Your top 5 game disappointments

[Slant]

Mass Effect 3 ending... I'm surprised nobody mentioned that, yet. Everything else just pales in comparison.

[HisDudeness]

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.

Let me get this straight. Original WoW is a huge disappointment yet you CONTINUED to play it through MoP leveling 50+ toons? Wow I have never seen such a hypocrite lol

[Czar]

Dawn of War 2: Honestly, you give 40K fans the chance to finally ruin everything with Tyranids, and then you make a no base building DotA mimic and expect us to swallow? What confused me the most is that if you want to play Strategy level 40k, you can literally play 40k. I wanted huge battles, hours long with sprawling bases and gigantic armies, and instead I got a regular Sunday of dice rolling.

GTA4: Yeah, not GTA3/VC/SA though was it? I dunno, maybe I grew up, maybe the story wasnt fulfilling, maybe the violence just got silly. OR MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE IT FELT LIKE STEERING A CAR THROUGH JAM ALL THE TIME. Maybe.

Swtor: This seems pretty common, but when the creators of KotOR and Mass Effect get into the MMO market to make a Star Wars game, you'd think it would be a faultless road to success. How wrong we were.

Every CoD game since WaW: (maybe not Black Ops 1): You think WoW was bad for reskinning, think again. And yet we buy them to keep the little real world friends we have because they have no idea what an MMO is, and buy these games and FIFA every Autumn.

Battlefield 3 (on the xbox... pffff): I know I had dreams of reliving great times with my buds in a tactical fps with incredible scope, and though, 'Hey! all my xbox friends will love BF3, we just to love BF1942 and Conflict: desert storm LAN parties. I know they wont get decent enough PCs to bother with it there, but they cant be releasing just an awful version of the fantastic game can they?'
A: they can. And they did. Note to all developers. 30fps isnt fast enough for a fps. Just no.

[kamikaze148]

WoW Cataclysm: I hate to jump on the bandwagon of hate for this expansion, but it reaaaaally took the wind out of Warcraft's sails. After WotLK's resounding success, financially for Blizzard, and in terms of decent content and improvements, i cant help but feel that Cataclysm should have been ALOT shorter. Revamped old world, is great and all. but you cant rest two years plus worth of material based on content the majority of level cap players dont care for. Lore was lazy, but i for one LOVED the difficult Heroic Dungeons, shame Blizzard caved in on that model. Hoping they return to it next expansion.

Assasins Creed 3: For me, i am a HUGE HUGE HUGE fan of the AC franchise, dug deep into the story and history behind the events of Ezio and Altairs world. I loved the fact that you could be a stealthy assassin on some missions, and an all out brawler in others. Connors story progression was half assed at best, combat mechanics out in the open brawling ALL THE TIME. and heaps of vehicle missions that i personally did not care for. Its the only AC title i rather sat and watched someone else play than myself play.

Star Wars Force Commander: This one i think i am just bitter for being a Naive 13 year old kid saving up money from paper runs, and purchasing a Star Wars title thinking it would be amazing simply because, Star Wars. buggy mechanics, god aweful gameplay.

Cant think of any other right now, but those three stick out in my mind

[Flame6]

1. Resident Evil 6
2. Two Worlds
3. Fable 3
4. C&C 4
5.

[Bloodege-NUFC]

Cataclysm
Diablo III
Street fighter X Tekken
Every Crash Bandicoot game after Twinsanity
Red Alert 3

[Sithalos]

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria took up all 5 spots for me.

[May90]

Swtor: This seems pretty common, but when the creators of KotOR and Mass Effect get into the MMO market to make a Star Wars game, you'd think it would be a faultless road to success. How wrong we were.

I was very skeptical about the game from the moment I heard it was going to be MMO. Still, somehow, I expected the game to be very similar to KotOR. With all that information, that they'd spent 200 million dollars or so on this game, that they really cared about not only MMO players but also KotOR fans, and the very fact that it was Bioware, not Obsidian or some other "substitute" company... And those videos they kept showing us, with excellent battle system (which proved to be a copy of WoW system), with incredible cinematics (proved to be only the intro movie; in-game cinematics were much more choppy), with companions (each dialogue with a companion proved to last 30 seconds or so, as if they believed that the player has a Dawn syndrome and is unable to understand more information at once)...

The game was a HUUUUGE disappointment. As a MMO, it's not bad, I guess. But as a successor to KotOR... Well.

