Disappointing Games You've Played

[Replicant Sasquatch]

That's pretty much what I was referring to when I mentioned BW overcompensated for Dragon Age 2. And to an extent, Mass Effect 3.

Dragon Age 2 was a hopeless morass of edgelords and grimdark bullshit, to such a ridiculous point that it became comical and self-parodying. It's like BW heard those complaints and did a total knee-jerk "happy endings for all" without any real nuance. I have to admit, I used to be a pretty loyal BioDrone, but between Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, my overall support for the company has dropped off considerably. The countless personnel changes and departures for ME: Andromeda don't inspire much confidence (and Manuvier Heer or whatever his name is comes off as a complete hyper SJW douchecanoe).

For all its faults, at least The Old Republic hasn't fallen victim to BioWare's style of social justice pandering (outside of finally getting same-sex romances and one or two mentions of gay NPCs, albeit in very brief passing), but that's probably because the majority of Star Wars fandom is (still) made up of highly conservative people, so EA and BW are pretty much forced to not wade too deep in SJW-y waters despite their posturing that they love and support the LGBT community. Whether or not that's a good or bad thing is entirely up to you.

I don't think the Star Wars fandom is more conservative as much as it's just really, really large. And most of those people aren't interested in social justice nonsense in Star Wars because that's never been what the franchise is about. And it's still not what it's about, despite what retards on both sides of the aisle will tell you about The Force Awakens.

I also forgot to mention I hated the romance in Inquisition. In the Mass Effect games, even in 3, you get the sense they're sincerely telling a love story when you got the romance route. It's obvious you're supposed to shack up with Ashley Williams by the end of the story, though other romance options are still reasonably compelling. And above all, you choose one and only one. In Inquisition, the romance is functionally just a dating simulator mini game. You flirt and bed your favorite waifu/husbando regardless of gender or sexuality. It's blatant pandering to the shipper crowd, who care more about squeeing over their OTPs than any kind of interesting romantic arc.

 

[Strelok]

I bought Homefront because I had confused it with that game by the Hitman devs about the Russians invading america and playing as a resistance member. I'm still salty about that fuckup.

Freedom Fighters was the name of the game I was looking for.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

LA Noire was just an illusion. I was put off by the baby-face used on every single character, hint markers were also useless.

Sherlock Holmes is in ways better, but I am currently stuck and having a hard time wanting to touch it again.

 

[D.Angus]

Black Desert Online..

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

Saints Row: The Third
My lord they butchered everything that made 2 great and changed the franchise forever moving it into the LOL SO RANDUMB XD territory.
SR2 had so much silliness too of course but they pulled it off well. Oh and let's not forget dumbed down customization.

 

[D.Angus]

Saints Row: The Third
My lord they butchered everything that made 2 great and changed the franchise forever moving it into the LOL SO RANDUMB XD territory.
SR2 had so much silliness too of course but they pulled it off well. Oh and let's not forget dumbed down customization.

Holy shit.. I completely forgotten about SR3..

I even fucking took off three days of work to play it, and ended up beating in like a Day..

 

[CWCissey]

WatchDogs
Naughty Bear
Sim City (2013)

 

[SpessCaptain]

Why hasn't anyone mentioned Spore? I got severely dissapointed with the game after I played it after seeing Wil Wright's Beta.

Other Mentions:

• Mass Effect 3 (A majority of it was bad)
• Dragon Age II (Too deviant for me, especially with no race choices etc.)

 

[Vitriol]

I just completed the banner saga. I was expecting a decent kength game with a mix of resource managementmixed with cyoa and turn based combat with xcom style deaths and a complex rich story. That was certainly how it was pitched.

The art was beautiful and the world intriguing but:

Spoiler

its so short, its blatantly meant to be the bannersaga episode:1. The turn based combat is easy, the resource management a doddle, characters only die in cyoa and not combat (which would massively up the tension and difficulty of the game) it alao introduces all these important things like a nidhogg with a prophecy and an archmage and the sun which stops moving and a darkness swallowing the world none of which we resolve. There are only 4 enemy types in the game, 6 if you include has shield/does not has different.

