2014 was a weird, wooly year for video games. The big new consoles were finding their feet, and most of the games we were expecting to play got pushed back to next year. Some of the ones that did come out were great, but others, well… weren’t as great.
As has become a tradition here at Kotaku, today we’ll be listing the biggest video game disappointments of 2014. (Here’s 2012’s list, and here’s 2013.) As in past years, I’ve compiled this list with contributions from our entire staff, and they’re presented in no particular order. Noteworthy: We’re not furious about all of these things or anything — a lot of entries on this list are simply things we hoped would be better than they wound up being.
Also, as with past years, we’ll be countering all this negativity with a list of the best surprises of 2014 in the next few days. For now, however: Sadness! Regret! Broken promises! Here we go.
Broken Games
Hey, we get it. Games are huge and difficult to make, and sometimes they launch with a little missing polish. We don’t think our expectations in this regard are unreasonable: Online launches are usually rocky, and it’s actually a good thing that a game can be polished and improved after launch. All the same, 2014 set a new low standard for buggy, poorly optimised, and sometimes flat-out broken games.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Driveclub, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the PC versions of Advanced Warfare and Watch Dogs… the list goes on. Some of those games were eventually improved by post-release patches. Some of them, most notably Master Chief Collection, suffered (or still suffer!) from problems long after their release. It sucks, flat-out. New video games shouldn’t be so broken. Big-budget publishers lost a lot of faith this year, and a wise consumer would take every promise about next year’s games with a raised eyebrow and a fistful of salt. Wait until a game comes out, and wait to see if it works well. Stop pre-ordering. And to video game publishers: Get your shit together and quit selling us busted games.
Assassin’s Creed Unity
Assassin’s Creed Unity made a lot of promises. It was the first major new-gen-only game from a third party publisher, not only with updated visuals, but with enhanced design and a previously unprecedented level of detail in its depiction of revolutionary Paris. What a shame, then, that the final game wasn’t just a technical mess — it was a mess as a game, too. While Unity‘s most-discussed problems mostly involve frame-rate and crowd density, the fact remains that it was a poorly designed, microtransaction-peddling, dull game that fell far short of the standard set by its predecessors.
The PS4’s Software
When the PlayStation 4 launched, there was something admirable about its stripped-down operating system. Just the games, man. Nothing fancy, just a long bar of applications, with some ancillary stuff underneath. Now, more than a year later, the PS4’s software situation feels like more of an issue. The console is lacking basic features like an easily browsable game library, or the promised suspend/resume system. It’s far too difficult to tweak settings, and many functions are buried in counterintuitive places. The console still lacks DLNA streaming support, and there’s still no HBO Go app, though both are expected to arrive… sometime.
There are lots of straight-up problems too — the 2.00 software launch was an embarrassment, causing systems to hard-lock when put to sleep and causing other smaller, aggravating issues. PlayStation Network seems to suffer from regular outages, which is an increasingly big deal in an era of always-online games. The PS4 is a fine machine, and some of Sony’s more experimental software ideas — things like Share Play and Remote Play — are really cool. All the same, Sony needs to get their console’s software fundamentals up to scratch.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a timed Xbox Exclusive
Just when we thought we were beginning to leave The Era of the Third-Party Exclusive behind, Microsoft and Square Enix announced that 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider would be a timed Xbox exclusive. Nice for Xbox fans, but for a big, multi-platform (at this point) series like Tomb Raider to suddenly announce that most people won’t be able to play the newest entry (at least at first), is a drag. We had hoped things were moving in the other direction. Sony played this timed-exclusive game, too, and Xbox Destiny players are all the poorer for it. (Note: Some of you have pointed out other crappy exclusive deals, most notably the fact that Street Fighter V is coming to PC and PS4 but not Xbox One. We agree, that sucks too!)
Final Fantasy VII is Coming to PS4!
