Games That Have Turned You Off Certain Developers

After The Old Republic --> DA2 --> ME3 I decided to apply a "three strikes and you're out" policy to Bioware. Their drop from "generally really entertaining" to "depressingly mediocre" seemed to come really fast.

With regards to Obsidian, I get more frustrated with their seeming lack of self-awareness than I am with the games themselves. You would think by this point they would know that being buggy bordering on broken is a pretty consistent knock on their games. Personally, if I were a developer and the reviews of my games tended to include some variation on the phrase "it's a great idea but it's a buggy mess," I would think about investing in big changes to my quality control process. For whatever reason, that doesn't seem to have happened.

Halo never did it for me. Weary of anything Bungie now. Don't know if they can make the type of shooter that I like.

Bioware is one of my all time favourite developers, with Baldur's Gate 2 my favourite game ever. But I've lost a lot of faith in that company, mostly because of how dissapointing Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2 were. I find it hard to be excited for the next Dragon Age game, which is a huge change from the immense hype I had every time they announced a game in the past. I've not given up hope, but I fear that the Bioware I once loved is dead (and EA is the murderer).

Brutal Legend was a different game than what they were showing before hand. As a result Double Fine have stolen enough of my money and time that I won't play another Double Fine game. I won't even add it to my library if one shows up in PS+. There are enough quality games out there that I can spend my money and time on those and easily ignore everything that Double Fine produces.

Everybody just assumes that SHRED is a bad game because it's the sequel to RIDE. They knew they fucked up the controls for RIDE. They hired a university physics professor who has been skating since he was 5 to tune the handling for SHRED, but only for the expert mode. From everything I've heard from people who played it they actually nailed it, but everyone had already written it off. They had assumed that RIDE was the result of an unresponsive or imprecise controller that couldn't be fixed. I looked for SHRED in stores but retailers weren't having any of activision's peripherals based business after DJ Hero and RIDE left them with more inventory than demand. In fact, retailers unwillingness to take peripherals is probably what ended Guitar Hero as early as it did.

I'm not really a big call of duty guy but I do really enjoy the black ops games. Ghosts completely turned me off any more zombie infinity ward games though.

I love Bioware, I think they have produced fantastic games in their history and have had especially great games in the last generation with Mass Effect 1 & 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.

However, with Mass Effect 3, while I enjoyed the game for the most, I'm very skeptical of them going forward for how they handled the ending, the controversy that followed it and the choice of packs to get random weapons, characters etc. to facilitate microtransactions is something I don't like. I enjoyed the multiplayer for the most part, but not letting me pick what I want is just dumb.

Furthermore, having seen a fair bit of DA2 from watching a friend play it in the background, I've seen them have a big miss with that.

I'm skeptical of them going forward, they've had a big miss with DA2 and another (albeit less) miss with ME3, I'll have to take anything they say with a grain of salt.

@mosespippy said:

Fucking CHURCH.

For me right now its DICE. It seems like EA has really run them into the ground. BF4 is basically a complete loss at this point considering 6 months in the game is still glitchy and borderline defective for most people. Even if you can get the game working stable its probably the most unbalanced version of battlefield yet created. The game will probably never be in a competitive balanced state and will be full of people using the same overpowered loadouts and cheese tactics forever. Its so very disappointing that BF bad company 2/ BF2 have such solid balance and are still great games. Its also a big problem that DICE seems to not give two shits about supporting their own games. For example, DICE has basically dropped all support for BF3 at this point and have done literally nothing to stop the huge influx of cheaters that are destroying the game. Most good battlefield players have gotten sick of dealing with BF4 and just gone back to play 3 (which STILL has glaring balance issues), but now that game is being ruined as well.

If you have the audacity to try and charge people $100 for the full experience they need to try way harder because this stuff will catch up with them sooner rather then later. Maybe if EA would give them a proper 3 year dev cycle we can get a game as good as BF2 with all the fancy pants graphics too.

