets a positive turnaround like NMS.

When the tutorial is explicitly referenced as such, instead of seamlessly being integrated into the game or put to one side as an action guide. (This is recent.)

When you find the materials of the game using made up words to reference real concepts; forcing you to read an ingame glossary.

If you have to refer to external materials in order to understand the whole plot or miss on critical things because you forgot that Mr. Berkshire on page 122 of the extended universe manual mentions the Excalibur 2 was dropped in the sewers.

That also applies to movies.....long delays and big reshoots, scream "Bad movie on it's way"/ Dark Phoenix is the latest example. Good films don't get delayed and don't need to have one third of a movie rewritten and reshot after principal photography is done.
The last sentence is also applicable to movies and TV. The term "reimagining" means "let's throw everything that is good about movie or game out the window and replace it with crap we pull out of our ass because we think it'd trendyill

Ohh, look the alt right guy is calling someone else a troll.

If a game's marketing is trying too hard to make it look exactly like a hit game. That screams " ripoff clone".

Too many Sqeenix games I like, even recently. Also, Capcom. And CDPR. And also, Sony and From Software. These are all AAA devs/pubs I like.

The game development process takes so long to finish. Although this may not apply to all games, I really do have a bad feeling regarding Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. Just a hunch. I hope the game turns out great to be honest, as I've been waiting for its release for a long time.

It have been said already but EA, Activision etc and broken live service games shipped unfinished and it's life hangs by a slim chance of a completed roadmap but thankfully i have been doing a good job avoiding all these games.

Even then hearing live service and roadmap announcements is one of the few things that actually pisses me off enough to want to invoke the magical word: Would you KINDLY fuck off and stop making this garbage for like forever.

Final words. I know there's some games that are considered to have a fair "live service" model like PoE and Warframe but personally i just despise online games and too many of these live service games seem to have horrible practices that only escalate in shittiness every year that passes.

When the beta opens just days (or hours) prior to the full release.

Fair enough, and yes, Capcom's been killing recently Now if they only put something on GOG...

Tnx for the reply!