Given that I was writing about No Man’s Sky earlier today, it’s hard not to think of all the fury and rage people had in the weeks after launch. I think the “most disappointing game of the year” train has probably moved on, but it got me wondering: what’s the most disappointing game you’ve ever purchased or played?
The first cab off the rank, surely, would have to be the trainwreck that was Aliens: Colonial Marines. I feel like it’s going to be a long, long while before people forget how appallingly bad that game was.
But one that I bought myself, many moons ago, was BRINK. I even had an AMD graphics card back then, which made the experience all the more painful. The ideas around movement were certainly ahead of its time – just look at games like Titanfall and how Call of Duty has co-opted parkour – but the execution, the atrocious performance, bafflingly bad AI and the regular crashes were hard to forget.
Other suggestions:
- SimCity (2013): Pretty hard not to include the game that basically popularised provisional reviews because its servers were so hideously broken at launch. Hell, EA even won a Shonky award over their support hotline that year.
- RAGE: Why Megatextures Never Became A Thing.
- Evolve: What was a really good concept ended up being let down by a bad business model, matchmaking that took forever at launch and the fact that most games you ended up in were far too one-sided, which blew the tension right out of the water.
- Assassin’s Creed 3: In so, so many ways.
- Dragon’s Lair Time Warp: Because you couldn’t actually input the commands on an Amiga joystick, so you just got screwed over repeatedly.
- Any Mario Party after Mario Party 3: This one’s from Hayley (although I reckon 4 and 5 weren’t too bad).
What’s your most disappointing game?
Comments
140 responses to “Tell Us Dammit: Your Biggest Disappointment”
Any game I have bought, that didn’t allow inverting mouse. INSTANT DISAPPOINT! (and refusal to play)
Where appropriate of course. Obviously depends entirely on the game type.
The exact opposite of this.
So you’re disappointed if they give you the option? That seems a bit odd…? 😉
Not precisely what I meant. Regardless, yes the option to invert is entirely unnecessary for me. Waste of a precious half byte on my drives!
Boourns!!!!
That half byte can cost half a games potential audience!
Freedom of choice is best! Don’t be intertophobic! We’re people too!!! 😉
#deporttheinvertites
#bantheinvertcontrols
#onenationundernoninvertedgods
My brother!
It’s always fun to get back to your computer for some Overwatch after the GF has been playing it and stare at the floor for a second isn’t it?
hahah I am fortunate enough to not have that problem. Even when I did have a partner, she had her own pc cos nobody used mine except me! 😉
I do recall having that happen several times years ago though at a LAN. I’d swap out and let someone play while I ate or something, and come back and everything was backwards!
Ha, definitely been there as well.
Check this out if you haven’t seen it:
I think it was made right around the time I was mad into CoD4 and it totally captures the feeling
The message is backwards though! 😉 It should be friends don’t let friends play non-inverted! hahah
Honestly I don’t care what people prefer, but they should be given the choice! It’s not like they have to re-code the whole game. Can’t comprehend why game makers would risk alienating half their potential audience by not giving the option!
Totally agree. To be honest thought, I can’t even remember the last game that wouldn’t let me invert look.
They even let you invert X axis, and I’ve legitimately never met someone who prefers that option. Hrmmm, maybe I should learn it just to create even more chaos for my GF!
holy shit! is that Brink!?!?!
Just seeing that still makes me feel disappointment….. That game had so much potential!
Yeah Brink was mightily disappointing – I think I paid $5 for it and I feel like I was ripped off
I preordered that one and had hyped up my brothers and a bunch of their friends. We were watching developer diaries about the story and getting into heated political debates about the divide between factions.
My GOD, the disappointment… the waste of potential. It should be a crime.
Too many resources spent on fancy shit instead of the core game. Splash Damage have made the same mistake with Dirty Bomb.
I think Mirror’s Edge Catalyst this year. Or it was probably just me.
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst? Agreed!
Every new piece of information they put out about that game before release lowered my expectations. I loved Mirror’s Edge but all of the marketing material made me believe that they simply were not making a sequel that highlighted the good parts.
So I skipped Catalyst and feel pretty vindicated by my choice. Such a shame. There’s a lot of potential in Mirror’s Edge.
Watch Dogs and Aliens: Colonial Marines, yes i bought the collectors editions for both games. WD was mediocre and A:CM was just plain shit.
Haha I bought the collectors for Aliens: Colonial Marines aswell. Shit game, decent figure
Bugs Bunny Birthday bash on the NES. Spent ages on tram to go to Movieland to hire it. Got back, played game and finished it on first go. such a bad game riddled with extra lives on every freaking screen.
Oh, and there the was the time I ordered Micro Olympics on the BBC. Sort of a home grown version of Hyper Olympics. Took nearly 8 months to arrive and then my mate (C64 owner) was pissing himself at how pox the graphics were and how fast I was hammering the keys for 100m and the “athlete” was hardly moving down the track. Turns out is was a game you could have bought the magazine and typed the code in yourself.
I hadn’t even thought about the oldschool ‘console wars’ era of games!
I think my biggest disappointment in those days was NBA Jam on the Game Boy.
I had been saving pocket money for a few months and wanted to buy Road Rash for $50. When I went to the store, I saw that NBA Jam had been discounted from $90 to $70, which seemed like a steal – I loved it on the SNES and Mega Drive, so thought it might be a good purchase.