This one’s fresh, so it still hurts. Partway through a December PlayStation Event, Final Fantasy producer Shinji Hashimoto took the stage. The Final Fantasy VII logo appeared on the screen behind him. The crowd gasped. FFVII on PS4! Could this be… are we really getting a remake? Is Square Enix going to deliver the most-requested remaster in history? Well… no. Turns out they’re porting the old PC version of the game over to PS4. That’s it. I’ve never seen hype whiplash so extreme.
Watch Dogs
Believe it or not, we like lots of Ubisoft games. But this year, man, some of their biggest efforts just bummed us out. If Watch Dogs had been made by some lesser-known studio, with minimal pre-release hype, would it have gotten as negative a reaction as it did? Probably not. From its showstopping 2012 E3 appearance, Watch Dogs‘ narrative was set in stone: This was a turning point, the next-gen game that would show us what our new consoles would do. This was going to be different. Welcome to the future.
The final game was… well, it had some good ideas. Some very good ideas, even. But it was such a mess, in general. Its interesting ideas — like camera hacking and control over a city’s power grid — felt half-assed, hastily balanced on top of a pile of unnecessary stuff lifted from Grand Theft Auto. Its story was drab and forgettable, its hero even more so. It treated women poorly and people of colour even worse, while shying away from the hot-button topics it purported to address. Even the game’s atmosphere and visuals, which so stole everyone’s imaginations during its E3 debut, were watered down to the point where the finished game was often downright ugly, and even the PC version needed the help of modders. Watch Dogs had enough good ideas for a superior follow-up, and given Ubisoft’s penchant for serialization, we’ll doubtless get one. Unfortunately, the game we got this year was a real letdown.
PlayStation Now
Sony’s proposed solution to the PS4’s lack of backwards compatibility, to let us stream games from older systems directly to our PS4 and Vita, sounds ok on paper. But there’s a catch: You have to rent games individually, and the prices to do so were ridiculous at launch. While prices have lowered somewhat since then, they remain far too high. Who on earth wants to pay $US30 to rent a digital game for a limited period of time? Why should anyone who owns these games on older systems pay for the temporary (temporary!) privilege of streaming them to a PS4? PlayStation Now was already an imperfect solution, and the audacity of Sony’s pricing model is just insulting.
Destiny’s Story
“Rich, cinematic storytelling,” promises the back of the Destiny box. And that’s kind of what we were expecting — a game with an enjoyable story to match all that lovely music and beautiful art. These were the same people who made Halo, after all. Surely we’ll at least get a popcorn-y sci-fi yarn, right? Well… no. As it turns out, Destiny‘s story was a hilarious mess, and not in a good way. Half of it was hidden in Grimore Cards that could only be read outside the game. The other half was spooled out in hasty loading screen voiceover or impenetrable cutscenes in which new characters would arrive, say something vague, and vanish, never to return again. What is The Darkness? How does it relate to these aliens we keep killing? What’s the deal with the Awoken queen? For that matter, what is the deal with any of these people, what drives them, who am I doing all this fighting for, and why?
“I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain,” says a character, famously, at one point in the game. Her name is “The Stranger,” and in the game’s final cutscene she gives you a gun and bails. I’ve watched her give me that gun more than half a dozen times now; at this point I’d rather she took five minutes to tell me what the fuck is going on.
EA Access
This year, EA had a notion to start a Netflix-like subscription service that gives players access to its games for a flat monthly fee. That sounds like a neat idea, but unfortunately, EA Access doesn’t really live up to the Netflix comparison. For $US4.99 a month, or roughly the cost of a full-priced game per year, you get access to a pretty small list of games, most of which are pretty old. You get a 10% discount on EA games, though you’d need to buy a lot of those for the service to pay for itself. New, big-ticket games are nowhere to be seen, with Dragon Age: Inquisition getting a limited early demo and Titanfall specifically “excluded from all EA Access features” per the service’s fine print. On top of all that, EA Access is only on Xbox One. It really is a good idea, but in its first incarnation, it’s not exactly the all-you-can-play buffet we’d hope to see from a major publisher’s subscription service.
