Has 2014 been a disappointing year for games?

Besides Dark Souls 2, I haven't spent much time on any game that has released this year. Mainly spent a bunch of time going back and playing older games like Mass Effect and Skyrim. What are your feelings on this?

Does Warlords of Draenor count? I don't actually care whether or not it does, it came out this year and I'm playing it and it's awesome. Hearthstone also came out this year, and it is also awesome. Oh yeah, and Diablo III: Reaper of Souls.

Basically, I'm a Blizzard addict. And this was a great year for Blizzard addicts.

@mooninaut: Understandable. I guess it comes down to which franchises or companies you follow for your primary games, and for me they all went down the toilet, like Ubisoft.

Bayonetta, Smash bros, mario kart, donkey kong, sunset overdrive, shadow of mordor, dragon age, persona games, danganronpa games.....

not exactly a disappointing year. not a mind blowing one either like the previous few years though.

Dark Souls II is about the only game I haven't walked away from disappointed so far. Oh, and FFXIII-3, I keep forgetting that even came out this year. DA3 was pretty good gameplay-wise but the story kinda left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

Not really. I've played several games I really liked this year.

People focus too much on a couple big releases and consider that the whole year of games. A lot more stuff came out than just Destiny and Assassin's Creed. (Although Destiny wasn't even that disappointing. I pretty much got what I expected out of it.)

OH RIGHT MARIO KART AND SMASH BROS.

Those are pretty good too. :p

• Bravely Default
• Tales of Symphonia Chronicals
• Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare
• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD
• Transistor
• Mario Kart 8
• Shovel Knight
• Persona 4 Ultimax
• Bayonetta 2
• Fantasy Life
• Hearthstone (Never played before official release
• Costume Quest 2
• Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (I can already see that I will love this)
• Super Smash Bros for Wii U
• Persona Q
• Dragon Age Inquisition
• Kingdom Hearts II.5 ReMix
• Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

I don't know how you feel about any of these games, but this has been a hell of a year for me personally. I usually skip out new games and wait till they drop in price a bit, but so many of these I got/will get this year because they are/look so good.

I really enjoyed dark souls and south park more than anything I played last year so I can't say it's been that bad. Warlords of Draenor is pretty decent too.

Agreed: not at all disappointed, between Dark Sous II, Bayonetta 2, Dangan Ronpa (I and II), Dragon Age Inquisition, Transistor, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I have had more games to play than I've had things to complain about.

In terms of a big budget games ending up much worse than people anticipated, yeah it's been a really disappointing year.

Still a lot of good games, but between problems with Destiny, Watch_Dogs, Assassins Creed: Unity, Driveclub, Master Chief Collection, Thief, The Evil Within and a big part of the most well reviewed being rereleases, I don't think you can fault anybody for calling it a disappointing year.

For AAA it's been near disastrous. For everything else it has stood up as a solid year.

Indie releases on Steam are really getting better every year.

Its just that there hasnt been a real knock out of the park moment like bioshock infinite and last of us were last year, so it probably made the middling to bad games stand out more.

Frankly i think theres been more games i want to play this year vs last.

@johnnymcginley: I posted this somewhere else, but indie games had a very weak year compared to the last few years.

I would have said so earlier in the year, but Q3/Q4 2014 has been pretty good to me. This is what I've enjoyed in the last couple of months.

• • Shovel Knight
  • Super Smash Bros for 3DS & Wii U
  • Bayonetta 2
  • Pokemon Alpha Sapphire
  • Gucamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition

I'm still looking to pick up Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker as well as Never Alone, once I have more time next month.

That said - 2015 looks like a far, far better year than 2014.

I had a pretty good year. I don't look at a series of anomalies and exclaim the sky is falling. Would have liked to have more to play on the 3ds. WiiU got good this year, Dragon Age got good again this year, Wolfenstien got good again this year, Divinity knocked it out of the park this year, Fallout 4 probably will never come out but Wasteland 2 did a good job filling that role. Small games left that "fake 16 bit" phase and actually look pretty nice this year in addition to doing some interesting things.

I wasnt ready to play AC again so no huge loss, I was never a huge Halo fan so that hot mess collection wasn't something I had to deal with. Never played WoW. Watchdogs was destined to be kind of mediocre, writing was on the wall with that. People had weird expectations for Destiny, my experience with it was eventually fine but I'm probably not going back. It is what it is.

Just because news outlets are having a heyday shitting on Ubisoft weekly doesnt mean games are over. It was a good year.

