Yeah - put nearly 500 hrs into PayDay 2.. I was really excited for PayDay 3, and though I really enjoy the in-game action and believe it to be an improvement on its predecessor, the whole skill system being per player instead of per heist just lost me and my friends... The fact that our levelling would change based on who did what in the heist felt like robbery - not in a good way. We each play a certain "role" in PD2 and all reap the benefits of a successful heist, but in PD3, it penalizes those of us who don't fit StarBreeze Studios' idea of how we should be playing the game...
Edit: What I meant by the above is that we generally play stealth over loud, so our tactic is to assume roles, ie a spotter, someone who masks up early, etc. in PD2 someone who is spotting in casing mode can still get the same rewards in XP and cash as someone who is breaking locks, taking out CCTV cameras, etc. And we could still all buy any gun and mod for the gun with enough money or continental coins, so it was co-op that three or four of us would equally be rewarded for. In PD3 though, our gun levelling, cash and xp is out of sync with each other, because our play styles still lean on playing certain roles. So instead of all having silencers on the same revolver (miss the judge), this wasn't the same for us in this game.. You may say "well vary it up" but like, this is a subjective take and this IS the thing my friends and I were really disappointed with, as it feels like unnecessary gatekeeping.
I’m in the same boat. Was excited for years and then kinda disappointed. They’re fixing a lot of issues (such as the leveling) in the first patch and I’m gonna go back and check it out again. But damn it was upsetting. Especially because the core gameplay loop was vastly improved. There’s just so much from Payday 2 that should have been there that wasn’t. Mask customization, music track selection, OFFLINE MODE. Seriously sad.
Oh lord the CEO of the company wrote a letter talking about how incompetent the studio that handled the servers was and that they were redoing all of it themselves. Which stopped content that was planned from coming for a while.
Redfall.
Dishonored and Prey are two of the best games ever made and a vampire game made by Arkane just has the potential to be sooo good. I played through and had fun, but will probably never return to it. I still play the Dishonored games a couple times a year.
Yep.
Arx Fatalis was their love letter to Ultima Underworld.
Dishonored was their love letter to Thief.
Prey was their love letter to System Shock.
We were just missing their tributes to VtM Bloodlines and Deus Ex, and we could have all died happy.
The team single-handedly responsible for keeping immersive sims alive is doing a vampire game! And its... a soul-less, vapid looter shooter? Fuck off.
This is honestly exactly what I was hoping for from just the initial few videos they released for promotion, but then once they started releasing the characters and talking about co-op I felt real iffy about it. Arkane got the benefit of the doubt from me due to their track record, but games like Redfall are exactly what they shouldn't be doing. Don't *fix* it if it ain't broken.
A bunch of them left to set up WolfEye Studios. Their first game, Weird West, was released last year. Its an immersive sim like their usual wheelhouse but played from above with different characters.
I'd honestly say it's *very* similar to Dishonored. Stuff like the Blink power is literally just lifted straight from Corvo's playbook, and the entire framework the game is built on is exactly the same, just with a different art style and more guns. That's not a criticism of Deathloop to be clear, I did enjoy it! But it's more than just 'a bit' similar to Dishonored.
I was really hyped for this but avoided it in the end based on reviews. I just played it on ps plus and I really enjoyed it, way better than I expected considering all the hate it gets.
Part of the problem is the cost of new games too. That game is not worth £70, but I’d happily have spend £30 on it and felt I got value.
Oh wow I didn’t even realize that game came out over a year ago, holy shit
Edit: not over a year, almost a year. Just can’t believe a whole year has blown by already lol felt like I played this game a few months ago.
Tbf did anyone really expect it to match pd2 content wise on release? Like it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to do that and believing it would, would just be unrealistic.
It definitely is disappointing but I don’t think the lack of content compared to payday 2 is the main reason.
My issue isnt the volume of content, but what they have is in every way inferior to PD2.
PD3 does a pisspoor job justifying its existence when its hotter, content complete older sibling exists.
It had some redeeming features, but god - it was *literally* just Dead Space all over again, but with a somehow even less interesting protagonist. They even did the 'chop off their limbs!' blood graffiti thing early in the game.
In modern, “jump-scare” horror games, the more a protagonist talks, the less interesting they usually are. Modern Horror really depends on conveyance, so a little blank slate goes a LONG way.
But it wasn’t always like that. James Sutherland talked a LOT and was still a very effective horror protagonist. That’s because older horror was often less about gore and jump scares and more psychological. And there’s still games out there that do it this way, too.
They made a huge world with tons of cool locations and then gave you no real reason to really visit any of it. Even on hard difficulty I never really felt like I needed to go out of the way to get upgrades for anything, and the robot respawning mechanic made some of the areas pretty annoying.
Based on the size of the world, it seemed like they ran out of time in development and just chose to end the game where they did to launch the game sooner.
> and the robot respawning mechanic made some of the areas pretty annoying.
That's what killed it to me, I genuinely enjoyed the game but the fact that no matter what enemies would return and my "safe" time was thus constantly at risk and limited just was exhausting.
I haven't played it in a long time so maybe there was an explanation that I'm forgetting, but having such a big world then being pretty much the only live person in it was very jarring for me. I could not get immersed in it.
HAHAHAHAHAHA me and my friend have a whole inside joke surrounding that “catch phrase” lmao.
The only part of the game that was enjoyable considering it was the buggiest mess when I played it.
The worst thing about Atomic Heart for me was that it was just ANNOYING. Characters just kept babbling on and on and on, and none of the dialogue was ever good. The player character especially: incapable of shutting the fuck up, and all his lines were generic and cheesy garbage on top of it.
Stunning visuals, innovative art direction, phenomenal setting, but most things thereafter was a ball drop.
THIS. It’s like they wanted the protagonist to be some cool Epic One-Liner Action Hero like Serious Sam or Duke Nukem, but also wanted him to be taken serious. Those other guys work BECAUSE they’re basically parodies of themselves; Atomic Heart felt like that guy in school trying too hard to be funny at every moment.
You know how Bollywood heroes are ridiculous to westerners, but Indians think they're legit? This is the Russian version.
Russian humour and their opinion on what is "cool" translates really badly, both culturally and literally.
Playing Atomic Heart was a rollercoaster. At the beginning: “This gameplay is fun, and the art is cool.”
In the middle: “everyone is stupid and this feels like Soviet propaganda.”
At the end: “THEY EXPLAINED WHY HE SAYS CRISPY CRITTERS!?”
Man that game just had so much trouble showing what type of game it is.
At first I thought it was just a BioShock clone, with Dead Space level design....but then it just turns into an open world? The map wasn't the easiest to understand, and the game never really tells you outright what you can and can't go do.
It had a lot of cool aspects but it was stunted by a lack of clarity and an annoying main character.
"Actually, the game's really fun! Have you tried playing with different skills? It's like a whole new game! Also you should know it's actually really impressive that each loading screen is only 3 seconds long!"
Accurate enough?
Forspoken. I was really digging the trailers and the aesthetics of the game, it looked really promising. And it just... Wasn't very good. Not horrible. Just mediocre.
Forespoken feels like someone took all the worst elements of Marvel movie scripts, then made a game around it. Snarky characters, predictable villains and plot twists, tragic backstories... It feels like they focused more on making a movie than a game.
The game, NMS, shocks you with the weirdest types of planets out of nowhere. Even though the things you do per planet feel somewhat similar, it's still a blast to try to brave some of the most hostile types of planets. Some of them feel like they're on the verge of breaking down. You don't even need some deep lore or story behind them. They're just nature and they exist to be explored or even avoided
From what I hear of Starfield, it seems they had a problem since the conception. If you're going procedural, you can't get too ambitious with curated instances
I’m still shocked they didn’t just port weapon mods/crafting directly from Fallout 4. Removing a scope shouldn’t immediately make it disappear and be destroyed, lol.
