Your top 5 game disappointments

[May90]

Just want to open here this thread that has been very popular on US Battle.net forums.

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So, let me start.

1) Star Wars: The Old Republic
We had been waiting for KotOR 3 for many years. When I first heard that it would going to be a MMO, I thought they were kidding (even checked the date, but no, it wasn't April 1). Then they gave hundreds of promises that story component of this game would be not worse than in previous two games. And they lied, terribly... Grinding MMO, that's what this game has become.

2) Age of Empires 3
AOE 1 and 2 were my favorite RTS before Warcraft 3 came. We knew that they were working hard on the next game, which, unlike AOE 2 - that was made in, what, 2 years? - would have long years of development and, hence, even better quality than the first two games. Needless to say, I removed the game the day I installed it. Never felt like playing it again. The game is just... Terrible.

3) Heroes of Might and Magic 4
HoMM 3 is classics, many people still play it (and I do sometimes). They promised that HoMM 4 would be the most popular game ever, with excellent graphics, many innovations, etc. But the game proved to be an abomination. Graphics was outdated and just, honestly, ugly; new ideas, like mobs patrolling the map and heroes participating in battles as units, were implemented horribly and absolutely unbalanced.
I removed the game the next day after I bought it. Tried many times to come back to the game ever since, but...

4) Doom 3
Doom and Doom 2 were of these games that are made once and forever, popular even 20 years after release. Of course, everyone expected Doom 3 to be, at least, as cool as these games. But, I just hated the game and played it only for a few hours and quit. All those elements that made Doom what it was - incredible level design, so that every level was basically a big puzzle you need to solve: find buttons, secrets, escape "doors of death", look for bottles of health, etc.; many humorous levels with Easter eggs, even two levels from Wolfenstein 3D!; steep learning curve, that makes the hardest difficulty virtually impossible, until you've practiced long enough - all this lacked in Doom 3. The game was not bad, it just was a different genre, not what Doom fans expected.

5) Supreme Ruler: Cold War
I love grand strategy games, and this one was promised to have the most complex economical, political and diplomatic system ever. The developers hold on on their promises and made the game that was, really, very complex in every mentioned aspect, and also featured quite a good AI. The only problem is... After 5 years in game it starts lagging so hard that, even on max speed, 1 in-game day lasts about 1 real-life minute. So a year lasts over 6 hours during which you have basically nothing to do, as major decisions are made only once a few weeks or so.
For some reason, developers didn't take into account that splitting one army into 1000 smaller armies requires 1000 more computer resources to handle it, and AI keeps resplitting its armies all the time, in every country, in every province.
The game also had some other problems, particularly a lot of bugs with Industrialization goods that simply disappeared from the game, leaving countries depending on it non-viable after a few years. But it didn't matter that much, as the game became unplayable soon after start.
Last I've heard, they partially solved that problem in the latest patch, speeding the game up to 5 times in some cases. But... First impression is a very strong one. Haven't touched the game since a few days after its release.

[dokilar]

Warhammer Online
Diablo 3
WoW : Cataclysm
Dungeon Siege 2
D&D Dragonshard

[Ashana Darkmoon]

3) Heroes of Might and Magic 4
HoMM 3 is classics, many people still play it (and I do sometimes). They promised that HoMM 4 would be the most popular game ever, with excellent graphics, many innovations, etc. But the game proved to be an abomination. Graphics was outdated and just, honestly, ugly; new ideas, like mobs patrolling the map and heroes participating in battles as units, were implemented horribly and absolutely unbalanced.
I removed the game the next day after I bought it. Tried many times to come back to the game ever since, but...

I sometimes think I'm the only one who liked HoMM4 much better than everything other than the newest one (which is underrated imo). I actually liked being able to send heroes on the battlefield without an army; it made them feel a lot more powerful when they could tear down a whole castle by themselves at later levels. One of the Gathering Storm xpack final missions had you take all 5 or 6 (can't remember) of the heroes from the buildup campaigns and use that as your whole party for the last map.

[Venziir]

AoE 3 is fine, the leveling system gives the game a lot of replay'ability. And HOMM4 is fine too, not perfect, but fine - epic soundtrack. The reason as to why it was a mess however was the whole 3DO bankrupcy.