Titanfall Burns Bright and Fades Away
We were all excited for Titanfall. Turns out, we had good reason to be — the game came out, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. We played the heck out of it for a few weeks, and had a blast. And then… well, we kinda just stopped playing. Based on a poll we did a little while back, a lot of you did, too. The game had a lot going for it: Great level design, smooth controls, huge robots. It just didn’t have that stickiness to keep us playing, which for a multiplayer-only game can be a real killer. These days, it can be hard to find people to play with, and some of the matchmaking lobbies feel like ghost towns. The addition of a co-op horde mode came a bit too late, and most people were already off playing other games. Rarely has a good game burned so brightly and faded so quickly.
Xbox One Still Doesn’t Have a Screenshot Button
It may seem like a little thing, but it isn’t. The PS4’s dedicated screenshot button has proven to be one of the console’s neatest, most useful new features, and makes games feel more social and sharable in precisely the way console manufacturers are always promising. A lot of us constantly use it, and as games continue to include niftyphotomodes, it seems like a safe bet that we’ll be using it even more. (And, yes, we know Nintendo systems support screenshots in a variety of ways, too.) The Xbox One’s lack of a comparable function is increasingly glaring — games like Shadow of Mordor might add a neat 360-degree photo mode, but in order to get a screenshot, Xbox One users have to go through a convoluted process of capturing a video, exporting it, and grabbing a screenshot using software on their PC. It’s rarely worth the hassle, and Xbox One users are missing out as a result.
Thief
Few names in video games are more storied than Thief. The series more or less invented the stealth-simulation genre back in the 90s, and after a decline in quality over the years, felt ripe for a triumphant reboot. When word arrived that a new Thief game was being made by Eidos Montreal, the same studio responsible for the terrific Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we were psyched. But when the game came out, it was a real stinker, earning a place among the year’s worst. How did it all go so wrong? Rumours and reports suggest the game’s development was deeply troubled, with constant changes in personnel and leadership resulting in a project with no clear direction. Whatever happened, Thief was a woeful disappointment. Garrett deserved better.
Our Tiny, Tiny Hard Drives
When the PS4, Wii U and Xbox One launched, people were understandably a little bit nervous about hard drive space. 500GB (or 32GB for the bigger Wii U) just didn’t seem like a lot of room, particularly considering how games keep getting bigger as they get more elaborate. Turns out… yep! That’s not enough room. Just a year into each console’s lifespan, most of us have completely run out of space. There are solutions for this, of course — you can install a bigger hard drive in your PS4 or use an external USB drive with your Xbox One or Wii U. All the same, we just got these things — would a terabyte have been too much to hope for?
Sony’s Fall Games Lineup
Sony’s PS4 built up a huge head of steam over the year, handily outselling its competitors and earning generally positive buzz. And then the fall arrived, and… well, the games just weren’t that exciting. Oh, sure, there were plenty of good cross-platform, cross-gen games like Shadow of Mordor, Destiny, and Far Cry 4. But where were the big Sony exclusives? Where were the games that showed off what the PS4 could really do? The biggest planned exclusive, The Order: 1886, was delayed into next year. The other one, Driveclub, was a niche driving game to begin with, and it launched with a raft of connectivity problems. That all left the PS4 without a big tentpole game to call its own. Of course, it’s better to delay games than to release them broken and unfinished. All the same, it was difficult to look at the PS4’s fall lineup and not feel like something was missing.
Steam Machines
Hey, remember Steam Machines? They were going to be so cool! Valve was getting into hardware! They had this weird new controller, and a new operating system, and were sending out super powerful mini-PCs to people to test. Truly, a new era of PC gaming was upon us.
Ah, but was it really? From the start, it hasn’t been all that clear what a “Steam Machine” really is. It’s a PC, designed to fit comfortably in the living room, and somehow affiliated or branded with Valve. What makes a Steam Machine a Steam Machine, rather than a boutique PC running Valve software?
When Valve hosted a Steam Machine unveiling at last year’s CES, things didn’t get much clearer. Here were 13 custom PCs made by well-known companies like Alienware and Gigabyte. They were basically just living-room PCs. Valve’s new prototype Steam controller was strange, and certainly compelling, but its wide release has been delayed and it remains unclear whether the final controller will look like the prototypes. SteamOS seems cool enough, but it can run on the PC you already have.
