Games That Have Turned You Off Certain Developers

So, I was recently talking to a buddy of mine on Twitter who had just started KotOR. He was having some rig based troubles I couldn't help him with, which isn't surprising from pre-Mass Effect era BioWare PC games on modern rigs, and I suggested he avoid KotOR II. When he asked why, I realized my first response wasn't that he should avoid it because it's buggy and incomplete, but rather because it was made by Obsidian. I've had bad experiences with Obsidian's games over the years; with KotOR II, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas all being either bad, broken or both. The bugs I've run into while playing Obsidian games have almost never failed to be game breaking at some point, and as a result I refuse to buy anything they're involved with in the future - unless it's dirt cheap. (In fact, I like to think I'd be inclined to avoid playing Obsidian games even if they were gifted to me.) I don't feel like supporting them as a developer, because I don't feel like they care what they release.

I know not everyone feels the same way towards Obsidian though. So, I was wondering what developers people on Giant Bomb feel burned by and why.

(Please keep this civil, give an explanation don't just say something like "fuck BioWare cause Mass Effect 3 ending." I think this can be an interesting discussion if people are willing to elaborate.)

This is an old one, but back in the 90s I stayed away from anything OCEAN did, or even if someone mentioned a game and them in the same sentence.

Are they still around? God I hope not.

I played Resistance 1 and F.U.S.E. recently... them games feel SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO archaic. Resistance 1 has an excuse, but MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN... F.U.S.E. sucked. I'm not sure I care much for insomniac anymore. They've made a couple of games so bad, they keep me up at night. PUN!

@vrikk: Ocean went bust in the late 90's I think. I enjoyed quite a few games they published though, so I was kinda looking for their logo, at least when it came to flight sims and space combat games, such as F29 Retaliator and Inferno. I guess I later learned that the common thing between the games I thought were great from them was that they were developed by Digital Image Design, but even then I never really got burned by any non-DID Ocean games.

Back on topic. WarCraft III really turned me off Blizzard games. I already didn't really enjoy Diablo II as much as the original Diablo (which remains one of my favorite games of all time along with WarCraft II), but I've actively disliked everything they've published since WarCraft III.

Other than that it's hard to say, I think BioWare, Bethesda and Obsidian were always pretty hit and miss, so I've always gone on a game by game basis with them, and even after releasing really disappointing stuff they've come back and released something great too.

@jman240: Idk, all of the Obsidian games I've played I've enjoyed, even with said bugs and unfinished games. Most of their games I would say are excellent and have great ideas and interesting mechanics, but almost every time they release a game it's due to running out of time/money to complete it 100%. I would definitely say that South Park: The Stick of Truth is their most polished game, since Ubisoft gave them room and support to actually delay the game to polish it as best possible. I personally never ran into any bugs or oddities while playing it. It was a great game in general, if you're into South Park at all and enjoy the Mario RPG mechanics.

I wouldn't say I have ever actively avoided a developer based on their past games, but I would say I might be a little more patient and see what others say about their games before playing/buying them. An example for me would be Klei. I really disliked Shank 1 and 2. I thought they were kinda bad and extremely boring. Then they made Mark of the Ninja, which is awesome. I don't want to completely ignore everything a developer makes because I haven't liked their previous stuff, because I might miss on out something really good down the line.

There have been instances where one game turns me off feeling a developer is really iron clad but I am still willing to give them another shot if I like how a game sounds or looks.

Most often I guess this happens to me when you see a developer get bought by a big publisher. The great studios that have been turned into CoD teams (Raven in particular was a personal favorite of mine). Pandemic had a good start with some fun games and then just went to hell by their sequels it seemed like.

I feel the same way you do about Obsidian, finding bugs and also not finding the rest to be as great as some claim in many of those games, but I will still check out any game they put out. I have high hopes for Pillars of Eternity at this point.

