Trailers are a double-edged sword for video games. They can build hype like none other, but they can also deceive you in many ways. This can be from graphics to actual gameplay that doesn’t actually exist in the game.
Because of this, games sometimes fall flat on their faces after a trailer that promises the world and delivers far less than that. We’ve seen it happen many times over the years, and that’s why it’s always smart not to get hyped by a trailer alone. You can’t know all that much from a few gameplay snippets and, often, it’s far less information than that.
We’re going to check out a bunch of games that had trouble living up to the epic trailers they provided.
Some of these entries will include slight spoilers for their related games to highlight misleading trailers.
10The Day Before
The Lie After
The Day Before
The Day Beforewas an amazing hype train when its trailer debuted. It looked like we were getting an open-world, MMO version of The Last of Us. The trailer was full of great graphics, sharp-looking gameplay and, overall, a pretty compelling MMO in the vein of The Division.
It’s one of the most deceptive trailers ever made, as the reality of the game is so far from what it was supposed to be. The sharp shooting, slick graphics, and overall gameplay are nowhere to be found, as the actual game was awkwardly controlling with terrible gunplay, mediocre graphics, and filled with so many bugs thatit’s a wonder if it was ever released in the first place.
This was Steam’s most wish-listed game at one point, making the result all the more hilarious considering how bad the game actually was.
9Final Fantasy 15
Oh, What Could’ve Been
Final Fantasy 15
Fextralife Wiki
This one really hurts me. While I likedFinal Fantasy 15, it was far from the game promised in the original trailer. And I mean really far. To the point that the majority of the gameplay in the trailers wasn’t even in the final game. Entire scenes were gone to make the story in the trailers make absolutely no sense in context to the final game.
There are entire city segments shown in this trailer, and you don’t even touch the city throughout the game in this capacity, as well as amazing-looking segments with Leviathan that were severely cut as well. There are also teased fights that would’ve looked amazing to play through in the game that aren’t in the actual game at all.
We all know by nowthe game went through development hell, but it’s clear that things were completely rebuilt from the ground up at some point, and so many Final Fantasy fans still wonder “what if?” when it comes to what Final Fantasy 15 was once promised to be.
8Tom Clancy’s The Division
Immersion Removed
Tom Clancy’s The Division
The Divisionis a decent time, but compared to the amazing trailer that dropped, it felt pretty underwhelming. Other than the noticeable graphic downgrade that Ubisoft is all but known for at this point, the engaging story that is promised in the trailer was nearly non-existent in the game.
The trailer teases what seems like organic combat situations, where, in reality, it’s all set up like an MMO, with instanced areas that trigger enemy aggro and nothing really close to what is being promised in the trailers.
The hype for this game was unreal due to these amazing trailers and, while the game wasn’t horrible by any means, it was a noticeable let-down for anyone that played it, because it just simply didn’t live up to what the trailers said it was going to be.
The Tone Was Lost In Translation
Dead Island
The first trailer forDead Islandwas absolutely brilliant. It shows afamily on vacation getting attacked by zombiesand the horrific action that takes place all while being shown in reverse. It’s so unique and there really isn’t any other trailer like it that I can think of.
It promised a dark and somber view of what a zombie attack on a resort of vacationers would look like, and the chaos that would ensue. Yet, the actual game was a far cry from the tone of the trailer.
The actual game was a melee-focused dark comedy of sorts that was far more focused on jokes than the terror, and the action was more in line with a first person Dead Rising rather than a first person The Last of Us.
It wasn’t a terrible game, but I think the Dead Island that existed in the trailer would’ve been the far better game.
6Watch Dogs
We Can Forgive, But Never Forget
Watch Dogs
The trailer forWatch Dogsis one of the most infamous examples of a trailer that lied to us. There was so much that was promised that didn’t really make it into the actual game despite the fact that the game was actually pretty good on its own.
Let’s start with the most egregious lie told to us;the graphics. It’s an insane downgrade from the trailer for the game that seemed to really give the PS4 a reason to exist at the time. Sadly, those graphics were downgraded immensely in the final product, resembling something closer to the PS3 than the next gen everyone was expecting.
The gunplay also looked very interesting with some impressive animations and acrobatics, and the effects shown off were incredible as well.