The whole thing feels kind of like an experiment in progress, and it’s not clear what Valve is actually attempting to do. Was this whole thing just a test balloon, or a halfhearted initiative that will eventually be set aside? Possibly. Will Valve deliver on the concept next year and finally see it through to some sort of exciting conclusion? Maybe. For now, we’ll just stick with our regular old PCs, thanks.
Those are our disappointments, but I’m sure you all had your own. Let us know what disappointed you most this year in the comments below, and if one of your disappointments is “Kotaku,” well, sorry! We’ll try to do better next year.
We’ll be back soon with our list of the Best Surprises of 2014, and everything will be sunshine and rainbows once more.
Comments
71 responses to “The Biggest Disappointments Of 2014”
I would put the death threats, harrassment and publishing of personal details of women right up there too.
Top of the list, that should be.
Um yeah this is the number one biggest disappointment of the year.
“Um yeah…” That part tells me sarcasm. I don’t get it.
But that’s not really a disappointment in gaming, that’s a disappointment in a**hole human beings.
To say it was a disappointment would be to say that it was somehow unexpected…
Thief made the list and there were few disappointments more predictable than that one.
Yes, it was unexpected, I don’t know a single human being in person or online that acts like that and I refuse to accept that behaviour. Yes, it can be expected, but it is still bitterly disappointing to the point of insanity.
I’ve never felt that AC Unity pushes microtransactions.
I know they’re there, but they’re fairly unobtrusive.
Micro-transactions are a blight on the gaming industry. The more games they appear in the more the game will be balanced around them.
Unity might have microtransactions, but it’s certainly not balanced around them. They’re completely unnecessary, except for people who want to unlock things quicker.
The fact that they exist at all in a full price game is rather disgusting.
Yeah, the fact that a triple-A title has this is just beyond disgusting. Far enough for indie titles or lesser known companies, but for a Ubisoft; Just no.
Upvoting this comment is not enough.
If you sell me a game for $10 with Microtransactions I won’t be pissed. If you sell me a full price game that has Microtransactions I will never be able to let go of my disgust for this practice.
I would love to see Microtransaction automatically require an R rating and require a 10cm by 5cm warning on the game box. Would that hurt sales? Tough luck than. If I have to be 18 to play the pokies (although I don’t) I should need to be 18 to play a game with Microtransactions.
Would this mean certain games would never see the light of day in this country? Yes. Would this mean Ubisoft would never release another game in this country? Yes. Am I being serious about this? Yes. Is this stance too hard core? No.
Your argument is ridiculous, and I’m assuming you haven’t actually played Unity.
Using similar logic, a driver’s licence should be required to ride the bus.
Well for starters I’m not talking about Unity so it doesn’t matter if I played it or not.
Using Similar Logic you’d need to be old enough for a Drivers License to ride the bus that asks for your credit card every stop.
You see I’m setting an age restriction based on our current classification system. I’m saying children should not be purchasing that cool in game thing with a credit card they are not allowed to own. My logic is simple, if I have to advertise that my game has swear words and violence why should I not have to advertise that it has Microtransactions.
I have played “The Crew” which uses the same logic of everything is available for a real world price. They even created an achievement/trophy that is only possible with a a couple of Microtransactions.
And finally why wait 30 days before responding to this?
Comparing AC: Unity (you might not specifically be talking about it, but this whole comment sequence is about it) to a bus that asks for your credit card at every stop is not a fair comparison. Maybe if the bus had a sign that said “give me $5 and I’ll drive faster”, that would be more accurate. You’ll get to your destination regardless, but you’ll get there faster if you pay extra.
Why not force publishers to advertise if a game has tacos? Or men wearing skinny jeans? Where do you draw the line?
I took ages to reply because I wasn’t on Kotaku over the holidays.
I said it asks, not it requires. But I really should have been clearer.
