Biggest disappointment of 2011

[Chardok]

I'm going to say Rage. Mostly because I'm stupid. No, really. I looked at that shit, and, like a drooling imbecile, thought "ZOMG BRODERLANDS AND FALLOUT AND MAD MAX YES PL0X"

It never clicked...not once, until relase day that...this is an ID game. Seriously. Despite everything ID did to discourage my thinkging that this was ZOMGBRODERLANDS AND FALL OUT AND MAD MAX LOL, I still, for some reason, believed in my heart of hearts that it was that what I just said. What the fuck is wrong with me? I certainly don't know.

I will say that it did help quite a bit that the game was ugly as shit when it released and turns out it's a pretty vanilla shooter. But man, for a long time....my hype meter was waaaaaaaaaay up there.

[Stark]

I think a lot of people expected - if not Borderlands - then something good from Rage. It certainly counts as a disappointment.

[weemadando]

Child of Eden bummed a folks out.

Actually just Rez again and you can't play through the game without grinding each level repeatedly to unlock the next.

[Chardok]

Child of Eden bummed a folks out.

Actually just Rez again and you can't play through the game without grinding each level repeatedly to unlock the next.

I don't recall too much hype around that one, though, except from LOLHARDCORE gamers who were just glad to have a reason beyond Dance Central to own a Kinect that wasn't a stupid ass minigame collection.

[Stark]

It got a huge push from the reviewmills due to being 'amazing' and 'beautiful' and 'artistic'. And it was just Rez.

[Chardok]

Did El Shaddai do anything for anyone? I remember hearing about that fuckin' thing for like a year. I played the demo and I was like "Oh, Japan, I get it."

[Ford Prefect]

Did you think AssRev suffered from being a 'middle game'? Aside from mechanical issues, it basically exists to set up the next game.

I don't think it really suffered from being a bridging piece - AssBros was as well and had the same level of polish that AssCreed II had, and was just really well put together in general. AssRev brings less to the table in comparison, but it refined and expanded stuff, like the Assassin's guild thing. The design work is also good. The thing I think it's suffered from is the development turnover. Ubi basically stated that they wanted to do a major AssCreed release every year, and while that turned out fine for AssBros, AssRev suffered for it.

Like previews had full on Desmond freerunning in these abstract environments made up of colliding memories and computer architecture ... the actual game had these first person segments based around using spawnable blocks to overcome obstacles. This is probably the most significant thing, but the game seemed to get really rushed in the last couple of sequences.

Did El Shaddai do anything for anyone? I remember hearing about that fuckin' thing for like a year. I played the demo and I was like "Oh, Japan, I get it."

It's fucking great.

[Lord Woodlouse]

Dragon Age II is the big one for me. I loved the original, the sequel just simplified so much for no real good reason (and I'm not usually one to argue for complicated elements for the sake of them, I can appreciate a good bit of streamlining in a game).

Besides that I've been fairly content with the games released so far, I kinda expected them all to be the way they were.

[CaptHawkeye]

So i'm not sure anymore if their is a general lack in quality control in video games these days, or i'm just growing out of them. The mainstream game market is making game after game that I (and pretty clearly not just I) find totally abhorent or bereft of real ingenuity. Meanwhile, you've got indy developers starting to make games like T-17 Tanky and Kerbal Space Program, which are way more fun than you'd think they'd be and they aren't even finished.

I guess that the mainstream games industry went from being gaming itself, to becoming a weird, pulsating tumor that's slowly being bypassed by indy developers. I'm not trying to pass out my usual "repent sinners" hope of another 1983-level collapse of the market. What I am saying is that the more mainstream games move out to become their own self-sustaining circle of shit, the more room it makes for other areas of the market to get around them.

[mithie]

Sword of the Stars II takes the cake EASILY for me.

That, and Stronghold III. Gah! It still hurts.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations was probably the most disappointing game I played. I was expecting it to be roughly the same as AssBros in terms of quality, but it obviously had shit dummied out (like essentially all the Desmond stuff) and the way the game was paced wasn't as carefully put together as AssBros, where there was a sort of natural progression through the side missions that opened up with the central plot. It refined some stuff like Notoriety and movement to a better point than in the previous games, but there was something unpolished about it, and Istanbul was really disappointing after the really beautiful Rome. Like the architecture was there, but there was this brown haze that did it no favours.

There were a couple of gems in AC: Rev; a few of the missions were very well designed and showed a lot of attention to detail.

And then there's the remaining 80% of the game, which is the same rehash with less polish.

[Sarevok]

For me it was FEAR 3. The original was one of the most amazing FPS games ever. FEAR 3 just felt like another bland game with the slo mo and Replicas tacked on. Everything about it is mediocre from the graphics to gameplay to the music.

[DPDarkPrimus]

For me it was FEAR 3. The original was one of the most amazing FPS games ever. FEAR 3 just felt like another bland game with the slo mo and Replicas tacked on. Everything about it is mediocre from the graphics to gameplay to the music.

Well the studio that made the first game doesn't actually own the rights to the FEAR name, so subsequent games have been made by whoever WB Games felt like hiring to make it.

[Losonti Tokash]

Fear 2 was made by the original developer, which didn't stop it from being terrible. Fear 3 was also made by the company who helped make the console versions of the original game, so...

[Stark]

Dragon Age II is the big one for me. I loved the original, the sequel just simplified so much for no real good reason (and I'm not usually one to argue for complicated elements for the sake of them, I can appreciate a good bit of streamlining in a game).

