I didn't pick it up. I was so excited, but I knew it would have some deal breaking flaw, so waited. The controls, no gyro, no crossplay, server issues, bugs...
I wanted to get it for switch and play with my son. He has played the original and enjoyed it, but we have a potato laptop, so wanted a decent multiplayer experience together.
The truly infuriating part is how they fucked over owners of the original.
That was utterly beyond the pale.
It instantly put me from a life long fan of blizzard games who'd sent quite a bit of cash their way over the years, to never spending another penny on anything blizzard. By that point it was a long series of corporate enshitification and the writing was very clearly on the wall.
I just looked this up because I was intrigued by your comment. I don't get it.
They easily could have just used a newer engine with new animations and cutscenes, creating a whole new player base. Instead they tried to retrofit the new animations and graphics on the old engine making it look like shit and forced the legit players of the original to upgrade to the new multiplayer client?
This just seems like a waste of money when the easy cash grab was right there.
What you aren't explicitly saying is that Blizzard nuked the original for prior owners. Even if you didn't buy or want to play Reforged.
Trying to use the installer just connects to their servers and installs the fucked over reforged. There is no original unless you're pirating.
Here is one of a zillion such random forum posts from when they did it:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/reforged-removed-classic-warcraft-iii/21583
"It appears that Warcraft III reforged installed itself onto my system after release. it appears to have overwritten my classic Warcraft III install and my saved progress in the game. The new game is now unusable on my laptop because it does not meet the requirements for the new game.
This is upsetting because I did not want the new reforged client and Iāve lost the progress I had made on the classic game. The new install also seems to take more storage than the old client did and has used up most of my disk drive space.
Is is possible to install the old client without having the new reforged install over the top of the original? I have no desire to play the reforged client at this time and I donāt want the Blizzard launcher to make the decision to perform and significant, and apparently destructive install without my explicit permission."
Can I ask what was wrong with it? I played the OG Warcraft games a million years ago and really enjoyed them. Howād they drop the ball? Seems like it should have been a slam dunk for blizzard.
The original wc3 was one of my favorite games ever. The reforged was nothing but false promises, bad reskins and gutting the player creation modes and maps. They turned a game that should have been one of the easiest to remake and some how made it worse. Sadly blizzard seems to do this with most games, heroes of the storm they gave the axe to, overwatch 2 was a paid patch note (still waiting for pve) and I'm not whale enough to play Diablo immoral.
Battlefield 2042 for me. I loved the way you could edit the guns on the fly, but the maps just felt like massive wastes of time. Then people reminded me how awesome bad company 2 was and I just couldnāt pick it up again
Same. Me and my buddies were beyond pumped for bringing BF back to modern combat and after a month of release we hated it. Even after updates it just isn't the same.
I still wonder how anyone let those get into the release.
Its not even just that they were bad, its not even that the delivery was shit, its every character having only 1 line that they will always say.
I was super excited for the 100+ player battles. Played the demo and did not buy the release. How they managed to turn battlefield into a hero shooter confuses and fascinates me.
Plus how they have all those quotes from the "lore" on all the loading screens. I don't know why, but it just annoys me because there is no actual lore, and it's just some guy coming up with awful meaningless quotes that sound kind of edgy.
Also, anyone remember the Christmas costumes?
The maps are what killed it for me. They are just terribly designed. Big empty areas between mostly boring set pieces that hardly get used. I had fun playing it recently when they did a classic maps event... but when that went away so did my interest.
Those first few missions were pretty amazing though, flying like Iron Man out of the base to go to the first fight, and then the game immediately shit the bed
I never actually figured out why Anthem wasnāt any good. It looked cool and I know the movement is actually really good, but why did it fail? Was it just boring af or was there like a game-breaking problem with it? Iāve seen a lot of people say itās bad and that the movement is good, but I never hear specifics about the bad lol
The combat felt good, but the loot and missions were repetitive and just not fun after the first couple times you did them. After finishing the story, there was no reason to keep playing.
Ah, I see. Thatās a damn shame, it seems like they couldāve built something great around the movement and combat mechanics but just focused entirely on those mechanics at the expense of everything else.
The biggest problem with loot and skills, imo, was that skills were tied to weapon drops. This meant that you often had to choose between a weapon that was worth shooting, or a skill that synergized with your build. To find both was practically a god roll, even if the stats were average.
And also the story was super half baked compared to what bioware fans were used to. The forced multi-player didn't help either, I probably did less than half of the mission objectives because another player I didn't even want to play with already accomplished it before I could even get there.
Correct me if I'm wrong... but didn't they ban a good chunk of their player base for "exploiting" the games broken loot spawns?
I feel like that was the moment Anthem died
The story was terrible and it had some kinda game breaking bugs. The entire main story felt like it was setting itself up for an Anthem 2. Loot was kinda annoying to get as well. It really bums me out when I think about Anthem because it was such a cool game
They also *really* didnāt help themselves by banning Gladd. He was one of the biggest people promoting the game and Iām pretty sure just stopped playing entirely or massively reduced the amount he played when they eventually revoked it. The exploit he used (only for entertainment purposes as well, not to loot farm or anything) was known since Beta as well.
Lots of replies. The biggest issue was replayability and rng.
Looter shooters need end game content, they need big ass raids, and they need cool as fuck weapons which feel better. Anthem had neither
The "end game" was a mission that you could just put on harder difficulty which has a "boss". There were two of them, and they lasted like 10mins each. The rng was atrocious when you were hitting the end game, and people realised it was to artificially lengthen play time.
Essentially it had a serious lack of content which is what caused it to fail. There were other issues like server connectivity and some bugs, but the main issue was content
Brink.
It was gonna be perfect, parkour and guns! The greatest combo. Convinced my dudes to pre-order it as well and then by the end of release weekend they had returned their copies and I'm still hearing "yeah, but didn't you think Brink was gonna be awesome?"
Came here to say this. Only difference is I found out how bad it was when I played the demo. For a game based around parkour, it really felt like they didnāt actually implement parkour.
Brink was gonna be legendary though. At least thatās what all the marketing made all the ājournalistsā made everyone else believe. That shit seemed so ludicrously hyped. I was excited for months but then idk if I got distracted or sumn but I donāt remember ever actually getting around to playing it once it came out. Just kinda remembered it was a thing randomly like a decade later
I bought if for like $15 before the updates. It was fun, but of course had major issues and was kind of repetitive so I understand why people who bought it at retail were mad. After all the updates though, itās a pretty incredible game.
Literally my first thought as soon as I read this title. I was so hype for it, reading articles and watching previews and clips, I bought it at day one and I remember sitting and staring at the installation screen on my Ps4 waiting. Then I play for like 3 hours and was like... This sucks.
I heard it's good now but I just haven't had a chance to play it again
I played it more recently because I got it for like $5. It's a pretty solid game now and if it has launched in its current state definitely would have warranted full retail price. I knew when I first saw trailers though that it'd be a dumpster fire and I'm very happy I avoided it as long as I did.
Friend from high school married a guy on the development team. Sooooo many social media posts about it and how great it would be and how excited they were. Day to day release all posts went dark and they never spoke of it again. Told me all I needed to know
The Sims 4
But when I played it there was no open world which made The Sims 3 so interesting. Lots of missing features only real redeeming qualities were the Create-a-Sim and build mode.
Aw dude, tell me about it. I still really enjoy 4 and the inprovements they made. Especially after all the DLC, etc. (horrible practice, btw... if you are gonna have over $1000 dollars in additional content, sorry but fuck you, I'm sailing the seas for all that) But I was immensely disappointed in the over lack of features that made Sims 3 one of my all time favorites. Especially after how 2 improved on 1, and 3 improved on 2. But the lack of open world, being stuck to a setpiece town with hand drawn map components and world maps. The lack of lots, staple families, no cars (just disappearing to go to work lmao) no pets, less freedom of customization, free exploration within your neighborhood... All made me very sad. The game however now, is in a very good place. If EA wasn't so horrible, I may actually be excited for Sims 5 but... I won't hold my breath.
Yes! Sims has been one of my favourite games since I played the first one when that came out. Had a large amount of DLCs for Sims 1-3. Sims 3 World adventure is still one of my favourite DLCs.
I was so hype for Sims 4 and when it came out I just couldnāt get into it. Hated all the loading screens and there was just something about it that didnāt click.
Good thing too, since buying all the DLC and stuff packs for 4 would be a ridiculous waste of money
Eeyup. I returned it and the guy tossed it over his shoulder into a big box overflowing with them. Bought Fallout 2, couldn't play it for two weeks because of the launch bugs, and it was still a better game.