I was so very, very, very wrong. It was one of the worst games I think has ever existed. My buyer’s remorse was so strong (months of saving… wasted!) that Mum saw how bummed-out I was and took me back to return the game. I went with my gut and bought Road Rash instead, and it was one of the best purchases on the Gameboy ever.
(Zelda 4 was the best, followed by Kirby 2, and Warioland. These were the pre-pokemon days.)
Could not agree more. And yet, I keep picking new ones up in the hopes they’ll recapture what the games used to be like.
The gamecube games had EXCELLENT sports games on the side. Ice hockey and beach volleyball were amazing fun.
Would it really be so hard for them to bring out one that just harvests all the best mini-games from the entire series rather than trying to make us waggle wii-motes in new ways? Grab bag or riot!
dafuq! heresy!
anything after 7 was munted in my opinion. i had 5,6 and 7 on gamecube (have also played the first 3.) i think where they really fucked it was in the last few where they force all the players to move at the same time, takes away from the tactical side of playing in my opinion.
Brink is pretty high up there for all time disappointment.
I still get bummed out thinking about that final “boss” fight in RAGE, but I did like the shooting in that game.
Neverdead – it had a novel gimmick but it wore thin 10 minutes into the otherwise forgettable third person action game.
the majority of the licenced Platinum games – Legend of Korra and TMNT were bitterly disappointing because I know how good the company can be. Transformers Devastation eeks out a pass because damn I love the cel-shaded visuals and that they got all the living og voice actors back.
The Division – I was expecting more of an MMO from this or at least the ability to encounter other players in the PvE world even if I couldn’t team up with them.
The division has slowly turned itself around.
Whenever someone posts about Aliens Colonial Marines I feel a chill in the breeze.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/04/theres-a-reason-to-play-aliens-colonial-marines-again/#comment-3646677
But seriously, I think ‘biggest disappointment’ on its own isn’t that easy to define. I mean, it’s not something that’s set in stone.
Bioshock Infinite, for me, was a huge let-down. But I allowed myself to get blind drunkenly hyped on trailers that were released showing concepts that were never in the final game. I accept some of the blame there.
I didn’t end up finding Zelda Link to the Past that interesting when I finally got to playing it in 2014 or thereabouts, same with Super Metroid. My introductions to these games were their 3D instalments, and I truly believe the latter are the better games, I wouldn’t say I was disappointed with the formers, just under-whelmed.
Please put down that bat, Mark.
Similarly, with the PC and the absolute bananas that ecosystem has gone, I can’t say I’m that disappointed with stuff I’m paying really cheap prices during a sale for.
My biggest disappointment?
P.T.
I didn’t play it until after the news of its removal was being reported. I ‘think’ I only had my PS4 for a short time at that stage (I got it for Bloodborne), so the ‘OH MY GOD THIS GAME’ phase had passed me by.
It was a game of its time, clearly. And that window was only about two months. If that. Obviously others had a better time with it than me, but cripes it was a drag. I’ve played better games that are similar to what P.T. was attempting to do, and they accomplished it with much less. Much more interested in Resident Evil 7.
EDIT: Shout-out to Alien Isolation as well. It was such a wet fart by the end I had totally forgot to mention it in an article where it totally would have fit my idea of a disappointment. Sigh.
EDIT 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: DAYZ STANDALONE. Oh gawd why did Rocket ever leave.
Wet fart by the end….
Yup, that perfectly captures the soul of Isolation.
For a game to start so brilliantly, only to die in such mediocrity, it’s certainly a contender.
I know people will think I’m an idiot but these are my 3 recent disappointments:
Last of Us – I was so looking forward to this when I got my PS4, played 4 hours and just disliked it immensely.
Journey – Again all that hype, for what?
No Man’s Sky – Yeah we all know, as JB Hifi put it, “Best refund simulator of 2016”
People think I’m crazy when I say I didn’t enjoy Last of Us. I played for a few hours and got sick of the clunkiness. Watched the rest of the game on YouTube and had far more fun. An average action game with an amazing atmosphere and characters, more fun to watch than play.
I didn’t like tlou either, felt like uncharted but with all the good bits taken out.
Supposed to be survival horror but there was ammo and guns everywhere.
Also supposed to be an apocalypse but sooo many bad guys pouring out of doors to kill over and over. Then when you kill them all it’s like nothing ever happened.
Stealth was crap. Barely worked.
Characters had little to no personality arc, they just changed towards the end to suit the ending.
Oh yea the ending sucked.
vanilla Destiny…and Daikatana.
Assassins Creed III is really the correct answer. Turned me from a lover of the series into a hater.
I’ve looked at every asscreed since, and a cold, clammy dread has come over me that it would just be 3 again.
I don’t understand the hate that asscreed3 gets.
I enjoyed the game even if Connor had the personality of a wet noodle. Maybe having such a gap between the games and not punching them out each year helped.
I felt like so, so many of the mission objectives were too restrictive, and disconnected from the narrative. I felt like rather than being given the ability to achieve the mission goal, I was on the worst kind of railroad – one that was desperately protesting that it wasn’t one
The ending. The ending of AC3 killed the series for me forevermore, since it was a giant FU to the player. Maybe they thought they were being edgy with it, but it left a terrible taste in my mouth.
Goodbye Deponia suffers the same where a terrible terrible ending killed a series that I’d loved playing.