Overall very dissapointing considering they hit the nail with music, tone, writing and art,just far too short with gameplay far too simple.

 

[Mimic]

Seconding Starbound and Paper Mario: Sticker Star. Heck Sticker Star feels more like a survival horror than an RPG (limited ammo, killing enemies only wastes ammo, puzzles requiring certain items, the horror of having spent money on this game).

Etrian Mystery Dungeon was one for me. I still like it, but when it was first announced and hyped it seemed like a great combo of two of my favorite things. Instead I got a game with broken buffs (both good and bad) and the feeling that it does neither genre justice. I said fuck it and picked up a used copy of Shiren on DS. I got much more mileage out of that.

 

[TheImportantFart]

I've never played Paper Mario: Sticker Star, so I can't really comment on it. I've never heard anyone say anything positive about it so I've never been compelled to take a look. However, for me, the disappointments in the Paper Mario franchise started much earlier. I found Super Paper Mario a bit of a letdown. It's not a bad game by any stretch, and there are moments that really shine, but Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is one of my favourite games of all time and Super Paper Mario didn't even come close to matching it. The world and the companions (with the exception of Tippi) felt much more empty and lifeless, and I felt like I was playing a series of levels rather than exploring a continuous, living world like I was in The Thousand Year Door (even though that was split up into Chapters as well).

I will say that Super Paper Mario removing turn-based combat was a big plus. I hate that game mechanic and it's a tribute to how much I love The Thousand Year Door that I can slog through it despite the turn-based combat. The Thousand Year Door with Super Paper Mario's combat system would be a dream come true for me.

Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier just broke my heart. What makes it worse is that as of this writing, it's the swan-song of the Jak and Daxter franchise. After so many years waiting for Jak 4, instead we got a generic adventure-platformer with Jak and Daxter shoehorned in. Again, everything was split up into levels rather than allowing you to explore a continuous world and the aerial combat was dull and came up far too frequently. At least in Jak 3 they split up the vehicle sections with some long stretches of platforming. The Lost Frontier isn't an awful game, but it's not even close to a Jak and Daxter game. Even Daxter was better in that regard.

I actually quite enjoy Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's the only MMORPG I've been able to get any mileage out of, but every time I play it I just end up wishing it was KOTOR 3.

 

[NG 070]

Black Desert Online..

I remember the hype for BDO based solely on the character creator alone. It sure looks nice for a Korean MMO... but it's basically a glorified Barbie doll dress-up simulator. I guess that could be said for every MMORPG out there, but BDO was all hype and virtually no substance beyond that.

I actually quite enjoy Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's the only MMORPG I've been able to get any mileage out of, but every time I play it I just end up wishing it was KOTOR 3.

TOR gets way more crap than it deserves, IMHO. Sure, the start of the game was super rocky and they made some pretty boneheaded choices (like removing same-sex romances from the vanilla companions, and taking away your ability to permanently kill certain companions at certain points in the story), but even with its flaws and a few questionable choices since then, it's miles better than it used to be. But yeah, I wish it had been KOTOR 3 sometimes, too, especially since the current story in the recent expansion would be far better served as a standalone game without the MMO elements.

 

[MediExcalibur2012]

I went out and picked up Homefront: The Revolution today, the premise got me hooked and I was hyped for it's release months before it came out. It was very generic, repetitive, extremely buggy as hell and uninspired.

Are there any games that you were really excited for, but once you finally played it, you were disappointed or unsatisfied with the finished product?

I tried playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time and got bored

Maybe it just isn't the type of game I find enjoyable

 

[GeorgeDaMoose]

TOR gets way more crap than it deserves, IMHO. Sure, the start of the game was super rocky and they made some pretty boneheaded choices (like removing same-sex romances from the vanilla companions, and taking away your ability to permanently kill certain companions at certain points in the story), but even with its flaws and a few questionable choices since then, it's miles better than it used to be. But yeah, I wish it had been KOTOR 3 sometimes, too, especially since the current story in the recent expansion would be far better served as a standalone game without the MMO elements.