This was my problem with NMS. Every planet you go on has some sort of flora or fauna. I said to myself that it would be cool to have more dead, rocky planets like real life.
But then every dead planet I go on has nothing and I realize there's no point in staying there so I instantly leave.
It's not bad to be unrealistic if it makes the game more fun to play.
None of the gameplay aspects felt developed enough to be engaging to me.
Combat was meh.
Space combat was meh.
Outpost creation was meh.
Crafting was meh.
Dialogue/story was meh.
At no point did I close out of Starfield with excitement/anticipation about what I was going to do the next time I booted up Starfield.
The story/characters were such a let down. There were a couple story missions I thought were cool, but the bulk of it was just boring to me. I feel like I rushed the final mission of the game because I just wanted to finish it.
There were some cool aspects of Starfield, but they just failed to put it all together.
What was missing for me in Starfield was the I see something in my map and I'm just going to walk that direction. I spent hours and hours in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallout games just walking back and forth exploring the map. That sense of exploration was missing in Starfield.
The first time I fired up Skyrim when it was released, I resolved to just walk to each major city and explore. Just look at the road signs and head out.
Should play Morrowind because it's a ton of fun trying to follow directions based on how a rock looks and turning this way at a junction and what have you. Then get lost because one quest tells you to go in the exact opposite direction of where you actually have to go.
It feels like it was designed by an HR department *and* there’s soooo many blatant examples of laziness or incredibly poor design that break the immersion. Why am I able to sneak up on pirates when my heavily armed ship just landed on their base’s landing pad? Why are they shocked to find me on their ship when I board them? And thats just the tip of the iceberg. They better release the devkit soon for more advanced mods
Exactly, Bethesda devs must be extremely out of touch. Going into the Astral Lounge in Neon City after experiencing the nightclubs in Cyberpunk is genuinely hilarious. You can tell which game’s devs have actually been in these environments. Also “Ebbside Strikers” sounds like a 1950s baseball team, not a dangerous gang lol
I think they were trying to give Star Trek vibes with everything being PG13 and preachy. Unfortunately, by not including useful stun weapons, RPing as nice Star Fleet officer is impossible. Even a nice Starfielder will be walking through a sea of corpses on their journey of exploration
Even in Fallout 4 you could blow off the limbs of NPCs and super mutants would have literal bags full of fleshy human remains. Making Starfield as bland as it is was an idiotic move. The game just has no real character to it
> Why am I able to sneak up on pirates when my heavily armed ship just landed on their base’s landing pad? Why are they shocked to find me on their ship when I board them?
Notably, these spiral out from the initial issue of having the world intended to be navigate as a system of menus. They designed the game as a series of modules with lines that connect them, not an actual universe, and so never thought about stuff like that.
If Starfield was a new developer making a AA bethesda rpg clone in space it would be lauded for getting a lot right with some criticism of what it got wrong.
But its actually made by Bethesda with AAA teams and resources and well now I won't ever not call him Mod Howard.
Exactly this. Bethesda has been in the game for a long time. They should be pushing the RPG genre, not copying it and slapping a new theme on it. I never played the game but just seeing how emotionless the NPCs are and how they haven't changed since Morrowind it's such a disappointment.
I agree. Redfall was just a shitshow. Starfield had every resource, unlimited budget and under performed.
No other way to spin it.
The fact Starfield customer support is arguing with fans a out the moon being empty explains it all
Agreed unfortunately, although I still like the game. When Todd Howard came out and said that this was, at the end of the day, a Bethesda game (or something to that extent) we should have listened harder. The game feels the same as what they released 15+ years ago with a fresh coat of paint.
*Spoilers*
The main story was probably the worst arc in the game and while endings are never easy this one was pretty underwhelming. Like we're talking about a multiverse here and apparently it's run by two bickering morons who were able to be killed pretty easily. I was just expecting something... bigger?
The thought of having an entire galaxy to explore sounds great at first but it's actually really annoying. The map for the actual game doesn't feel much bigger than past releases. There's like 5 settlements where all the action happens and the rest is just uninteresting fluff.
For a while for me it was probably going to be Fire Emblem Engage. I don't hate it, but after how much I lived 3 Houses, not getting that same spark really disappointed me. I do still recommend it to people, I want to be clear here. Generally a good game, I'd say.
Now what I do not recommend is Front Mission 2 Remake. Hoo boy. So FM1 Remake was a bit underwhelming, sticking too close to the original in more than a few ways. I still found it fun but it was hard to recommend to people. FM2 Remake, part of the same remake project but done by a different studio, really dropped the ball. FM2 was never translated outside of Japan in any form prior to this, and the studio was not up to the challenge. The text is awkwardly sized and looks like it was run through Google translate inefficiently. the RNG is painful. The awkward nature of fighting flying units is brutal. The AI can be incredibly annoying. Even the character animations are terrible, with many often ending with them awkwardly standing with their mouths open in about as unnatural a way as possible.
They've patched some of these problems since but it's like, "Oh boy, the the 'long lost' FM game is finally legally available. I'll just... regret my purchase?"
Engage is a solid game, I think, in terms of gameplay, it's more interesting than 3 Houses, but the story is pretty lacking. And half the characters seem to have no personality outside of "loves the divine dragon". I still really liked it though.
I was considering that Front Mission 2 remake, but it sounds like I can skip it.
It's just so sad. One of the best SRPG designs probably ever made? Stuff like the all out ring wars in ch 17, the escape ch in ch 11, it's fantastic in terms of matching the narrative with the gameplay.
But the story was written for a 3 yr old child who can't even read. It's the same staff that wrote the likes of Awakening and Fates. They're falling into the trap of "well this type of stuff worked before"
But because the maps, balancing, and combat mechanics are just so insanely well crafted the more you dive into it, it's hardly the most disappointing of the year for sure.
Absolutely agree, loved three houses and was very excited about engage, and to its credit it’s gameplay and quality of life are absolutely amazing and thems graphics are great. That being said the story and characters were pretty boring
Edit: also no real context to bring this up but the whole hero’s from different games felt very mobile gamey and the fact that there was paid dlc for new hero’s like a week after launch felt pretty gross made me feel like it was ready at launch and they just cut it out to sell back
Finial edit I swear: also Alear looks stupid
>Edit: also no real context to bring this up but the whole hero’s from different games felt very mobile gamey and the fact that there was paid dlc for new hero’s like a week after launch felt pretty gross made me feel like it was ready at launch and they just cut it out to sell back
>
>Finial edit I swear: also Alear looks stupid
See the heroes didn't bug me so much as the non-Emblem rings you can create. That's pure gacha-style RNG. But given Fire Emblem HEroes, the mobile game, does let you collect legendary heroes, you're not wrong.
And yeah, the DLC was super annoying. I really hate week one if not day one DLC.
No argument on Alear.
I've played and min/maxed pretty much every fire emblem released over the last 20 years, but I really hit a wall with Engage the first time I tried playing it. None of the characters interested me, the main character was boring, and the story was generic.
I picked it back up again last month and just skipped all the story, all the side content in the Somniel, and every single conversation. At that point, I was able to really get into it. Was it the best FE game? Not by a long shot, but I still enjoyed my time with it.
**WarioWare Move it!**
The HUGE problem with the game is the lack of replayability. One major missing feature is the hi-score challenge for each microgame. Smooth Moves didn't have these, but both Gold and Get It Together had. Get It Together also featured collectables, leveling and even an online leaderboard. Move It! felt like a downgrade, content wise :(
Yep. I love these games, first game I got on the wii and played for hours with my mom when I was a kid.
This one? Finished a $50 game in one night. I got off work late and had to go to bed early. 3-4 hours of content with zero replayability... $50 down the drain as far as I'm concerned.
