A game you were exicited for, only to be disappointed

Watchdogs is probably the most recent.

Borderlands 1, and Dead Island where meh when I was expecting something better

Force Unleashed 2: Short overall, repeated areas, hardly any new features, lame story.

Spider-Man 2 (PC): This is REALLY not the Spider-Man 2 you're looking for.

Uncharted 3: The second half of this game tapers off inexplicably. You really get the impression the first half belonged to a different game.

Skyrim: Not as good as Oblivion.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations: They fucked up Altair.

I feel like I've answered this question countless times on this forum and my answer is usually FF13 or GW2. FF13 was...well..FF13. It was shit. Everything from insufferable characters to boring ass gameplay to a nonsensical story.

I was into GW2 for like a few weeks. Maybe a month tops. The more I played, the more it became clear that it was ultimately "just another MMO" in almost every way that matters and despite it having no subscription, the cash shop was, in a bad way, anchored to every part of the game they could possibly attach it too.

Oh yeah, think I'll add Borderlands 2 to this list. Managed to find some enjoyment in Borderlands 1 after the abysmal first few hours. Borderlands 2 looked to be a huge improvement so I was definitely looking forward to playing it. Then...I played it. Forget the gameplay. Starts off slow like the first. Picks up a bit. Clearly not balanced for single-player. Etc etc it's whatever. What bothered me more is that this has to be one of the most unfunny games I've ever played. Holy fuck. Half the jokes are practically just the same shit recycled from the first game. Dumb rednecks. Insane bandits. Claptrap being Claptrap. Moxxi is a slut (we get it already, guys. She's slept with everyone in the game. SHUT THE FUCK UP). But, dear sweet baby jesus, worst of 'em all has to be Handsome Jack. Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh

I know it'll sound stupid, but none. I actually just enjoy games for what they are. I have a really large bullshit meter too, and rarely go into a game thinking it will be amazing. I'm not a pessimist, I just rarely choose games to make me excited.

@babychoochoo: Oh yeah, Guild Wars 2 was definitely one for me too.

Resident Evil 5 definitely stands out for me. Loved Resident Evil 4, played through it four times. Stopped playing Resident Evil 5 half way through. It's fine for what it is, but I wanted and expected something else...thus the disappointment.

I played Okami after hearing how incredible it was/looked. It still looked great when I was playing it, but the game is boring and the pacing felt way off.

Mercenaries 2.

Gran Turismo 5

Dirt 2 because of the heavy swing to extreme sports angle. Dirt 1 is a rally game. A pretty serious business kinda rally game. Then Dirt 2 happened and i dunno man if they were going to do that I'd have preferred Dirt to be its own thing and keep the Colin Mcrae series going. However, I will grant that Dirt 2 definitely is a good game in its own right, as opposed to the previous two games I mentioned. This one was more just a disappointment.

I've read your blog, but it doesn't address any of the issues I put in my post - especially in regards to the inconsistent writing - and I still don't have a clear idea why you love the game as much as you do. Dismissing the timer mechanic as being not as "sadistic as those found in games like Dead Rising" is hardly a defense of a mechanic that has many other reasonable criticisms leveled against it, not the least of which being it insists you rush through every quest you find if you hope to find and complete everything without a guide in what is ostensibly an open-world RPG.

Stating that it doesn't require a guide to get the true ending is also a little disingenuous when the game is clearly designed for the player to fail the first, if not the first few times around and can only really be completed in a new game plus. Technically it is possible the first time through, but no one will be beating this game without either a guide or restarting. Especially if they start on "normal" difficulty which most reviewers seem to agree should be renamed "hard" and "easy" to "normal". I can testify to that. The first boss repeatedly wiped the floor with me on normal my first time through, which is when I finally resorted to the Internet and found out I really should be playing on easy the first time through, and even then I should expect to fail. Straight-up fuck "normal". I ended up just completing as much before d-day as I could to get more stats. And then had to repeat all those badly written quests that I did manage to finish on my new game plus if I want the true ending and more stats. Bafflingly terrible design decisions!

