Biggest disappointment of 2011

[Stark]

A much more interesting question that 'what do you like lol', which game really sticks out for you as a missed opportunity this year?

We have quality games like Saints Row that are way too short (and still lack anything to do lategame). We have games like Gears 3 that took a giant dump of crap story over bland mechanics. We have games like Skyrim that are disturbingly 1993 and broken. There's LA Noire, a game that taught us all how to mash A to investigate and savescum in dialog. Is DEHR and its pathetic 'room of buttons' the biggest missed opporunity of the year? Or is it Halo Anniversary, for showing us what 15 frames a second looks like?

Be heard.

[weemadando]

Having played very few "good" games this year, I'm basing this on the bitching of fake internet people.

Thus, the list is:

Deus Ex Human Revolution - amazing non linear gameplay, except for all the times when the devs got lazy and made the gameplay totally linear and with no other option which negated entire character builds.

Skyrim - huge open world. Still shitty gameplay, utterly unbalanced and boring as fuck.

Dark Souls - we just made more of a game that hammers you in the nuts with advancement by death and rote memorisation. But hey, people love that shit.

Zelda: Skyward Sword - holy fucking shit. AGAIN?

Dragon Age 2 - cut and pasted level design and cut and pasted level design and cut and pasted level design and cut and pasted level design.

[AniThyng]

Shogun 2, for the hilariously broken late game realm divide mechanics and arcadified gameplay.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Dragon Age 2 - Too copypasted. Felt like an expansion pack version of the original.
It was a lot funner mechanically than the original, and was a fun game, but wasn't what I was hoping for. (Yeah, I remember the days of Black Isle/Bioware, so sue me!)

Deus Ex - utter dissapointment. The only time in the past 2-3 years when I really regretted buying a game after playing it [and before that after reading reviewshere on SDN. (and this from someone who's bought every single humble indie bundle ).

Skyrim - I'd expected it's flaws, but the game is so engrossing, that I enjoyed it and finished it (unlike previous ES titles, most of which I barely got into).

L.A Noire - Had few expectations, and it's fun. It's also actually original in terms of game type/concept.

[SilverWingedSeraph]

I haven't yet played Saints Row: The Third or AC: Revelations, both of which I've been looking forward to, so one of them might turn out to be a bigger disappointment, but so far the biggest disappointment gaming wise has easily been Skyrim. I still love it despite its flaws. I can play it for hours, but I was hoping and perhaps expecting more than I got. Was hoping that Bethesda had learned from their mistakes, or at least learned how to bugtest their goddamn games or something! But nope. Nope.

An example of a typical conversation I have these days is:
Me: "Man, this is a thing in Skyrim that I am REALLY ANNOYED ABOUT. They should have done it differently."
Friend: "You're still playing Skyrim right now aren't you."
Me: "Of course I am, what are you, high?"
Friend: "Why are you still playing it if you're going to keep complaining."
Me: "Because I can still enjoy it despite its flaws. But I'd much rather prefer that those flaws weren't there. And I like to complain. lol that dragon just got killed by a Mammoth, what the fuck Bethesda."

And man, don't even get me started on the Main Quest plotline. Finishing it was so underwhelming. It felt more like I'd finished one of the numerous faction questlines instead of "beating the game" or anything like that. It was incredibly short and the ending was unsatisfying. And apparently following the civil war questline is even worse! So I'm just not bothering. Thieve's Guild quests are more fun and Nightingale Armor is cool.

A lot of what I've heard about Saints Row 3 is really disappointing as well, though, especially if it is so short. If I'd cared about the Dragon Age franchise then Dragon Age 2 would have been the worst thing ever, but fortunately I don't and never did and now never will.

LA Noire was just silly. I think that would be the second biggest disappointment, because I heard all sorts of cool things and then I played it and it was just a massive, boring letdown. So boring. Just mindnumbingly. There was lots of cool things that could have been done with it, and parts of it interested me, but it took too long for things to get interesting or go anywhere and the driving was a chore. After a while I realised, "I'm better off letting my partner drive everywhere, because the game penalises me for hittings stuff and driving is boring if I can't go driving at breakneck speeds smashing into shit." That is not a fun thing.

