What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations?

Cyberpunk 2077 is the poster child for this. That game was easily 7/10 even when it came out as a buggy mess. Now that it's had a few years of polish, it's much better than 7/10.
But the public perception was bad mostly because of unmet expectations. I don't know if I'd call them "unreasonable" a they were set by the devs themselves, but either way, the game was and is much better than a lot of people think.
- It was announced way way way too early.
  Announced "It will be finished when it's finished" on that way too early reveal.
  Years later, it's not finished, but tough shit, the studio is out of money and the shareholders are pushing for release.
  It was released unfinished. Oops.
  Years later, it is now closer to the original expectations.
  Still no wall-running, so a lot of things they hyped and were expected are still unmet.
  The Flathead was supposed to be a thing you kept throughout the game, but they never got the AI pathing right with it, so they dropped it.
  
  The salt is real. (And the edits.)
- The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn't live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn't allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.
  Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn't meet it. And that's kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you're charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.
  
  I don't know what to tell you, I played it on Xbox just fine. Played the whole game through from start to finish and had fun. I believe the issue was with last gen consoles specifically.
  And again, I think a lot of the criticism was reasonable. But my point is that the game itself was and is fun, but suffers because of the bad reputation it got at launch thanks to some ill-advised (intentional understatement alert!) decisions by CDPR.
- It was a mess on last gen consoles. It's it even purchasable on them anymore? I know Sony stopped selling it at one point.

No Man's Sky is still, in my opinion, trying to make up for what it was on release. It's a great game now. Not my jam as I find it far too expansive for my tastes, but I can't knock it for what it is today. I think it's a work of art and the seamless planet travel is pretty damn cool.

I really enjoyed Watch_Dogs, despite the shit it got at the time.
- I got it for free and really enjoyed it. The main character is the epitome of beige and bland generic gruff white dude but the game did quite a lot new and had some good ideas.
  The second one was even better, it's very meme heavy in its characters but if you can tolerate them the gameplay is even better and the story is better too.
  
  I thought the protagonist was great. It was a man coming to the realization that he wasn't so much a heroic renegade as he was a malicious bad guy.

Metal Gear: AC!D
It was such a great adaptation of stealth-action, but people didn't like that it had "Metal Gear" in the name. I absolutely adored the card collecting and deck-building, and the very deep, seemingly-emergent combos you could pull off.

Unpopular opinion because it's so recent, but I think Starfield is/will be in this category
- It will be if they give it some TLC like CD PROJEKT and Hello did with their games. There’s a lot to like about Starfield, but it has problems that have a big impact on gameplay. I don’t want to deal with that inventory system for the hours it will take for me to enjoy the story. In general, the menus kinda suck. They really need to work on the ergonomics.
  
  Bethesda never does that and from what I've heard the modding community still won't switch away from Skyrim. They, too, are tired of Bethesda's shit and they already invested so much time in Skyrim to fix it up they might just as well continue.
  
  The problem with starfield is not technical but that the writing is pretty crappy in general. Technical or feature problems can be fixed (cyberpunk or no man's sky did it) but the story can't be extensively rewritten without making it a different game.

I'll throw my hat into this ring with Monster Hunter Rise. I often spend my time browsing monster hunter content and almost every time Rise gets brought up it's just to talk about how much worse it is than World. I'll say it now, yes I also prefer World to Rise, but holy fuck do I still love Rise.
To start with, let's compare the two. Monster Hunter is developed by 2 teams who take turns making games. World was developed by the mainline team who are known for more grounded and polished games. Rise was developed by the portable team who are known for flashier and more experimental games. Most players started the Monster Hunter series with World (it's Capcom's #1 best selling game of all time after all) and so going from the high detail immersive World to the action packed fast paced Rise was extremely jarring. A massive portion of the hate just comes from the fact that it was different.
Also, as you can probably guess from the name, the portable team makes games for portable systems, such as the Switch, which immediately gives them less power to work with system-wise. Couple this with the fact that Rise was developed during the pandemic, and Rise was really dealt a rough hand. Graphically it's a massive downgrade from World, and it even ended up releasing without an ending or any non-scripted elder dragon fights.
In spite of all this, even though Rise lacks a ton of the personality and charm of World, it's still an absolute blast to play! The combat is stellar, and while it may not have the weight World had, its fluidity and high adrenaline action makes it some of the best in the series. The sunbreak expansion especially really improved the game in every single way, fixing a ton of the issues people had with the base game. I feel that most players already moved on after base Rise and so didn't get to experience that improvement unfortunately.
TL;DR play Monster Hunter Rise. It's really good. Just don't go in expecting the same experience as World.

