Decline Biggest waste of potential in video games

[mbv123]

What are some video games that you feel you'd enjoy a lot in theory but in practice it falls flat one way or another. I know this happens a lot but I'm mostly interested in extreme cases.
For example - The Sims 3.
On paper it sounds like the perfect life simulation game. Tons of features, customization options and shit to do if you have all the expansion packs installed. It has so much content that you're unlikely to run out of stuff to do in any foreseeable future. As someone who likes fucking around in Sims and experiencing basic life goals such as cucking husband sims with my virtual Chad alter ego, it sounds absolutely fantastic. Except it's the worst coded piece of shit software in existence and is impossible to play if you have more than 2 EPs installed and it stutters and lags even on a NASA supercomputer. So instead to put up with all that shit you just go back and boot up Sims 2 because it's actually playable.

 

[Gragt]

Black & White.

 

[McPlusle]

Controversial take: Freelancer wasn't nearly as good as it should have been. The mouse-oriented flight model was shit and the universe wasn't nearly as engaging as in Privateer or the X series.

In response to OP, running like shit is Sims tradition. The Sims 1 ran horribly after installing the first four expansions. It wasn't until I had a Pentium 4 machine that it ran smoothly again.

 

[warpig]

House Of the Dying Sun/Enemy Starfighter-> The core gameplay mechanics were imo really good. It didnt feel just like a straight ripoff of X-wing/Freespace/Wing Commander style gamplay...it was kind of in the same vein but had its own unique feel and introduced some new ideas, it could be right there with the classics of the genre if it had a proper campain instead of something that you can finish in 3 hours with missions built around the same idea (kill one specific baddie before time runs out).

 

[Dayyālu]

House Of the Dying Sun/Enemy Starfighter

There's a very interesting story about the death of Enemy Starfighter: the main dev was a member of SA and often dropped in their thread making updates and showing videos. The gist of it was that he fucked up badly on several levels.

- The initial campaign pitch, the one in which you had were the "tip of the spear" of an Evil Empire and you had at your disposal a personal fleet, Homeworld style, and a dynamic campaign was even done in some regards. Then he playtested it, and his playtesters hated the feel of the "generic" missions that the pseudo-dynamic campaign gave, preferring handmade missions instead. He went for several interactions before scrapping them because "they weren't good enough". There are probably several half-finished versions of Enemy Starfighter in a HD somewhere. After years of wasted chances he merely dropped what he had because he had enough.

- Controls. Game is unplayable on keyboard, and was barely tested on it because the dev didn't even think that someone would play it without a gamepad.

- Hilariously enough, bug-hunting, optimization and tester feedback. The dev was from "proper AAA" development experiences and so tried to ape the same systems, trying to provide a "stable and fun" first release without having the resources to do it properly. He wasted months in remaking the game several times.

- "Plot" was an hackjob done to salvage what he could.

It's a pity, but it's very easy to see that he could have done so much better by simply doing the usual indie thing and dropping the game on Early Access and trusting a tad less his own hand-picked testers, because a shit dynamic campaign maybe could have been salvaged with mods and user feedback, the half-baked tech demo we had is merely a lost opportunity.

On the same regard, Battle Brothers. Great game, you see everything in 20-30 hours and it will be dead until eternity because the devs can't be bothered to get out mod compatibility.

What a shame.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Dreamweb is a game that some would consider a classic, but all I saw was wasted opportunities. A cyberpunk top-down adventure game where you assassinate targets, what could go wrong?

Well, the writing is shit first of all. It's nothing but a string of events tied together with some bit of background information. Now this wouldn't have been a big deal if this was an action game, but writing is kind of considered important in adventure titless. The game also had a background fictional diary manual thing that tries to make the game ambiguous, but the actual game offers little to no room for that.

Another thing was the visuals; mildy interesting, but there is quite the lack of details. The resolution is way too low for its own good and it very much hampers the atmosphere the game was going for. Also, said resolution leads to pixel hunting, which I loathe. The last grip was the puzzle solving. Dreamweb has this thing where you could pick up nearly every item. Now that can work with immersion, but does not serve anything outside of confusion. If you're gonna allow that many random items, offer multiple solutions to the puzzles. All you do is make me scratch my head for not following the exact same pattern of thinking because your game has too many useless items.