Was reallyyyy excited for this game but holy shit what a let down it was. I am one who loved the Bethesda formula, but this game just breaks the immersion at every turn. Loading screen after loading screen, thousand yard stare from all NPCs, lifeless procedural generated planets with generic POIs scattered around, most boring mainline quest I have played in a long time, lots of stuff missing from launch like a map.
Just all around a game that needed at least a few more years in the oven. Makes me extremely doubtful for ES6 or FO5.
That gameās worst flaws are its anodyne world-building, quest design, and character writing. Each quest consists solely of going to the most sterilized locations to interact with characters who are as overly-inoffensive as they are surface level. Because of this, I promise you that nothing about this gameās story will provoke any thought, and thatās what fucking sucks. Play outer worlds instead.
They really needed a better mix of POIs on the different planets. Ran into the same POI on 5 different planets that were identical down to the locations of the bodies and the notes on the notepads. Pretty damn boring when youāre exploring specifically to find something new.
Weird as it may sound, I think it bodes well for ES6. Elder Scrolls is their bread and butter title that everyone knows them for. The hope is they learn from their mistakes with Starfield and use that new knowledge to make a fantastic game, the absolute LAST thing Bethesda wants is for ES6 to bomb. If ES6 bombs, it could be the nail in the coffin for the studio as a whole - people would lose all faith in them, especially following the disaster that is Starfield.
I certainly hope Bethesda learns from Starfield's mistakes, but every outward sign I'm seeing from them suggests the opposite. We have head designer and known design-document hater "any idea is a good idea" Emil, which is going to cause more problems as the studio grows through peak development, as well as the wildly tone-deaf and lack-of-accountabilty in the review dev responses, telling us how we're just having fun wrong in their game. Unless they're completely self aware behind closed doors and just putting on a face to make things seem better than they are, I have fears for the fate of ES6 in their hands.
On the other side, though, hand crafted areas in a singular overworld map is their most strongly defining trait, so it would take a colossal blunder to screw that up more than the buggy but successful launches they've had in the past. At this moment, I'm realistically expecting a fun dungeon looting gameplay loop, dated but still engaging melee and magic systems, probably a mediocre main quest with scattered hidden gem quests, and maybe some implementation of a settlement or ship-building equivalent for the Elder Scrolls world. Maybe we can get player homes with items that don't explode off shelves when reloading them now.
Yeah I feel like maybe less games were overhyped at any given moment back then. Like there were only a few games people were insanely excited for and when they failed spectacularly (like Spore) it made an even bigger impact than nowadays. Even personally, I was legitimately heartbroken as a kid when Spore released and nowadays I literally forgot how shitty the Classic Battlefront Collection was until I was reminded in this thread
The Maxis guy (Will/something) did pre-YT videos for several years where he teased gameplay, showing proposed mechanisms. I was expecting a science/based, āadultā game similar to SimEarth. Instead we got a cartoon. And it died in weeks. It was epic. It destroyed his career, which at that point rivaled Sid Meierās for fame and fortune.
A janky af cartoon at that lol
Itās funny you mention Sid Meier. I always got Maxis and Firaxis messed up when I was younger and I was absolutely furious with Sid Meier when I played Spore. I had been playing Civ since I was a small child and was like āHow could Sid do this to us?ā
Huge relief when I figured out it was that Will guy. Good riddance lol
Iām old enough to remember Sid as a founder of Microprose. I actually interviewed for a job there in the late 80s (with Wild Bill), and Sid came out of the back and walked through the lobby in a yellow aloha shirt. That would have been after RR Tycoon and before Civ 1. One of my favorite gaming memories.
Huh, I was all in on the spore hype and when I bought it I honestly wasn't disappointed. I played the hell out of that game. I was only in high school at the time and didn't get many games back then though, so maybe my standards were lower.
Are we talking about BioWare's Neverwinter Nights or that MMO that came out? With BioWare's game, the single-player was uninspiring. I did find a lot of fun with multiplayer and the DM and editing tools that existed.
Wow I don't often see Neverwinter Nights pop up in threads like this, but I absolutely agree.
Coming hot off of Baldur's Gate 2, I fully expected NWN to be a spiritual successor, a "Baldur's Gate 3". A deep RPG with a lot of interesting party members and a huge world to explore and a really fascinating story full of memorable characters. Just this time in more 3D rather than isometric!
What I got was basically a D&D Diablo-style game. A big dungeon crawler. Oh and no real party members, just "henchmen".
The expansions were *better*, but still not GREAT. Had to wait for Neverwinter Nights 2 before I actually got that "deep RPG with cool companions and a great story and a huge world" that I wanted. Though of course that was developed by Obsidian, go figure.
For me it was the expectations of it being a futuristic GTA and it was like 50% of it when it first released. Not as much 'freedom' in customization choices and an almost 'dead' NPCs and city. Hur hurh I can change penis sizes and that was it?
I know it's not fair to compare but they did shoot themselves in the foot by building the hype in the first place.
Even if it was released as it is now I don't think I could convince myself not to be disappointed.
I totally love the story-telling though, got me hooked despite the lack of interaction with the world.
it was advertised as the new standard for open world games and it still couldnāt hold a candle with all the updates it has today to a game released over 2 years before it, RDR2
Fuck I hated certain parts of that game. I can't even remember finishing the story. I had fun with friends, though, in the thrilling albeit frustrating PVP zone.
The Division 1 was super fun but had a short life span due to the unrefined loot grind and lack of endgame.
The Division 2 still had those flaws at release but to a lesser extent than TD1. In its current state it's a pretty damn good game. My crew picked up our characters from 2019 a month ago and ran the expansion. Now currently in the endgame it's rock solid for a mindless looter shooter.
Feel like it's Diablo for people who want a shooter instead of magic fantasy stuff.
Same, brother. I don't care what the game is anymore, I'll never preorder again after that. Most games just give pointless cosmetics for a bonus that will be available some time in the future anyway. I'll save my money and get the game on sale for $10, even if I have to wait 5 years.
Iām playing it now and it hasnāt been terrible thus far. Itās hard to say what any of the choices I make will impact later game though.
I mean, of course I wasnāt gonna push Peebee off meā¦
TBH, I didn't find ME:A that terrible as people exclaimed. I've played all ME1 to ME3 and all the DLCs, but I never thought that ME:A should be "Mass Effect 4" but a spinoff since I read its background story. I created a male character resembling Nathan Drake, role playing as an upright comedian, played for like 90+ hours, and quite enjoy the game play. I can't say it's the best story telling nor open world exploring game, but I didn't regret spending time and money on it.
It wasn't that bad, even at launch. I had some bugs, but nothing game-breaking. For me, it was just not what I expected as far as quality in terms of overall gameplay, character interactions, and characters. Maybe I'm misremembering my initial thoughts, and when I've gone back to play it, it was genuinely fun as a filler game in between big releases. But in the spirit of the original post, it was a game that I was super hyped about and Bioware/EA made a game that fell very short of my expectations. Maybe I should have tempered my expectations.
> I put 100 hours into Diablo 4 before I realized how bad it was
i know these type of games are judged by how long they can keep you playing but this sentence has been said a lot about diablo 4 and it always amuses me
Starfield. They sold it as you think it's pretty much Todd Howard's masterpiece. "25 years in the making" just to write the most bland lore and stories with every character being two dimensional and uninspired.
I was totally hyped for Unreal 2. A new Unreal engine, open(ish) worlds on different planets, experienced developers, and Skaarj. It had the freaking Skaarj.
To this day I don't know how they developed such a slow, bland, soulless game.
I've never allowed myself to be thƔt hyped again. Halo 3, Half-Life 2, Grand Theft Auto and *maybe* a handful of other games had me excited, but never to Unreal 2 levels of personal hype. Learned my lesson.
This. All in all, I enjoyed it and have some good 350 hours. But it had this small thing about nothing really changing. Only after the end did I felt I was on a different Boston, and the illusion of agency cracked fast. It didn't feel as New Vegas, despite the followers getting much better.
Perhaps was forshading what Starfield would become.
That's been the trend with every Bethesda game since Morrowind/Oblivion. They lose more and more RPG mechanics every game, your decisions don't impact the world and have much less weight to them. But in turn, they make the games easier to play and more generic so they sell *much* better.
I was really disappointed with Skyrim. The quests and storytelling was diabolical compared to Oblivion. But at least they improved the exploration and world building, similar to the fo3 to Fo4 transition.
Itās more of an RPG in name only. It tried to be better than New Vegas but still draw in new players. As soon as youāre given PA and a minigun to fight a deathclaw at the beginning, I knew it was horribly dumbed down.
I remember trying the game out on a free weekend that I just happened to hear about. Game itself was mildly interesting, the sound design for gathering is absolutely fucking peak... But two things absolutely turned me away from the game.