One of your final lines pretty much sums up my feelings on it: "Lightning’s journey is a grim, sad, goofy, and ultimately joyous one..." The game rarely knows what it wants to be or what kind of tone it's trying to set and just comes across as a slightly creepy, dress up the pink haired, frail-looking, monotone girl simulator. Thankfully the combat is engaging the second time around when it's not frustratingly impossible.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 - I absolutely adored the series and was interested when it was going "open-world" but the level design was sub-par and lack of the timer actually wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.

Mortal Kombat 3 - mk2 was one of my all time favorite fighting games and couldn't wait for this one... I was really excited for how big the roster was but this game disappointed me to no end. The sprites were small and the characters felt silly. It just didn't feel as good as two.

Time splitters 2 - I still think this is a good game but the time this came out it was supposed to be the successor to Goldeneye and Perfect Dark and it just wasn't as good. Still a good multiplayer game but the single player couldn't touch goldeneye or pd as far as depth went.

I love Dark Souls 2 so no complaints there, surprised to see people say that considering it reviewed so well. Also, have y'all played the DLC?? It's so good, vintage Dark Souls in a way that a lot of 2 wasn't.

Skyrim is the most recent one. I was HYPED for that game, only to be down trodden by lazy quests and soulless character.

My biggest disappointment was Assassin's Creed. That game is fucking torture.

I'll do something different:

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Don't get me wrong, this game is still one of my all time favorites. The first two-thirds of this game are pure RPG goodness, combat aside. And then they decide to dump you into a sewer dungeon full of unavoidable enemies with high health; it was such a drastic dip in quality. The parts afterwards also feel rushed and the solutions to most of the late game quests were reduced to simply combat. Did I mention that the combat is not good?

Oh lawrd yes! I totally forgot about that one. For good reason.

Brink - I was a huge fan of ET, and while I saw potential in ETQW I couldnt get into it due to the vehicles and clunky combat. When Brink promised a return to form by removing vehicles and making the combat more fluid, I got really excited. After playing it for a few hours and really trying to enjoy it I came to the conclusion that Splash Damage got lucky with ET, the multiplayer formula established by Nerve in RtCW only needed a few tweaks, and the Q3 engine was already awesome - Splash damage brought very little to the party beyond the level design. Sad times.

FF13 - I've loved most of the games in the FF franchise, mostly due to the crazy worlds, character progression and non linear exploration. FF13 threw away most of this in favour of flashy cutscenes. Ironically I gave up just when the game started to open up a bit, but after 40 or so hours of grinding through corridors I just couldnt bring myself to care.

Spore - So many of Will Wright's games were deep and replayable, so when I heard about the premise for Spore I was immediately excited. I thought the long development time would be spent polishing and refining deep mechanics and replayability, but it just turned out that they were trying to find a way to bring many disparate ideas together, which ultimately failed. The final product felt like they had stripped out the complexity in an attempt to make it work. The whole experience really soured me on Will Wright, and is a very black spot on his otherwise excellent reputation and legacy.

SimCity(2013) - The game had so much potential, but it was ruined by the terrible business decisions that were presumably thrust on it by higher ups. Server stability aside, if the game had been designed around larger cities and not been forced down the horrible multiplayer route they chose it could have been really great. I was also not a fan of the resource management side of it, mayoring is not about producing and selling coal or other natural resources.

Resident Evil 6 - After having a hard time adjusting to the direction of the franchise post RE4, I was actually quite a big fan of RE5. While I still havent played RE6, the abysmal reviews really seemed to indicate that RE6 was everything I didn't want out of a new RE game.