I’m asking them to advertise extra expenses built into the game. That’s reasonable, asking them to advertise everything in the game is ridiculous. Part of the reason I’m so against Microtransactions is because they effect people in the same way Gambling does. 92% of the population won’t put next weeks grocery money into the game, 8% will. (I can’t remember if it’s 8% or 2% of gamblers who develop a problem).
So, don’t use them? If someone wants to pay $70 for a game, and then pay another $70 to unlock everything right away, who are you to stop them?
They aren’t required to get through the game, so you don’t need to spend extra money at all.
I’ve got creed points and money coming out of every orifice, and haven’t spent anything above the initial cost of the game.
Also – Destiny having 1/20th of the content expected.
Destiny being an MMO at all is my beef.
It is an MMO…its massive, its multiplayer and its online….they never said it had to be massive, multiplayer online AND have interesting things to do or make any sense in terms of lore….
The MMO nature doesn’t bother me, the lack of story and the new Commendation marks do.
The what!!? This is the most annoying thing about destiny, all the weird jargon that seems to accompany it – reading about things like ‘ascendant shards’ or exotics or ‘vanguard marks’ it’s just putting me off progressing past L14 – I haven’t put the disc in since October because it increasingly feels like bullshit with a slightgame tacked on.
Crucible and Vanguard Commendations (required to buy weapons, Helms, and Chest armour) are awards at Tier 3 and above Tiers. Essentially you need to grind 2500-ish rep to get one. Now if you want 2 guns and a Helm you need to get L3, L4 & L5 respectively.
And of course the Raid stuff is way better.
Oh right. Titanfall came out this year. I totally forgot.
Honestly, it’s a great demo for what will hopefully be an epic sequel.
They needed a singelplayer. The tutorial in that game made me expect the most awesome sci-fi adventure yet, but I was wrong. I think it was having that pod open and the awesome graphics wash over me with all the beeping noises n stuff. Oooooh I can go play Alien Isolation instead. *Spins cape over head*
My biggest disappointment by far was Dragon Age. As a huge fan of the franchise, I’ve been following it since day one, and boy oh boy, what a let down. I was expecting a CRPG, but EAware put out an action game with an interactive storyline. I can’t even bring myself to finish the game once (and I finished Origins sixteen times). At least I have Divinity: Original Sin to drown my sorrows with.
I haven’t played any of the Dragon Age games, they don’t exactly look like my kind of thing (I’ve played some of Bioware’s other games such as the Knights of The Old Republic and the Mass Effect series … I’ve just never really been one for the ‘ye olde’ type magic setting). But the point I was going to make is that I’ve heard the same thing said from quite a few people – that Inquisition was a fairly solid 7/10 game that was worth playing, but that it doesn’t stand up to Origins.
I would concur with those views. It’s a massive game, it looks great, sounds great, story is good (if a bit short), characters are interesting, and there is heaps to do. The problem is that a lot of the game is meaningless busywork side quests (that you have to grind for Power to progress the story), battling endlessly respawning mobs, farming for mats for crafting, and the combat is frustrating due to a wonky AI and not very interesting due to a limited range of spells. If you don’t have a lot of preconceptions of what the game should be, it’s worth a shot. I’m just disappointed because I was such a fan of Origins and DAI bears little resemblance to that game.
I feel the same way. I was obsessed with Dragon Age 1, deeply disappointed in Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition made up for Dragon Age 2 in many ways but I felt disappointed in the conclusion and i feel like I am less inclined to create a new inquisitor so as not to go through all those quests again. Inquisition is bigger than origins in many ways…but it doesnt always mean better.
SPOILERS
I deep down wished there was an option to side with neither the mages nor the templars as I was fairly pissed off at both factions. I think it’s kind of a missed opportunity to explore the ability to try and reconcile the two or discard both. Instead you are forced to make a decision to side with one or the other…so really only two play throughs are needed, side with templars or mages. This is a bit of a downgrade from origins where your choice to ally with various races/factions had a huge impact on Ferelden. Even the decision on who rules in Orlais seems kind of empty i thought.Yeah, it feels like they were rushing to tie up a whole bunch of hanging plot points, when those things should have been given a lot more game time to play out. They put in a lot of effort building these situations up in DA2 and the books, and then just rushed through resolving them in a fairly perfunctory fashion. It was weird and slightly nonsensical. I agree about the lack of replayability; I think it will be a one playthrough game for me, which is disappointing given how many hours I put into repeat playthroughs of the first two.
