Max Payne 3 is my biggest disappointment. It plays really well and is very well polished. The gun fights were a lot of fun but there are too many of them. The game is too long and the action became repetitive and a chore long before the end. It also didn't help that the fights get a lot harder as the game goes on. The biggest disappointment though was the story, it had too many characters, had too many sub plots that had nothing to do with the main story about Max. The main story makes no sense anyway though and the dialogue Max says ranges from terrible to average at best. It felt like someone dropped Max Payne into a meh GTA subplot. It totally lacked all the quirky and surreal touches that Remedy used to make a Max Payne game a Max Payne game. I always thought it was never going to reach the brilliance of Max Payne 2 which I consider to be one of the best games ever made but Max Payne 3 is a game I don't really want to play again. It doesn't feel like a Max Payne game no matter how good it plays and that's my problem with it.

Halo 4 was disappointing in the campaign. It is amazing that a team of hundreds of talented people working for 2 or 3 years turned out one of the worst Halo campaign I have played. New weapons which are pointless, new enemies which are fairly boring to fight and come in a whopping 3 types, old enemies that are repeated ad nauseum and just dull waypoint to waypoint missions. Thats before even talking about the story which embraces the thing I hate most about games this gen. The "trans media event" where the story is spread over books and other crap I honestly don't care about. They did it at the start of Halo 3 which was bad but Halo 4 goes all out by not explaining anything about anything. Like Max Payne 3 parts of the story make no sense. The "drama" feels injected rather than a rising from the story. Examples like the Captain being an arsehole feel so terrible because the Captain is in the game for all of 5 minutes and his motive for being an arsehole is never explained because he is given no characterization or background. It all feels so terribly forced and contrived. The main relationship between Cortana and Chef is okay but Cortana has some terrible lines which are poorly delivered. The much touted Spartan Ops mode is fairly dull as well. The multiplayer is pretty good though mainy because of the revamp of modes like capture the flag and new ones like dominion.

Probably Dishonored in truth. I must admit I didn't really have much interest in it when it first appeared, however when everyone started hyping it up I really thought it was going to be something special, however despite the innovative mechanics and steampunkish stylings it just didn't gel for me on some level. Certainly it's a competent game, but it just felt like an amalgamation of existing ideas on the whole awkwardly repackaged (bit of City 17 here, bit of Deus ex there, and a bit of Bioshock on top). I think perhaps I've reached my saturation point when it comes to navigating sparsely populated environments with a few wandering AI to contend with, and once the thrill of the blink & possession mechanics wore off it became very journey man like. Certainly not the worst game I played this year (I did finish it after all), but not as compellling as I imagined it would be.

Also I was a little disappointed at how easy Dishonoured was. Stealthing everywhere seemed too easy and blinking felt really cool but presented no challenge what so ever. I still think it is a great game and I should probably turn the difficulty up to the highest level.

AC3 was 1/2 of a pretty ok game. Certainly better than Revelations. Just didn't live up to its potential.

ME3 wasn't bad at all, just had an unfortunate ending. The rest of the game was great.

RE6 was awful, but RE5 was also awful, so I don't know why people were so surprised.

@ShaneDev said:

Also I was a little disappointed at how easy Dishonoured was. Stealthing everywhere seemed too easy and blinking felt really cool but presented no challenge what so ever. I still think it is a great game and I should probably turn the difficulty up to the highest level.

I think they maybe needed more levels to the skills. I pretty much stealthed it entirely (though towards the end I threw in the towel and started stabbing dudes in the face because I was bored) and you don't really need to spend a lot of points to get good at that in the game. The challenge drops off considerably and it just becomes procedural at that point.

As regards ME3. I really really disliked the ending big time, and it pissed me off considerably. However at the same time up until the final ten minutes on the whole I enjoyed the game and had a great time with the multi-player. I'm struggling right now to find the motivation to replay it with my other Shepard tbh, but I can't quite mark it down as biggest disappointment. Worst ending ever for sure, but on the whole I thought it delivered otherwise.

I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but the Walking Dead game.

As much as I enjoyed the story and characters, saying the story is affected by your choices, then having those choices have no real impact on the story kind of sucked :/

@MegaMetaTurtle said:

I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but the Walking Dead game. As much as I enjoyed the story and characters, saying the story is affected by your choices, then having those choices have no real impact on the story kind of sucked :/

The story was very much affected by your choices. The ending wasn't. But it's Walking Dead. What did you expect? Shit was always going to go poorly.