Broken Age - Admittedly I pumped lot of money into this kickstarter without really thinking about it, but the product as it stands today ended up feeling really shallow. After so many ingenious puzzles and adventure games from Tim Schafer, I was expecting more. The story was charming, but as a game it just isn't very interesting. I was also really disappointed that they split it in half. Act I felt like an appetiser, and I doubt there will be a main course to follow. I'm still holding out hope that Act II will be better, but it seems unlikely at this point. It's also a little worrying that we aren't hearing more about it seeing as the second half is supposed to be released sometime soon.

Bioshock Franchise - I was a huge System Shock/Looking Glass Studios fan. They crafted deep RPG games and amazing non-linear worlds with many ways of making your way through the game. System Shock 1 was a stellar game, years ahead of it's time, and still holds up today (go play it!). After hyping Bioshock as a spiritual successor to the "shock" franchise, I was excited for more of the same. What I got was a very pretty shooter with some interesting philosophies underlying the fiction, what I missed was an immersive non-linear world with deep mechanics. They should've made a fresh start instead of toying with my expectations like that! Each subsequent game in the franchise has moved further and further away from the games I love, and as with the Simcity franchise it's indicative of an industry wide trend that studios are prioritising accessibility over depth.

I bought Call of Duty 3 after I had gotten COD 2 with my Xbox 360 on launch day and had countless hours of great memories with. I bought COD 3 before I began more intensely following online coverage of games and got it exclusively off my experience with COD 2. Needless to say I was very disappointed.

Deus Ex Invisible War was a another game I bought due to my experience with it's predecessor Deus Ex (one of my favourite games of all time) and even longer before I paid attention to online games coverage. I remember being frustrated after blowing all my bullets in one firefight very early on in the game and having zero resources for the remainder. I didn't have a lot of fun.

Amped 2 did not live up to my experience with Amped. Contrary to most others on the internet I was not a fan of Amped's moving from zen to zany, and had greatly enjoyed carving the (at the time) beautiful slopes set to the sounds of my uploaded soundtracks.

I never played it, but the new Ninja Gaiden series that includes basically my favourite game of all time (Black) completely lost me at 3. Crummy but to be honest I don't' hold any bad feelings. Once a series doesn't interest me anymore I don't get mad about it. I just move on to other things.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Nothing against this game's execution but I was a massive fan of the Jedi Knight games and their analogue, but less stylish looking approach to combat and level design. The force powers were mildly entertaining to me but the repeat bashing lightsaber combat killed my enjoyment for the game.

I can't remember exactly what early 360 much game it was, but after playing a ton of MechWarrior 3 in my earlier days I found an updated game on a gameplay to be uninteresting.

Writing that out made me feel whiny but considering the sheer amount of games I've played its a relatively tiny list. Most games I choose to play, I enjoy!

I lolled.

Then seriously considered making a game around this concept.

@sinusoidal: Haha thanks for the catch. I'm typing on a Surface 2 which I use as my primary computer and I really need to turn off the tablet-style auto-correct.

Also I just read your thing on Lightning Returns above, and your not-very-relaxing, sort-of anxious experience trying to max completion when it's ultimately futile reminds me of trying to use a guide during my first play through of FFX-2 remastered. I mistakenly believed that the bulk of the happy ending was locked behind 100% completion and not some throwaway bonus scene, and played that entire game not having much fun just to get 99.2% and watch the extra bit on YouTube anyway.

And then have all of that be ruined by the exceedingly annoying audio drama.

@sinusoidal: If people are able to complete the game without a guide, which people have done, then people are able to do so. There's nothing disingenuous about that statement. I've played the game twice through on Normal, and I never felt that it was Hard Mode hard in my personal experience. Is it challenging? Yes. But I found a line-up of equipment and a strategy that worked for me and, once I was able to settle into that, I found myself much more prepared for most of what the game had to throw at me. In any case, saying it's impossible because you personally couldn't do it is disingenuous in itself.