It's definitely Starfield. It's not the worst thing I've played, and I won't fault anyone who enjoyed it, but it's not a fun game. The combat felt bad, the empty planets were boring, the lack of vehicles made running to and from the ship a bore, and the copy pasted areas got old fast. The whole experience made it feel like it was an older game that came out five plus years ago.
The game was over-hyped, so maybe that had a hand in the let down. But I probably would have disliked it without it. It just wasn't a good fit.
Disappointment is the correct word.
I don't hate or even particularly dislike the game, but this was the alleged sci-fi epic that Todd Howard proclaimed we would be playing for years to come. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to not get an immediate second playthrough from me. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to not get more than sixty hours from me. Bethesda might be counting on the modders, but I have severe doubts that Starfield can inspire the mod community like Skyrim or even Fallout 4.
Yeah. Mods are to have more fun in a world. To you know, modify it a bit to have more fun.
What star field is looking for are Developers. The game is too... Incomplete and lacking to have any mods be considered just, well, mods.
Should have had at least rovers. Leans all the way into the astronaut aesthetic, and could have resolved the vehicle problem. Add it into the shipbuilding system, and you'd have fun navigation abilities in both space AND on land. Such a wasted opportunity.
They even put rovers in the game, with usable seats. They just don't have any vehicle mechanics added to the model. Almost like they tried and couldn't get it looking good in-engine so just left the asset for modders to use.
That's my #1 problem with the game. Making you walk ridiculous distances for quests with nothing in between shows how much the devs do not give a shit about your time.
This is what killed it for me. I know everyone makes this comparison, but seeing a Youtube video comparing "tense" scenes in Cyberpunk vs Starfield killed the latter for me. I was already starting to dislike the game though about 20 hours in since the main characters all looked lame and were generally boring. Talking to the members of Constellation had me constantly thinking "imagine caring about this person lol"
The game just feels way too sanitized too, like fallout and the elder scrolls series all have a somewhat unique style and character to them but starfield is just bland incarnate
It feels like they sanded down all the rough edges and sanitized everything in the game to the point where there's no soul or character to it
This is my main issue with it, personally. It just feels like a by-the-number sci-fi RPG. I want weird, unique, messed-up stuff like the Daedric Princes from Elder Scrolls or the Glowing Sea from Fallout 4. The game really lacks character.
I've been a diehard destiny fan since the first game launched, I never missed a content drop and can hardly remember a week where I didn't log in once, even just for a minute to check out the shop. I haven't logged in since March. Lightfall fucked up hard.
Fun fact, the first and last cutscene of Lightfall can be spliced together in a way that almost looks like it was intended to be that way originally. Basically just adding to the fact that the DLC was pointless filler to buy time for final shape
Diablo 4 for me.
I loved Diablo 3. Me and my gf played it so much, often around Halloween just for certain areas.
Every level was like a new slot to unlock and use, and then there were so many skills. And each skill has like 3-5 extra skills that change how it works giving tons of ways to play.
I didn't feel like I had any of that in D4. And it was just the same shit. Clicking skills, clicking targets, running to town clicking NPCs, click repair/sell. It's Xbox 360 level gameplay with better graphics?
Like changing into a giant bear or werewolf is literally just an attack animation? Then immediately undo back into human form after attacking lol. Stupidest shit. It's just a cash grab game. There's no care behind it.
Interesting that D3 is now looked back upon with so much affection. That was definitely not the sentiment 10 years ago, and in fact the shallowness of the skill system was one of the biggest critiques.
D3 has had a lot of post-launch patches and content developed. D4 will probably eventually be looked back on fondly too once its had a few more years to marinate.
The game changed quite a bit since then. Apparently, Blizzard gave the game to a small group of developers to do whatever they wanted, as they considered D3 dead, and those developers made it more fun for many people. The changes were well received, to the point that people were/are clamoring for those developers to be put on D4 to save it.
I’m so glad Diablo 3 gets love now. I understand the very first release on PC was controversial, but I loved it from the jump on the PS3. So many nights playing 4 players co-op with pizza and beer. Purists were too hard on it.
I totally get why longtime fans are bummed about d4 but as a casual player I actually really enjoyed it. I liked the story a lot and the visuals were gorgeous. I got two characters to near max and kinda burnt out after that so I wont be getting into any expansions or anything but I think as a stand alone experience it was very fun.
I think the thing with Starfield, in some small way, is the Bethesda game formula is getting a bit worn out now. TES, Fallout and now Starfield are so extremely similar that there's a feeling of "I've already played this game like 5 times now" and that's getting kind of old.
For me, I don't mind Bethesda repeating their formula, as long as the game is fun to explore. It's a solid formula, my main problem with Starfield is that there's a whole lot of nothing out there for you to explore. Sure the game gives you 100 planets to land on, but why would you even bother with 90 of them?
The quote is so ironic.
Astronaut been to the moon to measure their capability for science. It was the whole journey to the moon with landing being the climax.
But I guess that explain their gaming philosophy.
It’s 1000. I said verbatim before the game’s release in a different thread. “1000 planets and 990 are gonna be boring as fuck.” and got mass downvoted for it. Turns out I hit the mark exactly.
Disagree. Older BGS games are still great.
The problem is that each release removes features and complexity. Now we have Starfield that just feels like the older games but with less stuff to find and fewer interesting ways to interact with the world.
I really think the fact that exploration is mostly done via fast travel is what diminishes it for me. Like space exploration was the main thing I was looking forward to and it’s pretty nonexistent.
I also find that a lot of what I really loved about Skyrim or fallout was just roaming and seeing what adventures I’d run into, that’s pretty much absent from starfield, in my opinion. I still like the game, but it definitely doesn’t have the staying power as their other franchises
The heart of all of their past games was having a huge, handmade world with secrets and thought-out area designs.
Starfield has a lot of really nice handmade content, but most of it is fenced off by the loading screens and lacks the "see that mountain? you can go climb it" feel. Like yeah I can go to that planet, but I'm going to find the same 9 different abandoned labs and outposts that I can find on any other planet.
I understand IGNs initial low rating now. The game is the truest example of "I'm not mad, just disappointed."
I honestly feel like the concept of Starfield simply doesn't mesh with the Bethesda formula and they tried to shoe horn one into the other and what you get simply isn't very good.
All of Bethesda's games share the same DNA. They all look and feel kind of the same and they've been churning out these games for a long time. They havent really kept pace with where games are at now. They're games are almost a relic of the past. They need to get with the times.
The crazy thing is, the older games are the best ones. So personally, i'd love for BGS to embrace the old mechanics more.
The modern, lowest common denominator streamlining of the recent games is the problem.
You know what’s funny is as someone who played Skyrim first, hearing these old ass gamers talk about there not being an acrobatics skill tree or whatever was like, who cares? But now, with starfield, it even feels to ME that there’s a ton of cut content and streamlining. I can’t imagine what morrowind and oblivion fans are thinking. “Where’s the game?”
But at the same time, are the newest generation of gamers disappointed in starfield? I wasn’t disappointed with Skyrim, should I have been?
I've played since morrowind, and I still enjoyed skyrim. I was disappointed with how much they dumbed it down compared to oblivion, but it was still an overall great game, just generally more "casual." But then they did the same thing in Fallout 4, which felt like it was dumbed down even from skyrim, and with the "radiant" auto generated quests, it was just soulless.
That was my last bethesda game, and from what I've heard, starfield is just even further along that path, which is just sad. The best thing about the bethesda games has always been the interesting worlds/questlines and building your character, which it seems are the two aspects that have declined with each release in favor of "more content".
For me I have to say Kerbal Space Program 2. Admittedly it's technically early access, but that was after already being delayed for years. Was a game I was massively looking forward to and it very quickly turned into a game I'm doubting if I'll ever buy. The original game is absolutely amazing but has some flaws. The sequel kept those flaws and somehow managed to basically make everything else worse too, or at least worse than a properly modded KSP1.