[Biomega]

1) Final Fantasy XIII

After FFVII (first FF on PS) and FFX (first FF on PS2), I was expecting FFXIII to be nothing short of monumental. It was: a monumental disappointment. Characters, story, combat, music... all painfully sub-par for the franchise. I can't remember the last time I facepalmed so often during a FF when fiddling with the new features, nor the last time I didn't immediately want to play through the game again. I've ranked up double digits in FFVII playthroughs and just slightly less in FFX/X-2; heck, I even played XII a couple of times. But to this day, I have not even felt the slightest inkling to touch FFXIII again.

2) Final Fantasy XIII-2

I knew they were going to improve on the predecessor, but the result was still a far cry from what I wished for. The story is generic and boring, the characters extremely limited; the non-linearity (to a degree anyway) is somewhat interesting, and the combat system slightly better than before. Those small merits however are paid for by the most obnoxious and annoying FF soundtrack of all times. I still cringe when I come across it by chance! A major disappointment to be sure, and a serious question mark behind my future with Squaresoft titles. I gave them chances aplenty, and FFXIII-2 was just the latest spit in my eye.

3) Baldur's Gate: Extended Edition

I never did play the first part of the saga a lot originally, but BG2 is perhaps my single most-played game of all. After a decade of repeatedly coming back to that masterpiece, I was nothing short of hyped when they announced a HD remake of the saga - and nothing short of devastated when I found out how limited that remake turned out. To be fair, it's not the developers fault; they were operating not only under severe, borderline irrational contract limitations, but also had to find out that all of the original sprites and art assets have been lost. The result is a shiny polish that cannot quite hide the glaring flaws of the original; pathfinding issues, abysmal AI, power imbalances, they all still plague the game as they did on day one. Even worse, after a decade of brilliant work by the modding community, virtually NONE of their achievements and improvements have been taken into account. Add to that the problems during release (delayed on short notice by several months) and the sad attempts at creating "original content" that ended up not even part of the actual game and you have one big frown on my face. I sincerely hope that the second part turns out better!

4) Star Wars: the Old Republic

I never expected the game to be WoW in space - turns out it is, except WoW AS IT WAS FIVE YEARS AGO. It's like they consciously ignored all the progress that had been made in MMOs, repeating every single mistake and poor decision ever made in MMO design. Bugs beyond count, no dungeon queues, no proper endgame, uninspired professions and reputations, the list goes on and on and on. I think it will go down in history as one of the most colossal video game failures of all times, and rightly so. Given the money invested into the game, it should have been, COULD have been!, phenomenal. Perhaps the big problem is that everyone just wanted KotoR3 - and what they got was a bastard child of KotoR and WoW, with both their problems, and none of their highlights. Well, perhaps not entirely; there *are* good storylines in SWTOR. I enjoyed the Imperial Agent quite a bit, and do not regret getting the game just for that. But the very thought of what it could have been without the MMO part tacked on makes me break out into sobs...

5) Civilization IV/V

More parts of a series that could not live up to their predecessors in my eyes. For me, Civ3 remains the best game in the series, and no amount of polished graphics and Catan-esque hexification has helped to convince me otherwise. Sure there are some great new features that I wouldn't mind to have had in the earlier games, but there's also a ton of dumbing-down and just plain weird mechanics. The whole city-state thing, the shrinking of empires, it just doesn't feel... epic anymore. Perhaps that's just because my preferred way of playing the earlier games was to expand into massive empires that would make Romulans yell "don't you have enough?"... I just can't get into the spirit with the newer versions. I tried them for a bit. I played the expansion packs when they came out. And soon after, I found myself going back to good ol' Civ3 to get my fix of world domination.

Some special mentions:

Diablo 3

Unlike most people, I was *not* overly disappointed by this game. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't very good in its original incarnation, and even now is only very slowly creeping back to acceptable levels (hopefully) - but I completely expected that, and told people it would happen well in advance. I knew the second they announced the RMAH that it would completely destroy the economy, and I knew that after WoW, people were looking at "endgames" in a very different way. Endless loopy grinding á la Diablo II is largely unknown to this generation, and apparently even people who had played it have forgotten all about it. Blizzard could have done a better job to be sure, on many, many levels; but I didn't expect them to, and consequently I was not disappointed.

Mists of Pandaria

Same thing, in a way. It was clear after the heroic dungeon nerf in early Cata that the old ways were gone or dying. The next expansion would reflect that, I was certain. What I did not expect, though, was just how much Blizzard would overshoot. The dailyquestastrophe of early MoP took me unaware, and farmville & co. certainly didn't help. Still, raiding was reasonably enjoyable, so it's not a complete failure. Blizzard have also realized that they punted somewhat, which hopefully means more care and thinking in the future. Hopefully.

