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The biggest disappointments in your personal gaming history

Jarmaro

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 31, 2016
Messages
1,466
Location
Lair of Despair
MGSV - Video game blue balls. Story and pacing is an absolute disastrous mess even by the standards of the series, and it's clear from the get-go that the game is still pretty unfinished.
Well, for me MGS V is only metal gear I played and the best stealth game I've ever played. Yes, story is awkward beyond limit and some things like Quiet dancing are simply embarassing. But I can't believe you call this game unfinished, amount of content in this game is ridiculous. Or maybe you just mean last mission that didn't make it to game, in that matter I can agree.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Master of Orion 3 - after the 2nd part it was probably naive to hope for something even better, but 3 was much worse and buggy, too. Even mods never fixed it.

Neverwinter Nights - While I wasn't the biggest fan of IE games, I still liked most of them well enough. NN was a disappointment on all levels - bad graphics, terrible art style, bad story, lackluster party system. Later expansions and especially fan-made modules salvaged it to some degree, but it still stayed far behind what I had hoped for initially.
 

Jick Magger

Arcane
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Dec 7, 2010
Messages
5,667
Location
New Zealand
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bubbles In Memoria
MGSV - Video game blue balls. Story and pacing is an absolute disastrous mess even by the standards of the series, and it's clear from the get-go that the game is still pretty unfinished.
Well, for me MGS V is only metal gear I played and the best stealth game I've ever played. Yes, story is awkward beyond limit and some things like Quiet dancing are simply embarassing. But I can't believe you call this game unfinished, amount of content in this game is ridiculous. Or maybe you just mean last mission that didn't make it to game, in that matter I can agree.
The story. I'm a long-time fan of the series, and bought in to the hype of the game because of the frankly excellently put together trailers, so the fact that there basically is no story for 60% of the game, and what story there is is exposited in those shitty cassette logs was a colossal let down for me.

It wasn't just that the final mission was cut from the game, it's pretty clear that everything from after you beat Skull-Face was just them haphazardly stringing together what little content they had left to try and form something that resembled a cohesive narrative. You can basically feel the dev team struggling to finish the game as you play it.
 

Freddie

Savant
Joined
Sep 14, 2016
Messages
717
Location
Mansion
Some from the top of my head.

Deus Ex: Invisible war
Battlecruiser 3000 AD
Mass Effect 2
Mass Effect 3 (stupid!)
The Witcher 2
StarCraft: Heart of the Swarm

I think the first 4 are obvious.

Witcher 2 was just too much of a cliche, like everything you could expect and it just felt too cheesy. I didn't like how it was sort of streamlined from TW 1 where you could pick up and examine about anything. Triss was good looking, but that's just wasn't enough.

SC: HotS plot was too cheesy for my taste and campaign was a cake walk. I think one mission was challenging. I played it through though but it felt much like wasted time.
 

Jason Liang

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2014
Messages
8,337
Location
Crait
A lot of younger players couldn't even beat the 2nd level on TMNT. Then the 3rd level is like 10X more difficult, the 4th level is like 2X more difficult than the 3rd, the 5th is kind of easy, and the 6th level is like 3X more difficult than the 4th.

So yeah, that difficulty curve is a little whack.

YO! Noid was also a hard game to beat. Any game where you die in 1 hit is sadistic.
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,835
Location
Lulea, Sweden
MMORPGs. Just generally. I remember how excited I was about them once upon a time, how I imagined they would be these great pieces of gaming. In the end I think I had the most fun back in utlima online, then game by game I slowly lost interest so much that I dont even check them out anymore.

Interestingly enough I never became irritated about human players being insulting or trying to kill me, what really killed other players for me was how seriously players took the games. with ettiquette rules and general disdain towards anyone that didn't know everything about the game. I should just have pretended to be a woman I guess, retards playing would just shower me in freebies then and be on their best behaviour.

