A game you were exicited for, only to be disappointed

With the reason rumors for NHL 15 circulating, I have noticed that I went from being tremendously excited, to being disappointed and the game is not even out yet.

What are some other releases that you were excited for, only to be let down before or after release?

Hm...Assassin's Creed 3. Despite so many lackluster reviews I was really hoping I could enjoy that one. Brotherhood and 2 were big favorites of mine and I'm into American history so 3 really seemed up my alley. I still haven't finished it. The story was a mess, the gameplay was the same stuff over and over, and there were systems barely tutorial-ed that seemed completely tacked on.

The Fable series to some extent as well. I enjoyed my time with all of them but nothing captured the magic of the first one.

Arkham Origins

Fallout New Vegas

Splinter Cell Conviction.

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2

Tomb Raider(2012)

Super Time Force

Dustforce

Fable 1

Fable 2

Fable 3

Papo and Yo

Gunpoint

Amnesia A Machine for Pigs

VVVVVV - I actually HATED this one

Transistor. It looks really nice and the music is great. But I just can't get into it. The characters and story has been bland so far and I don't care at all about the fighting system. Which is disappointing because I loved Bastion.

metal gear franchise. thats just me because i lost interest in stealth. groundzeroes puts the finishing touch for me

@pinner458: I have to say, I enjoyed Fable 1 but the following two were very lackluster.

Assassin's Creed

Taken from: http://www.peoww.co.uk/the-2007-peoww-awards/#more-1407

“Apollo Creed, more like. It’s fucking dead.” – Shindig

And I stand by it.

Spore

Prototype 2, man if you could see how Hyped I was or this game you'd probably be freaked out, but man it was such a let down. Sure they did improved the gameplay, at least this time around I could actually control the battlefield and not get juggled around like a toy, but James heller was such a 2-dimensional character it hurt.

The story was no better either, the developers basically threw every key plot point from the first game to start something out of the blue for god knows what reason.They had everything established, the patient Pariah, Alex mercers development, his motivations, and etc. But noooooooooo, they forgot everything and started from scratch.

Ugh.

Dark Souls 2

For me Resident Evil 4 might be the game where my excitement was highest and my disappointment was strongest. I loved the RE GC remake, which was my first tasted of the RE franchise, but RE 4 was more 3rd person shooter-y than I liked and despite multiple attempts I couldn't get more than a few hours into it before I lost interest.

edit: oh, also most every multiplayer focused console shooter that I bought after Perfect Dark. Picked up quite a few hoping to have the fun that I had with Goldeneye and Perfect Dark but for some reason only Halo 2 really ever caught on with my group of friends.

I was let down by that Lord of the Rings Conquest game. I was expecting it to be basically Star Wars Battlefront with Lord of the Rings stuff in it, but the whole thing felt really restricted. The maps weren't sprawling, like Battlefront had, and the enemies didn't feel numerous. It kind of felt like a bad Lord of the Rings themed shooter more than something that emulated the massive wars.

I'm gonna start sounding like a broken record but... Dark Souls 2.

Or for variety's sake i could say Final Fantasy 8. Although i don't completely despise Final Fantasy 8 so... Dark Souls 2.

Crysis 2, Brink, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, and GRID 2 all come to mind as being pretty disappointing. I'm hesitant to put Mass Effect 3 on the list because although I originally came away disappointed, it did have a lot of redeeming qualities and the DLC did end up being mostly great.

Spore and Brink are the two games that had the biggest gulf between expected quality and actual quality. They were actually the two games that taught me not to get too hyped about announced games, and to not follow development about unreleased games too closely. Forming an attachment to a game before you've even played it is a terrible idea.

I should mention I was only 12 when Spore was released.

Xenosaga II was ultimately a disappointment. The combat system was changed for the worse, the story/gameplay pacing is poor, and in general, it just feels like a huge step down from the first game. Apparently Namco forced changes to try to expand the game's audience, but all it really did was turn off the existing audience.

Spore is my all-time greatest gaming disappointment. I dreamed of all the great things I could create in that game only to find that it was far more shallower than I had presumed.

The creature creator in the main game hardly lived up to what Will Wright had shown in his promos and press events. It was like a sticker party. You just selected from a conglomeration of different parts and slapped them onto a putty beast.