But I thought Mass Effect 3 wasn't so hot (not bad, but okay with a bad ending) and stuck with Dragon Age 2 for a while before its flaws were just too much (and its short dev cycle was obviously disasterous). But I'm still very hopeful for the next Dragon Age. And the Mass Effect games to come next. I still think a lot of Bioware. Dragon Age and Mass Effect 1 and 2 were this last gen, to suddenly act as if they are the worst has been a little much.

Unless the developer has released nothing but crap, then I've never really been " turned " off from a developer by a game they made. Actually, that really bad modern day Call of Juarez game maybe kinda turned me off of Techland. But I never really liked them to begin with, sooo.

There are sometimes when a game makes me kinda go " :/ ", though. Like, as much as I love Final Fantasy, sometimes some of the dialog rubs me the wrong way. I've never really felt offended by anything said, but they do sometimes give me a very " oh, here we go again " feeling.

@fisk0: Yeah, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 have pretty much turned me off Blizzard. I don't even know why I bought Heart of the Swarm. Like, they still make super polished games, but man, talk about hack writers and artists who are just making the most safe, populist, inoffensive visuals and game narratives. It's not personally their fault, it's just the whole mass market appeal Blizzard as a company has been aiming for for years and years. Like, man, the storylines of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 could not be ripping off Starcraft 1 any more even if they tried. Starcraft at least potentially had an interesting universe, which they aren't even focusing on anymore because they think we give a shit about this dumb romance between Raynor and Kerrigan that was barely more than flirting in the original game before Kerrigan got infested.

To this day, I really like the cutscene vignettes in original Starcraft and Brood War, because I think they did a great job of establishing the universe, expressly because they didn't focus very much on the characters. I guess that was just a product of its time, and not something worth doing anymore when you can instead pay to render out one fancy cutscene when the campaign starts, and one fancy cutscene when the campaign ends and that's it.

GTAIV and Rockstar.

Destination Software. Ugh. A little background. Years ago, while I was doing temp work as a game tester, I had the pleasure of testing a few of their games. I won't say the context in which I tested them, but I wasn't temping for them directly, I'll say that much. From my experiences with them, all of their software was just this bottom-of-the-barrel, bargain basement development that was done entirely to make cheap games based on affordable licensed properties, and then shit them out to unsuspecting people at Wal-Mart. There was one game in particular, Lionel Trains: On Track, that was just beyond all possible realms of stupidity. It has come to define the very nadir of what I consider bad video games. I'm not even sure if the game qualifies as playable. Imagine a train/railway management simulator where you build tracks between a few different locations and then are completely unable to do anything else except wait hours, and hours, and hours as the trains make their routes and deliver resources as your funds climb back up at a pace a snail could outrace like a jackrabbit.

Seriously, the only way that game could have been worse is if it threw microtransactions down your throat as a free-to-wait game, except you still pay the entry fee. I would play nothing but the buggiest, most broken game Obsidian has ever delivered for the rest of my natural life before I touch another Destination Software game. I would happily play my old copy of Ocean's SNES Jurassic Park game until I die before I even think of playing anything with their name on it. I once bought a used copy of that fucking game from Gamestop for the sole purpose of destroying it before it could blacken the soul of some unfortunate model train enthusiast.

Do you know how hard it is to destroy a Nintendo DS game card with a hammer? I do.

I do.

Doom 3 and id. Resistance 2 and Insomniac. That latest Tomb Raider and whatever Crystal D does next.

Wait, why? I understand the issues with Doom 3 and Resistance 2, but why would Tomb Raider turn you off to Crystal Dynamics?

Rare- Grabbed by the Ghoulies

after that and the Microsoft buyout I knew things would not be the same.

They haven't fully ruined all hope, but like others Insomniac have done a lot of things to make me much less excted about anything they do. I get excited at the thought of any new Ratchet games, but other than last years return to form with Nexus they have put out some awful games recently. I've never been all that fond of Resistance, although 3 was OK and the nicest thing I have to say about Fuse is "It's alright I guess" Co-op-ing through it recently has been pretty tiring.

Duke Nukem Forever severely tarnished my perception of Gearbox, and the A:CM followup pretty much destroyed any remaining good will.

Also Dragon Age II and Bioware. Ugh.