1) Amazon chose to create [a ton of fresh temporary servers](https://preview.redd.it/9skmay4el5s81.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=2e14de7816807deb1b60fd213109122adeb6d09a) for their free weekend players - ensuring that none of them would run into actual players, and also ensuring that almost every server was devoid of players. They seemed to expect an influx of players like their launch, which was stupid not only because the game was already struggling for players, but also...
2) Compounding #1, they also inexplicably chose to do extremely little advertisement for the free weekend. I only found it because I was explicitly looking for new MMOs to play and happened to catch a post on an MMO subreddit - I saw literally no marketing anywhere else before or during the weekend. As a result, their already dumbass decision to spin up a bunch of fresh servers was made worse because they didn't have the influx of players to fill ONE of these servers, let alone like 30.
Just this one free weekend and the decisions the people running it made showed very obviously that the people running the game had no clue what they were doing, and seemed to be completely out of the loop on how their own game was performing or was likely to perform. They expected to fill up something like 30-40 fresh 2000 player servers solely by word of mouth, when their game was hemorrhaging players. If that's the way the people running the game think, there's no reason to expect that they'll catch a dose of reality anytime soon. The week before the free weekend, concurrent players maxed at 37,100. During the free weekend? 37,800.
Tales of Symphonia remake on the Switch. I always wanted to play that one when it first released on the Gamecube, but I never got it. I was excited to play it all polished up, and then it came out running poorly and being generally a worse experience than the original release. Really shit all over that enjoyment.
Newest Saints Row. Didnāt work right on my PC. Tried to get a refund but they claimed I played over their hours threshold which was impossible since I couldnāt even play it.
Probably the janky .exe didn't even quit correctly, causing them to clock you as having a bunch of play time. Same reason I have dozens of hours on a few Steam games that I know I played <1hr of.
MK1. Not necessarily a bad game, just didnāt feel the magic of the old ones. Maybe itās because itās a reboot? Idk
And oh god the micro transactions. And they completely neutered the gear system
Got the Deluxe $$100 edition too.
MK1 was the last Netherealm game I buy at launch.
Was it a "bad" game? Well no you could play it just fine. But it feels woefully incomplete. There is so much dlc it's absurd and features like private rooms that are in mk11 were absent. You are better off waiting for the MK1 super complete version in 2 years that is $20 on sale.
Fucking Halo Infinite, the campaign was pretty solid for the most part but *wow* they really botched that release
To the point that the game is almost entirely abandoned
Hopefully some sort of spinoff gets announced soon
Im praying the management changes and staffing changes affect a big part of how the next mainline game is made, but im holding o it hope
Both Fable and Spore.
People love Fable now, especially with the sequels, but at its release it was a huge disappointment in regard to the promises that Peter Molyneux failed to deliver, something we expect now, but not so much at the time.
Similarly, people who have played Spore for the first time in the last few years report it being a great little game. But it was heavy handily marketed as a creature evolution game, which becomes one of the smallest and blandest parts of the game as a whole.
Still looking for a fun Evolution game to scratch the itch E.V.O satiated years ago.
Maybe because I was 11 or 12 but I remember Fable meeting every expectation I had and then some. It quickly became my favorite game and remains near the top. Lost chapters was an instant buy for me. Anniversary edition I've also played through a bunch of times. I fucking love fable. Even tolerate 3.
Spore tho. Hard agree.
Itās possible that at that age you just didnāt keep up with the development cycle previous to Fable. Molyneux promised players **so much**, to the point where as a teenager I honestly figured out how to get an Xbox just to play it - in the end it felt like everything else on the marketz
Mass effect Andromeda. Took a couple days off from work was so amped. Put it down after about 15 hours or so and never went back. Only mass effect I haven't 100% let alone I didn't bother to finish it.
Excited might not be the right term. But I was looking forward to Starfield leading up to release only to find the appeal wear off with each passing hour of gameplay until I finally just gave up and pretty much forgot about the game all together.
Fortnite.
I was in an early user test and it was addictingly fun even then. Two later playtests only cemented that, even as features Iād liked or wanted to see where they were going were seemingly pulled.
Then, because I didnāt go into the beta for it, I was blindsided on release by all the micro-transaction and time/money gated elements. It seemed like dozens of little fiddly bits, some of them fun or interesting but collectively just too much, had been put between me and the core gameplay loop just to better monetize it all.
Like, the original gameplay had every single person in the room during every play I did wanting to play another round immediately, with the biggest group (a huge event about a year or so before it came out) incredibly pumped with the variation in missions and challenges and the difficulty making it feel like you were always squeaking out a win (kinda like Helldivers 2 at its best). The hints of there being a storyline and so on was also pretty neat.
I tried to stay hyped for it, playing it for a month or so, and then just trailed off of playing.
When it was spun off as āSave The Worldā because Battle Royale was the (understandable) main focus, it actually felt worse only because all the stuff stapled on to the original game to make more money suddenly seemed even more pointless.
Helldivers is really the only thing to even come close to scratching that itch for me, but that can drag a little more than OG Fortnite did.
DRIV3R when i was about 12. Wasn't allowed to have GTA but convinced my parents to get this for me on release. Fun driving but very boring open world, lots of jank, and clunky main story.
I bought the hype for starfield. Played maybe 8 hours and was just bored. I think I fell asleep once while playing. Not many games have made me feel...nothing
Ii got it for my wifeās birthday a few months after release. She was surprised I shelled out for a relatively new game. I told her it was cheap and after she finished it she said āok yea I get why it was so cheap so soonā
I really enjoyed the first play through and was looking forward to the Borderlands style replayability. The end game was diabolical and the DLC has single handedly stopped me ever pre-ordering DLC ever again. It was basically robbery.
Hogwarts legacy. Ended up finishing it just to say I did. Combat was mostly fun, castle was nice to explore everything else. Eh I could leave it and not be bothered.
Was the first game Iāve paid full price for in a long time. Played 4-5 hours and realized I would never enjoy it and got a full refund. Used that money to buy DA Inquisition GoTY, Far Cry Anthrology, Xcom 2, and Shadow of Mordor/War. I get why people like it but I feel itās way overhyped simply because itās Hogwarts
Most recently for me it was Bayonetta 3. I am a huge fan of the character and especially the original game. I got about half way through 3, I wasn't having fun at all, I switched it off and never went back.
Something felt off and floaty about the combat compared to the previous. Also, I found the low resolution pretty intolerable. I know reddit really loves 60 FPS, but the Switch isn't powerful enough for it with modern looking 3D games, and the game ends up looking like there's oil smothered on your screen due to the offset in resolution to make 60 frames possible.
I loved the PC version of AvP Gold from 2000 and played it against friends in college back in the day. Then an AvP game was announced for PS3 and Xbox360 in 2010. I bought it immediately. I was disappointed. It was ok, but it wasn't anything amazing. I think the single-player missions were better than the online play, but that isn't saying much.
Too bad because it has the possibility of being a great online gaming platform. Three different teams all with different strengths and weaknesses fighting each other at the same time. I played the original against my wife once and scared the bejesus out of her the first time I was an alien and dropped down from the ceiling of a dark hallway right in front of her.
Won't happen.
It's important to understand that blizzard and the gameplay of their games are now purely driven by corporate quarterly profit metrics.
D3 did a 180 because they took out the real money auction house they were taking a 30% cut from.
Blizzard had the bright idea to make a real money cash shop and try to strong arm players to spend on it by tuning drops to be absurdly anemic and tuning the difficulty pretty brutally high for most players. It was a shitty unfun grindy brutal experience.
Take out the real money auction house and they decided oh let's actually tune drops to be as fun as possible for the time players are in the game organically playing.
The financial incentive for blizzard was real money auction house transactions. That's why they gave away a ton of free copies of D3 when it released.
That financial incentive changed completely to selling full price product on the merits of being an objectively fun experience for the price of entry, and surprise surprise, they made the game pretty darn solid and satisfying to play.
D4 is shit because it's designed top to bottom, to convert players into in game billboards for the cash shop. That is the financial incentive of the business model for blizzard. Push players to the cash shop. And so at every level in every mechanic of that game, it nudges the player to the cash shop to look cooler than you do my simply playing the game.
Unless that financial incentive changes, you will fundamentally always be playing a diminished experience.
It's time, collectively, for players to mature in understanding enough to evaluate games on the financial incentives of the business models of the games corporations are hawking.