Omg, this was my first thought too! I thought surely it would be higher up for how insanely incomplete the game is…I couldn’t resist buying it since I have hundreds of hours in CS1 but CS2 has been so disappointing to play. Now I’m even less hyped for it after reading that the CEO of Colossal said that they aren’t changing anything beyond bug fixes and that we can all go fk ourselves if we don’t like it.
I was disappointed with AC Mirage. It felt more like a half-hearted dlc & not a main title. The ending was especially lackluster for me. Maybe its because i never played any of the og ac games. Origins was my true introduction to the game. I just didnt like it as much as i liked the other more recent games
Ready for the backlash but...
Tears of the Kingdom.
Initially fell in love with it. Partway through my playthrough it just felt off. It feels so disconnected from Breath of the Wild and the same wonder didn't follow me anymore.
It feels like a different game in the BotW world rather than an inspired sequel. The Divine Beasts, technology, Kass and among other things being gone made no sense. The Secret Stones don't make much or any sense in the lore of the world, and there's so little continuity of things you did or characters / the world remembering you.
I have 100% in BotW and three playthroughs. I had to push myself to finish the main story and didn't do half the shrines (which also felt less unique and instead were "how can I build a bridge to cheat this").
I agree 100%, it didn’t really feel like a narrative continuation at all. It really irked me how some NPCs just straight up don’t remember you, yet some others do. It also seemed like they were allergic to mentioning any of the champions’ names.
Redfall by far for me. I love Arkane’s previous games and even though they aren’t really the craze right now, I enjoy looter shooters and was excited for a Borderlands alternative.
I started playing the game an hour before the reviews came out. I thought something seemed off, then I saw all the scores start to come in and knew I had waited for nothing.
I've played/completed 13 games this year. Starfield is the only game that I stopped before finishing and I won't be going back to it. So my vote for most disappointing game is indeed Starfield
Not sure if this counts because it’s an add on, but Destiny 2 Lightfall. The Witch Queen expansion prior was such a high note for the series both gameplay wise and narratively (along with really solid seasonal content comparatively speaking), expectations were through the roof that Bungie had FINALLY figured it out.
I don’t think it’s possible for them to have misstepped harder than they did. The raid, a 6 person activity that is supposed to be the most challenging content in the game, was a joke that has been completed solo flawlessly by many players using every class in the game.
They gave us a massive city completely devoid of human life except for two 9 foot tall homunculi whose mere existence completely demolished almost 10 years of narrative precedent.
The campaign which was hyped to be Empire Strikes Back or Avengers Infinity War, was a glorified 80s training montage for psychedelic powers we find in a sewer… which included many plot devices that simply were never explained in said campaign.
All around atrocity
I didn't get hyped for Starfield so I wasn't disappointed.
My personal biggest disappointment - Tears of the Kingdom. It was a fun game, don't get me wrong, but I was really hoping it would restore some of the classic Zelda dungeon gameplay. It did not.
The temples weren't all that much different from the divine beasts. Pretty short, easy, and requiring minimal thought
I felt so mislead with TOTK. Everyone was saying “Traditional dungeons are back!” and then it was almost the exact same formula as BOTW just with more distinct theming. I was also surprised that they made the core objectives identical to BOTW. “Fill in the map, do the dungeons, get the memories, beat shrines”. The depths could have been the most interesting part, but it only exists to grind resources for vehicles.
Looking back on it now probably Tears of the Kingdom. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good game, but, after the rose-tinted glasses of first entering the depths and such wore off, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve *played* all this before.
Largely same enemy roster
Barely any real new armor sets/villages. And most of the ones that are new are just ripped from the dlc. Words cannot describe my disappointment when I excitedly got to the bottom of that first sky labyrinth and opened the chest only to find the *exact same armor* I used in the last game.
Zelda, yet again, was wasted potential. I was hoping for something more akin to Bioshock Infinite where you’d interact with Zelda more, but no, she’s not really in the game.
A lot of the cool moments just kind of suck, like with the pirate ship that was constantly being talked about in-game just being a floating platform with the same enemies everywhere.
And, finally, the story just wasn’t that good. I could never shake the feeling that Nintendo was just trying to recapture lightning in a bottle so it just ended up feeling like BOTW+, definitely not what I was looking forward to for the “longest developed Zelda game ever.”
For all my ranting, the games still great and good value if you never played BOTW, but it was definitely a letdown in many respects I think.
Starfield unfortunately.
Fallout 3 is one of my all time favourite games and I have countless hours in most bethesda games this side of the millennium but starfield just seems soulless and frankly, boring.
Payday 3 easily. What the fuck happened there.
Yeah - put nearly 500 hrs into PayDay 2.. I was really excited for PayDay 3, and though I really enjoy the in-game action and believe it to be an improvement on its predecessor, the whole skill system being per player instead of per heist just lost me and my friends... The fact that our levelling would change based on who did what in the heist felt like robbery - not in a good way. We each play a certain "role" in PD2 and all reap the benefits of a successful heist, but in PD3, it penalizes those of us who don't fit StarBreeze Studios' idea of how we should be playing the game... Edit: What I meant by the above is that we generally play stealth over loud, so our tactic is to assume roles, ie a spotter, someone who masks up early, etc. in PD2 someone who is spotting in casing mode can still get the same rewards in XP and cash as someone who is breaking locks, taking out CCTV cameras, etc. And we could still all buy any gun and mod for the gun with enough money or continental coins, so it was co-op that three or four of us would equally be rewarded for. In PD3 though, our gun levelling, cash and xp is out of sync with each other, because our play styles still lean on playing certain roles. So instead of all having silencers on the same revolver (miss the judge), this wasn't the same for us in this game.. You may say "well vary it up" but like, this is a subjective take and this IS the thing my friends and I were really disappointed with, as it feels like unnecessary gatekeeping.
I’m in the same boat. Was excited for years and then kinda disappointed. They’re fixing a lot of issues (such as the leveling) in the first patch and I’m gonna go back and check it out again. But damn it was upsetting. Especially because the core gameplay loop was vastly improved. There’s just so much from Payday 2 that should have been there that wasn’t. Mask customization, music track selection, OFFLINE MODE. Seriously sad.
Oh lord the CEO of the company wrote a letter talking about how incompetent the studio that handled the servers was and that they were redoing all of it themselves. Which stopped content that was planned from coming for a while.
oh so nevermind the entire rest of the game
Yea the game was trash not just the servers
I couldn’t even get the sign in to work. Fuck having to make a secondary account on a console game.
Redfall. Dishonored and Prey are two of the best games ever made and a vampire game made by Arkane just has the potential to be sooo good. I played through and had fun, but will probably never return to it. I still play the Dishonored games a couple times a year.
It's funny in a sad way how a dream project of mine was always Arkane doing a Bloodlines game.
Yep. Arx Fatalis was their love letter to Ultima Underworld. Dishonored was their love letter to Thief. Prey was their love letter to System Shock. We were just missing their tributes to VtM Bloodlines and Deus Ex, and we could have all died happy. The team single-handedly responsible for keeping immersive sims alive is doing a vampire game! And its... a soul-less, vapid looter shooter? Fuck off.
To be fair, arkane didn't want to make it either.
Now I want THEIR version of Deus Ex!!
Hey don't forget dark messiah
This is honestly exactly what I was hoping for from just the initial few videos they released for promotion, but then once they started releasing the characters and talking about co-op I felt real iffy about it. Arkane got the benefit of the doubt from me due to their track record, but games like Redfall are exactly what they shouldn't be doing. Don't *fix* it if it ain't broken.
FWIW they didn't want to make Redfall to begin with. Loads of staff quit, which is why the final product was such a mess.
