TIE: Dark Souls/Skyrim

Yeah, I think a tie is totally acceptable for this category. Both games were disappointing to me for different reasons.

Let's start with Dark Souls. I bought Dark Souls and was enjoying the way the game started. The problem that I had started to rear it's ugly head a few hours in. Specifically, I stopped enjoying the game when it started opening up into a semi-open-world game. Dark Souls is frustrating enough as it is with the general combat, but the addition of backtracking and eventually getting lost became a real bummer. Add on top of that the limitation of health items for no apparent reasons than to just make the game harder soured me even more on the whole experience.

However, I think the biggest reason I didn't like Dark Souls much at all was, because it didn't hit the same nostalgic feel that Demon's Souls did. Demon's Souls was an unforgiving RPG that had an old school 'Mario' level 1-1 structure to the progression whereas Dark Souls feels like it's trying just a little too hard to be what Demon's souls was, but with the addition of newer, more arbitrary changes.

Next, Skyrim upset and disappointed me for a very different reason. The game did not work properly at times, and eventually didn't work at all! Sure, I purchased the Playstation 3 version which is probably not a great decision, but they never showed it and apparently had little to no faith in the PS3 version anyways. The game broke down at around 25 to 30 hours in, and never ran the same again.

Constant hiccups, pausing, and framerate problems prevented me from enjoying the game ever again. It was probably the biggest waste of money this year. I became infuriated when I found that it wasn't just a faulty disc problem or something that I could have prevented, and found that a large portion of PS3 users were having the same problem. Then, I gritted my teeth even more when I learned that the 360 or PC versions did not suffer from these problems and ran extremely smoothly. The last draw had to be when the patch notes listed the PS3 issue as 'occassional' and then did not fix the problem in the slightest. This one probably pissed me off a lot more than Dark Souls, but when the game was working it was pretty good.

It's a shame that Bethesda doesn't seem to give a damn about reaching the same level of quality on the PS3 and, instead, ships out whatever they have when the 360 version is completed. I learned my lesson for making such a dumb purchasing decision and will never buy a Bethesda game ever again without extensive research of every single version available. Fuck you Bethesda.