I don't know if you played it at launch or not, but it was just a complete fucking mess. The state it's in today is miles better than how it was before (which by the way, isn't saying much considering that it's still a pretty bad/mediocre game). The glitches, the painful leveling past 25-30, the animation work, the (I shit you fucking not) missing sounds from cutscenes, holy fuck I can go on and on. They actually had to go back and fix animations/cutscenes/sound effects years after release because they were that bad. Also the pathing for speeder taxis was hilarious. You'd see clipping EVERYWHERE and movements that didn't even make sense. And they still haven't fixed all of those animations to this day. Not to mention the fantastic(ally bad) writing mixed in with all of those issues.
I think this video sums up SWTOR better than I can though.

 

[_blank_]

And in this post I quote a lot of other posts so I may in too revel in the salty salt of disappointing vidya.

A lot of games come to mind as disappointments
Mass Effect 2 and 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, MGSV, Dragons Dogma, SWTOR, Battlefront, and FEAR 3.
I think the biggest disappointment for me was Dragons Dogma.

Totally not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious what you didn't like about Dragon's Dogma. After the Dark Arisen pack, I found myself really enjoying the game, esp. after they fixed the fast travel system. Just curious if you could elaborate.

Resident Evil 6 was another disappointing game. Not much changes from Resident Evil 5 aside from having three campaigns to play from right off the bat. The story itself felt ridiculous to me in having some secret society having ruled over the US and deciding to make zombie virus despite the fact that sort of thing is an utterly stupid idea.

"Hammer the buttons and wiggle the sticks"

Yeah, RE6 was a total wash for me. I think I played through a good chunk of Chris' campaign, then got bored, went to Sherry's campaign (I know it's technically Jake's, but fuck that Mary Sue) and I think I got as far as the giant ogre dude in which I basically ran around for 20 minutes and got increasingly fed up. Final straw though for me was playing the Leon campaign where some fucking flaming ambulance came out of nowhere and wasted me. I just rage quit on the spot. I might pick it up one day out of completion's sake, but I got about 100 other games I want to play before I touch RE6 again.

Can't believe I forgot Soul Calibur 5. SO much wasted potential, and it's a fact that they released the game unfinished. What a shitshow.

How could I forget mentioning that in a previous post. The fact that they released it unfinished due to the budget. We could of had a story for every member on the roster and instead, we get a story focused mostly on a guy who may or may not have some sort of creepy hots for his sister. Only good thing to come out of the game was character creation.

Agreed. It really says something when me and my friend would play SC5 solely for the character customization, and probably played the actual characters a grand total of five times at most. What is really infuriating for me was the disgusting overuse of mirror characters like Edge Master (I think that was his name), Not-Sophitia, and Not-Kilik, all the while really grievous omissions like Zasalamel, Seong Mi-Na, and fucking Talim.

I got Starfox Adventures as a kid expecting Lylat Wars/Starfox 64 2.0 and got.. whatever the hell Adventures was.

I got this game mostly because I was thinking "Oh, this is the last Rare game for Nintendo. It will be Rare's swan song. After all, I loved Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Jet Force Gemini- they could do no wrong!"

Got it, played through it in about three days. So much disappointment.

I also forgot to mention I hated the romance in Inquisition. In the Mass Effect games, even in 3, you get the sense they're sincerely telling a love story when you got the romance route. It's obvious you're supposed to shack up with Ashley Williams by the end of the story, though other romance options are still reasonably compelling. And above all, you choose one and only one. In Inquisition, the romance is functionally just a dating simulator mini game. You flirt and bed your favorite waifu/husbando regardless of gender or sexuality. It's blatant pandering to the shipper crowd, who care more about squeeing over their OTPs than any kind of interesting romantic arc.

In game one, I shipped my FemShep with Liara mostly because Kaiden was an annoying little bitch who I relished sacrificing during the end game. In game two, since Liara was essentially gone until the DLC, I shipped my FemShep with Thane, if only out of pity. Then Liara comes back in three and gets all bitchy with me, and I was like "Bitch, don't you be stepping up- putting your Shadow Broker job before our relationship! I have feelings too!" Then I fucked the... whatever her name was, the Super Space Secretary, just to spite Liara.

I think my Commander Shepard has commitment problems.