@bisonhero: Yeah, I skipped Heart of the Swarm, but for some reason I bought Diablo III and gave up on it in Act II, neither the gameplay or story did anything at all for me. I'm not sure I've ever disliked a game that much before, barring straight up shovelware. I'm pretty sad Blizzard have ended up this way, I really loved the worlds they built up in the original StarCraft as you said, as well as the first two WarCraft games and Diablo 1. I never quite liked Blizzzard as much as Westwood, but I still considered myself a Blizzard fan back in the 90's.

Final Fantasy XIII i guess. I don't think Square has made a game i like in a really long time but FFXIII was the most recent one i had huge expectations for that the game didn't even come remotely close to matching. And then they doubled and tripled down on it.

Doom? Okay. Resistance 2? Okay. But Tomb Raider? Why Tomb Raider? That game was fantastic.

Sonic 4. I hated it so goddamn much that I now refuse to buy a Sega game ever again.

It took you up 'till Sonic 4 to hit that point? You're a tolerant person.

The only one where I harbor a grudge is Gamecock and that's more for their bullshit than their games per se, although they were stinkers in the own right. Developers are really only as good as their latest games and the teams they have at the time so in terms of quality, and quality alone, devs can always turn it around in my book. It's almost always conduct and company culture that leave me cold or frustrated with devs more than a string of mediocre products. 3D Realms/Apogee or whatever they are this week also come to mind

There were only three Sonic games before Sonic 4. It's the 4th Sonic game.

On topic I tend to give everyone a chance. A chance in that I don't dismiss them until I see the game. I also take it on a game by game basis.

I can't understand the concept of one and done. Especially if it was a sequel to a great game that was bad.

not a particular developer but i avoid need for speed games because the crazy-ass rubber band a.i.'s in those games are such a turn off.

Beenox's hanging around my backyard and most of the stuff they develop make me puke. They once had a giant screen on the side of their office showcasing one of their AMAZING Spider-Man games. The local press was impressed but I knew better.

So... I guess Spider-Man games have turned me off Beenox. Still, I was never really turned on to begin with.

@dentist: I just feel kinda bad for any of the developers working under Activision, because it seems like they're basically being forced to just churn out games on a near annual basis, whether the game is any good or not. Like, the sheer number of times Beenox has had to make a Spider-Man game at this point, I can't blame them for being out of any good ideas.

@jman240: just for the record, Kotor 2 is far less buggy and far less incomplete now with the fan patch that added a lot of that shit back in.

also, them not caring about what they release? That's hardly fair. They haven't had a super broken ass game since NV, and that was fixed quite thouroughly (Fallout 3 is way buggier still). The reason they're so buggy is because they don't have the time to iron the bugs out because of publishers. They would've loved another 3-4 months of bug fixing but that would've put NV past Christmas. Plus with Kotor 2 they only had 9 months of dev time. Plus I have never had a game breaking bug with any of their games.

but DS3 had very few bugs and afaik the same is true with south park

@bisonhero: You're right. Activision is a harsh mistress.

That's probably an insult to harsh mistresses

Mass Effect 2 (haven't played 3), Dragon Age (haven't played 2), and SWTOR all sorta collectively killed what love I had for Bioware. It's not even about whether the games are good or not. I'm always "the one" who has to go gather up a party comprised of varying species from wildly different backgrounds, each of whom has an almost exact counterpart in another Bioware game. Let's not forget the wonderful dialog system that mostly consists of painfully black and white moral choices and the "keep picking this option to bang this character" option. After all these years, I'm kinda just done with the "Bioware RPG." I mean, I haven't seen much of Dragon Age Inquisition so maybe they changed it up, but they would have to do a lot to get me interested again.

For Bioware it was Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2, SWTOR was just made with their name and was a completely different studio. I've completely boycotted EA now due to shady business practices and what they did to Pandemic. Also I love almost every Obsidian game (not a fan of South Park so Stick of Truth does nothing for me).

The last two Devil May Cry's. But Itsuno redeemed himself with Dragon's Dogma. I think I like it even better than DMC3. He should keep making his own games instead of sequels to games made by other people. He has a talent for it.

