What's Your Most Disappointing Game of 2017?

Neir Automata. I got the platinum searching for why people like it so much. meh

Persona 5. It just beats you up with dialog. It's everywhere, it is the same and it is exhausting. Just think about a Persona game that you can be finished with in just 20-30 hours.

Monster Hunter Stories. Didn't get into it the way I get into most of the Monster Hunter games, put it down pretty quick in. Love the art and the younger versions of the Monsters, don't like the watered down battle system.

I honestly haven't been that disappointed by games this year to be honest. I really didn't like Resident Evil 7 much, but I knew I wouldn't going in. I also didn't think Breath of the Wild was as great as everyone made it out to be but I wasn't disappointed by it... I guess Mass Effect: Andromeda would be; even though I enjoyed the game more than most did, there were some key problems with it that couldn't be fixed by patches.

Did you play stories expecting it to be like all the other MonHun games? Criticizing the battle system seems a bit weird since the entire game is a different genre.

@ravelle:

Yes, I should have been more clear. I did know going into MHS that the combat was different. It is a rock-paper-scissors system for a younger audience and that system is too repetitive for me. Since the battle system tied with RPS-type selection, combo attacks were rare, using items didn't ever happened and I often felt luck would win out on some fights rather than strategy. It made me want to stay out of combat. I thought the art, monster riding, music and writing would keep me interested but it couldn't keep my attention.

I'm a big Monster Hunter fan as well and actually like the change and turn based combat, I can still hang around in the Monster Hunter world but in a more relax manner, exploring and collecting stuff. But I can see why it would rub the wrong way if you don't expect it.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

I pre-ordered it, played through three quarters of it, and never had an inkling of interest in going back to it. Part of it was Zelda coming out, part of it was general open world fatigue, and part of it was the less explorative gameplay and a story that literally went NOWHERE that I didn't expect it to go based on the trailers.

Destiny 2

Mass Effect Andromeda. Mass Effect is the franchise I care most about, to this day. To see the result of those five years was soul crushing. It's not a bad game after the patches, it was just an incredibly misguided game. They took all of the wrong lessons from Dragon Age Inquisition. The biggest miss was that the developers confused exploration for traversal. They thought if you have to drive 5km and shoot some guys, a fetch quest is fun because you "explored". No, you traversed. The sense of discovery was so much lessened despite the game taking place further away than the trilogy. I'm so sad that it seems we've seen the end of the series.

Pyre. It just didn't click with me at all and I'd been waiting for Supergiant's next game for so long. I was let down huge. Totally appreciate the team doing something so very different from their previous releases, though.

ME: Andromeda by far. What a waste.

Mass Effect Andromeda and I didn't even have high hopes, just wanted a decent Mass Effect game.

In the same vein is Agents of Mayhem. I have so much love for the previous work but still had plenty of reason to not get my hopes up for either. I just really wanted them to be good.

Ah well.

Destiny 2 is also boring as heck as a game but I didn't really care about it. I just picked it up to hang out with old friends so whatever if it's kinda bad.

Is it still a disappointment if I never bought and played the game? I am a huge Volition/Saints Row fan. Was really looking forward to whatever came out of that studio next. Reading all the reviews and watching gameplay of Agents of Mayhem really popped my souffle :(

Seasons After Fall. Not sure if it released in 2017, but that’s when I played it. It’s just not my cup of tea. The platforming is...I don’t even know if jumping on ledges automatically allows a game to be considered a platformer? There’s no actual skill needed to navigate them. Puzzles from what I’ve played aren’t really anything that I felt hasn’t been done already by better games.

It reminds me of Never Alone. A pretty theme/style masking a shallow and unsatisfying experience.

Persona 5

Played through it entirely and while I greatly enjoyed it but after the second palace they completely dropped things like altering the real world to change things inside the palace(the only real instance of this that I can recall is opening the door in the second palace) and after the initial trip into the palaces they all just become cookie cutter and don't offer much in the way of puzzle solving aside from "beat up this sub-boss to unlock this door". They introduce some party members too late and the gates to get to the later stages of some confidants pretty much means if you want to see everything in a single run it has to be by following a guide to a 'T' or a new game+ run with maxed out social stats(when the initial run through is anywhere from 80-100 hours).