I thought the music and ambiance were pretty nice, but that's kind of about it. It's not the worst adventure game that I played, but it's not exactly 'cult classic' material for me either. Maybe I should have tempered my expectations or something, but I wasn't impressed.

 

[Zombra]

Dragon Age 2.

An RPG focused around one man's rise to political power in a single sprawling city, with intrigue, faction management, and sexy pirates thrown in.

Sounded slightly better on paper than it turned out.

 

[Jokzore]

Any current date MMORPG.

Everyone is trying to ''hook'' people to playing their game by getting them addicted. Devs pray on your fear of missing out and suffocate you in endless, menial, daily tasks; daily quests, daily profession, daily dungeon, weekly raid, daily fishing, daily pvp etc.

Whatever happened to just making a game fun and attracting players that way?

 

[Cael]

Any current date MMORPG.

Everyone is trying to ''hook'' people to playing their game by getting them addicted. Devs pray on your fear of missing out and suffocate you in endless, menial, daily tasks; daily quests, daily profession, daily dungeon, weekly raid, daily fishing, daily pvp etc.

Whatever happened to just making a game fun and attracting players that way?

PvP MMO game players define "fun" as killing other players. They are attracted just by that alone. You don't have to provide anything else. Just give them an arena to kill other players in, and advantages you can gamble for via lootboxes and they will come in droves.

 

[Jokzore]

Any current date MMORPG.

Everyone is trying to ''hook'' people to playing their game by getting them addicted. Devs pray on your fear of missing out and suffocate you in endless, menial, daily tasks; daily quests, daily profession, daily dungeon, weekly raid, daily fishing, daily pvp etc.

Whatever happened to just making a game fun and attracting players that way?

PvP MMO game players define "fun" as killing other players. They are attracted just by that alone. You don't have to provide anything else. Just give them an arena to kill other players in, and advantages you can gamble for via lootboxes and they will come in droves.

PvP MMO game players want to make their own arena. The notion of restricting PvP to certain designated areas and times goes against the whole point of playing an MMO in the first place. Might as well boot up a regular multiplayer game at that point.

Take WoW for example. Vanilla, even though it was grossly imbalanced, was its golden age of pvp. You could find players in almost any zone, if you wanted a larger scale conflict you could always go to Hillsbrad and if you wanted something regulated and fair you could queue for a battleground. I haven't played WoW in years, but when I quit world pvp was all but dead, leveling zones largely empty and battlegrounds were more about avoiding the enemy team and camping objectives rather than fighting over them.

I guess there's always the arena, but I always felt a format like that beats the point of playing an MMO, if you want to 5v5 there's better ways to do it.

 

[Cael]

PvP MMO game players want to make their own arena. The notion of restricting PvP to certain designated areas and times goes against the whole point of playing an MMO in the first place. Might as well boot up a regular multiplayer game at that point.

Take WoW for example. Vanilla, even though it was grossly imbalanced, was its golden age of pvp. You could find players in almost any zone, if you wanted a larger scale conflict you could always go to Hillsbrad and if you wanted something regulated and fair you could queue for a battleground. I haven't played WoW in years, but when I quit world pvp was all but dead, leveling zones largely empty and battlegrounds were more about avoiding the enemy team and camping objectives rather than fighting over them.

I guess there's always the arena, but I always felt a format like that beats the point of playing an MMO, if you want to 5v5 there's better ways to do it.

A regular MP game, especially one with friends, would end up with a punch up if half the asshole trashtalking and pure jerkwad stuff MMO players pulled were to a guy in the same room. MMO is the only outlet they have because of the safety of several thousand miles of distance.

Even the best MMO ever in the history, present or future of gaming would be horribly curtailed by basic asshole human nature. Sad, isn't it?

 

[Alienman]

Metal Gear 5.

