Stupid executive decisions concerning games...

[MKSheppard]

My biggest one has to be:

X-Wing Alliance.

When the game was first announced, the info released said that it would be centered around smugglers; which was logical considering the progression of X-Wing games: X-W, then TIE Fighter, etc.

I of course, instantly thought of Privateer, and playing both sides in the GCW against each other for profit.

Instead, what we got was X-Wing v2.0.

Further on, the Dark Forces series opened with a pretty good solid FPS in Dark Forces 1. So I can imagine the meeting at Lucasarts:

Random Suit 1: "Okay, we've got a nice solid FPS with a rebel commando, Kyle Katarn. How do we improve on the story for game 2?"

Random Suit 2: "Make him a jedi?"

Random Suit 1: "Brilliant!"

Nevermind that anyone with force sensitive abilities would have had a very high chance of being recruited by the empire or simply killed in the 20 years between ROTS and ANH; the Jedi become virtually exinct, so why is our hero suddenly discovering a jedi past? What the fuck are the chances of that huh?

So what could have been a promising Star Wars series, centering around realistic combat actions like infiltrating Imperial bases with your commando team, etc sort of like a Star Wars Call of Duty, instead became:

"Jedi Wank Fest II", "Jedi Wanking Even More III" and so on.

EDIT: Extrapolating further:

We've never really seen any good well done depiction of the Hoth Campaign. It's always been Snowspeeder battle ad nauseam; there was no exploration of the Hoth Campaign as a whole, from landing on Hoth with the first rebel survey party, to general operations in the base; to the full battle (most of which apparently occured off screen in ESB).

Gameplay wise, the level(s) dealing with the battle would have been awesome; running around in the trenches, gunning down stormtroopers with MG equivalents as the AT-ATs pound your positions; etc.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Um, it has been a very promising series. Innovative, genre-bending, and a blast to play. Jedi Knight is easily amongst one of the best PC games of all time, and Outcast and Academy have been no slackers either. Their multiplayer modes have been on the level of Splinter Cell in their original and, thus far, exclusive gameplay.

But, back to the topic:

Star Wars Galaxies. Hooo, boy. The sort of game one really, truly, and without a trace of hyperbole has to wonder what exactly the suits and/or devs are smoking.

EDIT:

We've never really seen any good well done depiction of the Hoth Campaign. It's always been Snowspeeder battle ad nauseam; there was no exploration of the Hoth Campaign as a whole, from landing on Hoth with the first rebel survey party, to general operations in the base; to the full battle (most of which apparently occured off screen in ESB).

Gameplay wise, the level(s) dealing with the battle would have been awesome; running around in the trenches, gunning down stormtroopers with MG equivalents as the AT-ATs pound your positions; etc.

I take it you haven't played the Battlefront series? Not perfect by any means, but the focus is definitely more on the infantry, with plenty of corridor shoot-outs between Echo Base troopers and Snowtroopers.

[Vympel]

We have Republic Commando for the purposes of a pure shooter with no Jedi. Who knows, maybe one day we'll get Imperial Commando.

As for Kyle Katarn, well, him becoming a self-trained Jedi and defeating no less than 7 Dark Jedi (not Sith, but still) including an Inquisitor like Jerec is of course ludicrously unlikely, but I like Dark Forces II and Jedi Knight II.

I liked X-Wing Alliance too. Not as good as TIE Fighter, but still.

They need to remake X-Wing and TIE Fighter with all-new graphics.

[MKSheppard]

We have Republic Commando for the purposes of a pure shooter with no Jedi. Who knows, maybe one day we'll get Imperial Commando.

We can only hope.....

They need to remake X-Wing and TIE Fighter with all-new graphics.

That was done a bit ago. They updated both games to Windows 9x compatible, and added 3D Accelerated graphics which were in between X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.

[MKSheppard]

I take it you haven't played the Battlefront series

I own BF; got it cheap, and I was really disappointed they didn't even get the "feel" of SW right. Blaster ammunition capacities were ludicriously low; shots took forever to move across the screen, and the lethality of the weapons was very low; emptying 20 blaster shots into a guy to kill him? Fuck that. He should go down with at most 3 shots.

[McNum]

I kind of liked X-Wing Alliance, except for the final missions. Yes, participating in the Battle of Endor, very nice. So let me just get in my X-Wing and... I'm Lando? In the Falcon? Where's Ace Azzameen go? That was a letdown. I can see the executive decision "Let the player be the hero. Have him destroy the Death Star." Well, there were several unnamed Rebel ships in the DS2 with Lando and Wedge. Have me play as one of them! They didn't even bother to finish the Azzameen storyline... "Uncle Antan is a traitor. Good for him, here go destory the Death Star as Lando."

