No Man's Sky, near it's release. Starting out it felt pretty novel, and finishing that first repair of your ship, getting inside of it, lifting off, looking up at a distant planet in the sky, and just fucking going to it all without a load screen... I cannot overstate how insanely epic that felt!!
...and then the player experience hit a brick wall as you realize more and more clearly that the game you bought doesn't come close to the game that was advertised. Ya done got scammed!
Word is they're done a shitload to correct that last paragraph, but dude, that initial wound still fucking stings.
Yeah like I said, it sounds like they've done a lot to try to turn their product into something closer to what they advertised, but that doesn't excuse their initial deception.
If they were a car dealer or something, and advertised a souped up 2026 Ferrari, which their customers enthusiastically ordered en mass; only to realize upon delivery that they received a 2007 Honda Civic with the Ferrari logo sloppily painted onto the side, they'd be in jail. Because it's a videogame, the legal system didn't give a fuck, so they just let it slide, but what they did was 100% false advertising. They didn't just bite off more than they could chew, they stated clear as day that it contained a plethora of features that it simply did not.
Their decision to later send a series of free Honda-to-Ferrari conversion kits was a nice and extremely unexpected gesture, but doesn't absolve them of their initial crime.