Oh shit I forgot about DX:HR. That would have disappointed me a lot more than it did if I was expecting it at all to live up to the hype. I wasn't, so fortunately the disappointment wore off quickly enough, and I stopped playing it after Hengsha because I was just getting plain bored of it. Returned the rental, never looked back.

This post got a lot longer than I expected it to.

[Stark]

Skyrim - I'd expected it's flaws, but the game is so engrossing, that I enjoyed it and finished it (unlike previous ES titles, most of which I barely got into).

I don't think you understood the question.

All the gaming victims who need to explain their sad acceptance of sub-par games can go find a support group somewhere. This is for games that underachieved, not games you feel the need to talk about for no reason.

I've been asked why I didn't mention BF3, but multi failures are harder to stay clear on compared to things like small content or bad QA or failed design. Sure, BF3 ditched heaps of things that worked in BC2 for seemingly no reason and has a dumb as shit unlock system but I can't say that really disappoints me.

Ando, did you really respond to a question about your opinions with a list of things you read on the internet?

[weemadando]

Ando, did you really respond to a question about your opinions with a list of things you read on the internet?

Fuck yeah I did. Because I've avoided playing all those games because FUCK THAT. I've gone gaming hipster this year and have fucking indie games to play man. You probably haven't heard of them.

Also, way too much time into Bad Company 2.

When LA Noire gets cheapsy (or I can bother finding a rental place w/GotY) I might get that. And Skyrim is a "when it's on Steam sale" item.

But really, the big games this year that I wanted, I got (Battlefield 3 and MW3).

[Skgoa]

Man, I have become a pc game cynic of strakian proportions. My biggest "disappointment" was Anno 2070, because it was even more boring than I thought it would be. The runners up are: Shogun 2, which was OK-ish but exactly as bad as I predicted, and Airline Tycoon 2, which looked like a broken unplayable mess from the first time I read about it, and which I deleted within ten minutes of starting it for the first time. Other than that, this year I managed to keep away from games that suck.

[CaptHawkeye]

LA Noire wins this from me. After you realize you've basically experienced 98% of the gameplay in the first hour, you know you're not going to be missing much if you just ditch the rest and buy something else.

Thankfully getting rid of LA Noire allowed me to pick up Lego Star Wars III, a game I had a far better time with.

Battlefield 3. It's not a bad game at all, it's just not what it could have been either.

[DaveJB]

I have to agree with those who've said Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's a shame, because I actually liked a fair bit of the game, but there were a number of really bad decisions which brought the whole thing down. Crysis 2 was also pretty underwhelming, though a lot of that may be down to how shoddy the PC version was on its initial release.

In a more general sense, I can't help but be disappointed by the selection of games the Kinect has had to offer. Obviously the developers were never going to master it overnight, but I honestly expected better stuff than what we've had so far.

[Eternal_Freedom]

LA Noire and Halo: Anniversary.

LA was an interesting concept that had potential, but it dragged on and fucking on. I gave up after about three cases.

H:A just sucked.

I'll also throw out Space Marine. It was entertaining the first couple of times, but it was dissapointing in story and characters and all that. It's only redeemed from beign a bigger disapointment because butchering Orks is fun.

[Jaevric]

I haven't done as much gaming as some people on here, and my disappointments have mostly been mentioned, but I'll repeat them:

Dragon Age 2. I'm pretty forgiving and I enjoyed the first one immensely, but the sequel just didn't work for me. I never bothered to beat it even though I'm right at the end of the game. Normally I'd approve of a backstab by one of your allies at the end of the game, but when it's the PARTY HEALER, it causes issues.

Space Marine. My first recent foray into the FPS genre, as a shameless Warhammer 40K fanboy, and I burned out on the multiplayer in about a week and the single player after one playthrough. The subsequent "Exterminatus" patch failed to capture my excitement after a few attempts at playing and realizing I couldn't get any unlocks through that version. Oh well.

And, honorable mention as an "expansion" rather than a "game," the Incarna expansion of EVE Online. An utter embarassment to CCP, the best part about the expansion was the entertainment provided by the playerbase raging on the forums and in-game until the developer backpedaled furiously and returned to producing a game about internet spaceships rather than internet Barbie in the new Crucible expansion. The worst part was the resulting 20% reduction in CCP's staffing -- I hate to see anyone lose their jobs in the current economy. On the other hand, it was interesting to see first hand the amount of pressure a sufficiently dedicated playerbase can bring to bear against a (relatively) small developer.