Dirt and Grid, Codemasters. I just cannot get a feel for their handling mechanics one-bit.

This is probably the one for me too. Maybe Blizzard as well just because I just haven't cared for any of their games so far.

Bioshock Infinite would have done that for me but... yeah.

(Just to be clear, I have nothing against those guys and wish them all the best of luck. I wish they could have stuck around, even if I personally wasn't interested in whatever they were going to make next.)

I guess I have absolutely no interest in anything produced by Infinity Ward or Treyarch at this point. And honestly, if Activision is publishing it at all, I get immediately skeptical and feel the need to do a little extra research before purchasing.

I can't think of a single example. I do think Suda51 is way overrated though, and shouldn't be given the directorial position he has.

@cale: I don't even understand why this guy is so popular. Like....what has he even done? No More Heroes seems like the one game he was involved with that wasn't totally mediocre. Maybe Killer7 too, but I haven't played that one.

@fisk0: I had a case of that with Diablo 3. After I realized that the game was balanced in favor of the real-money auction house I just couldn't enjoy it any more. I decided not long after that Blizzard just wasn't a company whose games I enjoyed all that much anymore. Haven't played one of their games since.

The hilarious part is that the super mutant grandma you're thinking of is Lily, a companion in Fallout: New Vegas. The only Fallout 3 character you can think of is actually not a Fallout 3 character.

And yeah, if Irrational hadn't shut down i'd be definitely saying this for BioShock: Infinite. Maybe it's more that it's made me doubt Ken Levine as a lead, because back in the days of System Shock 2 and BioShock 1 I thought he was one of the greats. Then Infinite came out and, while it was a good game, it was so thematically muddled and the game-play was so uninspired at points. I look on his next game with a sense of "Well, let's be optimistic.." instead of what it was beforehand, "OH MAN I CAN'T WAIT WHAT THAT MAN IS COOKING UP".

The first episode of The Walking Dead: Season 2 is also the first time i've realised "new" TellTale can put out an episode of something and I can really not enjoy it. Season 1 was one of the most emotionally compelling game experiences i've ever had, The Wolf Among Us premiere was probably their best standalone episode of anything, but TWDG: S2E1 felt really contrived and aimless. Good thing S2E2 was one of the best episodes of either season so far!

Nintendo maybe?

I know that they make well-made games, but the Zelda ones are the only ones I can get excited for/play for more than an hour. It's not a malicious thing, It's just that I no longer enjoy what they make.

Mass Effect 3 alone would not have been enough to shake my faith in Bioware. But the disappointment meal deal that was Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3, and The Old Republic was enough to really make me worry about Dragon Age: Inquisition and all their future projects. Not so much if they'll be good or bad, because some people liked all the games I mentioned. But if Bioware makes the kinds of games I personally want to play anymore. I hope they do.

That's EA's fault, not Double Fine's

Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3. By far. I've never experienced another developer delivering a one-two punch of disappointment like those two games back-to-back.

Resident Evil 5, certainly. I at the very least quite liked every game in that series up until that one.

I'm trying to think of examples that are bit older and having difficulty. As far as I can recall from my childhood and teenage gaming years, no one or two games turned me from fan to detractor in this same way. There were gradual slides in quality in some of the series I enjoyed but nothing quite like my aforementioned examples.

I always give developers a fair shot. Before Borderlands, Gearbox hadn't made a good game yet (imo), but that didn't stop me from playing BL1/2.

Capcom, although I am not completely turned off by them, I would never buy any of their games. The only game I enjoyed from them was Resident Evil 5 and Dragons Dogma (Which I have yet to beat). I will be playing RE4 soon though and I would like to play Ace Attorney but no way in hell I'd buy a (3)DS for those games. I played Dead Rising 2: Off the Record and hated it so I wouldn't play Dead Rising 3 if I got it with an X1 for free. Megaman is dead. I suck at fighters so I won't ever buy a Street Fighter or MVC game. Lost Planet games are ass. If Deep Down comes to America, I will play it because it's free. I will never play a DmC game unless it's made by Ninja Theory. (Disclaimer: The only DmC game I played was the 2013 reboot, but I've never had an interest to play the older titles.)