Also the biggest problem Star Wars Galaxies had in my book was that it was Star Wars. The game was actually pretty good and with an original setting it wouldn't have been tied down so much by Star Wars mythos which it had trouble sticking to anyway. The turning point for SWG was the hologrind and the 100th Jedi, on each server.

Of not Star Wars stupid decisions the cancellation of Full Throttle 2 and Sam and Max: Freelance Police rank pretty high. And Sony's PS3 "launch", in particular the part about starting a "Coming Nov 17th!" campaign in Europe the day before announcing the delay. Bad timing there.

[Stark]

Um, it has been a very promising series. Innovative, genre-bending, and a blast to play. Jedi Knight is easily amongst one of the best PC games of all time, and Outcast and Academy have been no slackers either. Their multiplayer modes have been on the level of Splinter Cell in their original and, thus far, exclusive gameplay.

Wat lol.

Shep's demand for actual battles in common settings, as opposed to rehashing the events of the movie for the nineteenth time, is a damn good one. Guess what? I'm sick to fucking death of tripping up AT-ATs in the Hoth battle. I'm OVER the trench runs. If you're looking for SW-themed combat that ISN'T a rehash of movie scenes, you're basically stuck with XWing etal, and they're hopelessly inaccurate.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

I'd say pretty much every other game out there being rushed in development so it could be released to make the Decempber shopping season.

More so for the games that were released when they were actually unfinished.

[Uraniun235]

I take it you haven't played the Battlefront series

I own BF; got it cheap, and I was really disappointed they didn't even get the "feel" of SW right. Blaster ammunition capacities were ludicriously low; shots took forever to move across the screen, and the lethality of the weapons was very low; emptying 20 blaster shots into a guy to kill him? Fuck that. He should go down with at most 3 shots.

It's not even the "this doesn't feel like SW" that kills it for me, the whole game just feels... muddy. Partly because of the ridiculously slow-moving blaster blots.

...you know, I was about to correct that to "blaster bolts", but I think I'll leave it as is.

[Vympel]

That was done a bit ago. They updated both games to Windows 9x compatible, and added 3D Accelerated graphics which were in between X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance.

That was only 640x480 resolution and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter textures on the polygons. An improvement, yes, but it was a very minor upgrade. I'm talking new graphics, a new engine, better than anything before. Preferably with proper ship scaling.

Also, for some annoying reason the thing doesn't work on Windows XP.

[MKSheppard]

Master of Orion 3; lets strip everything out of the game that makes it fun to play!

[Noble Ire]

I'm still rather annoyed about the rushing of the end stages of KOTOR 2. Sure, it was still a pretty fun game, but it could have been much, much more. None of the characters were explored as fully as they could have been, and the ending was very abrupt and rather inconsistant. And then there's the unexplored potential of the droid forge world, GO-TO's plot, the battle of Telos, Nihilus and the Ravager, and the whole Malachor end sequence.

Of course, I'd forgive the whole thing if they'd just get KOTOR 3 up and into development. It would be quite a shame for the arc to just die without any real conclusion.

[Psycho Smiley]

Singletrac's OutWars. Think Starship Troopers (the novel, not the movie) covering an entire war, from first contact to border raiding, then on to campaigns for entire systems with actual defeats for the humans.

Dev-team: "Shit. We're almost to Microsoft's deadline, the teammate AI is still half-assed, and we're only 2/3 done the hard sci-fi plotline."

Marketing: "Throw in a boss-monster, chop some levels into multi-player arenas, and ship it."

The multimedia, lead-up events, and in-game background info for everything was even included, but the code to impelement the necessary AI was never finished, nor was the last campaign. Big surprise that the company went under without producing another title.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Master of Orion 3; lets strip everything out of the game that makes it fun to play!

And add 500 tons worth of Micromanaging factors just to squeeze any remaining fun out of it!

[Stofsk]

Of course, I'd forgive the whole thing if they'd just get KOTOR 3 up and into development. It would be quite a shame for the arc to just die without any real conclusion.

There's really no point to have a KOTOR 3 unless Obsidian gets to do it, and that's not going to happen because LucasArts will never admit that it fucked up and rushed Obsidian to begin with. Some of the blame gets thrown onto Obsidian's shoulders unfairly in my opinion.

[Faram]

Taking MOO2 and saying hey lets make a MOO3 but skip everyting that made it enyoable.

[Instant Sunrise]

Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.

also known as Total Warcraft.

[Lord Pounder]

An MMO I played several years ago springs to mind, Horizons it was called. Some of the ideas hadn't been seen before of since, playable dragons & Blacksmiths being able to make unique appearing weapons. One month into the game the idiots in charge fired everyone involved with the game except the graphics team. New patches where badly coded and all that dodgy coding made one laggy bitch of a game. In short it died on it's ass.