But yeah, the whole MMORPG market has been a big disappointment as far as I am concerned.
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
Patron
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Sep 10, 2014
Messages
17,046
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Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
MMOs had so such potential too. I remember playing UO, Myth of Soma and WoW(Vanilla) and thinking what the future would hold. All those games were sandbox-y, maybe not WoW so much, but it had an epic progression feeling, cool "lore", nice community and it was actually pretty hard at points and required dedication. Vanilla was a great romp, but ironically it was WoW that killed the genre.
 

Severian Silk

Guest
Yeah, every MMO ever is disappointing. They are either pointless theme parks, or you have to basically dedicate your life to them like EVE.
 

Kev Inkline

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 17, 2015
Messages
5,074
A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yeah, every MMO ever is disappointing. They are either pointless theme parks, or you have to basically dedicate your life to them like EVE.
I spent 2500h+ in GW1, mostly pvp (guild vs guild), which I still think is one of my best experiences in gaming. Crafting individual and team builds (like MtG decks), practicing timing, movement and strategy, I don't know what could have been better.

That brings me to one of the gravest disappointments I've had: GW2. I've clocked 13h and that's it. Can't bear or don't see any point playing it.
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
Yeah, every MMO ever is disappointing. They are either pointless theme parks, or you have to basically dedicate your life to them like EVE.
GW2 was sad, I played the beta and it was awesome. The mobs were tuned REALLY tough, so you could barely solo a mob, you had to dive constantly, kite the mob, dive more, kite more and hope you survived. It was dangerous but it was so fun, and the major upside is that travelling out into the world to pick up all the skill points and things was a serious adventure, and getting some friends was really important. But then later beta they tuned it easier, and then another later beta they tuned it easier again. By the last beta phase it was like every other dumbass modern MMO, you press 123 and all the mobs explode.

Turtles was awesome! It was hard though but wasn't everything back then?
I never beat it.
Me either :/ But I was only lil. I got quite far but I think I just got tired of the slog. I often didn't finish games back then though. Also I didn't have a SNES so I played it mostly at someone elses house which made it hard to really get focused on it. And then much later it came out on PC but I didn't feel like doing it all over again.

MMOs had so such potential too. I remember playing UO, Myth of Soma and WoW(Vanilla) and thinking what the future would hold. All those games were sandbox-y, maybe not WoW so much, but it had an epic progression feeling, cool "lore", nice community and it was actually pretty hard at points and required dedication. Vanilla was a great romp, but ironically it was WoW that killed the genre.
We were robbed a great genre imo. UO and EQ were brilliant, but they were early and primitive and basically just RPG's online. The interesting things back then were the idea of "Persistent Worlds", and the idea that people could become genuinely famous or infamous depending on what they did in the game. And also the idea that you could change the game world. Maybe it was just me and my buddies, but I am pretty sure people had really high hopes for MMO's then. We expected future games to have gigantic worlds with towns that you could completely capture with your friends and make it your town, and other people could try to capture your town or mobs would band together and recover towns for the orcs or whatever. And one player would rise up to become the king, and one evil bastard player would kill him and rise up to become the lord of darkness, etc, and player run economies, none of that bind on equip bullshit. But then along came WoW and dumbed everything down into a cartoon loot game and had 14 million people paying a subscription fee monthly, and the entire genre become obsessed with trying to be copy that blueprint. The original ideas just died overnight. There were a few interesting games that happened in the meantime like Shadowbane and Darkfall, but they weren't developed enough and failed miserably. There were others that were good on paper but never even made it to release, Dark & Light where you could slide down hills on your shield, etc.

It is frustrating and sad because what people today think an MMORPG is, is completely different to what people thought of MMOs in the early days. The games today are all just descendants of WoW. It doesn't matter if it is SWTOR, Rift, Archeage, Black Desert, etc.. they are all based on that formula of being casual, accessible, cartoony, cutesy, quest hubs, etc. The first gen games were not like that at all, they weren't gamey, they were virtual worlds and the blueprint and inspiration was MUDS. The gameplay was fitted into that, and it was done in an organic way that gave the players freedom to work out what to do. Most of what made EQ great was 'Emergent Gameplay', so many ideas that the players created that the devs never even imagined. And hardly any of it got nerfed, it just became a part of the game and it was that stuff that people loved the most. Since then, no MMO's have had any emergent gameplay, because they are all finely tuned theme parks.