When the game released, though, what we got was less an example of what the next gen of gaming would become and instead, just a solid open-world shooter with some cool hacking mechanics. Everything was downgraded from the combat to the hacking importance and the effects, but we were at least still left with a decent game.
5Fallout 76
It Just Works
Fallout 76
Fallout 76should’ve been a surefire hit. Fallout online, what could go wrong, right? Well, that initial trailer did a great job of hiding what a disaster the game was at launch.
First, it looked positively awful, with graphics that were lesser than Fallout 4 in many ways despite coming out 2 years later. The lighting effects in the infamous Country Road trailer are gorgeous, but they were nowhere to be seen when the game actually released.
The trailer promised a classic fallout experience with others online, but what it failed to mention is that there were actually no other people in the game. The NPCs that made the world so rich and interesting were replaced by tapes and robots. It was jarring, and it was such a shock. It received such negative reaction from the players that they immediately made a DLC adding people to the world.
Today,it’s actually a pretty good game, but it took a long time to get there and was one of the most hated-on games when it first launched.
4The Last of Us Part 2
We Wanted Joel
The Last of Us Part 2
The trailer forThe Last of Us Part 2didn’t just show a better game than the one we got, it completely lied to us. It put Joel into scenes he doesn’t even appear in during the game and even led to people considering suing Naughty Dog for false advertising.
The actual game had very little of Joel as he was taken out in the opening hours and only appears in flashbacks the rest of the way. Naughty Dog tried to hide this in the trailers by making it seem we would be playing as Joel and Ellie, but instead, we got Joel and Abby and the absolute hailstorm of hate that came with that decision.
I think the game would’ve been better had we gotten a lot of Joel,thenhad him ripped away from us in the way he was. It would’ve hit harder. We’d spent 7 years waiting for the game to come out, and to have him gone so soon wasn’t a cinematic gut punch, it was just a dumb decision.
The game where we played as Joel and Ellie and Abby is the one that was promised, but the actual game is just a lesser than what the trailer said it was going to be.
3BioShock Infinite
The Lie In The Sky
BioShock Infinite
Bioshock Infiniteis a pretty good game, but for many fans of the series, the trailer promised so much more than was actually in the game.
There are multiple powers shown off in the trailer that just did not make it into the game, as well as different scenes and especially downgraded graphics that were only marginally better than the first game.
The biggest letdown was the powers shown off though, with ones like turning an enemy’s gun against them, and having Elizabeth looking like some kind of retro futuristic mage in combat. Overall, the experience just felt far more muted than what was promised.
There was clearly some kind of restructuring of the combat behind closed doors, and that’s a big reason the actual gameplay doesn’t feel all that much like the experience that was promised in the initial trailer.
The Master Deceiver, Peter Molyneux
Fableis the undisputed champion of over-promising and under-delivering. Whileit’s still an iconic franchise in many respects, it always lied to us. Those lies began with the first trailers.
The big promises of choice and consequence, how the world grows with you, becoming good or evil, and the massive differences in each playthrough; It was all pretty much lies.
The actual game offered very little in the way of choice and consequence, and the most evil thing you could do most of the time was aggressively give someone the finger while yelling “shit”. It was the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of games that do choice and consequence, but it was really the only game of its kind to have that at this time, so we ate it up.
Fable will forever be a series to have a quizzical eye towards no matter what they promise, and it all started with the trailers.
1Too Human
What Could Have Been
If you weren’t around for the 2008 gaming scene, you’d be shocked to hear thatToo Humanwas supposed to be the next big thing. While Bioware was stomping the field of RPGs, Too Human was supposed to be the big contender to the Mass Effects and KOTORs of the world.
The hype was absolutely enormous, and the trailer got people talking. The graphics, the animations, the tone; it was all so interesting and not something we’d seen at the time. It felt like a sci-fi Witcher, which was saying something considering that game had barely picked up any popularity at that point in time.
The actual game was far from what it seemed it would be though. The controls were awful, the animations looked years behind the other action games, and the story, which was one of the big selling points, was an absolute mess.
We all thought we were getting the next big thing from the trailer, but the actual game is now known as one of the biggest letdowns in video game history.