My other gripe is SWG. The timeline of the game was a massive mistake, it gave no room for a story line to grow being stuck in the middle of the movies. On the other hand I hear all these fuck ups where deliberate on the part of SOE because they didn't want EQ2 to have much competition.

[Eleas]

Um, it has been a very promising series. Innovative, genre-bending, and a blast to play. Jedi Knight is easily amongst one of the best PC games of all time,

...what?

I'm sorry, but even with a crowbar and the aid of several stout men, I just can't wrap my mind around this assertion. I played and replayed Jedi Knight, and know it intimately. And, even in its day and age, that game was self-evidently inferior in almost every respect. Cutscene acting, lightsaber realisation, kinetics, weapon choice, the use and representation of Force Powers, level design, graphics, lighting, atmosphere, story... you name it, they blew it to hell, and only the fact that the consumers had until then been so utterly starved for Star Wars FPS's saved it from tanking.

So no. Despite the fact that Shep and I will likely never see eye to eye on 99 % of available topics, it's still obvious to me that his point in this case is completely merited. As with Alliance. But I would add another in those series -- introducing Mara Jade for Mysteries of the Sith and in the process utterly raping that character's concept really was unforgivable.

EDIT: However, the biggest disappointment, aside for KOTOR 2, is to me probably that TES4: Oblivion was built to exclude any working levitation spell. Yes, that's how sad a nerd I am.

[phred]

My other gripe is SWG. The timeline of the game was a massive mistake, it gave no room for a story line to grow being stuck in the middle of the movies. On the other hand I hear all these fuck ups where deliberate on the part of SOE because they didn't want EQ2 to have much competition.

have you played it since they brought in that other company to help with the expansions? its a FPS EQ with star wars stuff sprinkled in, and jedi as a player class
and yes they should have made it either pre-ANH or post-RotJ. its just sort of stagnating the way it is now... still fun for a mediocre pilot like me though

[Sharp-kun]

Also, for some annoying reason the thing doesn't work on Windows XP.

It does, its just needs a lot of poking.

Theres software by MS called the Windows Cmopatibility toolkit, there's some settings in there that get it working.

[Setzer]

Whoever made Firewarrior really shouldn't have been hired. It had nothing recommending it from other FPS games, and if it didn't have the 40k name on it, I would never have bought it.

Too many first person shooters are like RPG fetch quests. "Blow up those guns!" "Shoot 5 officers and get their keys" "Clear out the building full of snipers while the rest of our army stands around and does nothing!" If it's the one man army sort of character, that's understandable, but they really should not be adopting the approach in games where the player is part of an army.

[Ace Pace]

Here, hows this.

Interplay, 98'. Two games are coming out soon, Klingon Academy and Freespace 2. One, an average Star Trek game, garunteed to make money. The other a sequal to a rather well selling space sim.

Guess which they spent the entire marketing budget on?

[Jade Falcon]

Oh boy, I can think of a few.

What about Sierra cancelling Babylon 5:Into the Fire, and then refusing to sell the materials, just out of spite apparently to any other company.

There's also a Sierra game called Outpost that came out years ago. There was to be a case where you founded a colony and there were to be all sorts of features that were chopped out the end product.

Battlefield:Vietnam. The game never got debugged proplerly as well as the fact that the character kits in the initial released were unabalanced as hell.

Total Annihilation:Kingdoms.

[Crazy_Vasey]

Raping the corpse of the Fallout series with shitty spin-offs has to be up there. No-one wanted Fallout The Action Shooter but that's what Interplay spewed out thinking that it would be easy sales. Morons. Because an old-school PC RPG series is going to be a name that'll sell for a console action game.

You know what? Interplay in general really. Cancelling Baldur's Gate 3 (Project Jefferson as I recall, it was an open secret that's what it was) when it was nearly done because their lawyers fucked up and they lost the license really does take the prize. I can't stand the Baldur's Gate series but that would have made money and maybe they'd still be around now if they hadn't fucked up the licensing so they could only make shitty action games with the name. Doing a forced 12-month development of Fallout 2 straight after Fallout wasn't so bright either - a lot of good people walked out on the company over that one, and the drop in quality shows in Fallout 2 even if it is still a damn good game.

Deus Ex: Invisible War stands out as a shitty bit of decision making too. Ion Storm went from a big-name development company to being goners thanks to the decisions made for that project.

There's a special place in hell for Atari and Quicksilver for MOO3 too. I can understand why they'd want to make significant changes to the MOO2 gameplay - it's a fucking pain in the arse to play going back to it now - but they failed as abjectly as is possible for such a game.