The civilization stage was awful as well. I was expecting a chance to build up a civilization, like in Civ but it, again, was all face value. War with those vehicles was so awful. It was simply a throw-a-bunch-of-units-at-each-other style of gameplay; which is incredibly boring.

The space, the crown of my sadness, led nowhere interesting. It, too, was rather shallow, leaving the player to explore the void and to face an enemy that wasn't that demoralizing; those Grox were more annoying than anything else.

Metal Gear Solid 4. It was always a silly series, but it was a silly series you could feel OK about taking a little seriously. MGS4 didn't find a proper balance though and just became way, way too intolerably fan-servicey after Act II. I'm sure some people love that kind of stuff but it really rubbed me the wrong way and felt like it was distracting from the actual narrative. If MGS5 is just batshit crazy all around I'll be more OK with it I think.

Mass Effect 3 was a disappointment for the same reasons. As Jeff has said elsewhere, people who were mad about the ending were kind of mad about the wrong stuff. ME3 was basically a tourist's guide to that universe and was wholly unsatisfying the entire playtime. At least the combat was the best the series had ever seen, playing a Vanguard was a ton of fun.

I was slightly disappointed with Saints Row IV. I only played The Third, but diving into that game and absolutely loving it, gave me huge expectations for IV. It wasn't a bad game, it was just...too much of the same?

Sim City. SIM CITY. The moment the scope of the game and the limitations imposed by the multiplayer focused bent they went with for the thing became clear to me was so sad.

Dragon Age Origins. Still a great game, I just had high high expectations. Its very hard to create a universe from scratch that can compete with one that have a lot of years of writing behind it.

Monaco

Also. Spore. Fuck you Spore.

If we're going with the unpopular opinion twist on this, then Dark Souls

Diablo III, I guess. I wasn't a huge fan of Diablo II (absolutely loved the original Diablo though), but at least I managed to finish it. Diablo III's story was totally unbearable, at the start of Act III I just couldn't take it anymore and gave up on it. Duke Nukem Forever kinda managed to surpass even my low expections on how poor it could be. Had it felt like a game from 1997 that had been delayed far too long I'd have been somewhat alright with it, but instead we got a game that looked like it was from 2005, but had all the mechanics I hate about modern FPSes, with all the "hold E to do X" prompts and the two weapon limit.

Other than that I'm not sure, I usually am able to find something I like about most games, including stuff like Daikatana and 7th Legion.

I was a massive fan of the Conflict games, so when the final game came out on the 360 I bought it on launch day. All I can remember is that it was a half finished pile of garbage, which threw away everything that was fun about the original games.

Magic 2015 was also utter horseshit, made worse by the fact they had already made several great games previously.

Mercenaries 2. It was the first game that taught me not to jump on the hype train. Modern Warfare 2 put the nail in the coffin... I was active on the Infinity Ward Forums for like a year and a half anticipating it. Now I try to go into new games with really low expectations and it seems to be working out for me.

Final Fucking Fantasy XIII and its abysmal sequels. FF games have never been high literature, but at least the stories made (somewhat) sense and character motivation was logical in past entries. Not so here in the bland, thirty hour, ridiculous jargon laden tutorial corridor of XIII-1, the completely nonsensical, egregiously abusive of time travel XIII-2 and the constantly slightly perverted love letter to the blandest FF protagonist ever: XIII-3. Fuck Toriyama, and fuck Lightning. I know I'll eventually play XV anyway because I'm a sucker, but it'd better be something pretty special if Squeenix wants me to care about their hallmark franchise anymore.

@sinusoidal: If you hated the first one so much, why did you play the others? Did you even play them?

Wait what NHL 15 rumours? Google isn't yielding any answers.

Battlefield 3. Battlefield 2 was absolutely amazing and they managed to completely take away everything I loved about 2 when they made 3. They tried to compete to much with Call of Duty and it ended up ruining the game.

You know better than this...

I'm 60 hours into LR as I type this. Like I said: I'm a sucker. And I do quite like the combat and mechanics across the series. Minus the time limit. Worst idea ever in what is ostensibly an open-world, RPG. Why Squeenix, why?!? I also really wish LR didn't require terribly written sidequests to up your stats. At this point I am skipping a significant amount of sidequest dialog, since it's inevitably one bad country song after another: "My truck broke down. My wife left me. My dog died. I'm studying the mating habits of sheep?!?! Wah wah wah." Never fucking mind that the world is endingin *singledigitnumber* of days!!! Selfish fucks. It really is quite ridiculous.