Must be at least the 10th time I've seen a thread like this in the past few months, and that's just on GB.

The year of "Coming 2015". Or maybe "the year of tempering expectations" is more appropriate.

It's definitely felt lukewarm, but there's been a few games that are seriously some of the most engaging games I've played in a while (Divinity and Dragon Age come to mind). Most of the good stuff this year was either off my radar or I was iffy on, and most of the stuff I expected to be great fell short in some way.

Hey, it's been a pretty fuckin good year for me:

• Bayonetta 2
• Destiny
• D4
• FF X/X-2 HD
• Witch and the Hundred Knight
• Deception IV
• Dragon Age Inquisiton
• Sunset Overdrive
• Forza Horizon 2
• Hyrule Warriors
• Mario Kart 8
• Smash Bros

and some other shit that's escaping me at the moment. This may not be the best year for video games, but I feel like everyone up in this motherfucker (i.e. video game forums in general) is acting like it's the Great Depression 'n shit

I've had a great 2014, really. Samurai Warriors IV, Hyrule Warriors, Putty Squad, Farcry 4, Advanced Warfare, Lego Batman 3, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, Mario Kart 8, Bayonetta 2... It's been a fine year.

This has been one of the best years for rpgs honestly. Divinity, Wasteland 2, Dragon age, lords of the fallen, dark souls 2, Bravely Default, and Tales of Symphonia Chronicles. All pretty great games. 2013 didn't have anywhere near the caliber of rpgs (which are my favorite genre).

I feel like it's been mediocre, lots of games with promise but not much that actually lives up to them.

Not disappointed but some of my best games this year came from unexpected places. The Wolf Among Us was a surprise because I didn't like the way they handled characters in The Walking Dead(I know I'm one of the few) but Wolf blew me away. I finished Wolf over the course of 5 days, it took a good 2 months for me to get through The Walking Dead. I also didn't expect to love Shadow Of Mordor as much as I did considering my dislike for the Lord Of The Rings fiction. They made a mechanically strong game with an interesting AI system that I played for 18 hours over the course of like 3-4 days. Call Of Duty was also a surprise as I didn't expect the exo stuff to be a significant part of the game.

Apart from the suprises, I really enjoyed Child Of Light, Transistor, Broken Age and Watch_Dogs. Dragon Age and Titanfall are my game of the year and runner up respectively.

Sure there were disappointments (AC was looking so good) but I had a pretty good year for games.

South Park came out this year so it wasn't completely bad. Nintendo kicked butt.

But it was overall pretty bad. A lot of high profile fuck ups for one year. It made me more skeptical of the direction video games may be taking. Also most of the stories in games this year were garbage. It was a stark comparison to the quality of storytelling in last years games.

Fairly weak year in which one of the best games ever came out. I don't think it was terrible or anything though, 2005-2007 on the new consoles were way worse (though quite good for PS2).

2014 is a 4 star year

No not really. I have a huge back log, but at the beginning of the year I had just about emptied my steam wishlist and now there's ~60 games. So, no, 2014 has been fine.

Absolutely not, BOI:R is probably the best game I've ever played.

At the top level - absolutely. There might be a lot of good games, but very few standouts IMHO.

I think there have been some fairly decent games this year, but the complete influx of "OH DAMN THIS GAME DON'T WORK" in the past few months has clouded a lot of our memories. In terms of mind-blowing new experiences however, the hits have been few and far between.

I mean, if you dig deeper than an inch, you will find some incredible games that were released this year. I will say that there are fewer games that are absolutely fucking amazing in every respect. There don't seem to be as many mind blowing games this year, and the amount of said "mind blowing" games is typically the metric used to determine whether a year was good or not for video games.

A lot of this also comes from our lofty predictions for this year. Many expected 2014 to be the year that the new generation of video games would finally shine and give us glorious visions of the future. What we got wasn't what we were thinking of.

Maybe next year, folks.

I don't know, I've quite enjoyed this year. There wasn't a Last of Us situation of the entire industry having a collective "holy shit!" moment, but there was a fairly large amount of new releases that I played that I think are fantastic and quite a few more that I haven't gotten around to yet but will probably love as well. It wasn't the generation-defining year a lot of people were hoping for, but I think it was, overall, pretty good.

The start of the year was somewhat dissapointing for a PS4 owner, but besides that and a few dissapointing titles (not necessarily bad, just underwhelming), this year has been great. No TLOU, GTA V or Infinite level of surprises, sadly, but good enough still. Next year should be something really spectacular, though.