[TheFeniX]

Brink: by far.

It's 2011 and you can't implement a stable 16-player server? The solution: force 8-player matches and leaving 8 bots on each team. Except, the bots are either massively incompetent, not able to perform the simplest task or are 1-man armies capable of untold destruction. Iron Sights and optics are worthless when compared to firing from the hip at anything but long range, which doesn't matter because all of 1% of every map combined has an area that you could line up a long distance shot. That's just the start.

Brink was a $60 encyclopedia of problems other companies solved during the past 10 years. There really are no redeeming qualities.

[Flagg]

Brink, GoW3, and Skyrim. Brink because it just sucked, Gears3 because it had it's moments but lacked the awesomeness in scope and any of the cool set pieces of Gears2 along with having a shit story, and Skyrim because it's been out for almost a month and still doesn't fucking work. These were all games I was looking forward to for a long time, too so that has something to do with my disappointment.

Shockingly I found the ToR beta to be engaging and fun, which has prompted me to preorder it already making me a fat nerd, but oh well.

[Stark]

I can't believe I forgot Brink. Talk about fundamentally failing to make a functional shooter! Never mind - pre-release reviews will be outrageously positive and praise the 'near-human' bit AI. The second the game is released, they'll start telling the truth, but we'll have made money by then!

It's a game that makes you appreciate every game that gets gun handling right.

I was going to mention Space Marine because it was a lifeless, bland game - but that inst really disappointing for a 40k game.

[Vendetta]

L.A. Noire fails at everything it attempts to do. Even spelling.

As a detective adventure game it's terrible, due to the binary win/lose nature of conversations there is little to no room for experimentation, and this is especially grating because of the sometimes insane conversational logic of the developers (Ask a woman about her husband's new glasses = accuse her of murdering him, apparently). When a megabudget super polished game can't do something a Gameboy Advance game did right ten years ago, it's time to worry. And it all devolves into a rubbish run and gun with flamethrowers (which are worse than your normal weapons) at the end.

As an openworld game it's worse than terrible. Everything you do in the openworld during a case will penalise you on that case (by accruing damages etc) and nothing you can do in the openworld can possibly reward you. Not that there's much to do in the openworld. A few dull gunfights and heavily scripted chases, and a lot of fuck all in between. L.A. Noire is possibly the only game where the optimum way to play it is to skip the game so you can get to the next cutscene.

As a detective story it's, you guessed it, terrible. The individual cases are invariably either so blatantly obvious that you work them out in the first five minutes or, particularly on Homicide, so blatantly random that you might as well flip a coin (oh, and fucking spoilers, you can only ever choose wrong anyway, but you better damn well choose the right wrong perp...) until you get lead by the nose on a scavenger hunt around L.A. There's no scope for the player to actually use the clues to solve the case, the only thing they're for is figuring out which one will let you win this conversation. And then they do it again at the end of the overarching plot, throwing a curveball Fiendish Plot about eminent domain in at the end which accomplishes bugger all (and is completely spoiled in advance anyway by the newspaper articles).

As a blatant rip-off of James Ellroy modern Noir thriller it's terrible. Ellroy's L.A. Quartet is full of flawed characters, dirty cops, mobsters, grime, and crime. L.A. Noire is about an all but squeaky clean police department with the greatest flaw shown by RoboExley being that he has a bit on the side. Hell, they can't even get basic period research right, for the entirety of the homicide desk you will be chasing a serial killer who might just be the Black Dahlia killer. You can tell it's him because the M.O. of all these murders is exactly the opposite to that of the Black Dahlia, and you could find that out in the first two sentences of the fucking wikipedia article on it. If the designers had actually read a James Ellroy novel, not just looked at the covers, that impotent grimace of wooden rage the Exleybot gives when the interviewee is being coy would have been replaced with a "beat out confession" button. Fuck's sake, they can't even spell Noir, let alone portray it.

As a character piece it's terrible. RoboExley had a potentially interesting story about his survivor's guilt, but it's ignored in favour of him shagging a german, thereby committing some massive betrayal of his wife (who we didn't meet and barely heard about until after this had happened.) So because the writers were as inept at writing human characters as they were at writing interesting mysteries we got a mishmash of nonsense that ended with the Exleybot dying for no evident good reason (after a dull firefight).