You don’t get it? It’s not just that Connor has no personality:
I mean I could pick on individual aspects…
* Epic stealth and wildlife parkour … to kill rabbits
* Grow your homestead… by picking flowers to help a guy romance a woman who won’t care about them… and deliver them to him on the toilet.
* One assassination that’s almost entirely cutscenes.
Or more generally, that:
* We’re never given a reason to care about any of the events, they’re just important COZ MURICA!
* The clustertruck “conclusion” of the Desmond storyline
* Limited parkour options within the “cities”
* The fact that almost every single mission in a supposedly “open world” game is limited and constrained to highly restrictive paths both by optional objectives and boundaries placed upon the area and actions of the player.
There are just so many things fundamentally flawed with AC3 that I don’t ever understand how there were people coming out in support of it saying it was a great game.
I don’t think it is a great game but I found it to be a serviceable AC game
Maybe because I was repeatedly told how terrible it was, my expectations were so low for the game that the fact it worked was a pleasant surprise.
I guess in part why it isn’t such a bad game for me is the way I play those games. It is normally with my wife and it is more of an exploration, collectable hunt more than anything else.
Yeah, fair enough. If you’ve continually been told how awful it is, I could see how it could exceed expectations of being “pretty much the worst game ever”. When I started playing it, I’d been told by one person “it’s pretty bad” and the reviews were somewhat mixed.
As I played it, it just felt as though each design decision and game mechanic fought against each other, or if not, were utterly vestigial and isolated from anything else. Then the writing, which was never particularly good to begin with, descended into such lazy and ridiculous territory that I wondered if the writers had run an internal competition to see who could get the worst sub-plot approved.
I’ve always felt the collectibles have been the worst and most pointless part of AC, and the exploration just felt somewhat stale in AC3 to me – but if that’s what you were going for, I guess I can appreciate it could fill that niche.
see, for me it was black flag, i know ill cop hate for it. but i thought spending so much time on the ships was so tedious.
i played 3 years after it was released and really enjoyed it, then played black flag and ive put it down after completing 50%, meanwhile i picked up Unity and absolutely goes into my top 3 of the assassins creed series (i havnt played syndicate yet though, ill wait till its $9 at EB)
The only reason I play Black Flag is because a) it was free and 2) it’s the original asscreed multiplayer on my Xbone! Love the brotherhood multiplayer
Completely agree that Unity is a better single player game – the pirate ship stuff is boring
The ships were the only reason I played Black Flag. Without them, it would have just been another boring torturous “Assassin’s Creed” game, and nobody wants that. 😉
i was fine with the amount of ships in Assassins Creed 3 and even a little bit of Black Flag, but it just took up way too much of the game in my opinion. i enjoyed AC 3 more than black flag, and i enjoyed unity and AC2 more than any other game in the series, i even enjoyed the very first game more than ac3 and blag flag. but thats only because its how i preferred to play.
The only AC games I enjoyed were the first one and Black Flag. AC1 was super repetitive, though I did enjoy the desert setting. I haven’t played any since Black Flag though, AC2 really turned me off the genre (even though most people loved it).
The most disappointing game I’ve ever played in my life, that I can recall, would probably be Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
I’m a huge Star Wars fan and the hype leading up to The Force Unleashed was tremendous. The game promised so much but in the end, failed to deliver, instead giving us a short story, repetitive game play, frustrating boss battles and a lack of replayability.
This year, my most disappointing game was No Man’s Sky, but it could be better now due to these patches? I would say the next most disappointing game would be a combination of Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Dex.
To be fair, Dex is an indie game and to me, it sounded so awesome (a 2D side scrolling, open world RPG set in a cyberpunk world, what’s not to like?) but sadly it turned out to be a shallow, disappointing experience riddled with bugs.
but but but, Star Killer was awesome. (i actually mean that, i thought he was cool) it did get very monotonous though.
I agree, I thought Star Killer was pretty cool. It’s just a shame that a character with such potential was introduced to such a disappointing game.
Probably recently it would have been Skyshine’s BEDLAM which was a kickstarter game I backed. Had everything going for it to gel as a great game for me but just didn’t work for me.
They have apparently had some updates post launch so maybe I should try it again but for what could have been goty it really missed the mark for me
Civ:Beyond earth was not a modern alpha centauri
Not a game per se, but my biggest disappointment is my inability to make much of a dent in my backlog.
According to Darkadia I have 541 games, of which 214 remain unplayed. Curse you, real life, for always getting in the way!
Mighty Number 9?
The Halo 5 campaign. Don’t play much MP these days so can’t comment on that but the SP, besides looking good, didn’t really tick any boxes then ended when it felt like it was about to get going.
Halo 4 in general. Game starts with dozens of QTE events, features boring enemies in single player, and a multiplayer that was far too close to CoD for my taste. Also, all the weapons sounded wrong.
This is the only Halo I’ve ever played and it is my most disappointing game for sure. I was really looking forward to getting in on the series from seeing other Halo games. The game’s single player was so bad it made me hate everything about it. The one fucking boss you fight over and over is the worst designed boss fight I’ve seen since that god damn bird in Far Cry 4.
Try out Halo 1 somewhere. It’s on PC so I’m sure it’ll be somewhere on the net. Halo 1,2,3 and Reach are muuuuuuch better than Halo 4. Best played with a buddy in local splitscreen, so the MC Collection is a good buy.