There's also it refusing to allow you to go out at night on far too many occasions further limiting what you can see in the initial run.

It has to be ME:A. Such a drop in quality from the previous entries in the series. They got just about everything wrong, outside of game/gunplay.

Destiny 2. They managed to make the same hyper-tight loot-shooter as Destiny 1 but they forgot to include any sort of loot that matters. They somehow were able to make shaders better by allowing separate pieces of gear to be coloured differently and yet make nearly all of the shaders unappealing to the point where it doesn't matter what shader you use at all. It feels as though they completely missed what a good portion of their player base enjoyed about the game.

Persona 5 is my most disappointing game of the year, but with that being said I sunk 120 hours into it at least. I got into the series with Persona 3 and played 4 at least three times from start to finish. I found Mementos to be a drag after a while, and ended up having to clear a lot of it to finish the game, and I just didn't have an affinity with most of the party like I did in the earlier games. The social links are still a lot of fun, and I liked Makoto, but the rest of the cast seemed to fall flat. I'll still play it again at some point in the future, and I did enjoy it, which I think is a testament to what a strong year we are having.

For what it's worth, I feel like trophy hunting in that game in particular actually weakens it's case for why it's so great. Sticking close to the main storyline and doing some choice side quests made for a much better experience on my end. It's definitely an odd game but it's absolutely one of my GOTY's

Persona 5. It would probably be Mass Effect Andromeda, but everything I've read has put me off of playing it entirely. Persona 5 isn't bad...it's just more that I haven't wanted to play it, whereas from the minute I started playing Persona 4 I couldn't put it down. It just didn't grab me in the way the previous game did and that hurts considering Persona 4 Golden was my 2012 GOTY.

Probably Persona 5. I'm only half way, but haven't touched it in months. Story is easily the most uninteresting, boring plot Persona has had yet, and that's saying a lot after 4 and it's spin-offs.

While I agree somewhat with the first part, God no to that second thing. There's an overwhelming number of RPGs these days that can be beaten in a mere 20 or less hours without even trying to rush, we don't really need one of the only long RPG series' left to go that route too, thanks. What Persona 5 needed wasn't less dialogue, it just needed more dialogue that was actually fun or interesting to read and not repeating the exact same things over and over and over and over again.

Probably P5. It's too slow. Two dungeons too many.

ELEX hurt me pretty good. The usual RPG tripe, but plenty of open-world goodness, lotsa generic missions, which should have been just enough to scratch my kill-stuff-take-their-loot-sell-it-for-cooler-swords itch (or what me and my buddies call a hack'n'shop), but holy christ your character starts as such a weenie in combat that every got-damn fight takes about an hour and if you get hit twice you die. And if you make an incorrect early guess about how the character progression works you seem to NEVER get better at combat, because you need to go up levels to up your stats, and you need higher stats to use better weapons or armor, but you need to kill things to go up levels, but you can't kill anything because your stats and your armor and your weapons suck. If you choose the most interesting class you can't even start leveling in that class because the trainers don't want to know you because you can't kill the creatures to finish the missions to get the trainers to train you. An interesting-enough RPG locked behind a dreadful progression system, endless, boring combat, and a slog to get to play it the way you want to play it if you choose the "wrong" class.

Yooka-Laylee for me. I don't hate it, but it's definitely not as good as I was hoping it would be.

I agree. P5 might overdo it in terms of hitting the same plot points over and over, but a 30 hour Persona game sounds terrible.

@thewildcard: A lot of people close to me are put off by the 80-100 hour playthrough of any game. Granted, they can pour some time into PUBG or TF2 but as far as giving all the focus to a single-player story campaign for that long is tiring. I would like more people to play Persona games, get their input and criticism, rather than people ignore it completely.

@thewildcard: With that avatar, I'm somehow not surprised you agree. I need to get back to Cold Steel soon.

Mass Effect Andromeda without any doubt. I loved the first trilogy and I've spent hundreds of hours with Shepard & co and then this abomination.

Forget the technical issues and facial animations, the story too was weak and the characters were so flat. You can patch and fix technical issues, you can't patch a boring plot.