Maybe No Man's Sky. I'm not too sure what people think of it now a days but it had a massive turn around since launch
- Absolutely
  To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don't blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,
  But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.
  When people say it's shallow, I wonder if they didn't even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn't even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.
  Because of that I'm also really looking forward for their new game.
- Eh. NMS is unfair because it is literally a different game today then when it launched.
  
  Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.
- Yes, NMS was overhyped and completely failed to meet expectations. But it was also complete garbage on release. 7/10? Not even close. It's one of the only games I ever bought on physical disk that I returned because it was so bad when it wasn't unplayable. That wasn't a problem with expectations, that was a terrible fucking game.
  
  Sure, but this post is not about 7/10 games on release, it's about 7/10 games now vs their perception now.

I think Castlevania : Lords of Shadow's IP kind of worked against it. It's useless to non- fans of the series, and it's jarring to those who are.
It's like it is constantly wondering if it's a new take on the universe, or just a whole new one with useless, random references thrown in. There are lots of people completely displaced from their original time and background, and I am not talking about the game's big spoilery reveal, but completely random ones with no point.
One example among many : in the main series there is a character who is a 20th century German artist who tragically turned mad because he lost his family during WW2. He is "reimagined" into a random bat-faced vampire general in the 11th century. His name is just mentioned in narration before a short fight and he's never seen again.
Despite all of that, the game is great. Mostly linear, definitely has some pacing issues, but it's pretty good at telling its story, it's a decent spectacle fighter, and the environments are great.
Sequels... Yeah, not so much. But I really liked the first one. I just feel the Castlevania name only set it for something it wasn't though.

Maybe a bit unpopular but... Cyberpunk 2077. I followed this game intensely since it was first announced with nothing more than a short animatic sequence. It went through all kinds of changes, and many of those were publicly documented before the launch of the game and still had people complaining that they were not in the final game.
It did kind of start with pretty pie in the sky promises, but over thirteen years those promises were tempered. The hacking stuff most people point to is technically all there. Just not as presented in that extremely obvious pre-rendering. Many of the other disappointing things like cops not chasing you should have been expected. They were adamant about it not being like GTA and the cops wouldn't give chase the same way.
Somehow, everyone got hyped to shit about a lot of stuff with this game only ever mentioned way early into production while they were still brainstorming ideas they wanted to do while I was watching every single thing CDPR put out about it and ended up getting exactly what I expected. My biggest disappointment with the game is the overhype and overreaction leading to them cancelling a lot of planned additions and likely even completely changing the scope of the DLC.
That isn't to say I think it's a flawless masterpiece; I expected The Witcher 3 but sci-fi, and I feel that's what I got. Great story, well done dialogue, cool world, and fun combat. I see a lot of bad decisions and unfinished pieces, but as a long time gamer I can't say I don't expect that kind of shit from pretty much every game. Even the best games have those parts where you can clearly see the budget dropped off or management pulled some bullshit.
- I'm on my 3rd play through. It's still janky and buggy in some regards, but my god the theme, the characterisation, the stories, the plot. It's how you put together an open world game, where immersion relies on the art of story telling.
  Someone tell Todd Howard. Maybe the next Bethesda game won't be so incredibly bland.
  