Are you speaking in a narrative way, or a control way, or a character design way here? I'm always very curious about DA2 becauseit was pretty average, but its one of only two Bioware games I've ever finished, so I consider it a lot better than KOTOR/DAO/JE/etc. Its a laugh that it was 'streamlined' and auto-filtered a list of vendor trash... instead of just giving you money.

Sword of the Stars II takes the cake EASILY for me.

While SOTS2 is clearly an abortion, did you really like the first one? Did you expect the second one to be really good or of high quality?

For me it was FEAR 3. The original was one of the most amazing FPS games ever. FEAR 3 just felt like another bland game with the slo mo and Replicas tacked on.

I'm not sure how this statement isn't applicable to FEAR itself, where the slowmo existed to make the boring combat more bearable and the enemies being 'Replicas' was almost totally irrelevant to the game. I know you like to think FEAR had 'great AI' because it played sound files and was heavily scripted, but it just wasn't very good. I tried to replay it recently (on the 360 version rather than PC) and I couldn't stomach more than a few levels of it.

'Where's Jankowski?' Silence. Lets not mention the zombies, the visions, or anything. Protaganists can't talk, remember?

[Ford Prefect]

When it comes to Dragon Age 2, my honest impression is that, if anything, its narrative is way more complex relative to the first game. Like as far as the writing goes it's by far the most ambitious Bioware game (probably because they were aping The Witcher lol) and it totally blows the original out of the water, which wasn't really all that different from Mass Effect in terms of dilemmas or whatever.

[Stark]

It says something that the most common criticisms are defensive shit like 'you press a button to attack' or poor little control-freak stuff like 'oh emm gee healer is traitor, so wrong'. The density of the story and choices was a lot better than 'one choice per quest', although I thought a lot of the sidequests weren't fully realised.

And sorry, I can't take any Bioware fan seriously when they say 'recycled terrain'.

[Ford Prefect]

Honestly Dragon Age 2 was disappointing in some ways. They were making a lot of right decisions, like setting the game in a single city, focusing on a social issue rather than the end of the world, trying to find a real distinctive feel for the setting, Varric etc, but I think it could have been better realised with more resources. Regardless it's still probably one of their best games and, if not great, it's still pretty neat in its own way.

[Starglider]

I didn't play many games in 2011, but on a technical level I was disappointed with the Rage engine. It is IMHO a lot less impressive and less innovative than previous Id engine releases.

[SAMAS]

Assassin's Creed: Revelations was probably the most disappointing game I played. I was expecting it to be roughly the same as AssBros in terms of quality, but it obviously had shit dummied out (like essentially all the Desmond stuff) and the way the game was paced wasn't as carefully put together as AssBros, where there was a sort of natural progression through the side missions that opened up with the central plot. It refined some stuff like Notoriety and movement to a better point than in the previous games, but there was something unpolished about it, and Istanbul was really disappointing after the really beautiful Rome. Like the architecture was there, but there was this brown haze that did it no favours.

I'm sorry, AssBros?

[Stark]

Welcome to ages ago?

Starlider, did the megatex stuff not work properly or was it just not a practical idea??

[Starglider]

Starlider, did the megatex stuff not work properly or was it just not a practical idea??

I think the basic problem there was trying to implement it before the hardware has caught up. To work well it would need memory management techniques (unified address space and high performance GPU memory virtualisation) that won't be available in hardware until the upcoming 7-series AMD cards (and presumably Nvidia shortly afterwards). Existing GPU hardware and drivers just not designed with those kind of highly dynamic textures in mind, so the implementation is a bit of a hack. The pop-in issues are significantly mitigated by GPU transcode, but that doesn't work at all on legacy hardware, doesn't work at all on AMD cards due to some combination of bribery and programmer incompetence, and doesn't even work that well on recent Nvidia cards due to some combination of driver issues and GPUs still having crap branch performance.

That's not the main reason for my disappointment though. Rather it wasn't just that megatexturing was getting all the hype, it was that that really was the only major innovation of the engine; the shaders, shadowing, tesselation animation, physics etc were all bog standard if not actually behind the curve. Even megatexturing I'm ambivalent about, as while it is good for some kinds of realism it inherently chews up a huge amount of artist time; just another force pushing up budgets, reducing risk-taking and making it even harder for lower tier devs to compete with AAA titles. It's also an inelegant brute-force solution to the problem. I'd have been much more impressed if instead of just using JPEG2000 in streaming mode they used a suite of procedural techniques or even fractal compression (which is inherently friendly to procedural differentiation). That would have brought down art resource requirements instead of increasing them.

[Sarevok]

Rage is supposed to have great AI. What's your take on it Starglider ?

[Starglider]

What's your take on it Starglider?

I've only had a quick mess about with the X360 demo so I can't really say. That said it didn't strike me as significantly better than what Valve was doing in 2004; certainly everything on their feature list has been hyped by other companies before, although usually not delivered.
The water effects were nice but not significantly more so than Bioshock's.

[Stark]

Rage is supposed to have great AI. What's your take on it Starglider ?

Who says that?

[Xon]

Welcome to ages ago?

Starlider, did the megatex stuff not work properly or was it just not a practical idea??

It's not even technically interesting, just streaming large textures to make up for a lack of post-processing via shaders on consoles. Higher res textures means more artist time, and because engine lacks much in the was of modern programmatic shader effects it's utterly reliant on those textures appearing correctly.