While I'm at it: is Lightning supposed to be emotionless or not? The game makes it pretty clear early on that Bhunivelze (terrible name, shudder every time I hear it) removed her emotions or some shit (presumably to excuse the monotone voice acting) yet (very) periodically she shows an awful lot of emotion particularly post Snow fight. Also: do people know the world is ending? This seems pretty important, but the game is incredibly vague about it. One character will know, the next will seem completely oblivious. Also: are kids actually kids or not in this universe? One sidequest will feature kids acting just like kids, the next will make a huge point of pointing out that kids are no longer kids since no one has aged in 500 years. It's really all very inconsistently and shoddily written. Though I think the Luka's tears sidequest is one of the few brief moments of well-written story in the entire game so far. Too bad the fucking quest requires you visit her in a specific spot, four days in a row within a 5 hour window in a game with a fucking time limit!!! Terrible design.

There have been a few (and far between) moments of true, sarcastic wit from Lightning and massive props to the game for letting me drive a child insane by giving her the wrong colored doll, but so far, the game has made me groan out loud far more often than it's made me laugh or feel anything towards any of these cardboard cutout characters. The best thing I can say about it is that it's written better than XIII-2, but that's like shooting already-dead fish in a tiny barrel with a bazooka.

Skyrim.

I wasn't into RPGs, but though the scope and mechanics of Skyrim would allow me to have fun. It didn't, and after 1 hour of gameplay I put it back into the shelf - I had bought it release week too.

God of War 3. I even bought a PS3 in preparation for that game... but the characters were so cartoony it was painful.

Oddball answer to many: Viking: Battle for Asgard. I am a huge fan of Spartan: Total Warrior for the PS2, one of my top 3 favourite games of all time. With better graphics and MORE SOLDIERS ON SCREEN would been amazing. But I didn't own a PS3/360. So you can imagine the excitement when Sega stealthily announced porting the game to PC.

... Aaaaaand the critics were right. They couldn't be more wrong when they slammed Spartan: Total Warrior but Viking is absolute shit. Looks good, but no idea why the folks at Creative Assembly would change the combat so drastically that it's no longer fun. Probably the biggest disappointment/realization in my gaming history.

BRIIIIIIIIIIIIINK

all the new battlefields post 2142. at this point i shouldnt be surprised anymore i guess. no soul, no tactics in those games anymore, just chaos.

Titanfall, no map/asset destruction in a game that features big lumbering robots.

Rome 2 TW

Saints Row 4

Tropico 4 and 5

It was a legitimate question. Don't misunderstand, as I meant no offense.

As for Lightning Returns itself, I already wrote a pretty extensive blog on my thoughts regarding it, Lightning, and everything else in general. Spoiler-filled to heck and back, but it's the most comprehensive write-up regarding the game I've written thus far. And I wrote it before playing through the game start to finish a second time. (In short, I doubt you're going to agree with me on the game at all. But I've come to expect that.)

Uncharted 3 - shits awful. Seriously the series is build upon story telling and so it shit out a awful one, hence the bad experience.

infamous SS - not a bad game but nothing special either

GOW Ascension - ruined the perfect streak that was GOW 1-3

RE5&6 - 5 was good but 6 was shit

Little Big Planet - felt they robbed my 65 dollars. Seriously this is a 40 dollar game at best.

Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword - again good game but just didn't live up to my Zelda expectations.

LA Noire - good, sometimes great but after the first half of the game, it goes downhill.

I see Spore, SimCity and Brink are already represented. Those are on my list of most disappointing games as well. The only one there I ultimately didn't buy was Brink since my interest in that game faded the final months before release.

SimCity

Dragon Age 2

Total War: Rome II (getting better now though)

Assassin's Creed III

AC3, i was pumped as shit for that game. Dull main character, terrible ending, bland story, blinding white screens every 3 god damn seconds

Dark souls 2, don't get me wrong, i dont think its a bad game, i dont even think its worse than dark souls 1. It just didnt hook me at all like the first one did.

Mass Effect 3. Garbage for side quests, cameos every 2 feet, insulting ending. I still enjoyed it, but man...

Spore.

The Old Republic.