[PetersenIII]

2) Age of Empires 3
AOE 1 and 2 were my favorite RTS before Warcraft 3 came. We knew that they were working hard on the next game, which, unlike AOE 2 - that was made in, what, 2 years? - would have long years of development and, hence, even better quality than the first two games. Needless to say, I removed the game the day I installed it. Never felt like playing it again. The game is just... Terrible.

Good gracious yes! Why ever would they feel the need to try and innovate on a system they'd been doing for decades with little to no variation? </sarcasm> The only thing that irritated me was the bar-filling, which has seemingly perpetuated itself across the gamescape. I seriously can't think of any modern games that don't have some damnable form of bar-filling.


Note: I'm not saying bar-filling is a bad mechanic, I'm saying that not EVERY SINGLE GAME THAT'S MADE needs to include it.


I honestly have a hard time remembering gaming disappointments. Diablo 3 and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning were two, but beyond those (and most of my issue with D3 isn't related to the actual gameplay), I have difficulty coming up with anything.

[TacTican]

Link to the B.net thread?

Also, my game disappointment that really stood out to me:

C&C 4: Tiberium Twilight
We were promised a game that would conclude the Tiberium saga in an epic fashion, finally wrap up all our questions about Kane, the Tacitus, Tiberium, and the Scrin, be the greatest and best entry in the Tiberium franchise, and so forth. We were given a shoddily polished Dawn of War knock-off with practically zero gameplay variation which answered no questions, resolved no storylines, and seemed to basically throw out everything we loved about C&C in the name of "innovation." Gameplay was highly repetitive, campaign was impossibly hard without a co-op partner (yes, optional, but good luck actually making progress given the insurmountable number disadvantage), characters dropped in and out of the story without warning, rhyme, or reason, multiplayer featured a high barrier to entry, and what did they do to the Tiberium?! For a long time C&C fan, this was the moment when EA truly and finally did kill the C&C franchise.

[Spraxle]

It's funny I came in here to say my top biggest disappoint was SWToR haha... Anyway here's a list!

1) Star Wars: The Old Republic.
2) Warhammer Online, this one really pissed me off because the beta was a blast and for some reason they decided to completely change interesting game play elements and make them pointless.
3) World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Pandas and a million dailies a good game do not make.
4) Gran Turismo 5 Demo pack thingy. I can't remember the name I just remember it retailed for like $30 and it was just a demo of the game where you couldn't change your gear shift ratio or get new cars or anything. Such a let down, found it hard to invest in the 'real game' after wasting cash on the 'demo'.
5) Witcher 1, Bought it on sale on Steam and the combat was so bleh. Sure I only played for like an hour but that hour was so tear inducingly boring. So boring I haven't bothered to download and install Witcher 2 which I got on sale at the same time.

[Dunkman]

Kotor 2
D3 (I like D3, I still play it occasionally, but I was still very disappointed)
Dragon Age 2
Everquest 2

I honestly don't know what to put in the 5th spot. Could put something like ME3 because the ending was so terrible but I really enjoyed the game up until the ending. I thought Oblivion was dull after a few hours and could have put that there, or either of the last 2 WoW expansions. However, I think I'll just leave it blank. Also, I've played a lot worse stuff than the ones I listed, but I put them there because at the time they were series I really enjoyed and games I was very excited about.

Oh and as to the Witcher 1, I actually never finished chapter 1 the first time I played it because I was bored with the whole thing. If you can make it to chapter 2 the game improves dramatically.

[Venziir]

It's funny I came in here to say my top biggest disappoint was SWToR haha... Anyway here's a list!

1) Star Wars: The Old Republic.
2) Warhammer Online, this one really pissed me off because the beta was a blast and for some reason they decided to completely change interesting game play elements and make them pointless.
3) World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Pandas and a million dailies a good game do not make.
4) Gran Turismo 5 Demo pack thingy. I can't remember the name I just remember it retailed for like $30 and it was just a demo of the game where you couldn't change your gear shift ratio or get new cars or anything. Such a let down, found it hard to invest in the 'real game' after wasting cash on the 'demo'.
5) Witcher 1, Bought it on sale on Steam and the combat was so bleh. Sure I only played for like an hour but that hour was so tear inducingly boring. So boring I haven't bothered to download and install Witcher 2 which I got on sale at the same time.

Witcher 2 has a different combat, a lot of dodging and slicing.

[Tyrgannus]

5,) Mechwarrior 3
4.) DDR Extreme
3.) Fable 3
2.) Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex
1.) Final Fantasy X-2

[Venziir]

Link to the B.net thread?