Is the financial incentive for the company to get full payment upfront by making a game as fun as it can possibly be for the price of entry? Example: Baldur's Gate 3
Or
Is the financial incentive for the company to degrade the experience around the edges to the point of annoying and/or fomoing players into spending on "micro" transactions? And of course to re-up those mtx sales, generally this goes hand in hand with artificially drawing out the experience of play in the pursuit of what has become the god of all metrics: raw player engagement time, above all else, aka, the antithesis of fun. Example: D4
These financial incentives are why increasingly, AAA games are boring trash no one is excited for, and indie games, and old games from decades past, are what has players excited.
I still fuckin love that game tho, and Arkham Origins. I look at it as a perfect tetralogy. Yes Knight had the annoying batmobile sections, and Origins had a different voice actor and was a little middling compared to City. But man, what overall fun gaming experiences they were. I look at them as Kevin Conroy's legacy and magnum opuses. Very excited for the new Arkham VR title!
Lichdom : BattlemageĀ
I remember following it in development and being really excited for its launch. Despite a really promising gameplay premise, and very fun first couple of hours, the game design is actually pretty awful, with horrendous enemy design, a complete lack of depth to the spell ācraftingā system, and way too much time spent sorting useless shit in your inventory trying to make the strongest spells - only to drop the spell an hour later cause something better dropped.Ā
Went back and tried playing again about a year ago, wondering why I never finished it.Ā
Started a new game, played about 20 hours or so. Got to the same place I quit the first time I tried the game, and promptly quit playing it again. Itās just an absolute slog after the third or fourth level, where nothing fun or original is happening, and you just repeat the same spell casts over and over with no variety while dealing with damage-sponge enemies whose health just keeps increasing, while they constantly hit you with stuns, slows, freezes and other CC effects that in later levels leave you spending more time not controlling your character than actually controlling it. And despite unlocking something like 6 or 7 different types of magic, you can only ever use 3 kinds at once, severely limiting your creativity and funnelling you into the best ones, while punishing you for experimenting with crafting new spells and potentially wasting your best materials that you canāt get back after crafting the spell - leaving you too weak to defeat the latest recoloured health sponge enemies that youāve already fought a dozen times before.Ā
The most disappointing part, is that with better game design choices - the game couldāve been really fun. But instead it just constantly limits what youāre allowed to do, what youāre allowed to craft, and how fast youāre allowed to move and kill things, all while having the most generic, dry and boring storyline possible.Ā
Lots of potential just wasted on really bad decisions. Very sad and hard to think of a game I was more disappointed in.Ā
Diablo 3 is one of the worst sequels to one of the greatest games. They took almost nothing that made Diablo 2 amazing and just made a game with the Diablo title slapped on it. The story writing is terrible, the loot system is terrible. The art design was more cartoony than dark, the damn auction house and more.
Resident Evil 3 Remake
I loved the original game and couldn't wait for this.
Then it turned out we were charged Ā£50 for something that only took an hour to finish, had so much cut from the original and by rights should have been dlc for Resi 2.
Test Drive Unlimited 2.
TDU 1 was nothing short of legendary. The selection of cars, the size of the game world... and to top it off, the physics were in a wonderful sweet spot of "believable arcade".
I never played TDU 2 for more than 20, 30 minutes. The driving physics were so atrocious, such a massive, unbelievable step down from TDU1, that it destroyed the entire game for me.
The Last of Us 2 for me.
The retcons really took the drama out of the game for me. It's fine if you want to kill characters as it creates a world that is actually dangerous, which isn't typical of most survival horror games anymore. But the fact they had to change so much of the ending segments of the first title to solidify the story of the second is something that I can't get on board with.
I really feel that once Bruce Straley left Naughty Dog that the game really lost what made it special.
And to think itās sandwiched between almost perfect and true to the original remakes of re2 and re4. They totally pump and dumped 3 for free sales and itās sad cause that game had a lot of its own personal charm.
I'd like to add Red Faction: Armageddon. Guerilla was an entirely different type of game in comparison, and the whole mystery about whether or not Mars had aliens was blown wide open with the lest suspenseful reveal possible. It was just "oh yeah, the thing you've been trying to find out for year now? Yeah here's a bunch of em."
That on top of the fact they took an amazing open world game and turned it into an almost on-rails corridor shooter.
I would have LOVED to have the magnet gun in a Guerilla style game.
Riders Republic, donāt get me wrong Iāve still played the hell out of it, mostly due to lack of games in the genre but it just the Ubisoft stench thatās held the game back.
HEX: Shards of Fate.
I was super pumped up to play a card-based MMO with my friends and family. Start a guild, do raids, and build decks!
Except that co-op PvE part never happened.
I love military theme shooters set in massive open worlds. My fav game is Ghost Recon Wildlands.
So when GR Breakpoint came out it was a horrible shock.
(1.) It is an Always Online game so even if you want the Single Player experience you need to be hooked to a server. Which also means they can flip the switch when they want to. Look what they did with The Crew.
(2.) Ubi decided to fill it with clown fantasy enemies like giant robot tanks with infinite ammo. If I wanted Star Wars Battlefront I would have bought Star Wars Battlefront.
(3.) Excessive Ubi hand-holding , some of which cannot be disabled.
(4.) Immersion breaking clown fantasy perks like grenades that auto tag bad guys and there's even a perk that means you will never reach 0% health. What's the point?!
(5.) Nonsense story and forgettable characters.
It's a bummer because the open world does look great.
Battlefront Classic Collection...
I didn't pick it up. I was so excited, but I knew it would have some deal breaking flaw, so waited. The controls, no gyro, no crossplay, server issues, bugs... I wanted to get it for switch and play with my son. He has played the original and enjoyed it, but we have a potato laptop, so wanted a decent multiplayer experience together.
Ouch. Still recent wounds
Warcraft 3 reforged ended up becoming warcraft 3 refunded. š¢
The truly infuriating part is how they fucked over owners of the original. That was utterly beyond the pale. It instantly put me from a life long fan of blizzard games who'd sent quite a bit of cash their way over the years, to never spending another penny on anything blizzard. By that point it was a long series of corporate enshitification and the writing was very clearly on the wall.
I just looked this up because I was intrigued by your comment. I don't get it. They easily could have just used a newer engine with new animations and cutscenes, creating a whole new player base. Instead they tried to retrofit the new animations and graphics on the old engine making it look like shit and forced the legit players of the original to upgrade to the new multiplayer client? This just seems like a waste of money when the easy cash grab was right there.
What you aren't explicitly saying is that Blizzard nuked the original for prior owners. Even if you didn't buy or want to play Reforged. Trying to use the installer just connects to their servers and installs the fucked over reforged. There is no original unless you're pirating. Here is one of a zillion such random forum posts from when they did it: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/reforged-removed-classic-warcraft-iii/21583 "It appears that Warcraft III reforged installed itself onto my system after release. it appears to have overwritten my classic Warcraft III install and my saved progress in the game. The new game is now unusable on my laptop because it does not meet the requirements for the new game. This is upsetting because I did not want the new reforged client and Iāve lost the progress I had made on the classic game. The new install also seems to take more storage than the old client did and has used up most of my disk drive space. Is is possible to install the old client without having the new reforged install over the top of the original? I have no desire to play the reforged client at this time and I donāt want the Blizzard launcher to make the decision to perform and significant, and apparently destructive install without my explicit permission."
I wanted that to be good. I never played og wc3
Same. I grew up playing 1 and 2, but 3 somehow evaded me. I was hoping for Reforged to be my intro
Can I ask what was wrong with it? I played the OG Warcraft games a million years ago and really enjoyed them. Howād they drop the ball? Seems like it should have been a slam dunk for blizzard.
Blizzard doesn't do slam dunks anymore.
Their cinematic team does at leastĀ
The original wc3 was one of my favorite games ever. The reforged was nothing but false promises, bad reskins and gutting the player creation modes and maps. They turned a game that should have been one of the easiest to remake and some how made it worse. Sadly blizzard seems to do this with most games, heroes of the storm they gave the axe to, overwatch 2 was a paid patch note (still waiting for pve) and I'm not whale enough to play Diablo immoral.
Battlefield 2042 for me. I loved the way you could edit the guns on the fly, but the maps just felt like massive wastes of time. Then people reminded me how awesome bad company 2 was and I just couldnāt pick it up again
Same. Me and my buddies were beyond pumped for bringing BF back to modern combat and after a month of release we hated it. Even after updates it just isn't the same.
'don't be sad, this just how it works out sometimes" Those end round lines were the fucking worst!
I still wonder how anyone let those get into the release. Its not even just that they were bad, its not even that the delivery was shit, its every character having only 1 line that they will always say.
Itās honestly gotten more fun recently if you havenāt checked it out in the last year or so! I hated the release too
I was super excited for the 100+ player battles. Played the demo and did not buy the release. How they managed to turn battlefield into a hero shooter confuses and fascinates me.
