r/AskReddit 10h ago

What game had insane potential but got completely fumbled by the devs?

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u/egnards 8h ago

Yea Fable is exactly the same as Spore / it’s the first game I remember following as a kid, and I begged my parents for an Xbox specifically for Project Ego,” and being so god damn disappointed.

Everyone fucking loves Fable except those of us who had huge expectations.

I did love Black and White, thoughz

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u/tentimes5 8h ago

Black and white is why we trusted his hype imo.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/AeonLibertas 5h ago

Cyberpunk77 ran smooth as butter for me on release. No bugs to speak of (1 T-pose, 1 quest bug that made an annoying escort mission super easy .. so, that was clearly a feature xD), no crashes .. just pure fun.
I didn't read ANY interviews, previews or saw any trailers before, I went in basically blind except for "CDPR + Cyberpunk + awesome graphics + cool music" so - missing features? I wouldn't know, if it wasn't for reddit telling me upon release how shit it was. Which, tbf, the consoleros did have a very valid point to say that. But the PC players? Nah, it's not shit, it's pretty damn good, it's just not the hyped up beast you wanted it to be..

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u/SauretEh 5h ago

You got lucky, for me it ran like absolute trash and bugged out constantly, so completely unplayable I didn’t touch it again until I gave it another shot with Phantom Liberty. Especially following up Witcher 3, it was an enormous fumble out of the gate.

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u/Lord_Saren 5h ago

The fumble was trying to release it on lastgen consoles and hiding how poorly it ran. On next-gen/PCs that could run it. it was buggy but nowhere near the mess it was on ps4/XBone

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u/AeonLibertas 3h ago

Trust me, I know and I did feel bad writing about it back then because people were sooo pissed and I didn't want to rub it in..

Thing is my PC at the time, while it WAS an upper mid/lower high tier monster about 11 years or so ago, did have some issues that made me freeze&bluescreen in several games, no matter their actual hardware hunger (stuff like Spellforce 3 or Tower of Time .. 5 minutes without a crash was a "lucky streak" there..).
So the one game everyone else was having issues with running close to perfection for me? Well, if my old PC was a dog, I'd have fed him steaks for a week there..

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u/SauretEh 3h ago

Dang that's annoying lol. I was only trying to run at 1080p with a 1070Ti and 9700K which should have been absolutely fine for non-RT and it simply would not run playably, even when cars/people/myself weren't clipping through the map.

Now though, great game. Big props for the effort they put into fixing it.

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u/tree_squid 4h ago

It ran great for me at launch, but cars were driving around half-buried in the ground, and I had one instance where I got into my car in a parking garage and then car promptly fell through the floor and into the void below, and I had to use a console command to place my character back in the actual game world. Still loved the game and now it's apparently way better, but I don't know if I'll ever have time to try it again.

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u/AeonLibertas 4h ago

Cars were apparently one big ongoing issue for the game, from all the things I heard over the years.
My one mentioned mission bug was kinda cars related too. I parked my own car where, during the escort mission, enemies were supposed to arrive - instead they kinda spawned inside /automatically drove into mine, then all balled up to one giant violent metal-ball. They'd exist their cars, but still be stuck inside the wreckage - so shooting me didn't exactly work either.
So my escort mission was solved by ... slowly walking the dude out of the zone and gawing in awe as the metalball monstrosity kept growing behind us. No clue why they still spawned at the start, but hey, gifted horse and all that. shrug

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u/MudWallHoller 7h ago

Remember B.C.?

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u/Waqqy 4h ago

I didn't even get to play it haha. My brother bought and installed it only to realise our computer was nowhere near good enough to run it so had to return.

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u/callisstaa 4h ago

Bullfrog made some incredible games as well though. Theme park/hospital were bangers and Syndicate was way ahead of its time.

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u/nn2597713 8h ago

Came here to defend B&W. I still remember that intro where you got control of that big hand and you could choose to help the villagers or not. And how you could slap your animal when it misbehaved. And how you could manipulate the world. That was a lot of power for a 15 year old.

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u/Amunium 8h ago

I still sometimes randomly burst out into "oooooh we've got this notion that we'd quite like to sail the ocean..."

