10 GENIUS Concepts Wasted On Buggy Video Games
Sometimes, just having a great idea isn’t enough to save a busted game...
A colleague of mine once said “game ideas don’t have any value [until they’re proven in-engine]”. Though I don’t agree with the sentiment (I think creativity extends just beyond farting out the mere seed of a potential game), I do agree that you need quite a bit more than just a great idea to make a game stellar. After all, dreaming big is only the first step - making them come true is the tough bit.
Come on, the first guy who put chicken and tarragon together was an absolute genius, but if he couldn’t bake to save himself, his half-cooked, sludge-like pastry on his chicken and tarragon pie wouldn’t win him the Great British Bakeoff, would it?
In an industry increasingly happy to play it safe and release one bland, homogenous game after the next, it can be extremely frustrating to see an exciting and unique concept wasted on a so-so (or worse, a terrible) game.
But, in some ways, I’m still happy that these games exist - risks taken, properties revived - even if they missed the mark. But if you’re anything like me, you still curse what could have been...
10. Gigantic
I don’t think anyone could hear “a game where a 100ft-tall Griffin fights a Hell Serpent controlled by AI, and players fight as satyr archers, angry minotaurs and owl swordsmen to harvest power to give them strength to win the ongoing Kaiju battle” and think “ugh, seen it all before, mate. NEXT.”
This “next big MOBA/hero battler hybrid” was to suffer a painful fate, though - the PC/Xbox One free-to-play title was plagued with financial issues, with Motiga and Perfect World (developer and publisher, respectively) struggling to get enough of an initial playerbase to consider it financially viable, and it was live for only a single year.
With an exquisite art style and character designs (as well as a roster well-balanced across the board), the multi-stage battles in Gigantic would increase in intensity until reaching a dramatic crescendo where your humongous master beasts would scrap in the central arena. The only problem, though? Due to Motiga/Perfect World’s limited resources, the game would often be laggy, buggy, or crash out entirely.
As a...er... gigantic Gigantic fan on Xbox One, it was painful to see it a victim of its release window - one oversaturated with hero shooters - despite it being genuinely unique.