Posted 18th March 2024
All it takes to send a game into a spiral of negative reviews and a tarnished reputation for the rest of its existence is a bad day one.
The latest game on the chopping block is "STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection", the re-release which has been subject to a tsunami of negative reviews after being plagued by multiplayer issues, unchangeable controls and a hefty 50GB file size. Hell, only 3 servers were available on launch day. It boasts "Massive locations with up to 64-player online support" and with the game being on Steam's top sellers list before release you'd think Aspyr would be a little more prepared. The server capacity issue has since been fixed among other things after only a couple days, but its store page remains at 19% positive reviews from a total of 5600, leading to a "Overwhelmingly Negative" status putting off any further people considering replaying this classic from their childhood in its new form.
Of course, this is only the latest in a long line of bad launches. The one that probably springs to mind the most for people is "Cyberpunk: 2077". I remember booting up that game on my holiday off work on launch day, hyped up like the rest of the gaming community ready to play the new GOTY from CD Projekt RED, the developer that could do no wrong apparently. Lo and behold, I'm getting 20 FPS on the lowest settings during the character creation screen. Naive as I am, I trudged through it in the hope it will be better afterwards. Nope. I didn't even get far enough to see the other issues everyone else was reporting before I had to close the game. The phrase "worst gaming launch in history" was being thrown around, but 4 years later it has a "Very Positive" rating on steam and won the "2022 Labor Of Love" award.
"No Man's Sky" is also up there with one of the worst game launches in history, after promising a lot of features that simply were not there, and gamers quickly realised they were missing. In the game's defence, Hello Games have been releasing steady free updates for a long time and has clawed its way back to a "Mostly Positive" score.
So it's not all doom and gloom for the Star Wars re-release. With continuous bug fixes, QoL improvements and a bit of luck, the classic collection still has potential to be a great set of games.