Ehh, this. I was so hyped for Halo 4, I even got to play it before release at EB Expo and I loved it; but it was so damn disappointing.
Destiny would be my next choice, I wish it had ended up as more of a No Man’s Sky/Halo hybrid. Not sure how that would work exactly, but ehh, what we had on release was pretty bland.
Space Harrier for Amstrad CPC464 when I was about 8. The box had the arcade graphics on the back which blew my mind. Big colourful detailed sprites, it was amazing. Then I got home and saw wireframe enemies and was wondering when the detailed graphics would kick in. This is what I got instead http://s2.dmcdn.net/Bg85i/x240-Lcz.jpg
For me personally, it’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. I like the visual styling of the game, and what’s not to love about pirates, right? But there’s a spot early in the game that I just can’t get past (where you’re hiding in the bushes and have to get past the Redcoats). I just kept dying and dying until I ragequit. It’s not the game that sucks, it’s me.
I think I know wat you are referring to. Just hide in bushes, whistle, kill. Rinse and repeat. Do give it another shot.
I couldnt get into AC 4 the first time too and I quit at exactly this section. But restarted it a few months later. Absolutely loved it. Spent 50 hours in it.
For me thats much the same, loved all the pirateness of BF but hated most of the land stuff.
Particular as you mention Yet Another “Listen To Conversation Without Being Spotted” (i’m sure there is a more catchier acronym to use for that…).
Main reason for doing the land stuff was just to collect more Shanty’s!
If they lost all the land stuff and fleshed out the pirate/ship stuff more, woulda been great.
I just groaned every time i made land somewhere and open the map to see yet another dreaded “Ubisoft collect-a-thon” and just made straight for the shanty to get the hell outta there back to Jackdaw
Call of duty ghosts. Turned me off the series completely.
This! So much this! Used to love the series until this atrocious pile of suck came along. Haven’t played any title since.
Ghosts is the only CoD game I’ve played. So I wanna know why people hate it. Seemed fine to me. My only complaint was that it did not really let me take alternate routes or anything. Even thougj there were alternate routes.
Mostly sequels (or franchises), I guess. When you’re blown away by a previous game, then you get on board the hype train, and then you get let down.
Perfect Dark Zero – I love the original. If all they did was re-release it on the XBox, it would’ve been better than PD0.
Assassins Creed 3 – How they managed to make the American Revolution terribly boring remains a mystery. At least they trialed naval combat, which fed into the far better Black Flag.
Neverwinter Nights 2 – After loving the first game, the second was an absolute mess.
Star Wars Republic Commando – Didn’t play it on release, so there’s zero nostalgia value for me. After years of people telling me it was great, I picked it up on sale and was overwhelmingly disappointed.
Star Wars: The Old Republic – People spent, like, a whole year telling me that it wasn’t like a MMO. Turns out 90% of the quests are still “go to X, kill and/or collect Y number of Z things. And all the mobs keep respawning.
Bioshock 2 – The originality and wonder of Rapture was what made the original great. Loaded it up, played a couple of hours and got the overwhelming feeling that I’d done this all before. Haven’t played it again.
Beyond Earth – Pay full price for a reskin of Civ. Had none of the soul of Alpha Centauri.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who liked ACIII. Sure the protagonist was boring and I stopped caring about his backstory and the supposed conflict between his loyalty to his tribe and his role as an assassin-in-training almost immediately, but the gameplay was a decent improvement on Brotherhood (I hated Revelations and didn’t get far into it), I actually really enjoyed the frontier setting and upgrading the homestead, the early version of the ship combat was really great until it was superseded by Black Flag, and I enjoyed the sewer puzzles to unlock the fast travel, even if I did discover them embarrassingly late in the game.
The modern day aspects were also quite cool and I thought that the ending was fairly good. I wish ACIII had been the end of the franchise and Black Flag had been the start of an all new series.
AC3 struck me as a real paint-by-numbers affair. I enjoyed Ezio’s story in the previous games, but the story within 3 fell really flat for me. AC3 was also the height, in my opinion, of the AC protagonist needing to be present at every single historically significant event and to meet every single historically significant person in the area.
There was no need to continue with the Assassin’s Creed series for Black Flag. That could’ve just been a rockin’ pirate game – AC:Rogue, as a sequel, proved that it had more than one game in it.
have either of you tried Unity, all the patches are out which fixed the fuck up which was its original release, its easily as good as Assassins Creed 2, maybe just a tad shy of being so.
No, is it running well on PC now?
hells yeah, they patched over the course of a year and now it runs really well.
and if you have a few mates who might be interested, EB still sells it for $9, me and some mates bought it earlier this year becasue it has a co-op mode which is really fun. up to 4 people all doing a mission together and there are a few about.
you’ll jump into the game and within about 1 hour it will feel like home. like Assassins Creed 2.
if you like 2, i think youll like Unity. i have read of some people still have issues with it, but i have a 7 year old PC and it has run flawlessly for me in terms of framerates and such, no real bugs to speak of, the occasional assassins creed glitch, like when npcs do funny stuff. but yeah, give it give it a crack for $9 go in without expectations other than to have some fun in a new world and then i think you will be pleasantly surprised with how much joy $9 can bring you.
The main campaign of NWN2 was unfortunately flawed in a whole bunch of ways. The plot lurches through a lot of guff before it actually gains some steam, but even then, there’s nothing that feels particularly epic.