LA Noire was just an illusion. I was put off by the baby-face used on every single character, hint markers were also useless.

Sherlock Holmes is in ways better, but I am currently stuck and having a hard time wanting to touch it again.

Love the Sherlock Homes games. Looking forward to the newest one next month.

But agreed with LA Noire. I was amazed by how awesome it looked (for the time), but the game mechanics ruined it for me. You can't drive like you would in any other game (it is honestly better to just let your AI partner drive so you can fast travel and there and probably missing out on a lot of character building conversations. Then when you get to the destination, either you mow down twenty people GTA style or you interrogate the twitchiest people in California.

Saints Row: The Third
My lord they butchered everything that made 2 great and changed the franchise forever moving it into the LOL SO RANDUMB XD territory.
SR2 had so much silliness too of course but they pulled it off well. Oh and let's not forget dumbed down customization.

Mostly agreed, although I will say I did play the hell out of SR3. I really did miss the customization of SR2, and really looking back on it now, there is just so much that SR2 did right and you don't realize until much later. Districts actually felt like different districts. Your gang actually felt important to the gameplay. And the story was so much better, only to kind of shoveled away and sloppily concluded with the Gat Out Of Hell story.

WatchDogs
Naughty Bear
Sim City (2013)

God... Watch_Dogs. So much potential in that game. Then you realize if you take Aiden into Chicago, walk around for an hour and hack people's phones, you can essentially by all of the best guns and costumes before even playing most of the story missions. And Aiden himself... I can't think of any other character I have ever played that I felt less interest for than Aiden Pierce. I enjoyed playing Kane and Lynch's characters more than I did Mr. Super Hacker Pierce. Real shame.

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

Districts actually felt like different districts.

That's another thing I wanted to mention.
Stilwater is still one of my favorite open world locations. It has everything - poor projects, suburbs, a mountain, trailer parks, casinos, beaches, caves, skyscrapers, a nuclear power plant, all in a steady package. I love speeding on a boat through the canals too.
Steelport is a generic city and I remember nothing from it. There isn't even any boat traffic to boot.

 

[GeorgeDaMoose]

And in this post I quote a lot of other posts so I may in too revel in the salty salt of disappointing vidya.

Totally not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious what you didn't like about Dragon's Dogma. After the Dark Arisen pack, I found myself really enjoying the game, esp. after they fixed the fast travel system. Just curious if you could elaborate.

It has no appeal beyond the combat. The world is horribly bland, the story goes largely ignored for awhile, the affinity system is garbage, the open world was annoying to travel around, the side quests were beyond bad, the music was largely forgettable (with the exception of the theme of the fishing town which gave me some Berserk vibes), a lot of the armor looked really unappealing to me, the combat itself was only ever fun against larger enemies (but even the fun of whacking around a cyclops became boring after the 3rd one), and the writing is a joke.

 

[Abethedemon]

Amazing Island.
It felt really empty and hard to get through, although it had a really cool creature creating engine.

 

[Hypodermic Johnny]

Pokemon Platinum and Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Maybe it was because I didn't get a DS until like six years after everyone else (and hadn't heard of emulation before then) and I gave myself a 'sour grapes' complex so I wouldn't feel so bad about not being able to play but there's just something about DPP/Gen IV that feels just, I don't know, underwhelming. Maybe it was the heavy reliance on wifi features to be able to do anything, maybe it was the fact that I didn't really like any of the Pokemon they brought into that generation given the number that felt like their designs were superfluous and lazy inb4 Genwunner; Hoenn/Gen III is my favorite, I don't know.

As for Dark Dawn, that was a mixture of them being unable to follow up with how good Lost Age was (because Lost Age was the shit), overloading you with characters/Djinn/powers to use so that it felt like a clusterfuck, the fact that the plot/villain reveal was entirely predictable if you played the previous games, and the fact that after you start the eclipse; certain areas become cut off, which kept you from attaining 100% completion if you weren't extra careful. Lost Age let you go back and revisit literally anywhere; encouraged it even (Iris tablet/Dullahan boss fight, man).

It's not a BAD GAME, exactly, so much as it just felt like a lot of wasted potential after the previous games.

