I’ll say this, no one ever plans to do a bad job. Especially in a creative field. Everyone wants to do the best they can, and depending on how complex things become, it can be insanely hard to make all the pieces fit together. A great leader is one who can find all these good ideas, and make them sing together in harmony. And in today’s age, those leaders have bosses, who may not have harmony in mind.

On to Square Enix. I have no idea what’s going on in this place, aside from the fact that the number crunchers are on some serious meds. Aside from FF14 and FF7 remake, they have struggled to get anything out the door that made a lick of sense (Babylon’s Fall) or remotely within sales expectations (Outriders). Marvel Avengers has to be a painful realization on top of it all. There’s a meme somewhere in here that as a publisher, it just can’t get it right.

Forspoken had a really weird vibe in terms of generating buzz. Amy Hennig (from Uncharted fame) was a big name involved here, so there was some confusion in what was being presented vs what people had come to expect. A game with good writing can be undone with gameplay, and vice versa after all.

The real kicker here was that it appeared few media outlets (IGN is the only one I can find) were provided any release codes to the game, meaning that they’d get their hands on it when the public did. This is no different than movie reviews, where if critics aren’t allowed to see it, then that’s usually a very bad sign. And well..

Back to my first point. I am convinced that everyone involved here had the best of intentions and wanted to knock this out of the park. The end result is a good reminder that even the best of intentions do not make a great result, and further re-inforce the need to not pre-order until the game is actually out.

Been a really, really long time since a game before release actually ended up being impressive. Maybe Fallen Jedi? There’s just dozen more examples on the other side of the coin.

Hopefully, Square Enix can learn something here and find some new groove where they can release games that people are interested in playing. There’s only so long you can just give away money…