[-aiko-]

Mass Effect 3 ending... I'm surprised nobody mentioned that, yet. Everything else just pales in comparison.

Doesn't even hit my top 100.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog
2. Final Fantasy XIII
3. Fable II
4. Final Fantasy XIV 1.0
5. Total War: Rome II (yeah, yeah this is probably premature)

[Spellweaver]

Borderlands 2: If it wasn't for 3 friends convincing to play it together, I probably wouldn't have touched it.
Red Alert 3: Just felt like to much over-to-top humour, in comparison to Red Alert 2. (which was one of my favourite games.)
C&C 4 Tiberian Twilight: I don't even want to know what they were smoking when they developed this.
Assassin's Creed 3: Didn't think Connor was an interesting character, prefer Ezio from the previous games. I do have some hopes up for Assassin's Creed Black Flag, though.
Fable 3: Bought this to co-op it with a friend, but the co-op ended up being completely terrible. The game itself was also terrible due to the combat system. Melee was shit, magic was OP and you could easily get through the game by simply spamming the normal attack with a rifle/gun.

Mass Effect 3 ending... I'm surprised nobody mentioned that, yet. Everything else just pales in comparison.

I'd have to agree when talking about the ending on the game's release. However, the Extended Cut did fix a lot of things, so I wouldn't say that everything else pales in comparison to that version.

[Noorri]

Let me get this straight. Original WoW is a huge disappointment yet you CONTINUED to play it through MoP leveling 50+ toons? Wow I have never seen such a hypocrite lol

I was talking about vanilla WoW, before all the expansions. I started playing WoW a couple of months after release, but quit pretty quickly (as I said, about level 20) when I realized how shit it was. Then I started playing again in mid BC as Illidan/Vasjh/Kael'thas was some of my favourite characters in The Frozen Throne. A few months after WotLK release I quit again since I was tired of the bullshit in the guild I was in and didn't start playing again until just before Cataclysm launch. I then played through Cataclysm and into MoP, but started to slowely quit about 2-3 months ago and now don't play anymore.

[Fernling306]

1. SWTOR

2. DA 2

3. GW2

4. WoW cata/mop, I loved everything prior to them.

5. either d3 or fable 2/3

[enchanted]

Every CoD game since WaW: (maybe not Black Ops 1): You think WoW was bad for reskinning, think again. And yet we buy them to keep the little real world friends we have because they have no idea what an MMO is, and buy these games and FIFA every Autumn.

Agreed on this. Nothing new in CoD implemented ever since mw2 and the rest are just ideas taken from other shooters. Look at ghosts such a joke and ripoff bf3 but in cod style.

Apart from that I'd say:

1. WoW Mists/Cata: I'll start with cata and say it had so much potential and great things that blizz decided for this game yet was taken off (Abyssal Maw/War of the Ancients raid which was crammed into CoT dungeons) and overall they could've made it very successful the way they portrayed deathwing but sadly it had such a shitty ending, a filler "rehashed" content patch and a 7 boss raid (which most didn't like) Other things include afking in the city while you queue, as they removed the need for the world after you dinged. As for MoP I'm just going to say I was disappointed that blizzard decided on making pandas a whole expansion by itself. They have great ideas such as an underwater expansion, legion expansion but no... Pandas because fuck you that's why. (Now that's my opinion since I hate the whole asian theme and panda thing)

Other games include:

2. Diablo 3
3. Warhammer online
4. SWTOR
5. Everquest Next (I honestly didn't think it would turn out that way with the graphics style and the way combat is made)

[Ashana Darkmoon]

1)
3) Baldur's Gate: Extended Edition

I never did play the first part of the saga a lot originally, but BG2 is perhaps my single most-played game of all. After a decade of repeatedly coming back to that masterpiece, I was nothing short of hyped when they announced a HD remake of the saga - and nothing short of devastated when I found out how limited that remake turned out. To be fair, it's not the developers fault; they were operating not only under severe, borderline irrational contract limitations, but also had to find out that all of the original sprites and art assets have been lost. The result is a shiny polish that cannot quite hide the glaring flaws of the original; pathfinding issues, abysmal AI, power imbalances, they all still plague the game as they did on day one. Even worse, after a decade of brilliant work by the modding community, virtually NONE of their achievements and improvements have been taken into account. Add to that the problems during release (delayed on short notice by several months) and the sad attempts at creating "original content" that ended up not even part of the actual game and you have one big frown on my face. I sincerely hope that the second part turns out better!

Incidentally, at this point most of the mods for BG now work just fine on BG:EE. Better yet, since the modders have figured out the new structure importing mods for BG2 EE should be a lot faster/easier.