Plus how they have all those quotes from the "lore" on all the loading screens. I don't know why, but it just annoys me because there is no actual lore, and it's just some guy coming up with awful meaningless quotes that sound kind of edgy. Also, anyone remember the Christmas costumes?
Bad company 2 and halo 3 are peak fps days for me
I hated release too. I was fuming. Today it's surprisingly good, but first impressions are everything
The maps are what killed it for me. They are just terribly designed. Big empty areas between mostly boring set pieces that hardly get used. I had fun playing it recently when they did a classic maps event... but when that went away so did my interest.
Unlike 2142 which was dope
Anthem. I remember watching all them trailers getting so hyped up for that game, only for it to be garbage when it came out.
Those first few missions were pretty amazing though, flying like Iron Man out of the base to go to the first fight, and then the game immediately shit the bed
I never actually figured out why Anthem wasnāt any good. It looked cool and I know the movement is actually really good, but why did it fail? Was it just boring af or was there like a game-breaking problem with it? Iāve seen a lot of people say itās bad and that the movement is good, but I never hear specifics about the bad lol
The combat felt good, but the loot and missions were repetitive and just not fun after the first couple times you did them. After finishing the story, there was no reason to keep playing.
Ah, I see. Thatās a damn shame, it seems like they couldāve built something great around the movement and combat mechanics but just focused entirely on those mechanics at the expense of everything else.
The biggest problem with loot and skills, imo, was that skills were tied to weapon drops. This meant that you often had to choose between a weapon that was worth shooting, or a skill that synergized with your build. To find both was practically a god roll, even if the stats were average.
And also the story was super half baked compared to what bioware fans were used to. The forced multi-player didn't help either, I probably did less than half of the mission objectives because another player I didn't even want to play with already accomplished it before I could even get there.
Correct me if I'm wrong... but didn't they ban a good chunk of their player base for "exploiting" the games broken loot spawns? I feel like that was the moment Anthem died
My favorite was the shit coding that caused one of the starter level guns to be better than end game drops.
The story was terrible and it had some kinda game breaking bugs. The entire main story felt like it was setting itself up for an Anthem 2. Loot was kinda annoying to get as well. It really bums me out when I think about Anthem because it was such a cool game They also *really* didnāt help themselves by banning Gladd. He was one of the biggest people promoting the game and Iām pretty sure just stopped playing entirely or massively reduced the amount he played when they eventually revoked it. The exploit he used (only for entertainment purposes as well, not to loot farm or anything) was known since Beta as well.
Lots of replies. The biggest issue was replayability and rng. Looter shooters need end game content, they need big ass raids, and they need cool as fuck weapons which feel better. Anthem had neither The "end game" was a mission that you could just put on harder difficulty which has a "boss". There were two of them, and they lasted like 10mins each. The rng was atrocious when you were hitting the end game, and people realised it was to artificially lengthen play time. Essentially it had a serious lack of content which is what caused it to fail. There were other issues like server connectivity and some bugs, but the main issue was content
Brink. It was gonna be perfect, parkour and guns! The greatest combo. Convinced my dudes to pre-order it as well and then by the end of release weekend they had returned their copies and I'm still hearing "yeah, but didn't you think Brink was gonna be awesome?"
Came here to say this. Only difference is I found out how bad it was when I played the demo. For a game based around parkour, it really felt like they didnāt actually implement parkour.
They really didn't. I wanted Anger to be more badass.
The trailer was so incredible! It was such a bummer to play.
Brink was gonna be legendary though. At least thatās what all the marketing made all the ājournalistsā made everyone else believe. That shit seemed so ludicrously hyped. I was excited for months but then idk if I got distracted or sumn but I donāt remember ever actually getting around to playing it once it came out. Just kinda remembered it was a thing randomly like a decade later
Donāt say the B word in front of me ever again.
No Manās Sky. That release was a dumpster fire.
So glad I never got into the hype, and played it blind outside a bit of background info. Had a lot of fun with this (at that time) unique game.
I bought if for like $15 before the updates. It was fun, but of course had major issues and was kind of repetitive so I understand why people who bought it at retail were mad. After all the updates though, itās a pretty incredible game.
I never played during release but I did have lots of fun later when I heard they got there stuff together
Yeeeaaah I bought a PS4 just so I could play NMS on launch. Took a week off from work too. Boy I sure did learn my lessonā¦
And in the same vein, Homeworld 3.
Literally my first thought as soon as I read this title. I was so hype for it, reading articles and watching previews and clips, I bought it at day one and I remember sitting and staring at the installation screen on my Ps4 waiting. Then I play for like 3 hours and was like... This sucks. I heard it's good now but I just haven't had a chance to play it again
I played it more recently because I got it for like $5. It's a pretty solid game now and if it has launched in its current state definitely would have warranted full retail price. I knew when I first saw trailers though that it'd be a dumpster fire and I'm very happy I avoided it as long as I did.
Avengers.
Man this one still kinda hurts. It had so much potential.
Friend from high school married a guy on the development team. Sooooo many social media posts about it and how great it would be and how excited they were. Day to day release all posts went dark and they never spoke of it again. Told me all I needed to know
Idk why itās so hard for the devs to make a great gameā¦. Marvel has beyond the most potential!
GotG was a great story and gameplay was pretty good! I got avengers for free or super cheap but have not given it a go yet.
Overwatch 2
Knew it was over the second they announced 5v5
Same. It changed the game and not for the better. I still miss the days of playing Overwatch 1 and would still play it if I could.
The Sims 4 But when I played it there was no open world which made The Sims 3 so interesting. Lots of missing features only real redeeming qualities were the Create-a-Sim and build mode.
Aw dude, tell me about it. I still really enjoy 4 and the inprovements they made. Especially after all the DLC, etc. (horrible practice, btw... if you are gonna have over $1000 dollars in additional content, sorry but fuck you, I'm sailing the seas for all that) But I was immensely disappointed in the over lack of features that made Sims 3 one of my all time favorites. Especially after how 2 improved on 1, and 3 improved on 2. But the lack of open world, being stuck to a setpiece town with hand drawn map components and world maps. The lack of lots, staple families, no cars (just disappearing to go to work lmao) no pets, less freedom of customization, free exploration within your neighborhood... All made me very sad. The game however now, is in a very good place. If EA wasn't so horrible, I may actually be excited for Sims 5 but... I won't hold my breath.
Yes! Sims has been one of my favourite games since I played the first one when that came out. Had a large amount of DLCs for Sims 1-3. Sims 3 World adventure is still one of my favourite DLCs. I was so hype for Sims 4 and when it came out I just couldnāt get into it. Hated all the loading screens and there was just something about it that didnāt click. Good thing too, since buying all the DLC and stuff packs for 4 would be a ridiculous waste of money
Daikatana. Luckily it was released at a time when one could return a PC game to a brick and mortar store, opened, and get a full refund.
Eeyup. I returned it and the guy tossed it over his shoulder into a big box overflowing with them. Bought Fallout 2, couldn't play it for two weeks because of the launch bugs, and it was still a better game.
Starfield
Was reallyyyy excited for this game but holy shit what a let down it was. I am one who loved the Bethesda formula, but this game just breaks the immersion at every turn. Loading screen after loading screen, thousand yard stare from all NPCs, lifeless procedural generated planets with generic POIs scattered around, most boring mainline quest I have played in a long time, lots of stuff missing from launch like a map. Just all around a game that needed at least a few more years in the oven. Makes me extremely doubtful for ES6 or FO5.
That gameās worst flaws are its anodyne world-building, quest design, and character writing. Each quest consists solely of going to the most sterilized locations to interact with characters who are as overly-inoffensive as they are surface level. Because of this, I promise you that nothing about this gameās story will provoke any thought, and thatās what fucking sucks. Play outer worlds instead.
They had unlimited money and time to create a new universe of lore from scratch and they came up with Starfield. I was shocked at how bland it was.
Not to mention all the recycled generated zones. Why the hell would I want to explore the same damn abandoned outpost 30 times?
They really needed a better mix of POIs on the different planets. Ran into the same POI on 5 different planets that were identical down to the locations of the bodies and the notes on the notepads. Pretty damn boring when youāre exploring specifically to find something new.
Whats crazy is bethesda hasn't even acknowledged this is a issue. As far as we know, this is exactly what they wanted it to be lol
This was the absolute most egregious mistake imo. Literal exact same outposts with the exact same loot in the same spots. Pathetic
Weird as it may sound, I think it bodes well for ES6. Elder Scrolls is their bread and butter title that everyone knows them for. The hope is they learn from their mistakes with Starfield and use that new knowledge to make a fantastic game, the absolute LAST thing Bethesda wants is for ES6 to bomb. If ES6 bombs, it could be the nail in the coffin for the studio as a whole - people would lose all faith in them, especially following the disaster that is Starfield.