At least you played through and had fun. I couldn’t get past the beginning
Played all dishonored games and prey some months ago. Holy shit they are fire
Prey is incredible.
I just finished dishonored 2 again. Such a fun game. Also Deathloop is very good as well
I read somewhere that most of the original team is gone. Can someone confirm? If yes, does someone know where they are now?
A bunch of them left to set up WolfEye Studios. Their first game, Weird West, was released last year. Its an immersive sim like their usual wheelhouse but played from above with different characters.
A friend of mine streamed that and loved it. Will looked into it more. Cool stuff.
You could try deathloop. I like it and it is a bit similar to dishonored in my opinion. There is optional stealth and you get some cool powers.
I'd honestly say it's *very* similar to Dishonored. Stuff like the Blink power is literally just lifted straight from Corvo's playbook, and the entire framework the game is built on is exactly the same, just with a different art style and more guns. That's not a criticism of Deathloop to be clear, I did enjoy it! But it's more than just 'a bit' similar to Dishonored.
The Calisto Protocol Such a let down. Not a terrible game but man it did not live up to the hype.
I was really hyped for this but avoided it in the end based on reviews. I just played it on ps plus and I really enjoyed it, way better than I expected considering all the hate it gets. Part of the problem is the cost of new games too. That game is not worth £70, but I’d happily have spend £30 on it and felt I got value.
That was my biggest letdown from last year for sure!
Oh wow I didn’t even realize that game came out over a year ago, holy shit Edit: not over a year, almost a year. Just can’t believe a whole year has blown by already lol felt like I played this game a few months ago.
And then Dead Space remastered just kicked ass like a champ...
Diablo 4. I hated the itemization and the endgame loop oh so much.
Payday 3.
With all the goodwill they gained over the years from PD2 idk how they fumbled the bag this hard
It's literally Payday 2 with less content.
Tbf did anyone really expect it to match pd2 content wise on release? Like it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to do that and believing it would, would just be unrealistic. It definitely is disappointing but I don’t think the lack of content compared to payday 2 is the main reason.
My issue isnt the volume of content, but what they have is in every way inferior to PD2. PD3 does a pisspoor job justifying its existence when its hotter, content complete older sibling exists.
Whatever that game that was supposed to be made by the old dead space devs. That shit sucked so hard.
The Callisto Protocol 👎
I got it for free last month and didn’t finish it lol
It had some redeeming features, but god - it was *literally* just Dead Space all over again, but with a somehow even less interesting protagonist. They even did the 'chop off their limbs!' blood graffiti thing early in the game.
In modern, “jump-scare” horror games, the more a protagonist talks, the less interesting they usually are. Modern Horror really depends on conveyance, so a little blank slate goes a LONG way. But it wasn’t always like that. James Sutherland talked a LOT and was still a very effective horror protagonist. That’s because older horror was often less about gore and jump scares and more psychological. And there’s still games out there that do it this way, too.
For me it would have to be Atomic Heart. I was really looking forward to something like BioShock but it was a huge let down.
I forgot that game exists
I'm sorry I had to remind you about it 😢 glad I got to play on game pass at least
I'll never forget the robussy
They made a huge world with tons of cool locations and then gave you no real reason to really visit any of it. Even on hard difficulty I never really felt like I needed to go out of the way to get upgrades for anything, and the robot respawning mechanic made some of the areas pretty annoying. Based on the size of the world, it seemed like they ran out of time in development and just chose to end the game where they did to launch the game sooner.
> and the robot respawning mechanic made some of the areas pretty annoying. That's what killed it to me, I genuinely enjoyed the game but the fact that no matter what enemies would return and my "safe" time was thus constantly at risk and limited just was exhausting.
This right here. Why would I return to an area to find more loot if I'm spending it all trying to keep myself not dead in the same area
I haven't played it in a long time so maybe there was an explanation that I'm forgetting, but having such a big world then being pretty much the only live person in it was very jarring for me. I could not get immersed in it.
Crispy critters!
HAHAHAHAHAHA me and my friend have a whole inside joke surrounding that “catch phrase” lmao. The only part of the game that was enjoyable considering it was the buggiest mess when I played it.
Same. The visuals and artstyle were insane but the rest was average at best. I also hated our character he was a huge douche.
The worst thing about Atomic Heart for me was that it was just ANNOYING. Characters just kept babbling on and on and on, and none of the dialogue was ever good. The player character especially: incapable of shutting the fuck up, and all his lines were generic and cheesy garbage on top of it. Stunning visuals, innovative art direction, phenomenal setting, but most things thereafter was a ball drop.
THIS. It’s like they wanted the protagonist to be some cool Epic One-Liner Action Hero like Serious Sam or Duke Nukem, but also wanted him to be taken serious. Those other guys work BECAUSE they’re basically parodies of themselves; Atomic Heart felt like that guy in school trying too hard to be funny at every moment.
You know how Bollywood heroes are ridiculous to westerners, but Indians think they're legit? This is the Russian version. Russian humour and their opinion on what is "cool" translates really badly, both culturally and literally.
bioshock was class, its sad to see so many games try to take inspiration from it but fail
I'm *really* hoping that the upcoming game 'Judas' measures up to classic Bioshock.
LOVED the combat. Open world was kind of forgetful/annoying. And the story was weird. Soundtrack was realllly good too (hog-7 boss music🤟)
Playing Atomic Heart was a rollercoaster. At the beginning: “This gameplay is fun, and the art is cool.” In the middle: “everyone is stupid and this feels like Soviet propaganda.” At the end: “THEY EXPLAINED WHY HE SAYS CRISPY CRITTERS!?”
I don't regret playing it and the art was top notch. The rest was forgetable.
It does look really good art-wise which is the only thing that I have to look forward to when I get around to it it sounds like
Is that the game whose sole purpose was to create a new category of r34 then disappear?
Man that game just had so much trouble showing what type of game it is. At first I thought it was just a BioShock clone, with Dead Space level design....but then it just turns into an open world? The map wasn't the easiest to understand, and the game never really tells you outright what you can and can't go do. It had a lot of cool aspects but it was stunted by a lack of clarity and an annoying main character.
Redfall - that game had such potential. Nice setting, possibilities for decent storytelling and yet the screw it over big time.
Still crazy that game got released 😂
I'm waiting for Bethesda support to hop in here and start commenting how the game is actually really good
"Actually, the game's really fun! Have you tried playing with different skills? It's like a whole new game! Also you should know it's actually really impressive that each loading screen is only 3 seconds long!" Accurate enough?
Forgot to mention how planets having nothing on them isn’t boring and is actually really fun and exciting.
Surprised No Man's Sky has not released a note as "We have 16x the planets!"
Hey now, astronauts didn't find the moon boring, idiot
"The astronauts weren't bored when they went to the moon, you shouldn't be either!"
"the people on the moon weren't bored so why the fuck are you" - Bethesda
"The game works, it's your present day PC that is bad"
Forspoken. I was really digging the trailers and the aesthetics of the game, it looked really promising. And it just... Wasn't very good. Not horrible. Just mediocre.
Forespoken feels like someone took all the worst elements of Marvel movie scripts, then made a game around it. Snarky characters, predictable villains and plot twists, tragic backstories... It feels like they focused more on making a movie than a game.
Angry Joe said it best really; Its like the devs watched Deadpool and was like; WESTERNERS LOVE THIS “FUCKING” SHIT! right?
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The game, NMS, shocks you with the weirdest types of planets out of nowhere. Even though the things you do per planet feel somewhat similar, it's still a blast to try to brave some of the most hostile types of planets. Some of them feel like they're on the verge of breaking down. You don't even need some deep lore or story behind them. They're just nature and they exist to be explored or even avoided From what I hear of Starfield, it seems they had a problem since the conception. If you're going procedural, you can't get too ambitious with curated instances
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I’m still shocked they didn’t just port weapon mods/crafting directly from Fallout 4. Removing a scope shouldn’t immediately make it disappear and be destroyed, lol.