 

[Jubileus]

I don't know if you played it at launch or not, but it was just a complete fucking mess. The state it's in today is miles better than how it was before (which by the way, isn't saying much considering that it's still a pretty bad/mediocre game). The glitches, the painful leveling past 25-30, the animation work, the (I shit you fucking not) missing sounds from cutscenes, holy fuck I can go on and on. They actually had to go back and fix animations/cutscenes/sound effects years after release because they were that bad. Also the pathing for speeder taxis was hilarious. You'd see clipping EVERYWHERE and movements that didn't even make sense. And they still haven't fixed all of those animations to this day. Not to mention the fantastic(ally bad) writing mixed in with all of those issues.

I can't really speak for how it is now because the F2P implementation thoroughly convinced me I wasn't welcome to return to try it out (I may have done a small table-flip at the credit cap for F2P accounts; I had many millions on one of my chars from successful AH arbitraging and a racket on those pink lightsaber crystals since a properly specced Jugger could solo for those things, but can only access 500k of it when F2P hit and I came back to try, on top of all the rest of the QoL neutering they did to try and justify subbing), but even without going into bugs the game mechanically was also just all kinds of wonky on release. The talent system was a paint-by-numbers rendition of the vanilla WoW talents except seven years past its expiration date, there was no auto-attack so you were obliged to mash your primary attack over and over and over and over, and the various skills and specs were not really balanced well against each other; the putatively best Jugger/Guardian tanking spec actually dipped 20 or so points into what was supposed to be the PvE DPS spec (another outmoded concept: Jugger/Guardian had a spec definition of tank spec/PvE DPS spec/PvP DPS spec), and raid healing was essentially Sorcerer/Sage or GTFO while Sorc/Sage was also a powerhouse for ranged DPS.

I didn't really have a problem with the leveling itself, it was pretty basic TBC-and-beyond WoW-style "do every quest at an outpost, move along, repeat" but with voice acting, so I never had a point where there was an experience dropoff (ala the vanilla WoW late 40's problem or the Age of Conan half-the-fricking-game problem or Vanguard's you-want-to-actually-level-that's-adorable edgelord design problem). The writing was very hit or miss; Sith Warrior was massively more engaging and entertaining as a story than Sith Sorcerer, where it seemed the only redeeming value was the sheer number of times you got the option to zap someone in dialogue. Even maining a Jugger, I also did a Guardian playthrough because T7 was that goddamn amusing to see the reactions of when questing. On the other hand I did a table-flip and noped out of the Trooper storyline before level 10 when it was decided that obtaining medication for sick children getting bilked by the Republic bureaucracy is apparently a Dark Side choice (that really, really bugged me for some reason). Other than the leveling stories I liked, the main thing that kept me on it was the usual MMO reason: my friends were playing too. Until they weren't.

And because I mentioned it, damn was Age of Conan a beautiful trainwreck. Tortage Island (the starter zone) at least held to the TBC-and-beyond WoW-style "quests will get you all the experience you need" model, and you got a bit of that when you go to the mainland, but once you hit level 30 or so... gee, I hope you rolled a Tempest of Set because you're going to be mass-farming for that experience most of the way to 70 if not 80 and it's going to be boring as heck (I did in fact roll a ToS, and it was still boring as hell doing the cannibal terraces; as mentioned I only put up with it because I can turn my brain off and talk on Vent/Mumble/Teamspeak for the "entertainment" aspect of MMOing). A+ to Funcom for being brave enough to show bare titties in an MMO environment, but D- for actual character progression for anybody but poopsocking no-lifers.

And to stop bashing on subscription MMOs for a moment, Guild Wars 2 also had a lot of potential and ended up disappointing me in the end. I could have gotten over the growing pains meh on stuff as they were at least trying some new ways of doing stuff (even if that turned into "lolberserkerstatsforallpvemetalol"), but then NCsoft pushed more and more overt moneygrabs culminating in Heart Of Give Us Enough Money For A Whole New AAA Game For This Expansion and I wrote it off (which is really sad to me because I was a big supporter of ArenaNet throughout all of the run of the original Guild Wars).

Whew, that's a wall of text there I guess.