Civilization: Beyond Earth.
It’s almost as if they WANTED to release a crappy game to force us into buying the 20 bajillion DLC packs they’ll inevitably release.
I played for a while but I’m genuinely tired of diplomacy always being completely broken. Can’t make friends, can’t apologise, can’t trade for what I want, and I have no idea if what I am doing is close or far off in negotiations.
Every. Single
Game
I am so glad they didn’t call it Civilization 6, because it was shit-tastic. Almost as bad as Rome 2 but in a different way.
The Evil Within – a kick ass horror title that should have been an awesome hark back to ResiEvil ended up being this shitty combat game with too many enemy, weak weapons and annoying bosses
Ripped my heart out, that did
wait what? Did you play on easy? If you try to treat evil within as a combat game you won’t get very far. The level design doesn’t even give you enough ammo to make it through without using stealth and environmental factors to help you.
I didnt play on easy
Stealth was all good – until you got to that bit where the girl was trapped in the glass box and I lost count of how many enemies kept coming.. must have been at least a dozen. And the one hit kill boss you have to try and defeat in the furnace bit, forget it.
That bit was awesome!
I am not sure if this applies, but this year I found out just how disappointingly small the hard drive of the PS4 is. Looking at the game list, each game seems to have at least 20-40GB of install data, and being someone who gets alot of games, I was surprised how quickly I’ve filled it. I remember there was a bold yet vague statement about how it has a huge hard drive…well, not in this person’s opinion, yo! Nyah! 😛
That’s in the article.
You’re right….I must have scrolled past it cos it didnt have an image.
Kids today! gosh!
The wii u had a pretty solid year save for the embarrassing watch dogs port.
The first party games have been bug free, fun, and free of the runaway hype trains which have dogged seemingly every other game.
They also stepped up at e3 pretty well, and have some super interesting stuff for next year.
But I guess 2014 was the year third parties stepped away. No more ubisoft, no more cod. Annoying yes, but hardly tragic in the light of the failures of those key franchises.
-All of Ubisoft
To a lesser extent, Civ Beyond Earth 🙁 Oh would could have been 🙁
Awww, But I enjoyed Child of Light and Far Cry 4… 🙂
Also, Valiant Hearts.
Both Child of Light and Valiant Hearts appear to be before this everything must have Microtransactions BS they seem to be piling into everything.
With the exception of “The Crew” which I made some mistakes in with my research I shall never buy a game with Microtransactions. I will never knowingly buy a game with Microtransactions. I thought Crew Credits was the currency you earned by rolling with your crew in game. Not with your Credit Card.
The Crew is a game I like, it’s hard to describe it’s a MMO CarPG, you drive around, you level up, you customise your toys. It’s a Racing game in the same way you’d compare Forza or Gran Turismo to Mario Kart.
I would have agreed with you about Ubisoft, but I was pleasantly surprised by Far Cry 4…
I’ve given up on early-adoption. Most new games are a mess; the patching and updating systems are broken; publishers are in too much of a hurry to ship product that they forget to actually finish the game.
Six months to a year after a game has been released is about the right time to buy a game. The chumps that shelled out the big bucks for day one release have done the Youtube vids and reviews. The patches are *usually* all done, and with that amount of hindsight you can see what is worth playing, and what has fallen by the wayside. Anyone up for a game of Titanfall? It’s currently selling for $25 on Origin. No. No one is.
No Halo? I would put that in its own section.
At this rate, Halo MCC is going to be a contender for the 2015 disappointment list as well.
Hey now, we might have Halo 5 to get disappointed with.
No matter how good, polished or bug free Halo 5 is there will be people who are disappointed with it. Hell it’s the 5th game in the series. You have the same Covenant enemies, the same Flood enemies if they return, and the same robot things whose name I can’t remember.