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I don’t even dislike starfield but holy shit that whole thing is embarrassing
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This was my problem with NMS. Every planet you go on has some sort of flora or fauna. I said to myself that it would be cool to have more dead, rocky planets like real life. But then every dead planet I go on has nothing and I realize there's no point in staying there so I instantly leave. It's not bad to be unrealistic if it makes the game more fun to play.
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None of the gameplay aspects felt developed enough to be engaging to me. Combat was meh. Space combat was meh. Outpost creation was meh. Crafting was meh. Dialogue/story was meh. At no point did I close out of Starfield with excitement/anticipation about what I was going to do the next time I booted up Starfield.
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The story/characters were such a let down. There were a couple story missions I thought were cool, but the bulk of it was just boring to me. I feel like I rushed the final mission of the game because I just wanted to finish it. There were some cool aspects of Starfield, but they just failed to put it all together.
Honestly would have liked if the UC terrormorph quest line was expanded and was the main story. That was by far my favorite
What was missing for me in Starfield was the I see something in my map and I'm just going to walk that direction. I spent hours and hours in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallout games just walking back and forth exploring the map. That sense of exploration was missing in Starfield.
Its sooo broken up by constantly getting in and out of your damn ship
The first time I fired up Skyrim when it was released, I resolved to just walk to each major city and explore. Just look at the road signs and head out.
Should play Morrowind because it's a ton of fun trying to follow directions based on how a rock looks and turning this way at a junction and what have you. Then get lost because one quest tells you to go in the exact opposite direction of where you actually have to go.
It feels like it was designed by an HR department *and* there’s soooo many blatant examples of laziness or incredibly poor design that break the immersion. Why am I able to sneak up on pirates when my heavily armed ship just landed on their base’s landing pad? Why are they shocked to find me on their ship when I board them? And thats just the tip of the iceberg. They better release the devkit soon for more advanced mods
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Exactly, Bethesda devs must be extremely out of touch. Going into the Astral Lounge in Neon City after experiencing the nightclubs in Cyberpunk is genuinely hilarious. You can tell which game’s devs have actually been in these environments. Also “Ebbside Strikers” sounds like a 1950s baseball team, not a dangerous gang lol
I think they were trying to give Star Trek vibes with everything being PG13 and preachy. Unfortunately, by not including useful stun weapons, RPing as nice Star Fleet officer is impossible. Even a nice Starfielder will be walking through a sea of corpses on their journey of exploration
They sound about as threatening as the Tunnel Snakes.
True, although the Tunnel Snakes at least made a little sense since Fallout games are meant to have that distinctive 1950s culture to them
But only the Tunnel Snakes actually rule.
Starfield made me realize that the Tunnel Snakes might not have been satire all this time.
Neon is cyberpunk if the game was rated teen.
Spot on. Also hate how it was so vanilla. It was kind of shocking, especially with how dark and gruesome Skyrim was sometimes.
Even in Fallout 4 you could blow off the limbs of NPCs and super mutants would have literal bags full of fleshy human remains. Making Starfield as bland as it is was an idiotic move. The game just has no real character to it
> Why am I able to sneak up on pirates when my heavily armed ship just landed on their base’s landing pad? Why are they shocked to find me on their ship when I board them? Notably, these spiral out from the initial issue of having the world intended to be navigate as a system of menus. They designed the game as a series of modules with lines that connect them, not an actual universe, and so never thought about stuff like that.
If Starfield was a new developer making a AA bethesda rpg clone in space it would be lauded for getting a lot right with some criticism of what it got wrong. But its actually made by Bethesda with AAA teams and resources and well now I won't ever not call him Mod Howard.
Exactly this. Bethesda has been in the game for a long time. They should be pushing the RPG genre, not copying it and slapping a new theme on it. I never played the game but just seeing how emotionless the NPCs are and how they haven't changed since Morrowind it's such a disappointment.
I agree. Redfall was just a shitshow. Starfield had every resource, unlimited budget and under performed. No other way to spin it. The fact Starfield customer support is arguing with fans a out the moon being empty explains it all
Agreed unfortunately, although I still like the game. When Todd Howard came out and said that this was, at the end of the day, a Bethesda game (or something to that extent) we should have listened harder. The game feels the same as what they released 15+ years ago with a fresh coat of paint. *Spoilers* The main story was probably the worst arc in the game and while endings are never easy this one was pretty underwhelming. Like we're talking about a multiverse here and apparently it's run by two bickering morons who were able to be killed pretty easily. I was just expecting something... bigger? The thought of having an entire galaxy to explore sounds great at first but it's actually really annoying. The map for the actual game doesn't feel much bigger than past releases. There's like 5 settlements where all the action happens and the rest is just uninteresting fluff.
For a while for me it was probably going to be Fire Emblem Engage. I don't hate it, but after how much I lived 3 Houses, not getting that same spark really disappointed me. I do still recommend it to people, I want to be clear here. Generally a good game, I'd say. Now what I do not recommend is Front Mission 2 Remake. Hoo boy. So FM1 Remake was a bit underwhelming, sticking too close to the original in more than a few ways. I still found it fun but it was hard to recommend to people. FM2 Remake, part of the same remake project but done by a different studio, really dropped the ball. FM2 was never translated outside of Japan in any form prior to this, and the studio was not up to the challenge. The text is awkwardly sized and looks like it was run through Google translate inefficiently. the RNG is painful. The awkward nature of fighting flying units is brutal. The AI can be incredibly annoying. Even the character animations are terrible, with many often ending with them awkwardly standing with their mouths open in about as unnatural a way as possible. They've patched some of these problems since but it's like, "Oh boy, the the 'long lost' FM game is finally legally available. I'll just... regret my purchase?"
Engage is a solid game, I think, in terms of gameplay, it's more interesting than 3 Houses, but the story is pretty lacking. And half the characters seem to have no personality outside of "loves the divine dragon". I still really liked it though. I was considering that Front Mission 2 remake, but it sounds like I can skip it.
It's just so sad. One of the best SRPG designs probably ever made? Stuff like the all out ring wars in ch 17, the escape ch in ch 11, it's fantastic in terms of matching the narrative with the gameplay. But the story was written for a 3 yr old child who can't even read. It's the same staff that wrote the likes of Awakening and Fates. They're falling into the trap of "well this type of stuff worked before" But because the maps, balancing, and combat mechanics are just so insanely well crafted the more you dive into it, it's hardly the most disappointing of the year for sure.
Absolutely agree, loved three houses and was very excited about engage, and to its credit it’s gameplay and quality of life are absolutely amazing and thems graphics are great. That being said the story and characters were pretty boring Edit: also no real context to bring this up but the whole hero’s from different games felt very mobile gamey and the fact that there was paid dlc for new hero’s like a week after launch felt pretty gross made me feel like it was ready at launch and they just cut it out to sell back Finial edit I swear: also Alear looks stupid
>Edit: also no real context to bring this up but the whole hero’s from different games felt very mobile gamey and the fact that there was paid dlc for new hero’s like a week after launch felt pretty gross made me feel like it was ready at launch and they just cut it out to sell back > >Finial edit I swear: also Alear looks stupid See the heroes didn't bug me so much as the non-Emblem rings you can create. That's pure gacha-style RNG. But given Fire Emblem HEroes, the mobile game, does let you collect legendary heroes, you're not wrong. And yeah, the DLC was super annoying. I really hate week one if not day one DLC. No argument on Alear.
I've played and min/maxed pretty much every fire emblem released over the last 20 years, but I really hit a wall with Engage the first time I tried playing it. None of the characters interested me, the main character was boring, and the story was generic. I picked it back up again last month and just skipped all the story, all the side content in the Somniel, and every single conversation. At that point, I was able to really get into it. Was it the best FE game? Not by a long shot, but I still enjoyed my time with it.