As for the writing, well, I like it. It it the best writing that has ever been written? No. But I like it, I like the tone of it, and the way that, start to finish, it felt like the people of the world were worn down, trapped in centuries of routine and now on the verge of a world about to tend. I like the way that it wraps up the stories of the primary characters, Lightning in particular. I just enjoy the writing, the story, and the world presented. I've found more about the game as a whole to enjoy than most games in recent memory or distant. Feel free to disagree, but I'm not lying when I say that I love that game.

Spore

Sim City

Black and White 2

These are pretty much the only games that truly disappointed me. All three could have been SO MUCH MORE then they ended up being. You can almost SEE the perfection hidden underneath the surface of all of them.

Edit: I just realized that all three of these games were published by EA. How amusing. *sigh*

Brink

Assassins Creed 3

Metroid Prime

Dragon Age 2

Infamous 2

Killzone 2

Gears 2

Fable 3

LA Noire

Every Madden since 05

DNF and FFXIII. Both of which I DNF.

@hailinel said:

Sure someone has, but I'm willing to bet you that the vast majority of people playing without a guide failed the first time around. Especially on normal difficulty. I have played a lot - let me emphasize - A LOT of JRPGs. It's not like I don't know how to sling the circle button. Noel splattered me all over the wall a dozen times before I backed out and went to fill my inventory with potions and even then still barely won the fight. Snow was even worse and I was about ready to give up on the game when I got lucky and spotted a randomly spawning merchant who sold me some overpowered garb... It was at that point I Googled because I thought the game shouldn't be quite this hard and found out that the director intends you to fail the first time around. Which is when I said "fuggit" and just goofed around completing sidequests for stats until doomsday. Surprise surprise, the game is remarkably well-balanced the second time around. The game is straight-up designed to kick your ass the first time around. So yes, saying you can beat this game without a guide is disingenuous when you leave out that in order to finish it, you'll be restarting it at least once, possibly more and doing the same quests over again until you get it all right.

If this is your criterion, then sure! You can beat any game without a guide as long as you play it enough times.

@sinusoidal: Your personal experience doesn't speak for the entire population.

Neither does yours and unfortunately for you, a quick, non-biased Google search reveals that more of the population agrees with my opinion that LR is a badly written, mess of a game than with yours that it's one of the best games ever made.

This has to be the most recurring thread topic on this site. I guess I can answer it again...

• Darksiders II: Second game I ever pre-ordered, and man, what a mediocre experience. Huge empty ass world, tacked on loot garbage, repetitive dungeon design ugh it goes on. I still enjoyed the game but compared to the first one Darksiders II is just shit. I don't know what Nordic Games is doing with Darksiders III but hopefully it turns out better than this.
• GTA Online: Ever since the initial trailer for GTA Online I was foaming at the mouth to finally play that. Naturally I hopped on day one to play that shit, and the servers were so fucked I didn't get to really play it until like two weeks later. Turns out it's boring as shit and the focus on money is just annoying as hell. Seriously GTA IV's online was so much better.

Yeah, well, fortunately for me, I don't care about what the majority of people think about the game. I know how I feel about it, and what I like about it. Whether others agree with me or not is not my concern.

GRiD Autosport most recently. I loved the original, I thought the second was good even though it was a significant departure from the first, and I think Autosport is horrendously boring. It drives like GRiD 2, but they designed it to be like GRiD 1 whilst taking out every single thing that made that game unique or good. A customizable sponsorship program? Gone. Team configurations? Gone. A half decent cockpit view? Gone. Well done AI? Gone. It's not like I didn't give it enough time, I put in 10+ hours, but that game is just bad in pretty much every way. The multiplayer is kind of neat but the progression is really poorly done. This is one of the very rare cases where I wish I could return a game or at least sell it used for around 50% what I payed.

I also found Divinity: Original Sin to be kind of disappointing. Not necessarily because it's a bad game, though I do think there are some glaring flaws people frequently overlook, but just because the style of questing in that game wasn't what I was looking for. While I don't need a golden trail telling me exactly where to go and how to get there like the Fable games did, I also don't enjoy having to talk in circles around the town to complete a quest, with often very little direction on where to go. Again, I don't think it's all that bad or anything, but it didn't connect with me.