EA (and not BioWare) killed a game and maybe the franchise as a whole. What a shame!

Mass Effect Andromeda.

I get that, but the amount of time the games give you with the characters is a big part of the emotional investment. I do think you could trim down 10-15 hours of dungeon crawling though, more than the social sim stuff which is the signature hook of the series.

Destiny 2 for sure for me. The game was what I was afraid of...more of the same to the nth degree. They took none chances. The game is beautiful in terms of art and graphics, but the story(which I had high hopes for)was total corny boilerplate comic book style stuff. Also, Bungie still doesn't know how to do loot in a fun way. This game gives it up in bunches, but how it does so is generally very uninspired. The leveling system, skill aquisition, and the silly light lvl soft caps are all boring to poor design decisions. Destiny 2 is not a bad game in general, just too quickly boring, and so much less than it could've been. And considering the resources and budget at their disposal, it even seems more remarkable how uninspired, and lackluster this game turned out. Destiny 1 was popular so I get it, they made the sequel a safe money maker. I bet most of those Bungie devs are bored though, ......although they'll probably never admit it.

There have been some obvious stinkers this year - Mass Effect Andromeda has seemingly been well covered here already.

Shadow of War has been a disappointment to me so far. There are also a couple other, maybe slightly odd, games that disappointed me. One was Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. I know it seems weird to have had any real expectations for that game to start with given the series' history, but man, the stuff they showed off when they revealed the game a few years back just looked so cool. The game just didn't deliver at all, though. The other was Prey. It seemed like it was going to be new BioShock experience to me, but the game was just boring.

However, my most disappointing game this year has been Horizon Zero Dawn. Looking back over some of the games I've played this year, it feels a bit odd to say Horizon is the most disappointing since I did eventually finish the game and binged the last portion of it by playing it for 10 hours in a single day, and I did end up enjoying it overall. But I was just sooooo hyped for that game from the first moment I saw it, and that hype was magnified in the week leading up to release with the nearly unanimous great reviews and the overwhelming positivity coming from the GB crew about the game. Then I played it... I almost immediately bounced off. The combat just felt so bad, the dialog portions were boring, the side content was lame, and generally navigating the world felt like a chore. I have never felt the way I felt about Horizon about any other game I've ever played. I've wasted money on plenty of bad games in my life, but none of them made me feel as profoundly disappointed as Horizon. I guess it was the fact that I was so excited for it, various sources that I trust were lauding the game, and I just couldn't reconcile my feelings with what I was hearing. I just couldn't find the good that everyone was saying was there.

Persona 5 was not just the biggest disappointment of this year for me, but one of the biggest gaming disappointments I've had ever. To put it as simply as I can, if only because I've said this a hundred times, the game takes the very complex and delicate discussion of free will vs. good of the people and boils it down to black and white, objective right and objective wrong. You are the good guys because the people you go after are horrible people objectively, as deemed by reality itself, and everyone that stands against you is a terrible person as well. Your power never goes to your head, you always remain more or less focuses on the task at hand, and even when you go out of your way to take someone down, they deserve it anyways because they were monsters anyways. You do nothing wrong and the only reason why it DOES go wrong is because someone else has the same power as you do, who uses it only to kill people.

Been thinking hard about this and my answer is going to end up being Persona 5.

I was really put off by most things in P5. The characters and story were so lacking, forced and off putting to me, compared to the great story and characters in P4, that I didn't enjoy any of my time after 5-8 hours. I ended up finishing it but boy was I glad when it was done. The game play aspect of it is the best Persona has been, but I would expect that to be the case from a series that does classic, turn based RPGs.

My original answer to this question was Andromeda but if I am speaking honestly I never expected it to be good, thus wasn't really disappointed by it. I was still super bummed at the state of that game being as poor as it was, but nothing from it's development and how they addressed it the 2-3 years before it came out left me with any faith it would be a worthy successor to the trilogy before it.

@woodyrson: Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 was just bad,. The second episode of few years ago was really good, linear but good. Here they made the wrong decision moving to open-world, a boring one, really empty and flat.

Add to that Sniper Elite 4 was WAY better, that destroyed SGW3.