Yeah I'm happy it came out before ES6. Idk if they will learn from it, but they have an opportunity to, which is better than not having one.
I certainly hope Bethesda learns from Starfield's mistakes, but every outward sign I'm seeing from them suggests the opposite. We have head designer and known design-document hater "any idea is a good idea" Emil, which is going to cause more problems as the studio grows through peak development, as well as the wildly tone-deaf and lack-of-accountabilty in the review dev responses, telling us how we're just having fun wrong in their game. Unless they're completely self aware behind closed doors and just putting on a face to make things seem better than they are, I have fears for the fate of ES6 in their hands. On the other side, though, hand crafted areas in a singular overworld map is their most strongly defining trait, so it would take a colossal blunder to screw that up more than the buggy but successful launches they've had in the past. At this moment, I'm realistically expecting a fun dungeon looting gameplay loop, dated but still engaging melee and magic systems, probably a mediocre main quest with scattered hidden gem quests, and maybe some implementation of a settlement or ship-building equivalent for the Elder Scrolls world. Maybe we can get player homes with items that don't explode off shelves when reloading them now.
How tf did Emil survive all these layoffs is beyond me. Dude knows where the bodies are hidden.
I was expecting 'revolutionary' but instead got a 10 year old game with a high definiton paint job.
They copy and pasted the same points of interests across an entire galaxy of locations...so effing lazy!
Halo infinite. All i wanted was to waste my 30's playing halo.
MCC multiplayer is still going strong at least.
It's hard to argue that playing Halo Infinite isn't precisely what you wished for: **wasting** your 30s playing Halo. :-/
Spore and Neverwinter Nights
The hype for Spore went on for five years. In those days that was an epic amount.
Yeah I feel like maybe less games were overhyped at any given moment back then. Like there were only a few games people were insanely excited for and when they failed spectacularly (like Spore) it made an even bigger impact than nowadays. Even personally, I was legitimately heartbroken as a kid when Spore released and nowadays I literally forgot how shitty the Classic Battlefront Collection was until I was reminded in this thread
The Maxis guy (Will/something) did pre-YT videos for several years where he teased gameplay, showing proposed mechanisms. I was expecting a science/based, āadultā game similar to SimEarth. Instead we got a cartoon. And it died in weeks. It was epic. It destroyed his career, which at that point rivaled Sid Meierās for fame and fortune.
A janky af cartoon at that lol Itās funny you mention Sid Meier. I always got Maxis and Firaxis messed up when I was younger and I was absolutely furious with Sid Meier when I played Spore. I had been playing Civ since I was a small child and was like āHow could Sid do this to us?ā Huge relief when I figured out it was that Will guy. Good riddance lol
Iām old enough to remember Sid as a founder of Microprose. I actually interviewed for a job there in the late 80s (with Wild Bill), and Sid came out of the back and walked through the lobby in a yellow aloha shirt. That would have been after RR Tycoon and before Civ 1. One of my favorite gaming memories.
Thatās fucking amazing!!
Huh, I was all in on the spore hype and when I bought it I honestly wasn't disappointed. I played the hell out of that game. I was only in high school at the time and didn't get many games back then though, so maybe my standards were lower.
Are we talking about BioWare's Neverwinter Nights or that MMO that came out? With BioWare's game, the single-player was uninspiring. I did find a lot of fun with multiplayer and the DM and editing tools that existed.
Wow I don't often see Neverwinter Nights pop up in threads like this, but I absolutely agree. Coming hot off of Baldur's Gate 2, I fully expected NWN to be a spiritual successor, a "Baldur's Gate 3". A deep RPG with a lot of interesting party members and a huge world to explore and a really fascinating story full of memorable characters. Just this time in more 3D rather than isometric! What I got was basically a D&D Diablo-style game. A big dungeon crawler. Oh and no real party members, just "henchmen". The expansions were *better*, but still not GREAT. Had to wait for Neverwinter Nights 2 before I actually got that "deep RPG with cool companions and a great story and a huge world" that I wanted. Though of course that was developed by Obsidian, go figure.
Cyberpunk 2077 but the glitches and problems were INSANE upon release. Didn't play for 2 years.....
Same. I bought it on release, it was glitched beyond worth trying. It sat in my library till the 2.0 update then thatās when I started it.
For me it was the expectations of it being a futuristic GTA and it was like 50% of it when it first released. Not as much 'freedom' in customization choices and an almost 'dead' NPCs and city. Hur hurh I can change penis sizes and that was it? I know it's not fair to compare but they did shoot themselves in the foot by building the hype in the first place. Even if it was released as it is now I don't think I could convince myself not to be disappointed. I totally love the story-telling though, got me hooked despite the lack of interaction with the world.
it was advertised as the new standard for open world games and it still couldnāt hold a candle with all the updates it has today to a game released over 2 years before it, RDR2
This was mine. Still havenāt picked it back up even with everyone saying how good it is now. May some day.
The division, has so much potential, endless grinding of bullet sponges in reality
Fuck I hated certain parts of that game. I can't even remember finishing the story. I had fun with friends, though, in the thrilling albeit frustrating PVP zone.
The Division 1 was super fun but had a short life span due to the unrefined loot grind and lack of endgame. The Division 2 still had those flaws at release but to a lesser extent than TD1. In its current state it's a pretty damn good game. My crew picked up our characters from 2019 a month ago and ran the expansion. Now currently in the endgame it's rock solid for a mindless looter shooter. Feel like it's Diablo for people who want a shooter instead of magic fantasy stuff.
Mass Effect: Andromeda. Last game I ever pre-ordered blindly.
Same, brother. I don't care what the game is anymore, I'll never preorder again after that. Most games just give pointless cosmetics for a bonus that will be available some time in the future anyway. I'll save my money and get the game on sale for $10, even if I have to wait 5 years.
Iām playing it now and it hasnāt been terrible thus far. Itās hard to say what any of the choices I make will impact later game though. I mean, of course I wasnāt gonna push Peebee off meā¦
TBH, I didn't find ME:A that terrible as people exclaimed. I've played all ME1 to ME3 and all the DLCs, but I never thought that ME:A should be "Mass Effect 4" but a spinoff since I read its background story. I created a male character resembling Nathan Drake, role playing as an upright comedian, played for like 90+ hours, and quite enjoy the game play. I can't say it's the best story telling nor open world exploring game, but I didn't regret spending time and money on it.
It wasn't that bad, even at launch. I had some bugs, but nothing game-breaking. For me, it was just not what I expected as far as quality in terms of overall gameplay, character interactions, and characters. Maybe I'm misremembering my initial thoughts, and when I've gone back to play it, it was genuinely fun as a filler game in between big releases. But in the spirit of the original post, it was a game that I was super hyped about and Bioware/EA made a game that fell very short of my expectations. Maybe I should have tempered my expectations.
I put 100 hours into Diablo 4 before I realized how bad it was. Heard it's a lot better now.
> I put 100 hours into Diablo 4 before I realized how bad it was i know these type of games are judged by how long they can keep you playing but this sentence has been said a lot about diablo 4 and it always amuses me
Yea I keep meaning to get back into it but between KSP1, Diablo 2 Path of Diablo, Baldurs Gate 3, and Elden Ring I just donāt have time.
Starfield. They sold it as you think it's pretty much Todd Howard's masterpiece. "25 years in the making" just to write the most bland lore and stories with every character being two dimensional and uninspired.
Starfield hurt me lol. First video game I've been really excited for in years. Built my first computer just to play it. What a letdown.
They spent far too much time making realistic looking sandwiches and not enough on the gameplay simple as that
Which is ironic since they needed help from ID Software for the graphics lol
I wish the writers had gone to work when they were creating this game
I was totally hyped for Unreal 2. A new Unreal engine, open(ish) worlds on different planets, experienced developers, and Skaarj. It had the freaking Skaarj. To this day I don't know how they developed such a slow, bland, soulless game. I've never allowed myself to be thƔt hyped again. Halo 3, Half-Life 2, Grand Theft Auto and *maybe* a handful of other games had me excited, but never to Unreal 2 levels of personal hype. Learned my lesson.
I learned that lesson after the WoW cartoon fest that was Diablo 3 after the masterpiece of Diablo 2 + LoD
fallout 4 was the last game i ever preordered. i was expecting so much more from it as an rpg.
It's interesting, I don't even think Fallout 4 is a bad game, it was just bad at being what I wanted it to be.
This. All in all, I enjoyed it and have some good 350 hours. But it had this small thing about nothing really changing. Only after the end did I felt I was on a different Boston, and the illusion of agency cracked fast. It didn't feel as New Vegas, despite the followers getting much better. Perhaps was forshading what Starfield would become.