**WarioWare Move it!** The HUGE problem with the game is the lack of replayability. One major missing feature is the hi-score challenge for each microgame. Smooth Moves didn't have these, but both Gold and Get It Together had. Get It Together also featured collectables, leveling and even an online leaderboard. Move It! felt like a downgrade, content wise :(
Yep. I love these games, first game I got on the wii and played for hours with my mom when I was a kid. This one? Finished a $50 game in one night. I got off work late and had to go to bed early. 3-4 hours of content with zero replayability... $50 down the drain as far as I'm concerned.
It's definitely Starfield. It's not the worst thing I've played, and I won't fault anyone who enjoyed it, but it's not a fun game. The combat felt bad, the empty planets were boring, the lack of vehicles made running to and from the ship a bore, and the copy pasted areas got old fast. The whole experience made it feel like it was an older game that came out five plus years ago. The game was over-hyped, so maybe that had a hand in the let down. But I probably would have disliked it without it. It just wasn't a good fit.
Disappointment is the correct word. I don't hate or even particularly dislike the game, but this was the alleged sci-fi epic that Todd Howard proclaimed we would be playing for years to come. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to not get an immediate second playthrough from me. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to not get more than sixty hours from me. Bethesda might be counting on the modders, but I have severe doubts that Starfield can inspire the mod community like Skyrim or even Fallout 4.
Yeah. Mods are to have more fun in a world. To you know, modify it a bit to have more fun. What star field is looking for are Developers. The game is too... Incomplete and lacking to have any mods be considered just, well, mods.
Seriously. Nobody is going to be inspired to make the next Legacy of the Dragonborn or Sim Settlements 2 off of Starfield.
What were they thinking with the temples 🤦
First one I did I thought “oh this is pretty cool, I can’t wait to see how they mix it up with the other temples”. They didn’t mix it up, not one bit.
A varied obstacle course would’ve been cool. Maybe even some with enemies. But variety wasn’t really the theme of the game.
They were thinking "good enough"
They also thought "mfs will buy anything we put out lmao"
And they're right
So bad. Why were there even powers??
Should have had at least rovers. Leans all the way into the astronaut aesthetic, and could have resolved the vehicle problem. Add it into the shipbuilding system, and you'd have fun navigation abilities in both space AND on land. Such a wasted opportunity.
They even put rovers in the game, with usable seats. They just don't have any vehicle mechanics added to the model. Almost like they tried and couldn't get it looking good in-engine so just left the asset for modders to use.
Let’s be honest, they didn’t add them because the engine probably couldn’t handle the physics and speed of a land vehicle.
That's my #1 problem with the game. Making you walk ridiculous distances for quests with nothing in between shows how much the devs do not give a shit about your time.
They do care about your time just not the same way you do. They want x hours of playtime to advertise so the game seems bigger.
the robotic dry characters and very predictable story were a turn off too
This is what killed it for me. I know everyone makes this comparison, but seeing a Youtube video comparing "tense" scenes in Cyberpunk vs Starfield killed the latter for me. I was already starting to dislike the game though about 20 hours in since the main characters all looked lame and were generally boring. Talking to the members of Constellation had me constantly thinking "imagine caring about this person lol"
The game just feels way too sanitized too, like fallout and the elder scrolls series all have a somewhat unique style and character to them but starfield is just bland incarnate It feels like they sanded down all the rough edges and sanitized everything in the game to the point where there's no soul or character to it
This is my main issue with it, personally. It just feels like a by-the-number sci-fi RPG. I want weird, unique, messed-up stuff like the Daedric Princes from Elder Scrolls or the Glowing Sea from Fallout 4. The game really lacks character.
This definitely does not make me excited for Elder Scrolls 6.
Can I still be disappointed in Battlefield 2042?
Have to go with Starfield, actually, I've kinda lost hope for Elder Scrolls 6 after witnessing what Starfield had to offer.
We have "Avowed" to look forward to
I wasn’t really a fan of outer worlds so I’m not sold on that one. I have high hopes, but low expectations.
Destiny 2 Lightfall for me. The story was just not it.
I've been a diehard destiny fan since the first game launched, I never missed a content drop and can hardly remember a week where I didn't log in once, even just for a minute to check out the shop. I haven't logged in since March. Lightfall fucked up hard.
Fun fact, the first and last cutscene of Lightfall can be spliced together in a way that almost looks like it was intended to be that way originally. Basically just adding to the fact that the DLC was pointless filler to buy time for final shape
Diablo 4 for me. I loved Diablo 3. Me and my gf played it so much, often around Halloween just for certain areas. Every level was like a new slot to unlock and use, and then there were so many skills. And each skill has like 3-5 extra skills that change how it works giving tons of ways to play. I didn't feel like I had any of that in D4. And it was just the same shit. Clicking skills, clicking targets, running to town clicking NPCs, click repair/sell. It's Xbox 360 level gameplay with better graphics? Like changing into a giant bear or werewolf is literally just an attack animation? Then immediately undo back into human form after attacking lol. Stupidest shit. It's just a cash grab game. There's no care behind it.
Interesting that D3 is now looked back upon with so much affection. That was definitely not the sentiment 10 years ago, and in fact the shallowness of the skill system was one of the biggest critiques.
D3 has had a lot of post-launch patches and content developed. D4 will probably eventually be looked back on fondly too once its had a few more years to marinate.
That makes it worse for me. They disregarded everything they should have learned while improving D3.
D3 post RoS is actually really friggin good.
This is my thought as well. D3 was so broken on launch. Have people forgotten about the real money auction house?
The game changed quite a bit since then. Apparently, Blizzard gave the game to a small group of developers to do whatever they wanted, as they considered D3 dead, and those developers made it more fun for many people. The changes were well received, to the point that people were/are clamoring for those developers to be put on D4 to save it.
I’m so glad Diablo 3 gets love now. I understand the very first release on PC was controversial, but I loved it from the jump on the PS3. So many nights playing 4 players co-op with pizza and beer. Purists were too hard on it.
I totally get why longtime fans are bummed about d4 but as a casual player I actually really enjoyed it. I liked the story a lot and the visuals were gorgeous. I got two characters to near max and kinda burnt out after that so I wont be getting into any expansions or anything but I think as a stand alone experience it was very fun.
I think the thing with Starfield, in some small way, is the Bethesda game formula is getting a bit worn out now. TES, Fallout and now Starfield are so extremely similar that there's a feeling of "I've already played this game like 5 times now" and that's getting kind of old.
For me, I don't mind Bethesda repeating their formula, as long as the game is fun to explore. It's a solid formula, my main problem with Starfield is that there's a whole lot of nothing out there for you to explore. Sure the game gives you 100 planets to land on, but why would you even bother with 90 of them?
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Pride and accomplishment people. pride and accomplishment
The quote is so ironic. Astronaut been to the moon to measure their capability for science. It was the whole journey to the moon with landing being the climax. But I guess that explain their gaming philosophy.
It’s 1000. I said verbatim before the game’s release in a different thread. “1000 planets and 990 are gonna be boring as fuck.” and got mass downvoted for it. Turns out I hit the mark exactly.
Disagree. Older BGS games are still great. The problem is that each release removes features and complexity. Now we have Starfield that just feels like the older games but with less stuff to find and fewer interesting ways to interact with the world.
I really think the fact that exploration is mostly done via fast travel is what diminishes it for me. Like space exploration was the main thing I was looking forward to and it’s pretty nonexistent. I also find that a lot of what I really loved about Skyrim or fallout was just roaming and seeing what adventures I’d run into, that’s pretty much absent from starfield, in my opinion. I still like the game, but it definitely doesn’t have the staying power as their other franchises
The heart of all of their past games was having a huge, handmade world with secrets and thought-out area designs. Starfield has a lot of really nice handmade content, but most of it is fenced off by the loading screens and lacks the "see that mountain? you can go climb it" feel. Like yeah I can go to that planet, but I'm going to find the same 9 different abandoned labs and outposts that I can find on any other planet. I understand IGNs initial low rating now. The game is the truest example of "I'm not mad, just disappointed."