I still think some day the genre will grow into what it should have been all along, but I think it is currently taking a gigantic shitty generic detour and it is going to take a lot of time to come back around.
 
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Murk

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2008
Messages
13,459
Dark Souls 2 was terrible, cheap fan fiction (and Scholar of the First Sin did nothing to change that).

Until Dark Souls 2 lured me into being excited for a game and having hope again... Fool me twice, shame on me.

Dark Souls 2. What a pile of shit.

Damn, I've heard things over the years about people not liking Dark Souls 2 but those are harsh words. I started with Demon's Souls back in '09 and I thought it was alright, you guys got me feeling like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap:



Shit varies. 2 is my favorite in the series, in no small part due to the multiplayer and slower pace of combat.
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
I always forget it has multiplayer. I saw a video of it once and it looked really fun. Some guy disguised himself as a table, and all these people ran in the room and table guy materialises behind them and ganks. It looked fun but not enough for me to buy it.
 

Dawkinsfan69

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
Joined
Jun 3, 2016
Messages
2,815
Location
inside ur mom ᕦ( ▀̿ Ĺ̯ ▀̿ )ᕤ
We were robbed a great genre imo. UO and EQ were brilliant, but they were early and primitive and basically just RPG's online. The interesting things back then were the idea of "Persistent Worlds", and the idea that people could become genuinely famous or infamous depending on what they did in the game. And also the idea that you could change the game world. Maybe it was just me and my buddies, but I am pretty sure people had really high hopes for MMO's then. We expected future games to have gigantic worlds with towns that you could completely capture with your friends and make it your town, and other people could try to capture your town or mobs would band together and recover towns for the orcs or whatever. And one player would rise up to become the king, and one evil bastard player would kill him and rise up to become the lord of darkness, etc, and player run economies, none of that bind on equip bullshit.

That's what I always wished would happen as well. Unfortunately the sad reality smashed me in the face when I got banned from WoW early on for scamming gold from people, then another time for jumping through a wall in Stormwind because of some glitch in the game, then another time for hurting someone's feelings in chat.

I always expected MMOs to be social games where the fun would come from interacting with other people and dealing with whatever sort of emergent game play would result but the successful business model ended up being one that crushed the social experience in favor of solo with all players being reduced to replaceable cogs.

Thing is, I can't believe there are literally millions of people out there who want to play theme-park WoW MMOs where you press two buttons and have meaningless victory after meaningless victory for thousands of hours. It's worse than watching paint dry.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,235
Pretty much everything after 2006 or so has been a massive disappointment (with some exceptions), decline on unprecedented levels, so yeah it's best to focus on old decline:

Deus Ex: Invisible War
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
Oblivion

Not much else that actually let me down is coming to mind right now. Notable decline was an elusive thing, once upon a time. Nowadays companies just override the lack of quality with millions invested in marketing campaigns and catering to non-hobbyist gamers.

:negative:
 

SerratedBiz

Arcane
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Messages
4,143
Quest for Glory V. Not a terrible game per se, but the hype was so huge back in the day for it.
 

pippin

Guest
I've never liked multiplayer games. The idea of playing with other people has never been great in my opinion... Even as an idiot kid I knew game design would take a hit when the anarchic factor of human interaction would rule over everything else, and I feel I'm kinda right. MMOs played a huge role in the casualization of games in general.
 

Dawkinsfan69

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
Joined
Jun 3, 2016
Messages
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inside ur mom ᕦ( ▀̿ Ĺ̯ ▀̿ )ᕤ
I've never liked multiplayer games. The idea of playing with other people has never been great in my opinion... Even as an idiot kid I knew game design would take a hit when the anarchic factor of human interaction would rule over everything else, and I feel I'm kinda right. MMOs played a huge role in the casualization of games in general.