Rogue Squadron - It was my first game on the Game Cube and my first foray into Rogue Squadron. I thought it'd be more like TIE Fighter, but got something more like Rebel Assault.

Dragon Age 2. I loved Origins and was apprehensive with the action oriented gameplay. However, a few weeks before, they kept demo'ing their tactical view with pause and play combat which got me super hyped. Blergh. Two hours in, I was dissapointed with the game. Two hours, ten minutes in when the dungeon repeated itself for the third time, but with a crappy boulder shoved in a door frame, I was pretty upset.

Metal Gear Solid 2. The demo sold it as Metal Gear Solid but with cranked up graphics. The full game was super bad ass during the tanker. Then, it took crazy to 11.

Total Annihilation Kingdoms. Total Annihilation was my favorite game, at the time. Followed closely by Warcraft 2. If you could put the setting of Warcraft into the gameplay of Total Annihilation, you should get an awesome game, right guys? Right?

Neverwinter Nights 2. While people tell me it has a better story than NWN1, I never could get an hour into NWN2 before alt-F4'ing. NWN2 had the worst camera. Out of the box, on a fairly heft PC at the time, the frame rate was horrible. Characters looked like they were exported from Poser. Since the controls were tied to the camera, that suffered horribly. NWN1's content creation tools was top notch, which is why I still play it to this day.

Saints Row 4

Dragon Age: Origins. At no point could I get into it. I'm sure its a fantastic game (fans of it will tell you that almost every chance they get), but it was probably the point where I started to fall out of love with Bioware games.

Torchlight 2. I loved the first Torchlight but maybe Diablo 3 ruined me on this game? The feel of the game was really off and the story itself wasn't interesting enough to carry it on that end. I ultimately ended up speedrunning the game just to finish it.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The combat sections were terrible (granted, they were few and far between). Also the ending. It was a really nice game that just left a sour taste in my mouth by the time it was over (in a way making it feel much shorter than it should have been). Isn't stopping me from looking forward to Dreamfall Chapters.

Scribblenauts - the only good thing about the original DS game was the concept - everything else about it was a mess. It has the dubious honour of being the only game I have ever sold off. I knew it seemed too good to be true, but I couldn't help being excited for it anyway.

Luckily, they made good on that concept in Scribblenauts Unlimited though - that was everything I could have hoped for in a Scribblenauts game. Also, any issues with object summoning was nullified by the object editor / Steam Workshop.

Watch Dogs. I love a good open world game. Yuck, this was bad. It feels as though Shao Kahn first ripped out Aidens soul, then the game world's.

Dragon Age 2. If you played it, then you know.

FFXIII. I loved 6 and 7 as well as the spinoff tactics. I thought 10 was good and liked 12. 6 hours in was as far as I could go with 13.

Fuse. I had some blind loyalty for Insomniac. Fuse killed that. I am now cautious about sunset overdrive.

Fable 3. You had John Cleese! John Cleese! How dare you mess that up! Unforgivable!

RE5 and even worse 6.

This so hard, I can't believe people defend this game, the rinse repeat design of the Entire game is really awful.

Assassin's Creed 3: Very hour or so was crappy, then the rest just felt like they crammed as much U.S. history into 12 hours as possible. The gameplay wasn't new or interesting, either.

Saints Row IV: The whole premise on which you have super powers sucked. I hated the story.

Simcity: For 2-3 months, so much was broken. I tried to built a multi-city region with different strengths and hubs like they intended. But when transportation between cities doesn't work, and moving money and resources between cities hangs up for days because of the crappy internet infrastructure, you can't do that.

Infamous Second Son: It was so standard "sandbox" 3rd person action it should have just been called "Generic Sandbox Game". Going around shooting powers and beating up the same military dudes and taking back bases for hours was boring. I didn't like the powers besides the smoke one, either.

(Beyond: Two Souls) After Heavy Rain's mature and dark story line I was pumped for another game by David Cage, but Beyond was just wrong in every way. There's a brilliant story somewhere in that game, but it needed someone else at the helm of that project.

(Bastion) I blame the Giantbomb guys and the community for this. They hyped it up to such great lengths that when it came around for me to finally play it, it just didn't hold up. The combat was basic and slow, the narrative was repetitive and not really interesting. It's probably a great game, but my hopes were too high do to outside influence.

(Final Fantasy XIII) Pretty much goes without saying.