IO Interactive. I enjoy watching people play Hitman games. I don't enjoy playing them myself. Especially with Absolution. I played half of that game and stopped, that thing was a huge turd. So seeming as how their new IP got canceled and now they're only working on Hitman, I could care less.

Crytek. The Crysis series looks so boring and generic. I played Crysis 3. That game is soooooo mediocre. I won't even bother with Homefront 2, just watch a walkthrough on YouTube. Ryse looks like another borefest from what I've seen on YouTube. They're only useful for tech demos.

Activision. They're so laser focused on CoD & Skylanders that their other games suffer for it. Prototype was decent and Prototype 2 was fun. Only good Spider-Man game Beenox made was Shattered Dimensions. Amazing Spider-Man was passable, Edge of Time was mixed, Amazing Spider-Man 2 is thrash and Deadpool was also apparently thrash. High Moon did great with War for & Fall of Cybertron but now they're doing a port of CoD Advanced Warfare for PS3 & 360 while some unknown developer makes the new Transformer Cybertron game a tie-in with the movie. Also hurts that graphically, it looks horrid. Activision also shitted out The Walking Dead Survival Instinct, Fast & Furious, and Tony Hawk Ride/Shred/HD Collection. Oh wait, Singularity was pretty good too but the story behind that games development is fucked. Now Raven is stuck doing CoD map packs and Neversoft is no more. Activision is just bad.

Visceral Games. Dead Space 1 & 2 were fantastic. Dead Space 3 was disappointing. They also made 3 mediocre Army of Two games and a mediocre Dante's Inferno. I don't think I trust Visceral anymore.

I find it silly that the abbreviation of the series is now known to most people as DmC. It doesn't look good.

I say fuck anything from Blendo Games. Hate that shit.

what about ratchet and clank or is that to kiddie for you people?

hyperdemension neptunia:put me off of all of idea factory and compile hearts games it was that bad(but then again from what ive heard maybe that was a good thing i did)

Go check out my thread you just posted in, read the name of the game that I admit to liking in the very first post, and then tell me whether or not I play "kiddie" games. That's kind of a weird comment given that the whole point of my post is that I found two bland, uninteresting, and purposefully gritty shooters no fun to play. You couldn't be further off the mark with that assessment.

Bioware used to be one of my "go-to" developers. They never made anything I didn't highly enjoy. However, the triple whammy of Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 3, and Star Wars: The Old Republic really soured me on Bioware. I think the new Dragon Age looks promising, and Bioware is saying all the right things, but it's going to take a lot more than words to convince me to buy it. I'll be reading many reviews and user impressions before I make a decision. I imagine it's going to be that way with Bioware for now for quite some time.

@soapy86: Would it be that way if the couple games before that hadn't been so damn good? None of the games you mentioned are at all bad. They are widely considered disappointments, but in the grand scheme of things, they are pretty well received.

@lackingsaint: In fallout 3 they accidentally allude to Fawkes being or having been female before it was a super-mutant.

I know you're all going to think I'm nuts, but Burnout Paradise killed all enthusiasm I had for future Criteron games. I've tried to get into their Need for Speeds, but nothing is clicking like it did back in the heady days of Burnout 3 and Revenge. To this day, I think the open world approach to Burnout killed any fun I had with that game.

I know I'm in the minority, but I'm not really liking Naughty Dog anymore. Their cinematic and dialog are always top notch but the actual games leave me pining for the good old days of Jak and Daxter. Uncharted 3 went too over the top for me and I stopped playing at the plane sequence. I had high hopes for The Last of Us, but I just didn't like the gameplay much. As much as I've liked them in the past, I'll probably skip their next release.