However, the Mask of the Betrayer expansion is an excellent RPG adventure, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to people for its choices, complexity and overall plot.
I can’t remember which Resident Evil it was.. Maybe Operation Raccoon City or number 6, I’m not entirely sure. I was really frustrated with the hitbox when I would have the entire aiming reticle on an enemies head; only to say I’d made a body shot or completely miss; it made the game unplayable for me and traded it in within a fortnight of buying it a few years ago.
This year it was No Man’s Sky 🙁
Resi 5 was one the biggest let downs. Resi 4 was amazing. Had me up till 4-5am playing only to realise I had to go to work in a couple of hours. Resi 5 was unplayable.
007 Nightfire. My trusted source of reviews at the time (which lined up incredibly well with my own tastes in pretty much every other instance I can think of) labeled it a “GoldenEye killer”. It was no such thing, and is probably the only game I can think of that was a regretful purchase.
Possibly Project Cars too, though that’s more down to being no good at sim racers probably. Would be nice if it had some kind of tutorial, felt pretty lost.
Wow really? Nightfire is one of my favourite games. Spent countless hours on it in mp with my sister/friends.
It felt too much to me like a “PC” shooter, when I’ve always preferred console shooters. I don’t know what defines this exactly especially since I never really played any PC shooters at all, but there was just some kind of feeling that I associated with them and Nightfire fell within that 😛
In part one of the things I didn’t like about it versus GE was that rather than taking a kind of figure out what to do for yourself approach, and where you should use which thing, it was more “press Spy button to perform auto-selected Spy Action now hooray”. Also personally disliked how they nerfed the grappling hook in multiplayer from how it was in Agent Under Fire, where it could just grab onto anything and made for some insanely fun matches.
But yeah, in hindsight it probably wasn’t all that bad a game on its own, but it still comes nowhere near GoldenEye for me.
Oh yeah, no doubt, Goldeneye was great. I suppose it probably wasnt as amazing as I remember haha but the nostalgia value means it’s right up there for me.
Duke Nukem Forever. I know, I know, the vaporware that should have been allowed to float away forever. I somehow expected after a decade of development hell and reboots that this time capsule of misogyny and dated gameplay would somehow thrive in the modern day.
The humour was way off base, the sexual jokes instead of being playfully crude were just kind of gross, and the gameplay was horrible. Duke had the audacity to walk around jerking off about how much better he is than the Master Chief, while the combat was basically the same as Halo 1, only shittier. I could have forgiven all of that if the goddamn loading times were halfway acceptable. Early on in the game I was really struggling with the controls and the difficulty curve and it didn’t help that every death meant upwards of a minute staring at a loading screen to put me back into the action.
Got fed up and returned it.
Serious Sam is where it’s at. Can’t wait for SS4
I hated it too, but wouldn’t call it a disappointment because it was exactly as crap as I expected it to be. Got to the underwater level, go frustrated and returned it for a full refund.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection. A completely broken, inexcusable cash grab that killed all desire to ever play a Halo game again, for me and all of my friends who got suckered into buying it.
Going old skool with this : Ultima 9; after 8 which was a let down from 7, but had interesting ideas, 9 was just so small and janky. It was better on replay but I still feel the Sting of the first playthrough
I recall enjoying 9. Sure it wasn’t as big or involved as the previous 2 games, but I kind of didn’t expect it to be given it was 3d. Considering when it was made, I was rather pleased with it. Might not be one of my all time fav games, but it was definitely one of those games that made me appreciate having a 3dfx card! 🙂
Halo 5 for not having local multiplayer
All those game listed on the story, then in gaming mentions in all the comments, don’t add up to the disappointment of No Man’s Sky. Not even by half.
To see such delusions come crashing down in a heap of NMS procedurally generated alien dung was the only benefit to such a horrible awful, schizofrenic player hating game
Original Destiny maybe. So many basic features just nonexistent.
Also: Putting in the third disk of Final Fantasy VII to find that it was just the final boss fights. I watched the credits roll and waited for so long.
“Where’s the rest?”
Still one of the GOAT game though, but man did that disappoint me as a kid.
Oh god Destiny. Brother got hyped and bought the mega collectors, only to barely get halfway through the game because of crappy grind and zero story. To top things off the collectors edition didn’t even have a season pass so they still expected you fork out more for expansions.
Also, how bad was Dinklebot? Ugh
I had that experience with FF7, it was only on a subsequent playthroughs that I found you could actually leave that final dungeon and do a bunch of other stuff.
I don’t really feel disappointment, I just stop playing the game. Although if I had to say which game I’m disappointed by it’ll probably be Mechwarrior Online, from it’s weird meta-balancing, the monetisation and the way they handled Clans.
I put a fair chunk of money into MWO ($250+ over 3 years) and while I don’t regret it, I do feel like the game has progressed too slowly and missed a lot of good opportunities to be a great game. Combat is still solid and fun, but I’ve barely touched it since getting OverWatch
For me Fallout 4 was pretty disappointing. I usually read reviews before I buy a game but I loved Fallout 3 and New Vegas so much that I was sure F4 would be an improved merger of the best parts of the previous games.
I didn’t really feel the disappointment until I restarted because I wanted to try doing things a little differently and realised that the choices I had been making had mostly been illusions of choice.
