How can Halo Infinite disappoint? Oh I forgot, there's still people that give 343i a chance. It's kinda like the new Star Wars trilogy to me. You could see where it was already headed in the wrong direction from its first movie. As good as Halo 4 was in certain ways, it was just not very Halo in spirit. Both game-design it was copying Call of Duty facets like forced POV cutscenes that pretend to be seamless to gameplay, and storywise you got a very melodramatic but dreary tone that had such a "What if Halo was REAL LIFE" feeling and it sucked. But that spark of Halo, the sense of developers having fun creating huge physics mayhems on battlefields and Big Guns TM seemed lost. It was like Halo had an over-perception of what it was, and they trended more towards the generic.
And Halo 5 is not even a letdown it was just abysmal. I didn't buy it and my friend didn't buy it. They said "no splitscreen" and we were like "How can you even make that decision when you're working on HALO." That sent the biggest message that they just do not understand what they're playing with. So respectfully, we've been out since then and no promises of undoing that message-mistake is gonna instil a lot of confidence in their future games. They had two games, as it is, to prove that Halo can be taken under a new team's wing, and they didn't really prove it to work.
Rather, if Infinite was a suprising success that could get some old Halo and Bungie fans to be interested again. I just don't see how it can possibly be a "disappointment" but again, I'm projecting myself on what I thought everyone thought.
My big one would be Last of Us 2. Naughty Dog has a "proven" track record, they've had everything going their way for a decade and yet, I feel there have been some signs, even back when it got announced, that we've reached a straw that is potentially about to break the camel's back. It's no secret they have the ultimate crunch cycles to live up to their own branding and reputation but what happens when you combine that with pretty major veteran developers drizzling out? It's not a disaster because the loss has been confined to just a few key members (but significant ones on TLOU 1) but it could be a disaster in the making.
They lost Bruce Straley, longtime game director and co-op director to Neil Druckmann because of burnout. They also lost the guy that Neil cited to have been the person who plotted out TLoU1's story's structure for everyone to keep things on track. There's just a few signs in the amount of delays on the game and subtle signs of worry from their employee's twitters that it's enough that I've begun to feel sceptical. It all adds up because for the longest time the way I've felt about the hype and marketing around it has been that just being a sequel isn't enough. They've shown sparse details but the bits they've shown don't have any intrigue. You're not raring to find out what it all means yet, and I see that as a warning after they spent money on producing pretty major E3 demos that somewhat failed to invite me into the premise of their new game.