I'm not really sure about the "original content not being part of the actual game." There's the gladiator pit (which will reappear in 2), but there are also 3 new companions that will carry over into BG2 (which will add an NPC thief as well).

[Deleted]

1. Mass Effect 2 & 3 - seeing the game severely changed from the style of the first really took away some points from me. Didn't enjoy them as much as the first game, but played for the story. Even that wasn't as good as in me1.
2. Witcher 2 - again an example when the company changes almost everything, and there is absolutely nothing left from the first game. Loved the first one, didn't even finish the second one.
3. Dragon Age 2 - don't think this even needs any comments.
4. GTA IV - I liked the game but it kinda ended very fast for me. When they hit me with the finale I was really confused because I felt like wasn't even at the middle of the game. Was disappointed by this.
5. Mists of Pandaria - a good example how to NOT make expansions.

[Xargoth6634]

In no particular order:

-Star Wars: the Old Republic
-Final Fantasy VIII (Major letdown after FFVII)
-Chrono Cross (I didn't even get that far into it, didn't like it because I was hoping it'd be like Chrono Trigger I guess)
-Castlevania 64 (Major letdown after the absolutely amazing Symphony of the Night. Seriously, C64 blew, hard)
-Fable 3. (2 wasn't amazing either, but 3 just sucked)
-GTA: Vice City. (I hated the 80s and I loved GTA3)
-Might and Magic VII (Not Heroes, if they've even got to 7 yet. Might and Magic VI was an awesome, awesome game I still play through every couple of years along with a couple of friends. Might have just been a "hit me at the right time in my life" game but I loved it and 7 was fucking garbage.)

I'm going to cast an early vote for Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. I loved the original and even though I have absolutely no reason to expect this to be a major letdown I've been burned enough in gaming to kind of expect it.

Also not as a game but just for the ending: KOTOR 2. If you played it, you know what I'm talking about.

EDIT: Adding a couple more I just thought of because fuck the rules!

[Itisamuh]

1. Halo Reach - This game was an abomination in an otherwise excellent series that has been my favorite since the original first came out. The campaign was actually pretty good, but the MP experience was by far the worst in Halo history, by far. The only redeemable thing about the MP was when Anniversary Classic came out and gave a relative imitation of the Halo CE experience. But even that was stained by being on the clunky Reach engine. Halo 4 is good enough that I can forgive the blemish, but not forget.

2. SWTOR - It pains me to put this on the list, since I actually really like the game. It is probably tied with WoW as my favorite MMO, probably even above it. But it could have been so much better. I would have rather they had made it a true KOTOR sequel instead of an MMO, but instead they tried to make it a mix of MMO and KOTOR single player RPG elements. It was a good attempt in a lot of ways, especially the leveling. But still, the MMO aspects took away from the game in a way that will always make me bitter. Fantastic game still, but it could have been so much better, to the point that I would have never played WoW again.

3. MoP - WoW has always been primarily about Horde vs Alliance to me. As a non raider, having a bunch of big world ending villains only seen in raids does nothing for me. I thought MoP was going to finally be the expansion that gives a lot of Horde vs Alliance story that I could actually partake in. Instead of being told through the leveling though, it was told through dailies, scenarios and raids. Not to mention the fact that I have to rebel against my Warchief that I want to support, because the rest of my faction are turning into pacifists and Alliance lovers. What a poor joke. They took what could have been my favorite story arc and completely turned it on its head. Plus the PvP sucks now.

I could probably go back and think of older games for 4 and 5, but at this point, doing anything other than recent disappointments would be hard, since my views of games and what I want from them have changed over the years. For instance, I remember being sorely disappointed in the more light hearted Final Fantasy IX at first, since VII and VIII were among my favorite games ever, but I later grew quite fond of it.

[Faldric]

Most of them have already been mentioned so in no particular order:
Dragon Age 2
Cataclysm
Diablo 3
Final Fantasy 12
Assasins Creed 1

Things that are further back have already got deleted from my memory. I know there has to be bigger crap but I cant remember atm.

[Denpepe]

Diablo 1 & 2 - think I played d1 for about 1 hour b4 uninstalling the piece of crap it is, finished d2 once and never looked back

Dragon Age 2 - way to kill what could have been a good series of games, crappy combat, too much reused locations.

Duke nukem forever - while i still think there is room for games with this kind af humor and setting this one was very poorly executed

Far Cry 3 - just not my kind of game (not to mention that for some reason the graphics look very sub par to me, might be some bug)

Rift - one of the main reasons I have problems with this game is that I realy doin't like the art style, and the regular rifts get boring fast.