I wasn't expecting much from this year to be honest so it's not many games that have disappointed me so far. But I would say the following two:

Hitman: Absolution - I actually just played through all of the Hitman games in the past 2-3 months so I feel I can compare them very fairly. Absolution just doesn't feel like a Hitman game. It feels like some random stealthy-action game that they stuck 47 in. Way too linear, not that creative, and odd stealth mechanics left me really disappointed.

Deadlight - The absolute worst ending to any video game I have ever seen and it seriously went from me enjoying the game and thinking it was a cool fresh idea to absolutely despising the game and telling everybody to not waste their time because of the final 3 minute cutscene... I think it's the only game I have ever played that I hated solely because of the ending.

@MegaMetaTurtle said:

I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but the Walking Dead game. As much as I enjoyed the story and characters, saying the story is affected by your choices, then having those choices have no real impact on the story kind of sucked :/

The story was very much affected by your choices. The ending wasn't. But it's Walking Dead. What did you expect? Shit was always going to go poorly.

@MegaMetaTurtle said:

@mtcantor

@MegaMetaTurtle said:

I know I'll get a lot of hate for this, but the Walking Dead game. As much as I enjoyed the story and characters, saying the story is affected by your choices, then having those choices have no real impact on the story kind of sucked :/

The story was very much affected by your choices. The ending wasn't. But it's Walking Dead. What did you expect? Shit was always going to go poorly.

The choices they gave you were mostly, 'do you want this person to live or die?' If you picked 'die' they died, and if you picked 'live'... They also died :/ Only exceptions are the final choice in the first game, where whichever person you pick lives (but then they have no real impact on the game), but they always die in episode 3. The other is saving Ben in episode 4, and then he just dies in episode 5 (as I predicted on these forums). You didn't starve or have any ill consequences if you didn't take the food either. Even having Kenny and Ben hate me enough they wouldn't help me didn't mean anything as, as I also predicted, they ended up coming with you regardless :/ As I said, I enjoyed the game. I just think it could have been a lot better.

I just think you are looking at it the wrong way. The destination was always going to be the same, it's how you got there that changed via your choices.

They were telling an interactive story with set story beats. They weren't telling 13 different stories with the same characters. The story was stronger because of this.

I don't mind that the destination was the same, it's just the journey is too near identical for my liking. Having someone shout at me instead of being polite to me isn't my idea of a changed story. I probably wouldn't have been as disappointed if it didn't have the whole 'This story is affected by your choices', since I really liked the story.

Also, the guy at the end annoyed me. Made up reasons for me doing what I did that weren't correct :/

AC3.

Skyrim. PS3 version jank forced me to play it over seven months, at an hour or two a day, because the loading times. You'd have multiple 30-45 second loads to get from quest giver to bedroom of the item you gotta grab, ten seconds of actual gameplay stealing it, then another four 45 sec load screens back to the guild hideout. Two, or three, main campaigns, that ended abruptly and jarringly, especially on how they related to one another. You could even kill that snarky dragon after the campaign ended despite choosing to be on his side. Stormcloak's death had zero impact, and his nude corpse laid at the dinner table for the rest of time, even with his former associates sitting at it and eating.

Gears of War 3. Less than 2,000 people play this game in 2012. I know you'd think that Halo and Call of Duty would eat into their sales, plus Battlefield, but after Halo 3... hell, after ODST and Gears 2, tens or hundreds of thousands of people still played Gears 1. And Gears 2 still had plenty of people after Halo Reach. For some reasons, and I believe those reasons are limiting matchmaking to those with DLC season passes, and having separate, non-dedicated servers (even though one of the things you allegedly pay for for Xbox Live Gold ARE DEDICATED SERVERS) for people without the season pass, and the FIFTY DOLLAR make-your-guns-any-color expansion pack. Seriously. They sold a DLC pack that was literally nothing more than the ability to make guns camo-colored, pink, gold, etc. for FIFTY U.S. DOLLARS. The result is more people play Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 online now than a mere one year old Gears of War game.

Assassin's Creed 1. Because it came on disc with Revelations, I played this sucker, and it was the most tedious, boring game with pretty platforming graphics since Super Mario 64.