  The v2.0 changes were actually pretty good, made me want to start another playthrough. I really like the new metro system even though it's such a small thing considering everything else they changed, but it's fun to be able to hop onto a metro to get somewhere. The game is already pretty immersive and that small detail just adds to it
- I just did a replay recently and it was a lot of fun. They really nailed environments, sound, really the whole look and feel of the thing. Gameplay too; I did a monowire netrunner build this time and it was wild. Unlike anything I've played before, really. But I did have to cheat a bit to get there.
  There used to be a monowire you could go grab out of a box right from the start, but they took it out and locked access to any monowire behind street smarts. I added a console to give myself one and added some cyberware while I'm at it, because why not chrome up?
  This was, in fact, totally fine. The locking out doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with balance.
  I did have to spawn myself a bunch of these new shards to increase my cyberware limit, though, because they decided to cap them out and add an item to unlock them. Again, my going crazy with it really didn't disrupt balance at all.
  So why? Because someone in some department somewhere sees game mechanics as a commodity, and they're treating them like dlc. I get an infinite sea of generic weapons, but try to do the cyberpunk things and the game wags its finger.
  Aside from treating game mechanics as a commodity and meting out little scraps, it really doesn't seem to have any concern for player autonomy when it comes to a lot of the quests. At one point they shoved me into a hideous green snake skin pantsuit and I stopped playing for a week. The game repeatedly forced me to use a pistol, turning what would have been fun quests into obnoxious slogs while I waited to be allowed to play the game again.
  Hell, even a pivotal moment in the DLC literally forces a gun into my hands and glitches out if I try to do anything it doesn't expect. I had a character literally glitch its hands through its head to shoot at me when I tried to run behind it. That's not even mentioning the numerous points where going off the rails just immediately kills you and forces you to reload. Not because of anything actually dangerous or bad, but just because you're not supposed to go that way. Rather than making some obstacle, they literally just pick you up and put you back on the path. Could have invented literally anything to explain it away, maybe a security shield or something that kills anyone with a head computer who tries to leave the area, but they just didn't bother. Telling the player 'no' is enough for them. Cool. Fun.
  It's a fun game overall, but it could have been a way better game with a little more inter-departmental communication, a few less money people, and a little more respect for player agency.
- The launch was a disaster on consoles. But on PC, while still having bugs, wasn't anywhere near as bad. The game is fantastic.
- How do you get 13 years? It's been 11 years since the pre-rendered teaser trailer, and it was less than that between announcement and release. They also were open about not being full force on development for the game until Witcher 3 finished, and the announcement trailer served as a recruitment tool, something that most studios don't do anymore.
  
  Er... I think I was just thinking 2013 when that teaser came out. Them not being full-on in development was part of my point. A lot of things they mentioned that hyped the game up were before they were actually set in stone and actively being worked on.

I feel like Days Gone belongs in this conversation.
- Man I loved Days Gone. I played through the whole game and deeply enjoyed it. I'm always surprised when I hear it getting shit talked online because it was really well done in my opinion. Maybe it was launch issues or something since I played it on PC long after release.

Definitely No Man's Sky
It was bad at launch, sure, but the expectations of the game were way outta proportion to what a game could deliver on
- The problem I had with no man's sky is that a large amount of the out of proportion expectations were a direct result of the developers over promising, rather than consumers just being over hyped.

Resident Evil Revelations 2 never gets talked about since it's a 'mediocre' spinoff but i very much enjoyed it

Fallout 76.
The game is really fun now. Only downside is the monetization (subscription model for infinite storage space)
Even better with friends in my opinion.

No Man's Sky, but they vastly redeemed themselves.

Unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed the hell out of Redfall. It wasn’t what most people wanted from Arkane and I completely agree, but it was still a lot of fun and didn’t deserve all the hate it got. It isn’t perfect and had a ton of bugs, but the scores it received made no sense and it seemed like it was just fun to jump on the hate bandwagon.

The new Lords of the Fallen game. It was a pretty enjoyable game. There were many issues regarding online play and such, but I've had a great time as a soulsbourne fan.

Fallout 76.
Got a bad reputation at launch because it was so buggy, the main "quest" was lackluster and the world felt empty due to a lack of NPCs. It was genuinely in a bad state.
They've made loads of improvements and the game is really fun now. After the Wastelanders update, which brought NPCs and a new main quest, it started to shake off some of the negativity but I think many people are still turned off due to the launch stigma

I hated Callisto Protocol because of the story so much that I quit rather than advance the narrative. When I couldn’t kill Dani Nakamura for murdering my partner and crashing my ship and locking me in her cell after I freed her, I quit. No thanks, she sucks, not interested in saving her under any circumstances.

I think almost all "big name" AAA games that announce a new game will be over-hyped, and over-hype makes people disappointed. The higher they fly, the harder they fall; look at everything Blizzard, Bethesda, CDPR, and all the big names have released in the last few years - people expecting something better than their favourite game will always be disappointed!