10 Overhyped Game Mechanics That Were A Complete Disappointment

The video game industry runs on hype. In order for a game to get good coverage upon release, it needs to excite a potential audience with something that sets it apart from other titles.

However, because capturing your interest is so important, sometimes developers sell their project a little too well, leading to general disappointment and many bitter outcries when expectations aren't met.

This is especially true in the case of overhyped game mechanics. Developers will promise that their games will include revolutionary new features that will completely change the way you think about certain genres, only to present you with something really generic, or worse, an unfinished mess that feels all the more insulting because of the promised potential.

At one point, these mechanics were the talk of the town. They were supposed to be the next big thing, but in the end, they delivered nothing but disappointment and resentment. If you fell for the hype back in the day, the following list will probably hurt all the more badly.

L.A. Noire is one of the more ambitious Rockstar projects when it comes to innovation. The game’s goal was to create a realistic 1940’s detective experience by making the witnesses and suspects express the most subtle emotions on their faces with the latest motion-capture technologies.

Well, “latest” by the standards of 2011, which is probably why this revolutionary feature ended up looking more comical than immersive. Instead of serving as a window into the suspect's psyche, the expressions your character’s interviewees made were either stupidly easy to read or so grotesquely contorted that you had to double check if you were still talking to a human being and not some sort of malfunctioning shapeshifter.

You can’t deny L.A. Noire's ambition but its core mechanics simply aren’t as impressive as its developers anticipated, especially when you come back to the game nowadays. It makes for an entertaining spectacle in the vein of a circus show, but if you’re looking for a proper interrogator simulator, you unfortunately need to search for it elsewhere.

Well, at least Detective Phelps’ drawings looked really good.