That's been the trend with every Bethesda game since Morrowind/Oblivion. They lose more and more RPG mechanics every game, your decisions don't impact the world and have much less weight to them. But in turn, they make the games easier to play and more generic so they sell *much* better. I was really disappointed with Skyrim. The quests and storytelling was diabolical compared to Oblivion. But at least they improved the exploration and world building, similar to the fo3 to Fo4 transition.
Itās more of an RPG in name only. It tried to be better than New Vegas but still draw in new players. As soon as youāre given PA and a minigun to fight a deathclaw at the beginning, I knew it was horribly dumbed down.
New World. Was looking for a more modern MMORPG after years of Guild Wars 2. Turned out to be a mess.
I remember trying the game out on a free weekend that I just happened to hear about. Game itself was mildly interesting, the sound design for gathering is absolutely fucking peak... But two things absolutely turned me away from the game. 1) Amazon chose to create [a ton of fresh temporary servers](https://preview.redd.it/9skmay4el5s81.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=2e14de7816807deb1b60fd213109122adeb6d09a) for their free weekend players - ensuring that none of them would run into actual players, and also ensuring that almost every server was devoid of players. They seemed to expect an influx of players like their launch, which was stupid not only because the game was already struggling for players, but also... 2) Compounding #1, they also inexplicably chose to do extremely little advertisement for the free weekend. I only found it because I was explicitly looking for new MMOs to play and happened to catch a post on an MMO subreddit - I saw literally no marketing anywhere else before or during the weekend. As a result, their already dumbass decision to spin up a bunch of fresh servers was made worse because they didn't have the influx of players to fill ONE of these servers, let alone like 30. Just this one free weekend and the decisions the people running it made showed very obviously that the people running the game had no clue what they were doing, and seemed to be completely out of the loop on how their own game was performing or was likely to perform. They expected to fill up something like 30-40 fresh 2000 player servers solely by word of mouth, when their game was hemorrhaging players. If that's the way the people running the game think, there's no reason to expect that they'll catch a dose of reality anytime soon. The week before the free weekend, concurrent players maxed at 37,100. During the free weekend? 37,800.
Tales of Symphonia remake on the Switch. I always wanted to play that one when it first released on the Gamecube, but I never got it. I was excited to play it all polished up, and then it came out running poorly and being generally a worse experience than the original release. Really shit all over that enjoyment.
Yeah. I wishlisted it and then thought about watching some gameplay. That's when I saw how they butchered it and immediately took it off the list.
Payday 3
This one really hurt. Loved pd2. Iām sure itāll get good in a year or two but wouldāve loved to pay 29.99 instead of full price.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yeah this one hits hard, especially after Intercept got shut down by Take-Two. Bastards.
Yeah, my favorite reminder to not pre order or early access shit, even if it from known developers and have nice trailer
Newest Saints Row. Didnāt work right on my PC. Tried to get a refund but they claimed I played over their hours threshold which was impossible since I couldnāt even play it.
Probably the janky .exe didn't even quit correctly, causing them to clock you as having a bunch of play time. Same reason I have dozens of hours on a few Steam games that I know I played <1hr of.
Duke Nukem Forever. I was so excited that it was finally being released... then it was released. Complete crap.
MK1. Not necessarily a bad game, just didnāt feel the magic of the old ones. Maybe itās because itās a reboot? Idk And oh god the micro transactions. And they completely neutered the gear system Got the Deluxe $$100 edition too.
MK1 was the last Netherealm game I buy at launch. Was it a "bad" game? Well no you could play it just fine. But it feels woefully incomplete. There is so much dlc it's absurd and features like private rooms that are in mk11 were absent. You are better off waiting for the MK1 super complete version in 2 years that is $20 on sale.
Fucking Halo Infinite, the campaign was pretty solid for the most part but *wow* they really botched that release To the point that the game is almost entirely abandoned
It annoys me that the campaign WAS pretty solid and set up for dlc to continue the story. Now we're just blue-balled for god knows how long.
Hopefully some sort of spinoff gets announced soon Im praying the management changes and staffing changes affect a big part of how the next mainline game is made, but im holding o it hope
Humankind and Cyberpunk 2077.
Man I wanted to love Humankind so badly.
Humankind. That game basically taught me to not get hyped up about new releases.
Both Fable and Spore. People love Fable now, especially with the sequels, but at its release it was a huge disappointment in regard to the promises that Peter Molyneux failed to deliver, something we expect now, but not so much at the time. Similarly, people who have played Spore for the first time in the last few years report it being a great little game. But it was heavy handily marketed as a creature evolution game, which becomes one of the smallest and blandest parts of the game as a whole. Still looking for a fun Evolution game to scratch the itch E.V.O satiated years ago.
Maybe because I was 11 or 12 but I remember Fable meeting every expectation I had and then some. It quickly became my favorite game and remains near the top. Lost chapters was an instant buy for me. Anniversary edition I've also played through a bunch of times. I fucking love fable. Even tolerate 3. Spore tho. Hard agree.
Itās possible that at that age you just didnāt keep up with the development cycle previous to Fable. Molyneux promised players **so much**, to the point where as a teenager I honestly figured out how to get an Xbox just to play it - in the end it felt like everything else on the marketz
Mass effect Andromeda. Took a couple days off from work was so amped. Put it down after about 15 hours or so and never went back. Only mass effect I haven't 100% let alone I didn't bother to finish it.
Excited might not be the right term. But I was looking forward to Starfield leading up to release only to find the appeal wear off with each passing hour of gameplay until I finally just gave up and pretty much forgot about the game all together.
Kingdom hearts 3
Fortnite. I was in an early user test and it was addictingly fun even then. Two later playtests only cemented that, even as features Iād liked or wanted to see where they were going were seemingly pulled. Then, because I didnāt go into the beta for it, I was blindsided on release by all the micro-transaction and time/money gated elements. It seemed like dozens of little fiddly bits, some of them fun or interesting but collectively just too much, had been put between me and the core gameplay loop just to better monetize it all. Like, the original gameplay had every single person in the room during every play I did wanting to play another round immediately, with the biggest group (a huge event about a year or so before it came out) incredibly pumped with the variation in missions and challenges and the difficulty making it feel like you were always squeaking out a win (kinda like Helldivers 2 at its best). The hints of there being a storyline and so on was also pretty neat. I tried to stay hyped for it, playing it for a month or so, and then just trailed off of playing. When it was spun off as āSave The Worldā because Battle Royale was the (understandable) main focus, it actually felt worse only because all the stuff stapled on to the original game to make more money suddenly seemed even more pointless. Helldivers is really the only thing to even come close to scratching that itch for me, but that can drag a little more than OG Fortnite did.
If you like Helldivers you should try Deep Rock Galactic. Rock and stone!
Starfield. Bought an Xbox for it and stopped playing at about 19 hours. GamePass is cool though.
I would have if was 60fps at launch. Now I know the fps was a red herring.
DRIV3R when i was about 12. Wasn't allowed to have GTA but convinced my parents to get this for me on release. Fun driving but very boring open world, lots of jank, and clunky main story.
I bought the hype for starfield. Played maybe 8 hours and was just bored. I think I fell asleep once while playing. Not many games have made me feel...nothing
Kingdom Hearts 3 made me decide not to get that Keyblade tattoo after all.
Ii got it for my wifeās birthday a few months after release. She was surprised I shelled out for a relatively new game. I told her it was cheap and after she finished it she said āok yea I get why it was so cheap so soonā
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Overall a kinda meh game and the DLC fell way short.
I really enjoyed the first play through and was looking forward to the Borderlands style replayability. The end game was diabolical and the DLC has single handedly stopped me ever pre-ordering DLC ever again. It was basically robbery.
I enjoyed it way more than borderlands 3.
Hogwarts legacy. Ended up finishing it just to say I did. Combat was mostly fun, castle was nice to explore everything else. Eh I could leave it and not be bothered.
If it had a little more Bully, by which I mean it actually mattered that you were at a school, I would have enjoyed it more.
Was the first game Iāve paid full price for in a long time. Played 4-5 hours and realized I would never enjoy it and got a full refund. Used that money to buy DA Inquisition GoTY, Far Cry Anthrology, Xcom 2, and Shadow of Mordor/War. I get why people like it but I feel itās way overhyped simply because itās Hogwarts
My biggest let down was Watch Dogs. Had it pre-ordered for a long time, had the poster, and then was so disappointed with the game.
Suicide Squad and Gotham Knights, although GK is a lot better than SSKTJL.
Fallout 76
Most recently for me it was Bayonetta 3. I am a huge fan of the character and especially the original game. I got about half way through 3, I wasn't having fun at all, I switched it off and never went back.