The combat mechanics were terrible. For most fights the best way to win was to run right next to the enemies and execute them point blank, and there was never any real reason to change weapons. The controls were dire, with completely disparate features being mapped to the same button, and a very wooly context sensitivity deciding poorly between them), and the whole business was limp and uninspiring as a result.

As a complete videogame presentation it's, you guessed it, terrible. Early in the game your character will have a conversation with his partner about another case they worked, but not one you've seen. Unless you preordered the PS3 version of the game, because then you have played that case. And this gets worse in the later game, when you're working Vice and you meet up with your first partner from Traffic, now on Homicide, and the Exleybot has no reaction to this change at all. Because that reaction was in a DLC case, and if you didn't preorder you get to pay extra for one of the only significant human interactions your protagonist is ever going to have.

Still, as a faithful visual reconstruction of late 1940s L.A. it was, y'know, passable. If all presented in washed out shades and pastel colours, not the distinctive use of heavy shadows and high contrast typical to actual Noir. And it gave out some easy gamerscore, so whore away chaps!

[Stark]

The homicide thing was the best. Choose the 'right' suspect who has a green uniform! Please ignore any ideas of your own you might have about other suspects - you can't even mention them because the story is about you being wrong!

[Flagg]

I totally forgot about La Noire. That's how shit that game was. I played it for a month and forgot about it.

[Vendetta]

The homicide thing was the best. Choose the 'right' suspect who has a green uniform! Please ignore any ideas of your own you might have about other suspects - you can't even mention them because the story is about you being wrong!

And please disregard the big tall guy you saw being the murderer in the start of the case and choose one of the short dumpy guys and/or Matt from heroes.

[TheFeniX]

I can't believe I forgot Brink. Talk about fundamentally failing to make a functional shooter! Never mind - pre-release reviews will be outrageously positive and praise the 'near-human' bit AI. The second the game is released, they'll start telling the truth, but we'll have made money by then!

It was sickening to see the reviews, even knowing how bullshit they are anyway. Most were positive (I saw numerous 85s or 8 out of 10s) even after the horribly broken mess hit the market. It wasn't until after the huge shit-storm that people started giving out "Average" scores for a hideously broken and uninspired piece of shit. The worst of it was, even though it's a shill of a magazine to begin with, Gameinformer flat out refused to even review the game until the patch was released to "fix it." After-all, you can't risk losing all that advertising money.

For those that never played Brink, just imagine a typical objective based shooter with emphasis on integrating numerous tried-and-true gaming conventions and putting in a few new ones for polish, and it completely and utterly failing in every aspect of that. Seriously, besides the "hold a button to jump over and through everything" parkour system, I can't think of anything else that actually worked as intended or wasn't back asswords with regard to how things should be done (like having infinitely more ability to customize your character's looks rather than his weapons/perks load-out).

[Stark]

Most of the weapon mods did nothing anyway, or were hopelessly imba. Amusingly, while the freerun was nice, the levels were clearly designed with it in mind and it was just two fixed paths through the map that used freerun, instead of two fixed paths on the ground. The gunplay (conefire/damage/recoil balance) heavily favoured the lighter bodies, so heaps of what they tried just failed.

It was sold as a flexible, customisable mutliplayer shooter... and you had to finish challenges to unlock parts to be competitive in multi - Including challenges where the bots on your team would either not spawn or never do anything.

[DaveJB]

Well, well, well. No sooner was Brink mentioned in this thread than it popped up on Steam, with a weekend of free play on offer, and a 75% discount for anyone who would actually want to buy it! I guess someone at Valve read this thread and decided to give us the opportunity to experience the disappointment first-hand.

I forgot to mention it in my earlier post, but... Pilotwings Resort, which was not only severely underwhelming, but bordering on broken as well. I only hope that spending so little effort on it helped to get Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 out sooner, because there's really no reason why the only first-party launch game for the 3DS should be so bad.

[Stark]

3DS reminds me of another disappointment - Nintendogs and cat. My partner loooooved Nintendogs, and even she thought the new version was exactly the damn same (with less activities in some ways, like agility). Way to milk one of the most successful games of the DS!

[Ford Prefect]

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.

[Stark]

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