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Games that were released blatantly unfinished

Wind Waker isn't unfinished per say.

It's just unsatisfying and laughably low on content thanks to how rushed it was.

But the game has pretty visuals and so people are willing to forgive a lot.
 
Halo 4.
The game felt like it just abruptly cut right before the climax and it lacked a final boss battle.
Or did it just suck?
 
A lot of examples from modern Sonic, but even back when the series was good Sonic 3 technically wasn't finished until later than year with Sonic & Knuckles.

Also I think a lot of games from the PS1/N64 era apply to this. Great games or not, a lot of games from that era were released with a lot of key concepts missing just because developers were learning the limitations of the big 3D jump and what worked and what didn't. Like wasn't Mario 64 originally going to have like 30 courses but a lot had to get cut out to meet deadlines?

Also Final Fantasy VII's original Japanese release 9 months before the west got it was released without the extra Weapon bosses.
 
Dark Souls 1.

10 minutes into Lost Izalith and you can tell this was the area where the "uh oh we're running out of time/money" talk was had.

Missing textures, boss fight that was lazily designed that Miyazaki had to apologize for, and the game was hyping up the place the whole course of the story as some crazy demon hub where shut went bad and it was so nothing.
 
padlock said:
1393437-outpost_1_cd_cover.jpg
Click to expand...

Holy shit. I played that game. Had no idea what I was doing at the time, but... wow.

What was unfinished about it?
 
Ame said:
Can't believe nobody posted Medal of Honor: Warfighter. The game was the definition of unfinished. It's basically the reason the franchise is dead.
Click to expand...

I only played like the first few levels, they were so bad I didn't play anymore to see that it was unfinished. My first tag on this forum was "does not much care for MoH: Warfighter".
 
Not enough attention paid to:
padlock said:
1393437-outpost_1_cd_cover.jpg
Click to expand...
Althane said:
Holy shit. I played that game. Had no idea what I was doing at the time, but... wow.

What was unfinished about it?
Click to expand...
It was literally unfinished AND still had very positive reviews.
Stolen from Wikipedia said:
Initial reviews of Outpost were enthusiastic about the game. Most notoriously, the American version of PC Gamer rated the game at 93%, one of its highest ratings ever for the time.....

Indeed, many of the features described in the game's own documentation simply did not exist in the game at all. These included the ability to enter diplomatic relations with the rebel colony and the ability to build roads, orbital colonies, or the mass driver. Many of these gameplay aspects were later patched in, though in appearance only, as many of them failed to have any meaningful effect on gameplay.
Click to expand...
The chutzpah to review a beta.
Imagine Streetfighter V getting 90+ reviews touting the coming single player modes? Scandalous.

Shame because it really is a great premise. Not sure how the sequel fared.
 
I mentioned this in the thread about it the other day, but King of Fighters XII is a blatant example solely because most of the new characters in its immediate followup, KOF XIII, have empty data on the KOF XII disc. The game is literally an unfinished version of King of Fighters XIII.

Similarly, Street Fighter III: New Generation and JoJo's Venture have data for characters who appeared in their followups, SFIII Second Impact and JoJo: Heritage for the Future. For example, Hugo actually has data in the original version of SFIII, but wasn't added until the update. Third Strike was a ground-up, whole different beast of its own, but New Generation is pretty much just a rushed-out version of Second Impact.

Spaced Harrier said:
A Zelda game without dungeons, it would be like a fighting game without Arcade mode.... Oh right yeah.
Click to expand...

Good thing Wind Waker had dungeons!
 
KOTOR 2, Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines ofcourse.

Neverwinter Nights 2. The game ends in a very abrupt and disappointing way. It is ultimately saved by the Mask of the Betrayer expansion.

Stellaris: A work in progress.

All of them really great games though.
 
Galak-Z really rubbed me the wrong way launching without all 5 of its seasons. Did the last one ever come out?
 
Collingwood said:
I was going to post MCC, but realised it was broken, not unfinished. Technically there's a difference.
Click to expand...
There's a difference between the two words, but they're not exclusive. MCC was broken because they rushed it out the door before it was finished. Solving bugs so that a game is actually playable is usually considered part of the process of finishing it.
 