The final one I can think of at the moment was Soundodger+. I thought it looked fun and I tend to like any rhythm game that'll let me use my own music, but this one was just bad. It ran poorly on my PC, looked rough for what it was, and took forever to load custom songs. The base gameplay is very rudimentary and not something I ended up finding very fun/interesting/rewarding. I played 10 minutes of this on Steam before wishing I could get a refund. Thankfully it was only $8, but even then I felt pretty badly burned at the time.

The three biggest ones I can think of off the top of my head are Dragon Age 2, Resident Evil 6 and to an extent Battlefield 3 ( Although that likely has more to do with my love of Bad Company 2 more)

Every MMORPG since WOW.

Watch Dogs would be the first to pop into mind. I only got about 10 hours into the whole game but it wore really thin on me pretty quickly.

• Chicago is heavily edited and feels more like a generic city rather then Chicago.
• Ran choppy on my Nvidia Titan Black.
• Main character is a boring vessel

It's a meh experience, but I think that that's been said countless times. We know Ubisoft will make another Watch Dogs and I'm curious how it will be improved. Hopefully not having to divide resources between multiple consoles/generations could help then give it additional polish.

Sim City is the biggest regret I can remember. Excited. Waited years for it. Of course it'll be great. It always is. $90 down. Waiting for launch. Install. Launch. Play... wow, this sucks. Jump back a few weeks later and everything is completely dead and it still sucks. $90 for about five hours of "entertainment" that I uninstalled and never touched again. On a title I thought I'd play for hundreds of hours.

I guess BF4 is the other one. I bought two full copies for myself and my brother on PC. Then a copy for myself on PS4. That's almost $250, with taxes and everything.

I've played less than 70hrs, combined - and most of that was miserable.

Tales of Xillia - I don't wanna spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it so I'll just say that ALVIN FUCKING SUCKS!

Bravely Default - Most of the game was so good! Then the ending completely ruined it for me. I didn't even bother finishing it.

Fire Emblem: Awakening - I beat the game but it felt real lackluster by the end. Did not like the kids suddenly coming into the game and being already really strong and formidable. Having played all the previous Fire Emblems, I found this one to be the least challenging. And all the parents didn't matter once the kids came in.

Dead Island - I liked the game but it was so broken. I played it co-op with my husband and the further we got into the game, the more it would freeze on us. Got to the point where it was just unplayable.

Borderlands. The gameplay was mixed and the characters / plots were awful. Art style was cool, so there's that.

It's patently obvious you're concerned. You questioned whether I'd even played the games. Then attempted to invalidate my criticisms. Failed and now feign apathy.

I remember being really excited about Two Worlds...for some reason that I cannot fathom now.

Honestly, Infamous: Second Son. It was my reason to buy a PS4 because the previous games had some amazing gameplay. Graphics stepped up, I felt that everything else was a step down.

Luckily, I still really like my PS4.

Arkham City, God of War 3, Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 3, Crysis 2, Bioshock Infinite... This has to do with disappointing, and those are all disappointing to me in some way, but others more than another. Yeah, Skyward Sword was pretty disappointing as well.

No, I was confused as to whether you had played the games or were just basing your opinions on your experience with all three games, or just the first game and reading about the later games. Again, I'm amazed that someone that hates the first game as much as you do actually sought out to play the rest of the series. That's curiosity, not concern.

Ni No Kuni. I absolutely love and adore JRPGs, but I never really enjoyed my time with Ni No Kuni. I thought the character designs were incredibly dumb, the story dumber, and the combat was just meh. I didn't even enjoy that little welsh dude everyone seemed to love. I don't know, I wanted to enjoy Ni No Kuni but something about it never clicked with me. Maybe I'll revisit it but I think the dozens of hours I already dedicated were more than enough to know that I wouldn't like it anymore.