Now, I did enjoy the game, and the gameplay was really fun. But unfortunately it was unfinished, and the twist at the end... just felt wrong for so many reasons. So you could say that the whole game is a waste, but that is not my real concern, well, since I liked the game still. My problem is that the engine they made for the game is fantastic. Runs like a dream, it looks fantastic and the stealth/combat is really fine tuned. The waste is that that engine is now trapped with Konami, and now that Hideo have left, I don't think we will see anything more stealth based on that engine. They made Metal Gear Survive, and if that is anything to go after Metal Gear is dead as the dinos.

I still have a small hope that maybe they will make a remake of the first game or something, but I highly doubt it. Anyway, it is a real shame to see such a great engine just go to waste.

 

[buru5]

The entire Fable series

 

[Burning Bridges]

Arma 3

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Realms of Arkania HD

Salvation Prophecy is this, mostly due to having an utterly minuscule map size to fuck about in. And the general Russian nature of the game.
Fallen Enchantress: Et cetera et al is entirely wasted potential, considering it actually had some interesting ways in which you could customize your sovereign, and your factions, but the actual game... Fug.

 

[Falksi]

Kingdoms of Amalur:Reckoning

Tons of potential from the fate-weaving skillset changes, to the story, to the world. All condensed into a repetitve, tropey, MMO type failure.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

All condensed into a repetitve, tropey, MMO type failure.

Not to mention the piss easy combat, whose only saving grace is that it managed to teach my nephew to WASD+mouselook simultaneously.

BUT THEN IT FUCKS IT UP BY MAKING HIM WANT TO PLAY MAGES.

 

[laclongquan]

Morrowind

You spend tens of hours, maybe even hundreds, to explore the big world, craft boatload of items, hunt artifacts, kill legions, join factions... then you suddenly wake up to see you go through the motion of playing that game.

Because it doesnt connect. The lifeless dialog, the limpwristed character, the supposedly good writings...

It is writings that kill Morrowind for me: dialog, text, lore... It make the whole gigiantic world a piece of disconnect.

It take 7th spot in Codex top 75 with its true strength, which speak legion about its other quality. Its unability to advance further is entirely due to writings.

 

[Farage]

Diablo 3

 

[Nathir]

HoMM4.

 

[laclongquan]

Like I said: waste. If it's bad from the start we wouldnt have invested massive amount of time into playing it.

Bad writings is like claps. You wouldnt know it's bad from the start~

 

[Gerrard]

Warframe

 

[Falksi]

The Dragon Age sequels - In reality CRPG's were always going to evolve into some form of casual shit, but Origins walked a great line between old-school & new school for me, retaining elements of what I thrived on from the BG days, but with the new, more casual elements being either bareable or done well enough not to bother me.

Origins should have been as casual as things got, and further sequeals used to snag casuals but convert them to a more CRPG way of thinking by slighlty creeping towards more CRPG depth.

Instead diving headlong into retard territory with "awesome buttoness" opened the fllodgate for the butchery of RPGs which followed.

For me a real Anakin to Vader moment.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader comes to mind. With the usage of the SPECIAL system and a Renaissance setting, this could have been a refreshing RPG that will be remembered for a while. Unfortunately, the game kinda misuses its own system later down the line due to lack of multiple approaches to the next quests, meaning you're more or less gonna invest into combat. Real-time with pause was applied to the system, which was fine, but it turns into an issue due to the increase in encounters as the game goes on. The worst part is the one where you could tell the developers clearly ran out of money. The game drops all pretenses and become a full-on Diablo, leading to very linear romp of just slaying enemies after enemies. It's a very jarring shift despite it creeping in over time and the barrage just gets tiring. The faction dynamics are also thrown out of the window.
The setting was very interesting, the writing hooks you in the first city, and the dialogue was entertaining. One thing that was neat is that you can choose which spirit you're gonna tag along with at the start and they all have their own personalities and abilities. The companions were also hilarious, albeit without any development.
You could tell there was a good game there, and they tried, but the development issues really didn't help. I just wish they had better circumstances to develop what they wanted to make. Wasn't angry at the game or anything, I just felt sad.

 

[fantadomat]

Neverwinter night 1&2,a lot of lost potential,mainly the shitty level design.

Alpha protocol,gods that dialogue system was really good.