Change too much and it’s not Halo, change too little and your not innovative enough. New IPs may be risky but I think Halo 5 and 6 can disappoint more than a new franchise.
Still waiting for the crash this industry oh so deserves.
I’d suggest the broken games and micotransactionery is testament that the crash is well under way. Games are just to expensive to make now and are only getting more expensive. The way the commercial industry works now is untenable and I’d suggest we’re only going to see the big publishers become more desperate.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see another big publisher go down in the not enormously distant future.
Capcom is looking pretty poor right now. It might be them.
I don’t think you can say that Sony have been clueless on pricing this year…that is a given every year. They wonder why they are bleeding cash …
Good article, shame but it’s not all the cockups for this year, there are plenty more to pick from…
Glad someone else has thought that Valve’s Steam Machine/SteamOS initiative isn’t getting anywhere in a hurry. When it released lots of people were crowing about how it was going to tear down the Microsoft monopoly on PC gaming and we’d be finished with ATX tower cases… and none of that has actually happened and shows no signs of it any time soon.
If Titanfall had a single-player component then it would at least still be playable. But since the studio behind it decided that single-player is a really bad idea and refused to even consider it as an option then we are left with memories of a game which had some very good ideas but did not have the ability to pass the test of time.
The only multi-player game that has lasted longer than a year has been Team Fortress 2. Still going strong since it was launched in ’07
You only meant shooters right?
WoW is 10, League of Legends is a few years, EVE is how old now? And that’s the 3 I can think of fast.
Are you people on the PC or something? Plenty of players on the Xbone still.
I believe you can do DLNA streaming on PS4 using the Plex app that’s become available in the last few days – but as far as I can tell you need to pay to use Plex.
Searching the PS4 game library doesn’t seem that hard to me. The recent apps/games are in the main menu, everything else is arranged alphabetically in the Library. Why is that hard?
In general though, I have to agree that the PS4 firmware updates have been disappointing. You see the list of new features added by the XBox updates, then compare against the PS4 updates which add very little.
I’m still happy to have gotten a PS4 rather than XBox, as the big XBox exclusives are all shooters which is not really my preferred genre. But I do wish Sony would pull their finger out.
Why is Rise of the Tomb Raider there but not Street Fighter 5?
They did mention Street Fighter 5.
From what I heard on Giant Bomb, that game wouldn’t exist without Sony. So it’s less a ‘we paid for timed exclusivity’ like Tomb Raider and more of a Bayonetta 2 situation.
The state of the internet community seems to have taken a couple of steps back this year…The state of my own sanity probably took a drive off a cliff….
There’s one company throughout this article that isn’t really mentioned and that’s Nintendo. The only place Nintendo is brought up is under the hard drive heading.
Does that mean Nintendo didn’t really disappoint at all in 2014?
Expectations for Nintendo were kept realistic and Nintendo didn’t promise the whole world (just some of it) so yeah, they didn’t have to live up to a whole lot of hype
I guess there is that, they didn’t promise a lot. And the big name games they released this year, namely Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros, delivered exactly what we were expecting.
Next year will be a defining year with games like Zelda and Starfox in the pipeline.
This year really hasn’t been the best for games I wanted to play. Most were either returned or sold at a latter date. Really disappointed in DAI, unless u had a nxt generation console it looked like crap and froze often. Mine did. And the customisation options were shocking. I played as a dwarf and had the same armor the entire game, it just changed color when upgraded. Huge fan of origins, liked the combat style but story took about 10 hours before getting to skyhold and making feel a little badass. Ihad to look up games that got released this year just to remember what I played. Really the only standout for me is wolf among us. I’m not a huge shooter fan, purely cause I have the worst reflexes, but far cry 4 and wolfenstien were games that I picked up on special and throughly enjoyed them. Watchdogs was billed as something it wasn’t. Hard to give a damn when ur main character is a bit of a dick. Might as well just rebuy the mass effect series…oh well.
And also no Phantasy Star Online 2. Up yours Sega.