There are times when you read/watch about a new video games coming out and you can see the signs that the game will be horrible outright. After years of disappointments I can summarize some of the signs:

ONE

The developers said it's a mash/mixed/combination of (insert a popular game here) and (insert a popular game here) also add more popular game titles to bait more suckers in.

TWO

No gameplay video just flashy prerendered movie trailer (Looking at you Battlefield)

THREE

Listless member of developer team looks like he's trying to run away immediately after the interview. This guy either quit soon after or fired after the game was done.

FOUR

The indie developer acting like he's God given gift for gamers (Yes, I'm talking about Phil Fish. Eff that guy)

FIVE

The dynamic duo: The big mouth crusader Peter Molyneux and and the corrupt wonder Randy Pitchford

SIX

A kickstarter game with no trailer just a jackass talking about idea for a game while an invisible guy playing ukulele in the background with the same tune over and over again.

Yeah those are my red flags. What's yours?

The marketing is about everything but the actual game content.

SEVEN

Broadband internet connection required to play the game.

This is all I need to know.

Most games are dissapointing

when game devs say "It just (gherkin) werks"

when game devs love to push the leftist narrative (Stop ramming your Leftist Politics into my entertainment PLEASE)

when devs wanna push infinite gender pronouns (two genders not a different gender for every breath you take a day)

when every minute it's Virtue signalling. "my little brony, friendship is tragic"

when women have man faces with serious man jaw (mass effect andromeda)

This!

EIGHT

HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE! YOU HAVE TO BE HYPED AND BUY THIS GAME! PREORDER PREORDER PREORDER NOW!

NINE

No betas/testing for multiplayer

(But they might call the game in beta to remove criticism for incomplete products)

TEN

Contains Loot Boxes (or 'Surprise Mechanics' as EA tries to relabel them)

ELEVEN

There's 10 different editions... And none of them give you everything.

Yeah Mad Max Steam version(ings)

TWELVE: any game with the words Wasteland in them or bandied around within a desert bomb dropped setting

THIRTEEN

"procedurally generated"

FOURTEEN

GOG rejected it. I'll be the first to admit that sometimes GOG's curation fails spectacularly, but for the most part the games they reject, end up with a mixed or worse review rating on STEAM.

"It's the Dark Souls of X"

- The publisher aggressively pushes pre-orders combined with review embargos

- Will include "optional" pay2degrind micro-transactions (so it'll be much more artificially grindy than had the game been designed without them to encourage you to purchase the 'optional' play-it-normally DLC).

- "Optional" DLC that's basically a normal chapter of the base game that's been split off for the sake of having DLC and will require a GOTY / "Definitive" re-release to put it back in again

- Sky-high VRAM requirements (due to being designed entirely for consoles 'unified memory' with zero optimization for PC porting)

- Where "we're making a hardcore survival game" = you have to eat 22 meals per day, collapse with exhaustion after running 50 metres and freeze to death on a mild autumn day

- Where "we're making a hardcore crafting-centric game" = you have 8x layers of resource trees just to build a basic spade or axe

- Where "we're making a hardcore trading-centric game" = you just sold 10x diamond rings and still can't afford a can of beans

- Where "we're making a hardcore RPG shooter game" = artificially crippled 'peashooter vs tank' gunplay for 75% of the game due to over-exaggerating the importance of 'levelling up'

- Where "we're making a 'new old school 90's style shooter' = shoving Minecraft textures into Unity Engine and "remembering" how all 90's games must have = procedural generation, floaty mouse controls and no quicksave

- Open-world for the sake of open-world

- "No, there's no modding, but we're planning on Creation Club!"

- "RPG + 'designed for controller'. "No it's NOT dumbed down, it's 'streamlined for the modern audience'"

- "You'll need a $500 CPU + $1000 GPU. This is because of the 8K textures we're shoving in before blurring them all out again under 32x layered Depth of Field shaders, and motion / radial blur. That's realism, that is."

- "We'll add rebindable keys later on in a patch"

- "Dark-Souls + Rogue-Lite like..."

- "Pre-release QA? What's that? Sounds old-fashioned."

- "Yes, it'll have lots of Quick Time Events, but ours are the good ones!"

- "Our E3 shots won't be dumbed down. Probably."

- "Our save system will be single-slot and checkpoint-only. We plan on our large, complex game being released bug-free!"

- When an advert for a new Bioware game appears next to an article by former Bioware Lead Creative Designer of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age Origins with the quote "I quit Bioware after DAO, because their future direction isn't where I wanted to go"

Fifthteen, my eyes.

Ouch... whats wrong with Wasteland? Wasteland and Atom RPG are good games. Probably best in genre since Fallout 2.

If Todd Howard says on-stage "It has 16 times the detail!"

"It just WORKS".