Also, my game disappointment that really stood out to me:

C&C 4: Tiberium Twilight
We were promised a game that would conclude the Tiberium saga in an epic fashion, finally wrap up all our questions about Kane, the Tacitus, Tiberium, and the Scrin, be the greatest and best entry in the Tiberium franchise, and so forth. We were given a shoddily polished Dawn of War knock-off with practically zero gameplay variation which answered no questions, resolved no storylines, and seemed to basically throw out everything we loved about C&C in the name of "innovation." Gameplay was highly repetitive, campaign was impossibly hard without a co-op partner (yes, optional, but good luck actually making progress given the insurmountable number disadvantage), characters dropped in and out of the story without warning, rhyme, or reason, multiplayer featured a high barrier to entry, and what did they do to the Tiberium?! For a long time C&C fan, this was the moment when EA truly and finally did kill the C&C franchise.

C&C4 can be summarized by "lulz alien". Such a bad game...

[Chinese Bootlickers]

Can moments in a game count?If not:
Halo 4
Dragon Age(Forgive me, I was playing it on a console)
WoW:Cataclysm
Borderlands 2.Something just felt...off about it, for me.
Tribes:Ascended.You were so much fun in beta, and then the micro-transactions came.

[Noorri]

I enjoyed both Age of Empires 3 and Heroes of Might and Magic 4, though neither were as good as their predecessors. They were completly acceptable sequels in my opinion though.

My top 5:

1. WoW: Mists of Pandaria: While I immensly enjoyed the leveling and questing parts, the endgame was just abysmal. And leveling new characters forever is not going to last, especially since you need to go through 1-85 for every character to get to MoP content, and I have leveled something like 50 characters through that content already and I am totally bored of it.

2. World of Warcraft: After Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne, I was really hoping for something far better then the terrible joke of a game that WoW was at release. None of the characters I liked was anywhere to be seen other then standing around AFKing in cities, and the lore was focused on completly new stuff and nothing of the old lore seemed to be relevant anymore. Sylvanas joining the Horde really was a total fail as well, it was the primary reason I never got into playing as Horde as the Forsaken really didn't make any sense in there. I didn't bother playing WoW beyond the first 20 levels or so, as what I had seen up to that point and what the other guys at school were doing at max level really didn't make me interested at all.

3. Heroes of Might and Magic 5: Instead of fixing the issues that 4 had and making a combination of 3 and 4 which would have been awesome, they made a much weaker version of 3. I was pretty disappointed when I first tried it, and didn't bother to play for to long. I recently started playing it a little again but it really is just a bad version of 3, and taking out all the hilariously broken stuff made it quite boring as well.

4. Diablo 3: Again, taking out absurdely overpowered stuff made the game much weaker then the earlier game. The extremely quick movement and all the teleporting in Diablo 2 was what made the massive item hunt in the end game tolerable. In Diablo 3 once you get to that point you just have to slowely run everywhere and it's just so slow I felt like falling asleep when I was farming Hell act 4 over and over just to have a popsicles chance in hell to live for a second in inferno as a Barbarian on release. It really was terribly balanced at the end and ended up feeling somewhat rushed in the end which is quite ironic considering how long they spent on it.

5. Settlers 5: Hard to pick one but I would have to say that this is the point were the series started to really go down. Settlers 3 really changed up the game, for both better and worse. Settlers 4 was just a better version of 3, but 5 and beyond is really much weaker games overall.

[Faesroll]

Guild wars 2
Black ops 2
Some shitty Star Wars game on the GBA like 12-15 years ago. Don't even know what it's called anymore.
C&C Tiberium Wars I think it was called, the one on the Xbox.

That's about it, but the first 2 really stand out though, I played the last 2 a few hours each but GW2 and BO2 are some of the worse purchases I ever made.

[Colmadero]

Darksiders 2
Darksiders 2
Darksiders 2
Darksiders 2
Darksiders 2

That ending was incredibly stupid and didn't invoke so much thrill and awe as the 1st one.

