9 Promising Video Games That Were Totally Ruined By Publisher Meddling

When the developers at Free Radical announced the follow up to their beloved TimeSplitters trilogy, Haze, most people assumed that it was going to be another unique, original release from the studio. The title's publisher Ubisoft on the other hand had an entirely different vision for the game.

Originally supposed to tackle the horrors of war long before the likes of Spec Ops: The Line did the same thing, the plot of Haze focused on genetically enhanced super-soldiers who used a drug called Nectar to increase their combat abilities, with the downside being that it caused hallucinations and masked the true nature of the violence they were causing.

It was quite an ambitious premise, but problems started brewing when Ubisoft began to pit the title directly against Halo in the press, demanding changes to the game and becoming obsessed with adding in new features and content.

The developers knew the game already had fundamental problems, but when they asked for delays to fix them, Ubisoft requested that the team worked on new features instead, wanting to see sandbox-like levels, crafting and, weirdly, the ability to play dead.

With the core problems not fixed, the publisher brought in its own producers and took control of the title, creating one of the biggest disappointments of the last generation in the process.