NBA Live 11

6a0115709f071f970b0133f4b385e2970b.png


Short development window, rushed to be finished, changed completely mid-way through, released with some ridiculous game crushing glitches discovered within mere hours of release. And EA Pulled the game off digital services, gave refunds, and then didn't make an NBA Live game for almost 3 years.
 
fernoca said:
One thing is unfinished and another is rushed. All the examples in the main post are rushed games, not unfinished per se.
Click to expand...

Yep, I was gonna make a post saying basically this.

And they're only rushed in comparison to expectations established by their predecessors, viewed in vacuum they're complete and fully functional games.
 
Star Ocean 5 comes to mind for something more recent.

Though that more screams of little to no budget and poor scheduling than being unfinished.
 
Dark Souls gets mentioned for lackluster endgame areas (really mostly just Lost Izalith and to a lesser extent Demon Ruins), but the real travesty is the half-baked covenants. Darkmoon Blades' hunting of sinners was clearly supposed to be the province of a covenant in the service of Velkna that got cut.

Gravelords is all kind of borked, you have to use the item used as the covenant's currency to gravelord other players to get them to invade your world so you can kill them for the item you just used to gravelord them. Also, you have to kill the covenant leader to progress the game, which opens up a bonfire you can warp to, only there's no reason to ever warp to it because you just fucking killed the only reason you ever would.

Mess.
 
The Albatross said:
NBA Live 11

6a0115709f071f970b0133f4b385e2970b.png


Short development window, rushed to be finished, changed completely mid-way through, released with some ridiculous game crushing glitches discovered within mere hours of release. And EA Pulled the game off digital services, gave refunds, and then didn't make an NBA Live game for almost 3 years.
Click to expand...

"NBA ELITE 11"

and the game was cancelled like a week before release.
 
Oooh, now I remember.
FIFA 13 for Wii U, or rather, FIFA 12.5 Wii U Edition.
How much development time did that thing get again?
 
My favorite part of MGSV is when
Eli and the kids fly off into the sunset on the back of a levitating robot powered by anger
and the game decides never to tell what happens to them.
Mission 51 can bite me. Its not in the game so Its not canon.
 
Phediuk said:
Zelda: Wind Waker -- the game takes forever to really begin, since after the tutorial area, you must go through a really shitty forced stealth section. Then, you have to collect 3 medallions, but there's only 2 dungeons; the water medallion is just abruptly given to you. Sailing anywhere takes way too long. You can explore, but there's not much to find except Rupees. Then there's the infamous second half of the game; at one point, you have to go to ice and fire themed islands, which suggests two more dungeons; but instead, you just sail up to them, grab the item at each one, and leave. In the last act, the plot grinds to a halt, and you have to spend a few hours fishing for Triforce pieces. After that's done, you go to the last dungeon, which is just lame; here's all the boss fights again, but in black and white. What fun!
Click to expand...

I really hated fishing for Triforce. It was so boring that I almost quit about halfway though. Once I was done grinding through that bullshit I was just happy to see the end of the game.
 
Space Base DF9, sadly. Yes, the development plan was never a guarantee - but they shouldn't have used it in their advertising if it wasn't.

AndrewDean84xX said:
XCOM 2. Still performs like shit on great PC's.
Click to expand...

I ran into some *awful* bugs in the final mission, yet to call XCOM2 unfinished is to render the term functionally meaningless.
 
Alienfan said:
Rage - seriously, watch the ending on YouTube
Click to expand...
So, I just watched this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDKhlRCxNQg
It says it's the end of the game and has a spoiler warning, but I'm not sure that's correct because...

Well, nothing happens. Literally nothing that I can recognize as being relevant to storytelling takes place. It looks like a graphical tech demo of some kind. Is that really the ending?
 
Surprising nobody has mentioned;

BF4_Trials_dblwidedeal_627x335_en_US.jpg


Battlefield 4 was THE broken/unfinished game of the current generation, and it's still in a poor state. So much so I still cannot complete the single player campaign on PS4 due to my save file being corrupted yet again. For the fifth time.

I couldn't believe there would be worse to come from a major company until this surprised us all...

Driveclub_box_art.jpg


Yeah.

:/
 
I bought Kasumi Ninja for the Jaguar day one. Took it back the next day cuz I thought it was broken. Exact same thing with Trevor Mcfur. It didn't have music. What a horrible console.
 
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