Dragon Age 2 is my all-time biggest gaming disappointment. DA:O is one of my favorite RPG experiences of all time. 2 took nearly everything that I loved about the first game and replaced it with mediocrity. Not saying it's a terrible game, but it's certainly the biggest gap between hopes/expectations and reality for me.

Boy, I have mixed feelings about this game. Jumped into it earlier this year as the first Tales game I've played since Symphonia 2 (which was godawful). Really enjoyed the combat, found the story to dance the line between interesting and boring, but was most disappointed by some of the worst level design I've ever seen in an RPG. Ultimately enjoyed the game, but it's so much less than it could have been.

For me:

Saints Row The Third

Metal Gear Solid 4

Pokemon X

Mass Effect 3 (Not just the ending, I had problems with a lot of the writing)

Borderlands 2 (Possibly the worst writing in a AAA videogame since Duke Nukem Forever)

Bravely Default (Beat all the bosses 5 times to get a semblance of an ending? How about no)

Well, I didn't hate it. Like the thread title says: I was disappointed in it. Along with the rest of the series. Looking through this thread, I'm not alone. Maybe it's some weird brand loyalty or something. I've been playing Final Fantasy games for over twenty-five years now and the XIII series was the first to really just not be fun. I did skip X-2, but recently bought the remaster. I have a feeling I should probably just play X and give X-2 a miss...

Alone in the Dark for 360

OH yeah! Borderlands 2.

I wasn't hyped for it, but i had so many friends and family tell me it was "SO GOOD!" that i ended up buying it. What the shit dude? Horrible story, embarrassing unfunny humor. I absolutely HATED the loot system, something would ALWAYS be wrong with the gun. The wrong type of scope, weird damage modifiers, ect. It was infuriating, oh an awesome purple quality SMG? Sweet! oh for some reason its red dot sight thing has a x6 zoom making the damn thing unwieldy as fuck....

I cannot stand that game. I tried to like it SO much, i really did want to like it. Just everything about it irritates the fuck out of me. Though i can see why people like it. Just to me, playing it was like having someone slowly shoving toothpicks under my toenails....

Resident Evil 5 - My console came with that game bundled, and I was excited about the game as I liked a lot RE 4, despite some cepticism about Chris design. Still playing in the first chapter I found myself in disbelief about how bad was Sheeva as an AI partner. It made the game nearly unplayable to me, and was probably my biggest disappointment in recent years.

I guess Watch Dogs. I was very excited for it, but due to the very lackluster press I skipped over it.

That's really the only thing that immediately comes to mind for me. I tend to temper my expectations for stuff so I'm usually at least partially spared of disappointment.

I must say I almost never get disappointed because I pretty much know what to expect from a game with all the gameplay shown beforehand these days and just experience.

I know I expected too much from Oblivion. It started off awesome but soon it dragged on and I never felt I made much progress somehow. The world pretty much looks the same everywhere you go and the dungeon layouts repeated itself regularly.
Funny enough I really enjoyed Skyrim.

There's a good handful of 'em, but if counting some recent ones, Hitman - Absolution was a really big bummer, to put it nicely.

Resident Evil Zero. FUCK THAT GAME! The Remake was fantastic in everyway, but then they follow that game with Zero. Terrible item management, what was wrong with the magic item boxes? Your character only has six item slots and your expected to drop things on the ground and return to them if you need them. Like this series needed more backtracking! This would have been fine if key items didn't effect your item slots but they do! So if I want a handgun, ammo for it, a heavy weapon that takes up two spaces(shotgun), ammo for that I am now left with one available item slot to either put a key item, which at times there are multiple, a healing item, a ink ribbon or the knife. You know you have an issue with item management when you look forward to unlocking unlimited ammo for your pistol because it frees up a single item slot. ARG!!!! Also Rebecca kind of sucks. She is by no means as bad as Steve from Veronica but man.

Brutal Legend

Lollipop Chainsaw

Deadly Premonition PC port