(I know he only oversaw DmC to a limited extent.)

Must have been a mistake and he meant turned on, lord knows I was certainly turned on when playing Tomb Raider (is Laura too pretty?!)

Obsidian games might be broken at times, but they're never bad. They make some of the best games out there and usually do a better job of it that than studios with a higher budget and profile.

There's no studio or publisher I actively avoid though. Activision haven't made a game I've wanted to play in years, but thats just because I'm not really interested in movie-tie ins or CoD.

rising star for their dismal pc port of deadly premonition which is still largely fucking broken. they barely lifted a finger to fix anything instead letting a normal person else fix the game for them free of charge of course.

Robomodo, while I never played RIDE and SHRED I heard they were really bad and they fucked it up so bad with the HD 'collection' (I use that word loosely) of the older Tony Hawks Pro Skater games that, I can't trust any new Tony Hawk game announced if it has their name attached. Or anyone else for that matter. I don't think anyone can capture the feel of those older games and it doesn't help Neversoft are for all intents and purposes, dead.

Going to give my love to Obsidian/Black Isle. They craft better characters. For instance, The Capital Wasteland was more dense, with things to see. But character wise? The only one I could remember was the super mutant grandma. Mostly because she forces you to die at the end of the game. Sure, she can hit a button and laugh off the radiation. But for some reason -you- have to do it.

If the same scenario took place in New Vegas, you'd have a way out. Sure, some flag in a quest wouldn't get marked off and it'd end up breaking another quest 30 hours later, but it'd get patched.

A game that turned me off certain developers? Dragon Age 2. I didn't mind the story. I didn't mind the shift from Baldur's Gate 2 style combat to Fable combat. What I did mind was the lazy ass level design with copy/paste levels that made the original FF14 maps look like handcrafted masterpieces. Lazy encounter design that had dozens of mooks jump over walls.

That rolled in to Mass Effect 3. Coming from someone who beat ME1 twice. Beat ME2 and all its DLC numerous times. I never finished ME3. It just never hooked me in after 20 hours, and I never cared enough to give it another try.

DA2 and ME3 on Bioware

BF4 and Dice

RE5 and Capcom RE developer, whoever you are

I'll have to disagree with this on my subjective experience. I found both New Vegas and Alpha Protocol seriously flagging. And while I liked KotOR II, it broke in a way that I would have had to completely play 3/4ths of the game again, so it was actually completely bused for me. I can see where you're coming from, it just doesn't line up with my experience.

Square- Final Fantasy XIII

Anyone who swears off a developer for one game has made an error in judgment. It's like watching one game in the NFL season and trying to guess that team's full season record. More productively, I avoid games published by Kalypso after Tropico 4, DarkStar One, and that Jagged Alliance game.

Littlebigplanet - Media Molecule

Can't really explain it. I loved LBP played it a lot, but got really burnt out on it, and now I just can't stand their entire cutesy aesthetics anymore.

@babychoochoo:

How can anyone NOT like Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age?

The topic title says games, not game. I kinda agree with this, but... Most people aren't naming a single game here, although in a lot of cases it's easier to point at a single game as the tipping point than lay out a history of dissatisfaction. For Obsidian I'd say New Vegas was my tipping point, though I definitely have plenty of problems with their stuff.

Battlefield 3. 3. Not 4.

Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3

Rome 2: Total War

DeathSpank, Borderlands 2, probably way more others.

I don't trust Bethesda any more because of Skyrim which was not just terrible on PS4, but just a really poorly put together games. Yup, people might disagree, but that is my opinion...its not going to be shaken by anyone's arguments. I will never buy another Bethesda game ever again, I will not buy anything they publish either.

Nothing really. If a game's central conceit interests me, I will get it regardless of publisher/developer. I may be a bit skeptical and wait for a price drop if it's from a sketchier developer, but I tend to play everything I want to play and don't let petty reasons get in the way of that.

@jman240: Wasn't a criticism of the OP, just some of the replies.