Jade Empire

I'm with you. Fallout 3 engrossed me only because it was so dense and huge, but then New Vegas really showed me that a game can be both big and detailed. Skyrim felt so bland and vanilla, there was nothing defining about it. Just a fantasy game built to make the player feel good about themselves and ingest as much content as possible.

I wouldn't say turned me off, but i don't quite trust Bioware anymore.

Knights of the old republic, ME1&2, dragon age: origins, all amazing games.

Then comes along DA2. Which well, it was a rushed hot mess. I can see the potential in there, if they had another year i'm certain it woulda been a great game, but yeah, it was a hot mess. ME3. Not really a "mess" at all. It was just mildly disappointing and then shit on itself at the end. Alot of the major story stuff throughout the game was pretty great, the crew interactions amazing as always, but the side stuff was like the worst of any bioware game. And yeah, the ending was really really bad.

So i'm still really looking forward to Dragon age Inquisition, i'm still reigning in my hype for it half expecting it to suck. I really hope it doesn't and they learned their lesson, but yeah....

Like many other people here already pointed out, DA2 was bad. It had an interesting story and characters, but holy shit did it feel rushed. It's sad when a company like Bioware shits all over their own titles.

I used to dislike Obsidian, but Fallout New Vegas and NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer have turned me around on those guys. Say what one will about how most of their games are buggy messes, they still have some of the best writers in the business (compared to the sterile lore-dumping of Bethesda and the archetype-heavy moral absolutes of Bioware) and even their games that I don't like are at least interesting.

I am nothing if not an endless bastion of second chances apparently, because nothing immediately comes to mind other than maybe me not ever needing to care about what Blizzard makes ever again, even after enjoying Diablo III. I still like Bioware somehow, though I will continue to point to Jade Empire and that Sonic RPG as evidence that not everything they made pre-Mass Effect 2 was sunshine and rainbows.

Bethesda. I thought Skyrim would turn my world upside down. Instead, I noticed I just spent a lot of time walking around, looking for something to fight and finding nothing, Same thing happened in Fallout 3. Only times I found those games fun were when something broke and crazy stuff happened.

EDIT: @rejizzle I was going to say Naughty Dog as well, but I love the stories they create. I was playing Last of Us on hard for a while but just hated every second I had to pull out a weapon, so I bumped it down to easy and rode it out. Never beat Uncharted 2 or 3 though just because their gunplay is so bad. Or I am just crappy with a ps3 controller.

Splash Damage. The crazy part, is that I actually like the games they've created. I have a good amount of time invested into Brink...

Why exactly do I dislike them now? They never patch their games until they're dead. They wait like an entire year to do so, making it worthless when it does come out. Usually those patches cover some extremely frustrating optimization and game breaking bugs...

Ubisoft. I've never enjoyed any of the Assassin's Creed games I've dabbled with, nor anything else released by them in about a decade. Whether it's mechanically, graphically, control-wise, UI, tonally, or something else entirely, everything just feels off somehow. I just don't like the way they craft games. The last Ubisoft game I bought (and kept) was the original Far Cry.

@daaan: Oh yeah i'm aware of that, but Lily is far more likely to be called the "super mutant grandma" when that description basically defines her character. Fawkes is best described as "talking super mutant", and he loses a lot of what makes him interesting when you realise that "talking super mutant" isn't that special in the Fallout world.

I'm gonna go with some others here and say Dragon Age 2 woke me up to where Bioware was headed. Mass Effect 3 sealed the deal.

God of War 3 turned my off about Santa Monica.

Also, Grasshopper after No More Heroes. Their games are definitely unique and I like their style, but I don't actually enjoy playing them...

You meant PS3, but everyone knows that so I'm not sure why I feel the need to point it out anyway.

However, I can respect the notion of staying away from a company because you think they produce crap (unfortunately, they'll never know you feel that way), but also the publishing stuff? I mean, Bethesda has published some good games where they kept their hands off the development of the game pretty much completely.