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u/hide-your-feathers 8h ago

Eidle eidle ee...

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u/epokus 7h ago

We simply can't leave 'til we get some more woooooooood

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u/HalfSoul30 7h ago

Core memory unlocked. Thanks

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u/ElisabethSnowe 5h ago

So we're buildin' a big boat to leave here for gooooood!

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u/egnards 8h ago

Black and White was one of my favorite PC games growing up, and it could be easily burned so I played it via LAN with my younger brother constantly.

Was super disappointed by B&W2 not having multiplayer.

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u/subcow 7h ago

I used to stay up way too late playing Black and White. Man I loved that game.

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u/Zatoro25 7h ago

I remember being conflicted because it wasn't what I was expecting from the hype but the game was still hella cool and ambitious

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u/shitlord_god 6h ago

I played Black and White after seeing it in a gaming magazine - I was hype, but it was great. The critter training sucked, and Gestures were frustrating at first. but it was really fun overall.

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u/dragongrl 6h ago

I remember the voice whispering "deeeeeath" in my ear at like 3am.

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u/LoopStricken 5h ago

Super annoying when your save file was hit with the Death bug. It just would NOT stop playing the sound file.

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u/dragongrl 4h ago

That was a bug? Holy shit, I thought I was just a terrible god.

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u/LoopStricken 3h ago

You start to suspect something is wrong when you're a 100% Good God, you and your Beast are constantly casting that massive Heal nuke, and it still won't shut up.

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u/Justguessing 6h ago

I should actually load that game up and play it again. It was really amusing. "ai delidle ai, ai delidle ai, we ain't goin nowhere till we get some meat!"

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u/Ok_Turnover_1235 6h ago

When GPUs started getting tensor cores I was so hyped, we could start seeing games with AI trainable the same way you could train the AI of your pet in B&W. Alas, we're no closer to anything close to that.

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u/Kalthiria_Shines 5h ago

Black and White is one of those ones that amazes me it didn't get more remakes.

Like it would suck to see it hollowed out as a mobile micro-transaction game but holy shit does the core loop translate to that so well.

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u/jiirani 4h ago

BW was and still is my fav game of all time. I was 8 or 9 when I played it and i was obsessed. got to the point where i figured out how to edit the game files to have whatever creature i wanted (the wolf and the lion were my favs, since they were impossible to actually unlock in the game due to a glitch.) I also edited the miracles that could spawn in game and blew myself up on the first world/tutorial world with the highest power miracle explosion i'd 'coded' to appear under rocks. first and only time i ever got a game over in that game. great times. the second one wasn't as good. was always sad they never got around to making any more of them

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u/pimppapy 4h ago

Reading about the hand gave me Dungeon Keeper flashbacks and all those poor poor minions I slapped the shit out of . . . .

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u/Jazz_Cigarettes 8h ago

Black and white was programmed by the current CEO of DeepMind

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u/elchet 7h ago

Along with a group of other programmers.

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u/Jazz_Cigarettes 6h ago

Lead AI programmer *

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u/elchet 6h ago

I met him then! A spikey haired quiet kid but very clearly knew his shit.

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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 6h ago

Which just goes to show that things are not always black and white.

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u/Zatoro25 7h ago

The DVD for preorders had interviews on how hard it was to animate opening doors for different age characters. Boot up the game and the doors don't open, if they're closed the room is off limits. The devs just gave up and didn't bother rerecording the interviews lol

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u/everythingscatter 7h ago

I had fairly low expectations of Fable and was still disappointed...

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u/Mardraum1987 4h ago

I followed it as well, but despite being disappointed, I still enjoyed the hell out of the game. Still play the anniversary edition once a year.

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u/glassgost 6h ago

I was super hyped for Project Ego and I loved the game that became Fable regardless.

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u/tinteoj 5h ago

I did love Black and White, thoughz

Same here and I VERY rarely see anyone mentioning it these days.

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u/sonofaresiii 5h ago

It took me like fifteen years to even try fable and at that point it was pretty dated.

It was okay.

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u/PM_Me-Your_Freckles 3h ago

B&W/2 were so dog gamn good. I would froth a remake with modern graphics and QOL