Mass Effect is great, you guys are crazy! They finally got the squad interactions on the ship right, the combat was brilliant and I'm not gonna lie I teared up when Legion gave his life to save and transcend the Geth. They managed to introduce new interesting characters this late in with Javik and the Garrus man-date was excellent. I feel a lot of people are overlooking the brilliant moments of that game, sure it wasn't perfect, it wasn't the best but it certainly wasn't the worst game of the year.

Sorry if already mentioned but: THPS:HD for me. When that was announced I was far too excited as THPS2 on PS1 was my youth. What a lackluster release that was. Limited number of levels, no create options and mainly...It just felt off somehow. I ended up getting hold of and old THPS2 PC port and had hours of fun with it again after all these years. Personally, a big failure by Robomoto.

Darksiders 2, they ruined almost everything that made the first game good, from the padding and fetch quests to the combat system, the only things that I thought were better is the world aesthetic and the platforming, everything else is arguably worse, and the ending was extremely underwhelming compared to the first game.

@Dylabaloo:

We're not crazy. We're disappointed. That stupid ending went against everything you did and what the games stood for. And that's what this thread is about. Disappointments. When an ending of a game does not satisfy, then it ruins the experience for you and makes you throw your hands up in the air and say, "Why bother?"

Seriously, the next person to tell me 'it's not the goal, but the journey that matters' is going to be strapped down to a chair and forced to watch Berlin Alexanderplatz, followed by the 7th Seal, and topped off with watching the unriffed version of Manos: The Hands of Fate!

@Dylabaloo: I agree almost completely that the high points of that game are being overlooked. The Thane story resolution hit me right in the gut, almost as much as the Mordin one. Seriously, Mordin's tale in ME3 might be my favorite/most bitersweet moment of 2012.

And I know I'll lose all my internet cred for this, but...I didn't mind the ending. At all. Not even a little bit. I played it before the extended stuff came out, and thought it was fine.

Now, Assassin's Creed 3? Huge disappointment. I couldn't even play past sequence 3, I was so put off by the game to that point. No story or ending is going to make up for the fact that I didn't enjoy a second I had spent playing it. And I LOVED 2 and Brotherhood. I keep thinking I'll give it another try, and have on a few occasions, but I just can't do it.

@IliyaMoroumetz:

You raise a very interesting point about the future of player shaped game experiences, if games allow you choice where should it end. Mass Effect allowed us throughout to make Galaxy defining choices but in the very end we couldn't save this Universe while we as a player had been groomed throughout the series to expect this level of control.

Completely oposite to Walking Dead where we have control over our reactions but not the actual situation, it has a fatalistic tone, where we accept that things will not always go our way.

I really didn't mind the ending. The community reaction annoyed me more, demanding that it be changed, it was Casey Hudson; the project directors choice and I'm willing to accept it. Although this reaction was an understandable product of a lack what the game had given us throughout, absolute control.

@Dylabaloo: A good point. I will admit, there is a part of me that thinks full-heartedly, that you can't choose the consequences, a game like Mass Effect, where player agency is the main selling point, to suddenly have that choice taken away at the last minute is very, very jarring.

Now, with Walking Dead, I completely agree. Perhaps it was because the choices were more personal and not 'OMG! WE HAS TO SAVES TEH GALAXIE!", that made those choices more agreeable.

While I also agree that Hudson was the one that ultimately made the decision, he made a very poor one. I've said it once before, but it bears repeating. He was trying to be Stanley Kubrick, creating his own take on A Space Odyssey: 2001. What it ended up looking like was some piece of self-aggrandizing tripe you'd expect from M. Night Shyamalan.

And the refusal ending? That was just him stomping his feet, giving you the bird, and him screaming, "YOU DUN"T UNDERSTAND MY GENIOUS! F*CK YOU! EVERYBURDY DIES!"

I'm not a published writer, however, I've been writing, watching movies, and playing games long enough to know when a story is bad. Is not the point of these hobbies to give pleasure? And while I admit, everyone has different tastes, the fact that so many people got up in arms over an ending that answered nothing and painted a bleak picture after everything we did to try and save the galaxy; made me utterly loathe the term 'artistic integrity'. Casey Hudson is not an artist, therefore, he has no integrity to defend.