10 Potentially Great Video Games That Were Dead On Arrival

3. Haze

Yet another creator-killer on this list, Haze might as well have been Daikatana€™s second coming. The many errors which had doomed Ion Storm were repeated once again here, with the same hubris, same lengthy developments and same massive changes plaguing the title€™s development. Promising true innovation and a hard hitting deconstruction of the worst aspects of first-person shooters with Haze, Free Radical had everything they could have asked for. Trusted thanks to their success with the Timesplitters series, the studio was offered a lengthy development cycle to introduce a truly revolutionary AI system into their games. This was when the problems began: Not taking the time to actually check their task-based AI system would work on the Playstation 3, Free Radical suddenly found their main gimmick could not function with the console - before they had even started the developer was already making a massive loss of the game. Did Free Radical even take this as a hint to tone down their marketing? Nope. With marketing ranging from licensed rap songs to interviews openly making pot shots at the developers of Halo, they were determined to compete with the biggest names out there. Ubisoft then demanded countless revisions to the story, with elaborate pre-rendered trailers made based upon unfinished plotlines with no solid concept behind them. Unsurprisingly, the release was a disaster. With generic gameplay and obviously out-of-place assets it€™s message was merely a ham-fisted €œcorporations are bad, soldiers are violent man-children€ plot which made Avatar look professionally written. What once looked like a deconstruction on par with the later Spec Ops: The Line, later proved to be nothing more than a bland, poorly made shooter.