The way things actually worked out was not so much anarchic as it was just a race to the bottom. Companies make WAAAAY more $$ by dumbing systems down and making them enjoyable (read: winnable) to people with room temperature IQ than they do when they allow players freedom and a higher skill ceiling.
 

rado907

Savant
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
249
NWN, what a piece of shit that was.

And Diablo 3, bad game though I enjoyed playing it with my brother (a Diablo fanatic) on a couple of patches. Wish Bliz would go straight to D4 and do a proper job.
 

thesoup

Arcane
Joined
Oct 13, 2011
Messages
7,599
I don't think I ever went into a game expecting a masterpiece and finding it underwhelming as I always knew what I was getting into. The closest to a disappointment was Bioshock, for which I was hyped for a while before release, but I played it long after the hype was gone and I think I already knew it was consoleshit (but probably didn't expect it to be that much of a consoleshit).

I never played a game at the height of (my personal) hype only to find it disappointing but long after I managed to get second hand impressions and know what I was potentially getting into. There's also games others hyped but always seemed meh to me so I didn't really get burned either.

So I dunno, maybe that's just partially hindsight as well as I can't remember every detail out there from years and years ago.
 
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tormund

Arcane
Joined
Aug 15, 2015
Messages
2,282
Location
Penetrating the underrail
Just from reading about it, I almost wish I could've experienced Battlecruiser shitstorm personally. Hype and promises compared with apparent godawfullness of actual game, and all those following escapades of The Magnificent Negro Autist, make that last year's NMS crap look minor and pale.
 

Bumvelcrow

Somewhat interesting
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Nov 17, 2012
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Over the hills and far away
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Strap Yourselves In
Just from reading about it, I almost wish I could've experienced Battlecruiser shitstorm personally. Hype and promises compared with apparent godawfullness of actual game, and all those following escapades of The Magnificent Negro Autist, make that last year's NMS crap look minor and pale.

It was fun for a while, but the internet was smaller and less meme-driven then, so it almost resembled a mature discussion compared to modern day shitstorms. :obviously:
 

Carrion

Arcane
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Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
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Lost in Necropolis
I've been defending IW in other threads and I'll stand by my decision. It's not bad. It's also more of a DX game than HR.But if you disagree, it's ok.
One difference is that there were big expectations for Invisible War but basically none for Human Revolution. IW being more of a DX game could also be seen as a negative rather than positive, as you can't really ignore its connection to Deus Ex and how dumbed-down and inferior it is in pretty much every way, whereas it's pretty easy to just treat HR as a part of a separate series taking place in some weird parallel universe.
 

prodigydancer

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 16, 2015
Messages
1,399
Hm... I can't say I was disappointed with Diablo 3. I followed its development closely and more or less knew what to expect. Doesn't mean it wasn't a stinking pile of shit though.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 were absolutely terrible. Both times I expected better and both times I couldn't believe my eyes. And people here call HL2 boring, LOL. Between D3, Q4 and HL2 I'll pick HL2 any day of the week.

FEAR sequels. How come they couldn't even reproduce the AI from the original game, I'll never know.

NWN2 OC. Worst performance optimization ever. Worst story and writing ever. NWN OC didn't quite live up to my expectations either, but NWN2 totally blew it.

Oblivion. I'm not a fan of Bethesda games in general, but I explored a good chunk of Morrowind before I got bored. With Oblivion it was like "WTF am I playing?"

DA:I. All I wanted was DA2 combat system + tactical camera from DA:O. To me that would be good enough. Then I watched the first part of RK47's letsplay and could only facepalm.

:negative:
 
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sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
I've never liked multiplayer games
you've not played enough or good multiplayer games then

I always forget it has multiplayer. I saw a video of it once and it looked really fun. Some guy disguised himself as a table, and all these people ran in the room and table guy materialises behind them and ganks. It looked fun but not enough for me to buy it.
the souls games have a lot of content, especially souls 2 with 3 DLC. Souls 2 really is the weakest game in the series but has great DLC. I never played its multiplayer though.
 
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