Also the season pass is a massive disappointment even if you didn’t have high expectations from the previous games. They jacked up the price AND only made 1 real expansion DLC!
Yes FO4 was a massive disappoint for me too. Just didn’t get into it nearly as much as FO3 and NV.
Particularly didn’t get into the whole base building thing, controls (at least on PC) where do damn janky, i think i ended up just chucking beds in the open and put a few turrents around and that was it.
Also never really used the mech suit.
And side quests… ugh. Maybe it would have been better had I not played Witcher 3 so recently before it, but the side quests in FO4 were generally utter crap.
“Go here and kill someone” or “go here and get this for me” was about all there was, particularly with the dumb repeating/auto quests
Life’s too short to get disappointed by games (for me at least, everyone is different).
So yeah, if a game doesn’t turn out how I initially expect I either stop playing or don’t buy it at all.
This probably comes across as a “holier than thou” answer and I apologise if that is the case, it is not my intention. Just a different perspective.
But if you bought a game and it turns out not to be worth your time doesn’t that make it a disappointment?
Just because you don’t dwell on it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a disappointment.
True, I guess it depends on how you classify disappointment. That’s a good point actually… I guess when I think of disappointment, I think full on downer etc.etc (something something what my parents call me HAH!)
I suppose it depends how hyped you get too? Do you get really excited when a game comes out you really are looking forward to? Or is it just “Hey that looks cool, I’ll grab that” on spec at the shops and dont really invest much into it?
I try not to hype myself much anymore because I do get super bummed when something I really wanted to like sucks. In this regard, I think it is a matter of how disappointed you are is dependent how much you invest emotionally beforehand…
Mine would have to be PvZ Garden Warfare 2. I avoided the first one cause I thought it was a bit threadbare, but heard decent things about 2.
Not only could I not find a single multiplayer game in all the time I was playing but I also couldn’t get a refund because of a loophole where it let you play a time waster level while the game proper was downloading, and EA counted that as my actual play time.
Final Fantasty: Crystal Chronicles. Played through two areas, realised how samey same it was and promptly traded it in for Zelda Wind Waker, which is what I should have bought in the first place.
I once played a game of Quiplash where jokes at @alexwalker’s expense weren’t guaranteed wins.
Last time I remember being completely disappointed in a game was FFXIII. I was actually really hyped for it since the trailers were awesome and it looked fantastic, plus I’ve always been an FF fan. I played to chapter 5 of the story and was so utterly annoyed/disappointed by everything in the game (characters/story/battle system/linearity/you name it) that I returned it. I have no regrets either because I used the credit to buy Lego Star Wars which was amazing by comparison.
FFXIII would be mine too, was so excited on release day, slowly started losing interest over time but held on because a friend kept saying “it totally gets better when you get to the open world part.”
I reached that part, played for about another 10-20 minutes, quit the game and never played it again :'(
IMO the only part that was ‘good’ was once you hit the ground/open world area. Even that is more just ‘good’ compared to the rest.
Until then, yeah not a fan at all.
What’s a FF where you can pretty much just keep the same weapon you have from hour 1 and not bother changing it?
So many to choose from!
Destiny, The Division, Watch Dogs, Sim City, Final Fantasy 13, Titanfall (campaign), Evolve, Prototype 2, Assassins Creed (Unity, 3, Revelations), The Sims 4, Duke Nukem Forever, Colonial Marines, Diablo 3, Rage, Brual Legend, Dark Souls 3, Bound by Flame, Front Mission Evolved, Mighty No 9, Homefront (the original), Battleborn, Firefall, Adventure Time (Explore the Dungeon), Aion, Warhammer: The Reckoning, Total War – Every game after Shogun except Warhammer, EverQuest 2, Bioshock 2, Plants vs Zombies 2 (plus spin-offs/Garden Warfare), Brink, Wildstar, Halo 5, Deus Ex 2 (Invisible War), Doom 3, Dragon Age 2, Earth Defense Force (every version after the original xbox version), Dungeons of the Endless, FF14 (pre-aRR), Fable 2, Guns of Icarus, Hitman: Absolution, Hunted: Demon’s Forge, I Am Alive, Legend, Jagged Alliance Online, Just Cause 3, Left 4 Dead 2, Massive Chalice, Mechwarrior Online, Mordheim, Natural Selection 2, Nether, DayZ, Orcs Must Die: Unchained, Planetary Annihilation, Tales of Monkey Island, Shadowrun (2007), Spacebase DF-9, Spore, SarWars: Battlefront, Thief (remake), Unreal Tournament 3, Dawn of War 2, Resident Evil 5…
I think, ultimately, Destiny is my winner for most disappointing ever. It could’ve been… sigh. SHOULD’VE been just… just so much more.
Yes, even after the expansions.
Hmm, with a list like that, do you actually like any video games? 😛
Seriously though, I agree with a lot of this list (havent played all of these…though, you have more time than me my friend…). Only one I sorta disagree with is Tales of Monkey Island because I thought while it was pretty easy, the writing etc was good enough for it to be enjoyable. To each their own I guess.
The writing was a big part of why I didn’t enjoy ‘unofficially MI 4’. I kinda believe the series peaked with Curse, and just felt like most of the jokes fell flat for Tales. Wasn’t a big fan of their art style, either. Y’know how you walk into the Scumm bar and discover it’s been gentrified into a sushi train for hipster pirates? That’s kinda how I felt about the Monkey Island series with the addition of Tales. I didn’t even finish it.