It's been a year full of solid, fun games. Nothing mindblowing, so it wasn't an amazing year, but I've had too much fun to say it was bad.

I didn't expect all that much for 2014 because it's the first year of a console generation, so I can't say I'm too disappointed aside from a couple games (Infamous, Destiny, Transistor).

I've enjoyed this year, it hasn't been totally amazing overall, but it has had some great/amazing stuff in it (Bayonetta 2, yo). It has been disappointing to see major game releases being broken messes become more and more of a trend, however.

No. Probably the only disappointing year for games in my lifetime has been the year 2007.

EDIT: Oh wait, Uncharted came out in 2007. So there has not been a disappointing year for games in my lifetime.

Not necessarily, no. There have been some bumps along the way but overall it's pretty good.

Pretty much how I feel about it. Too many games I was looking forward to ended up not quite reaching as far as they should've. Too many "safe" games and the more original ones ended up having a lot of design issues.

Sort of? While there have certainly been some GREAT games this year, I don't think there has been quite the volume of show-stopper definitive experiences that last year had (and I'll be honest, most of the games on my list this year wouldn't have made the top 5 if they came out last year). It's been a really good year for classically styled CRPGs and turn-based strategy games, both of which just so happen to be my forte.

I've actually really liked almost every big "disappointing" game this year. Enjoyed and played a bunch of Watch Dogs, love Destiny, playing a bunch of Unity and think it is the best AC yet, and even really enjoy playing Driveclub. Hell I even really liked the few hours I spent with Ground Zeroes. I guess I have bad taste in games, well I do think The Saboteur is one of my favourite games of last gen so that makes sense.

Add in all the games that most people don't consider disappointing and it was a pretty good year.

When I saw the "What did we miss" survey they were running on the site I promptly opened up Wikipedia and started combing through all the releases of 2014. Very quickly I realized that not only did I not buy that many games this year, but even the ones that I did buy and finish didn't really warrant any sort of deeper discussion. So yah, in my opinion it has been a lackluster year for gaming.

I only played two games released this year. TLOU: Left Behind and Watchdogs, and I liked them both, although I was expecting from Watchdogs. Sincerely I had so much on my hands gamewise (got my Wii) and otherwise, that I had little time to consider this question seriously, but it is the year of my memory with the biggest slew of disappointing games.

I think 2012 was worse. It's hard to beat 2013 though...Rayman Legends, Zelda: Link Between Worlds, Animal Crossing, Brothers, Devil May Cry, Super Mario 3D World, Bioshock Infinite...it was a crazy year.

This year at least had Dark Souls II, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. I'm still working on Shadow of Mordor, Bayonetta, Jazzpunk, and a few others and they're seeming good so far. Games like Destiny, Assassin's Creed Unity, and Watch Dogs have been really big let-downs but I think it's been a pretty alright year. I've had more than enough to play for sure. Heck, Hyrule Warriors turned out to be surprisingly entertaining and I've liked Titanfall and the Final Fantasy X HD update too so it hasn't been half bad.

Personally, this year was very disappointing on the games front. That mainly stems from me only buying one new game this year in the form of Dark Souls II and after a while just getting annoyed with it. A lot of my gaming this year has been stuff from a few years ago thanks to Games with Gold. Still being stuck in the last console generation also doesn't help, although a lot of this has to do with a change in personal circumstances this year that means me having a whole lot less time free and money for video games.

I'd say this has been the weakest year in a very long time. Traditionally I marathon all the games I missed in the year over winter break, and I still never get to all of them. This year I don't really feel like I missed anything, and at the same time, the list of new games I've already beaten is noticeably smaller than it was last year. And I feel like only a couple of those would've made the cut on my 2013 top 10.

Still, even weak years have some cool ass games. And this year gave me ample opportunity to play some older games.

For AAA, yeah, it has been a bad year.

I was under the impression this would be the year where I would be sold on the next generation... but its November now, and I don't have almost no more reason for getting a PS4 or XB1 now than I did in 2013. Seeing as all games are constantly being pushed further and further into 2015, I don't think I will be tempted into a position to buy a new console for quite some time.

Nah, there's been some great stuff this year.

I've liked a lot of games this year, but nothing stood out as absolutely incredible, which usually there's one or two of those per year. Stick of Truth, Mordor and Wolfenstein are all good, but none of them were without glaring flaws. I didn't find any indies that I fell in love with this year either. I suspected Transistor would be a top game for me but it just didn't do anything for me, same with Banner Saga, a game that I put down after two hours from boredom.

But yeah.. AAA games were train wrecks this year.