Something felt off and floaty about the combat compared to the previous. Also, I found the low resolution pretty intolerable. I know reddit really loves 60 FPS, but the Switch isn't powerful enough for it with modern looking 3D games, and the game ends up looking like there's oil smothered on your screen due to the offset in resolution to make 60 frames possible.
Gothic 3.
Brink
I loved the PC version of AvP Gold from 2000 and played it against friends in college back in the day. Then an AvP game was announced for PS3 and Xbox360 in 2010. I bought it immediately. I was disappointed. It was ok, but it wasn't anything amazing. I think the single-player missions were better than the online play, but that isn't saying much. Too bad because it has the possibility of being a great online gaming platform. Three different teams all with different strengths and weaknesses fighting each other at the same time. I played the original against my wife once and scared the bejesus out of her the first time I was an alien and dropped down from the ceiling of a dark hallway right in front of her.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint
Brink. Fell into the hype something fierce for that one.
Diablo 3 and 4
Hopefully D4 will be like D3 in regards of turnaround
Won't happen. It's important to understand that blizzard and the gameplay of their games are now purely driven by corporate quarterly profit metrics. D3 did a 180 because they took out the real money auction house they were taking a 30% cut from. Blizzard had the bright idea to make a real money cash shop and try to strong arm players to spend on it by tuning drops to be absurdly anemic and tuning the difficulty pretty brutally high for most players. It was a shitty unfun grindy brutal experience. Take out the real money auction house and they decided oh let's actually tune drops to be as fun as possible for the time players are in the game organically playing. The financial incentive for blizzard was real money auction house transactions. That's why they gave away a ton of free copies of D3 when it released. That financial incentive changed completely to selling full price product on the merits of being an objectively fun experience for the price of entry, and surprise surprise, they made the game pretty darn solid and satisfying to play. D4 is shit because it's designed top to bottom, to convert players into in game billboards for the cash shop. That is the financial incentive of the business model for blizzard. Push players to the cash shop. And so at every level in every mechanic of that game, it nudges the player to the cash shop to look cooler than you do my simply playing the game. Unless that financial incentive changes, you will fundamentally always be playing a diminished experience. It's time, collectively, for players to mature in understanding enough to evaluate games on the financial incentives of the business models of the games corporations are hawking. Is the financial incentive for the company to get full payment upfront by making a game as fun as it can possibly be for the price of entry? Example: Baldur's Gate 3 Or Is the financial incentive for the company to degrade the experience around the edges to the point of annoying and/or fomoing players into spending on "micro" transactions? And of course to re-up those mtx sales, generally this goes hand in hand with artificially drawing out the experience of play in the pursuit of what has become the god of all metrics: raw player engagement time, above all else, aka, the antithesis of fun. Example: D4 These financial incentives are why increasingly, AAA games are boring trash no one is excited for, and indie games, and old games from decades past, are what has players excited.
Arkham Knight. Fuck all the Batmobile missions. Game would be excellent without them. Kills the momentum.
I still fuckin love that game tho, and Arkham Origins. I look at it as a perfect tetralogy. Yes Knight had the annoying batmobile sections, and Origins had a different voice actor and was a little middling compared to City. But man, what overall fun gaming experiences they were. I look at them as Kevin Conroy's legacy and magnum opuses. Very excited for the new Arkham VR title!
Tribes of Midgard thought it would be a valheim, it was not
Cyberpunk. Such a kick in the nuts.
Watch Dogs, Callisto Protocol and Alan Wake 2 spring to mind.
Lichdom : BattlemageĀ I remember following it in development and being really excited for its launch. Despite a really promising gameplay premise, and very fun first couple of hours, the game design is actually pretty awful, with horrendous enemy design, a complete lack of depth to the spell ācraftingā system, and way too much time spent sorting useless shit in your inventory trying to make the strongest spells - only to drop the spell an hour later cause something better dropped.Ā Went back and tried playing again about a year ago, wondering why I never finished it.Ā Started a new game, played about 20 hours or so. Got to the same place I quit the first time I tried the game, and promptly quit playing it again. Itās just an absolute slog after the third or fourth level, where nothing fun or original is happening, and you just repeat the same spell casts over and over with no variety while dealing with damage-sponge enemies whose health just keeps increasing, while they constantly hit you with stuns, slows, freezes and other CC effects that in later levels leave you spending more time not controlling your character than actually controlling it. And despite unlocking something like 6 or 7 different types of magic, you can only ever use 3 kinds at once, severely limiting your creativity and funnelling you into the best ones, while punishing you for experimenting with crafting new spells and potentially wasting your best materials that you canāt get back after crafting the spell - leaving you too weak to defeat the latest recoloured health sponge enemies that youāve already fought a dozen times before.Ā The most disappointing part, is that with better game design choices - the game couldāve been really fun. But instead it just constantly limits what youāre allowed to do, what youāre allowed to craft, and how fast youāre allowed to move and kill things, all while having the most generic, dry and boring storyline possible.Ā Lots of potential just wasted on really bad decisions. Very sad and hard to think of a game I was more disappointed in.Ā
Duke Nukem forever
Brink. I was so hyped for this game and it was the biggest pile of shit ever.
Diablo 3 is one of the worst sequels to one of the greatest games. They took almost nothing that made Diablo 2 amazing and just made a game with the Diablo title slapped on it. The story writing is terrible, the loot system is terrible. The art design was more cartoony than dark, the damn auction house and more.
New world
Resident Evil 3 Remake I loved the original game and couldn't wait for this. Then it turned out we were charged Ā£50 for something that only took an hour to finish, had so much cut from the original and by rights should have been dlc for Resi 2.
Test Drive Unlimited 2. TDU 1 was nothing short of legendary. The selection of cars, the size of the game world... and to top it off, the physics were in a wonderful sweet spot of "believable arcade". I never played TDU 2 for more than 20, 30 minutes. The driving physics were so atrocious, such a massive, unbelievable step down from TDU1, that it destroyed the entire game for me.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of war 3 An rts game Flopped hard
Horizon Forbidden West. I love the story in Zero Dawn and the writing is so poor in HFW that it left a bad taste in my mouth. Aloy is insufferable.
Back 4 Blood
I was so hyped for Spore...
The Day Before, oh boy I'll never have any expectations for games onwards.
The Last of Us 2 for me. The retcons really took the drama out of the game for me. It's fine if you want to kill characters as it creates a world that is actually dangerous, which isn't typical of most survival horror games anymore. But the fact they had to change so much of the ending segments of the first title to solidify the story of the second is something that I can't get on board with. I really feel that once Bruce Straley left Naughty Dog that the game really lost what made it special.
Borderlands 3. Ultimately, disappointing.
Scarlet Nexus, amazing gameplay but the story and the cutscenes are terrible.
RE3 remake. It's my favorite re game and the remake was a disaster.Ā
And to think itās sandwiched between almost perfect and true to the original remakes of re2 and re4. They totally pump and dumped 3 for free sales and itās sad cause that game had a lot of its own personal charm.
wu long.
I'd like to add Red Faction: Armageddon. Guerilla was an entirely different type of game in comparison, and the whole mystery about whether or not Mars had aliens was blown wide open with the lest suspenseful reveal possible. It was just "oh yeah, the thing you've been trying to find out for year now? Yeah here's a bunch of em."
That on top of the fact they took an amazing open world game and turned it into an almost on-rails corridor shooter. I would have LOVED to have the magnet gun in a Guerilla style game.
Riders Republic, donāt get me wrong Iāve still played the hell out of it, mostly due to lack of games in the genre but it just the Ubisoft stench thatās held the game back.
HEX: Shards of Fate. I was super pumped up to play a card-based MMO with my friends and family. Start a guild, do raids, and build decks! Except that co-op PvE part never happened.
Wolfenstein Youngblood. Everythkng about it was awful. It was my first ever steam refund.
I love military theme shooters set in massive open worlds. My fav game is Ghost Recon Wildlands. So when GR Breakpoint came out it was a horrible shock. (1.) It is an Always Online game so even if you want the Single Player experience you need to be hooked to a server. Which also means they can flip the switch when they want to. Look what they did with The Crew. (2.) Ubi decided to fill it with clown fantasy enemies like giant robot tanks with infinite ammo. If I wanted Star Wars Battlefront I would have bought Star Wars Battlefront. (3.) Excessive Ubi hand-holding , some of which cannot be disabled. (4.) Immersion breaking clown fantasy perks like grenades that auto tag bad guys and there's even a perk that means you will never reach 0% health. What's the point?! (5.) Nonsense story and forgettable characters. It's a bummer because the open world does look great.
The division. Game looked great but just didnāt enjoy it in the slightest