As for the disappointment list being so big… haha. You should see my Steam library. It’s in the thousands. So there’s plenty to choose from. Also, many of these titles ended up being pretty OK, or even great… but still disappointing. It’s all about the expectations.
I consider DA2 to be unfairly panned as the worst, but it really did have the most interesting art style and the best writing and plot, taking the story away from the traditional ‘dark forces threaten the world, the chosen one unites the people to overcome!’ plot of DA:O, to something more intimate and personal for the Hawke family and their fortunes. I really loved that change, and how by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time but refusing to die created an unlikely hero, accompanied by far less generic and much more interesting companions. Voicing Hawke was inspired, making Hawke a REAL character of their own, a la Commander Shepard, a character with their own voice and motivations rather than a bland player-self-insertion device.
It’s just a shame that the game was so heavily marred by its game mechanics bullshit. Waves of enemies popping out of monster cupboards, mashed by button-pushing auto-attack, in between endless load screens to load up copy-pasted maps whose only differences were which doorways were arbitrarily blocked off… truly fucking awful. Inexcusable laziness in a AAA title.
Didn’t stop me from playing it til 3am every day for two straight weeks.
I also have a soft spot for a lot of what Deus Ex 2 did, and The Division, Diablo, and Destiny all improved significantly with patches and expansions a year later. But it doesn’t change the fact that they were incredibly disappointing on launch.
Deus Ex 2 and Dragon Age 2 were so disappointing compared to the first that I seem to have completely blanked them from my memory until I saw your comment.
If I weren’t so lazy I would go back and edit my old comment to include them.
Diablo 3! I had buried that memory under another half-dozen playthroughs of Diablo 2.
It got better. Needed an expansion and a few patches, but the current game is so much different to vanilla D3 that you wont recognise it. Unless you play through the story proper, then you will…
D2 went through the same issue, it needed an expansion and a few patches before it hit its high points.
Halo 4, easily.
Halo CE is the reason I’m a gamer. I read the books, watched the live-action series’, I devoured that entire universe. I read the first two Forerunner books that were released before Halo 4, and got myself really invested in the story… and was under a complete misapprehension because the third book hadn’t come out. There was absolutely no reason to believe that the real Didact (the game’s main antagonist) was alive at the end of the second book, and there was a perfectly good and thoroughly explained reason for his appearance in the game that completely conflicted with his in-game motivations.
I played it again after reading the third book, when it eventually came out four months later… but my initial playthrough had killed my interest in the character.
I bought the collector’s edition for Spore.
…
I bought the collector’s edition for AVP(2010). Actually, I had a lot of fun with AVP, particularly what multiplayer I played, but I got the game 6 weeks after release, and it was practically dead by then.
…
I bought the collector’s edition for Duke Nukem Forever.
Outside of Blizzard games, I don’t buy collector’s editions anymore.
Os42’s comment above reminded me that Halo 4 existed. I played so much Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, I really loved those campaign and multiplayer.
Halo 4 just sucked. Suuuuuucked. So much.
Borderlands The Pre-sequel. Very disappointing after the kick-ass Borderlands 2.
Biggest disappointments for me have been Red Alert 3 (I actually dug pretty much everything in the game but something just didn’t feel right) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The latter was very disappointing on release but I actually ended up going back and re-subbing after it went F2P and had a pleasantly surprising experience. Still a disappointment overall though.
For me I think it was RA3’s art style. Big and goofy, like ‘Fisher Price: My First RTS’.
I think you’re on to something haha.
Metroid: Other M.
It’s especially disappointing now, seeing as it seems to have singlehandedly killed my favourite video game series.
I loved total war and was so hyped for Rome 2 but I haven’t touched a total war game since.
Also Dragon Age 2&3. DA2 was a disappointment but i just put it down to being a rushed game. From the few hours i played the combat seemed smoother but the story and environment were very bland and limited in scope. Then the promotional videos for DA3 had me hyped again. Looked like DAO with better graphics. They even had a video showing how they made it to work best on pc. Then it came out and not only was it not optimised for pc, it was clearly designed to be played with a controller. Keyboard and mouse was an afterthought and one of the developers even conceded that when doing the pc port they used a controller 80% of the time. EA ruin everything i guess.
Damn you. I was quite content, until you reminded me of Rome 2.
God it was shit on release, and TBH really not much better now, even after months and gigs of patching. Dunno what the main prob is, but yeah just no excitement to play it, after hundreds of hours of all the others, particularly medieval 2
I think my top disappointments tend to be sequels.
Arkham Origins, Bioshock Infinite, The Force Unleashed 2, Jade Empire, KotOR2, The Bard’s Tale (the BG:DA clone), Halo 2 & 3 are my biggest disappointments at launch. They’re in an Ultimate Grudge Match of which is the biggest disappointment.
Biggest disappointments after playing them for the first time years after release would be Fallout: New Vegas, System Shock 2 and Ultima 8.
EDIT: I just keep on thinking of more and more. >
I thought that Jade Empire was awesome and would love for them to do a sequel to that
I’m hanging out for a remake. One of my first pre-orders on Steam was the PC version, which itself was a remaster.
I’ve said this every other year;
Warhammer 40K Fire Warrior.
This is my benchmark for bad games, not even War Z came close to this.