[rpdrichard]

1. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
The worst expansion so far in lore development and the worst raid ever Dragon Soul Z where we have a epic fight with deathwing nails, lets not forget the merging of 10 and 25 raid lockouts and the ridiculously hard 5-man at the beginning

2. Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City


3. Age of Empires III
The two previous installments and and age of mithology were great this one didn't made justice to the franchise with its terrible story

4. World of Warcraft: Mist of Pandaria
April fool joke becomes a playable race, daily grindfest on the first patches, terrible alliance lore development since patch 5.3

5. Resident Evil 5
Goodbye to survival horror welcome COD, and the retarded AI partner

[WarpedAcorn]

I'm basing this on my level of excitement for a title based on how much it failed to meet my own built up hype. This is not a list of games I think are objectively bad, just ones that let me down the most...oddly enough all are recent titles.

(In no order)

-Dragon Age 2
-Diablo 3
-Mass Effect 3 (raged at the ending, but have now come to terms with it)
-Rift
-Guild Wars 2

[May90]

Link to the B.net thread?

Well, there are many threads with similar discussion. I was copying this: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/8087088985

2. World of Warcraft: After Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne, I was really hoping for something far better then the terrible joke of a game that WoW was at release. None of the characters I liked was anywhere to be seen other then standing around AFKing in cities, and the lore was focused on completly new stuff and nothing of the old lore seemed to be relevant anymore. Sylvanas joining the Horde really was a total fail as well, it was the primary reason I never got into playing as Horde as the Forsaken really didn't make any sense in there. I didn't bother playing WoW beyond the first 20 levels or so, as what I had seen up to that point and what the other guys at school were doing at max level really didn't make me interested at all.

Funny thing. I was thinking of putting WoW in my list, but it was a bit different in my case. When Warcraft 3 just came out, something felt a little bit off about this game for me, as I didn't have a stable Internet back then and could play only off-line, so I got to the last mission of RoC Orc campaign and quit for a long time. So I didn't care much about what the sequel to that game would be.
Then, in 2006 or so, I came back to Warcraft 3. That time I started playing on Battle.net and totally felt in love with the game. But WoW was already up and running, so I accepted the fact that Warcraft 4 would never come and didn't feel particularly bad about it.

As for WoW itself, I didn't even manage to level a single character to max level. I just saw fast that this is not a game for me.

[Okacz]

1) Empire Earth 3

Empire Earth was a great classic-style RTS game with similiar premise to Civilisation - being able to venture from the most ancient times to the most modern, and even beyond. The game was a masterpiece, one of the best RTS games ever. Empire Earth 3 tho... kinda forgot about that. Game feels unfinished to say the least, and really? There were like, only 5 time periods? Yeah, way to go from "From prehistory to spaceships" to this.

2)Flat Out 3

Flat Out was one of my favourite driving games - crazy, violent, fast and with awesome destruction graphics. The game also had a funny little minigame mode, in which you literally shot your driver from the vehicle to play cards/hockey/basketball and such. It was weird to say the least, but a lot of fun. So, let's take everything BUT the minigames out and call it 3 - there we go. I wouldn't even be so mad if the minigames were better than in other games in the series. They weren't.

3) Heroes VI

I liked Heroes V, I really did. Despite its flaws, I feel that it made a jump into 3D quite well, and retained the magic from III. HoMM VI seemed to say "fuck that, we gonna be smarter than that", and introduced a lot of painful and boring elements to a once cool and easy to learn game. Plus, somehow they managed to make graphics look worse than in V. I'm still not sure how.

4) Crysis 2

I'm probably very unfair here, Crysis 2 may be in fact a much better game. But what was Crysis 1 about? Cutting palm trees with machine guns to pick them up and destory a building with them. Killing Koreans with living chicken. Punching through walls. Realising that a dead frog flies lower than a living one if you throw it. There was a TON of openworld bullshit, complete with amazing engine allowing you to destroy almost everything. Yep, it's almost all gone in Crysis 2. You can push the table only when the game allows you to. Bullshit.

Can't think of any number 5 that pissed me off to be honest

[unholytestament]

The only thing that really comes to mind is Fable 2 and 3. The endings were rushed and unsatisfying, which blows since earlier parts of the game were so good.

In Fable 2 I thought the way you met and recruited each of the other heroes was done so well, and I loved the idea behind the villain, but once the third hero is recruited you are dropped into a "mook rush" boss fight then that was it. Left me wondering why I needed the other heroes in the first place.

And Fable 3 pretty much fell apart once you finally become king. There's only a handful of decisions you make and the most effective way of making money for your entire kingdom is still playing music in the town square. Other than those special decisions and now being able to call the castle your house you don't really feel at all like a king. Plus the final battle with the big bad evil was nowhere near as exhilarating as the sequence where you were introduced to it.