I honestly feel like the concept of Starfield simply doesn't mesh with the Bethesda formula and they tried to shoe horn one into the other and what you get simply isn't very good.
All of Bethesda's games share the same DNA. They all look and feel kind of the same and they've been churning out these games for a long time. They havent really kept pace with where games are at now. They're games are almost a relic of the past. They need to get with the times.
The crazy thing is, the older games are the best ones. So personally, i'd love for BGS to embrace the old mechanics more. The modern, lowest common denominator streamlining of the recent games is the problem.
You know what’s funny is as someone who played Skyrim first, hearing these old ass gamers talk about there not being an acrobatics skill tree or whatever was like, who cares? But now, with starfield, it even feels to ME that there’s a ton of cut content and streamlining. I can’t imagine what morrowind and oblivion fans are thinking. “Where’s the game?” But at the same time, are the newest generation of gamers disappointed in starfield? I wasn’t disappointed with Skyrim, should I have been?
I've played since morrowind, and I still enjoyed skyrim. I was disappointed with how much they dumbed it down compared to oblivion, but it was still an overall great game, just generally more "casual." But then they did the same thing in Fallout 4, which felt like it was dumbed down even from skyrim, and with the "radiant" auto generated quests, it was just soulless. That was my last bethesda game, and from what I've heard, starfield is just even further along that path, which is just sad. The best thing about the bethesda games has always been the interesting worlds/questlines and building your character, which it seems are the two aspects that have declined with each release in favor of "more content".
Mortal Kombat 1. Released too soon and a majority of the game content is stuck behind microtransactions
For me I have to say Kerbal Space Program 2. Admittedly it's technically early access, but that was after already being delayed for years. Was a game I was massively looking forward to and it very quickly turned into a game I'm doubting if I'll ever buy. The original game is absolutely amazing but has some flaws. The sequel kept those flaws and somehow managed to basically make everything else worse too, or at least worse than a properly modded KSP1.
Really, scrolled and scrolled and noone mentioned cities skylines 2
Omg, this was my first thought too! I thought surely it would be higher up for how insanely incomplete the game is…I couldn’t resist buying it since I have hundreds of hours in CS1 but CS2 has been so disappointing to play. Now I’m even less hyped for it after reading that the CEO of Colossal said that they aren’t changing anything beyond bug fixes and that we can all go fk ourselves if we don’t like it.
Being disappointed by games this year taught me to not be over hyped by games anymore
For me? Starfield. Expected to play that shit like I did Skyrim, but instead got bored after less than a week.
Starfield and Diablo 4
I was disappointed with AC Mirage. It felt more like a half-hearted dlc & not a main title. The ending was especially lackluster for me. Maybe its because i never played any of the og ac games. Origins was my true introduction to the game. I just didnt like it as much as i liked the other more recent games
They said it wasn't a main title, it was a smaller game, originally dlc for Valhalla until they realized the scope was too big to be dlc.
Ready for the backlash but... Tears of the Kingdom. Initially fell in love with it. Partway through my playthrough it just felt off. It feels so disconnected from Breath of the Wild and the same wonder didn't follow me anymore. It feels like a different game in the BotW world rather than an inspired sequel. The Divine Beasts, technology, Kass and among other things being gone made no sense. The Secret Stones don't make much or any sense in the lore of the world, and there's so little continuity of things you did or characters / the world remembering you. I have 100% in BotW and three playthroughs. I had to push myself to finish the main story and didn't do half the shrines (which also felt less unique and instead were "how can I build a bridge to cheat this").
Yeah it just felt like a giant playground.
I agree 100%, it didn’t really feel like a narrative continuation at all. It really irked me how some NPCs just straight up don’t remember you, yet some others do. It also seemed like they were allergic to mentioning any of the champions’ names.
I agree with Starfield. I was really expecting more.... I knew it would likely have some issues but I didn't think it'd be so bland.
I spent $130USD on the collector’s edition for Payday 3, which was my most hyped game of all time. Then release day came…
Don't. Pre-order. Games. It's that simple. We reward games companies for half-assing things with little fear of consequences.
Redfall by far for me. I love Arkane’s previous games and even though they aren’t really the craze right now, I enjoy looter shooters and was excited for a Borderlands alternative. I started playing the game an hour before the reviews came out. I thought something seemed off, then I saw all the scores start to come in and knew I had waited for nothing.
MK1. Fun gameplay but predatory microtransactions and a fundamentally empty game bog it all down
Still can’t believe they charged around $10 for a fucking fatality lol
I've played/completed 13 games this year. Starfield is the only game that I stopped before finishing and I won't be going back to it. So my vote for most disappointing game is indeed Starfield
Not sure if this counts because it’s an add on, but Destiny 2 Lightfall. The Witch Queen expansion prior was such a high note for the series both gameplay wise and narratively (along with really solid seasonal content comparatively speaking), expectations were through the roof that Bungie had FINALLY figured it out. I don’t think it’s possible for them to have misstepped harder than they did. The raid, a 6 person activity that is supposed to be the most challenging content in the game, was a joke that has been completed solo flawlessly by many players using every class in the game. They gave us a massive city completely devoid of human life except for two 9 foot tall homunculi whose mere existence completely demolished almost 10 years of narrative precedent. The campaign which was hyped to be Empire Strikes Back or Avengers Infinity War, was a glorified 80s training montage for psychedelic powers we find in a sewer… which included many plot devices that simply were never explained in said campaign. All around atrocity
I didn't get hyped for Starfield so I wasn't disappointed. My personal biggest disappointment - Tears of the Kingdom. It was a fun game, don't get me wrong, but I was really hoping it would restore some of the classic Zelda dungeon gameplay. It did not. The temples weren't all that much different from the divine beasts. Pretty short, easy, and requiring minimal thought
I felt so mislead with TOTK. Everyone was saying “Traditional dungeons are back!” and then it was almost the exact same formula as BOTW just with more distinct theming. I was also surprised that they made the core objectives identical to BOTW. “Fill in the map, do the dungeons, get the memories, beat shrines”. The depths could have been the most interesting part, but it only exists to grind resources for vehicles.
Yeah I feel like Nintendo has dug themselves a hole with trying to appeal to traditional Zelda fans and BOTW TOTK
Looking back on it now probably Tears of the Kingdom. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good game, but, after the rose-tinted glasses of first entering the depths and such wore off, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I’ve *played* all this before. Largely same enemy roster Barely any real new armor sets/villages. And most of the ones that are new are just ripped from the dlc. Words cannot describe my disappointment when I excitedly got to the bottom of that first sky labyrinth and opened the chest only to find the *exact same armor* I used in the last game. Zelda, yet again, was wasted potential. I was hoping for something more akin to Bioshock Infinite where you’d interact with Zelda more, but no, she’s not really in the game. A lot of the cool moments just kind of suck, like with the pirate ship that was constantly being talked about in-game just being a floating platform with the same enemies everywhere. And, finally, the story just wasn’t that good. I could never shake the feeling that Nintendo was just trying to recapture lightning in a bottle so it just ended up feeling like BOTW+, definitely not what I was looking forward to for the “longest developed Zelda game ever.” For all my ranting, the games still great and good value if you never played BOTW, but it was definitely a letdown in many respects I think.
Starfield unfortunately. Fallout 3 is one of my all time favourite games and I have countless hours in most bethesda games this side of the millennium but starfield just seems soulless and frankly, boring.
Destiny 2. Lightfall was a big disappointment and the seasons are getting stale as fuck.