Empire Earth 3. EE2 made me fall in love with RTS. I still have a go at it to this day. EE3 was unplayable – but the premise behind it was awesome. Start, grow and expand over the globe. They just took out everything that was fun about the game.
And they ruined it for the same reason as every other great game usually gets ruined: multiplayer balance concerns.
How did GTA 4 on PC miss out? Dodgy conversion that, if you had an AMD card, was a mess to play. Plus, how many effing times do I have to go bowling with bloody Roman!
RAGE was certainly a disappointment. I bought it on sale via steam for $19, and still feel ripped off.
Another one is the PC version of State of Decay. Terrible low res graphics, an insanely bad game clock that gave you bugger all daylight to explore, and punished the crap out of you for not returning to your ‘base’ at night. Then to top it off, they release an upgrade for the graphics and game play and expected everyone to shell out another $30 for it! Russians!
gta 5. Although it is a good game, motor bikes suck in gta 5. I loved bikes in gta 4 and in five they completely changed. Tricks and flips are only possible at high speeds and height. Where as in 4 you could do a back flip off a small stair case with hardly any speed.
Valve not updating the 360 version of Team Fortress 2.
Every 2013 game getting a next gen remaster except for Splinter Cell Blacklist
I still love Blacklist. Best $14 I have EVER spent. It came with a watch too!
And the game is really great.
This is the thing – it is fantastic and the multiplayer (despite only having something like 5 maps) kept me hooked for months
I hang onto my 360 copy with the forlorn hope that it might eventually go BC but I worry that it seems to have killed off the series with Ubisoft
I haven’t given blacklist a fair shake. Conviction was my favourite in the series and I assume they borrowed and improved upon a lot of the mechanics that helped it along, but for me, Michael Ironside IS Sam Fisher. Hearing someone else’s voice come out of that – decidedly younger-looking – mouth was incredibly jarring.
It is tough to deal with. The new guy is definitely not as good. But the gameplay will get you there. It’s really well done. They improved on all of the new mechanics introduced in Conviction very nicely.
Conviction (and god I hope that goes BC also) has a game mode called Face-Off which is absolutely brilliant!
Doom 3. Was so hyped. Was so, so disappointed.
Still to this day have not fallen for hype since. But I’ve still been disappointed. Cos I’m still paying for the games.
Street Fighter V. Don’t know how they screwed it so bad after the perfection that was 4. It’s just not fun. It doesn’t have the “man this is great fun!” vibe that a fighting game NEEDS.
Bloodborne. I just could not get into but I know it’s a good game, I think it’s just me. I don’t like ‘working’ to enjoy a game.
Alien: Isolation. I picked it up very cheap but apart from the graphics I think I hated everything about it. And the ending made me feel like an idiot for even bothering to finish it.
Dead Space 3. They turned their back on everything that made the first 1 amazing.
Mass Effect 3. After the brilliance of 1 & 2 this was a big letdown.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Feels like a collection of mission packs. Where’s the over-riding amazing story? Very underwhelmed. Good gameplay but Jensen is OP as all hell very quickly in the game. But these games live and die by their stories and Deus Ex is missing a good one. Or even a coherent one. And the acting of the aussie commander! My god he is so bad. So bad. So bad. The worst.
Doom 3, now there is one that was a big disappointment, so much so that i had brain bleached it
For me, the last game to really disappoint was Mad Max. It wasnt BAD, just meh, and the only game in recent years where I’ve felt I wasted my money.
My biggest disappointment was the way the internets reacted to NMS.
Thief reboot…. nothing more need be said.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned The Order: 1886. It looked like it was going to be a total gamechanger, but it turned out to be a big nothingburger.
Honourable mentions: Destiny, Watch Dogs, The Division.
Bit of meta-disappointment: Overwatch. Absolutely fantastic game that I’m hooked on but it totally squanders its amazing world and cast of characters by being MP-only. A single-player campaign with the quality of narrative as the shorts would be God-tier.
My biggest disappointment was getting the Blizzard Cinematic DVD (I admit this was many, many years ago now). They had encoded it wrong and it played as a jagged mess.
The second biggest disappointment would be the Deponia series of games. The trailers make it look great. It has some good comedy and I like the visuals and the puzzles, but the main character is a complete asshole. After finishing the first one I dumped the others to lie on my pile of shame forever.
Metal Gear Solid 5. Coming from a huge MGS fan I played Ground Zeroes and was pretty impressed. I enjoyed sneaking around the base and relished the idea of MGS blending plot centric missions with the fun and chaos of free roaming.
Instead what I got was a rushed, diluted and drawn out mess of a game where the protagonist spoke barely a word inbetween repeating the same types of missions time and time again. I tried to like it but it’s not a Metal Gear Game, it’s what Kojima had ready in time for Konami’s over strict timelines and shitty work conditions.
R.I.P Metal gear Solid. Juat as well MGS4 finished it up well 🙂
Mega Textures worked fine in ETQW/id tech 4 and they still exist but are now known as virtual textures.
Rage/id tech 5 was a let down because of its dynamic resolution scaler which Carmack even admitted was too aggressive in down scaling textures for performance due to the consoles. No solution ever came about but there were a number of ways to improve the situation. Wolfenstein: New Order/Old Blood seemingly dialed back the aggressiveness of the dynamic resolution scaler but it was still apparent.