Mass Effect: Andromeda. I am a big fan of Mass Effect 1 and 2, (I am lukewarm on 3) and I kind of kept a blind eye to the game for the most part because I did not want anything spoiled for me, I wanted that experience I had playing ME1 for the first time and going into it completely blind (I didn't play ME1 until 6 months before ME2, only picked it up because of a co-workers recommendation). But after the gameplay trailer got out, I couldn't help myself and checked that out. Got excited to see the refined gameplay and how smooth the action was and I felt that maybe they got it right this time, if a game has that smooth of execution of combat there must of been a decent amount of effort put into the rest of the game considering how long it's been since ME3. Hearing the news that ME:A was a technical mess, the writing was on a junior high level, and seeing the clips of the games goofs, and that video Brad shared of the T posing cut scenes, it was rather devastating.

Agents of Mayhem. Seeing the next Volition project roll out as a technical mess, with no multiplayer was extremely disappointing. My buddy and I were looking forward to causing trouble in the next sandbox stylized comedic world crafted by these talented folks that brought us the Saints Row games. But I suppose it just was not meant to be.

Strafe. Oh man, the marketing got me hooked into this game hard. I loved the visual style this game had plus the promotional material they created for this game hit all the right notes to grab my attention. I was pumped for a FPS arena shooter that just focused on shooting, gore, and the fast pace super twitchy gameplay from the 90's. But hearing about the games clunky generation and technical issues, unusual gameplay design choices that to me seemed to be counter intuitive to what the proposed premise was to be; I was left feeling they spent 90% on flair and 10% on substance.

Andromeda, it wasnt terrible just really bland and felt completely unnecessary.

I did find Persona 5 pretty disappointing, maybe because I was expecting a few more changes to the formula. There is something so frustrating about being confined to your room by a cat. I have high tolerance for linear stuff in RPGs usually but this aspect of the modern Personas grates on me more with each game.

Also, Ryuji hit a new series low for me in terms of character likability. I even liked Ken better than him, and I didn't think that would be possible.

If I had to pick something.. it would be Zelda.

It just wasn't what I want out of Zelda game. Also I came right off of platinum'ing Horizon.

Edit: Thinking about it and looking at my GOTY list in progress.. I didn't really play any of the stuff often mentioned in here. They weren't anything I was interested in to begin with. Just about everything I played this year was at least engaging/fun for me, others I didn't play enough of and so they fit into a backlog category, and the other stuff I just really enjoyed and was very impressed by. No clear dislikes for me so far.

Its funny to see so many Persona 5 mentions. That seemed predictable to me. I have no interest and haven't played any of them but hearing the reverence for P4G on Giant Bomb you'd think that game was some unbelievable new thing.. To me it just looks like another weird JRPG. I feel like P4G was a lot of peoples first time or re-entry into the genre and they had crazy expectations for the next one. It just can't live up to what people have imagined (like nostalgia) in their heads P4G was, and if they went back and played P4G they'd be like.. "oh.. it was like this." I'm probably wrong though and people will tell me otherwise :P

For me, it is one of two games:

Horizon: Zero Dawn - I probably could have seen this one coming had I paid more attention to pre-release coverage, but I was sold after the E3 presentation a few years back. It looked like a gorgeous game with an interesting story to tell. The final version was very much both of those things, but it was also another monotonous open world adventure with way more checkbox filling than meaningful content. I loved the first two hours of the game, but as soon as the world opened up I was out.

Yooka-Laylee - I didn't hate the game like a lot of media outlets did, and I actually had a good time with a game to a point. About halfway through, though, it becomes such a slog as it feels like you've seen everything the game has to offer.

I'm typically in the 'rarely disappointed because I know what to expect' camp and I was still letdown by Mass Effect:Andromeda after playing ~7 hours of the 10 hour demo last month. Knowing full well what people had to say about the story / writing issues, I just didn't think it would be so flat and boring. One too many droning conversations with SAM reminded me of how fun the other games were and how this one just wasn't.

Yeah..it's hard not to say Andromeda.

Like I came to terms with and mostly enjoyed what it was but I'd be lying if I said that it was anything like what I really wanted it to be.

Ultra Street Fighter 2: The Final Challengers for the Nintendo Switch. Leaving out the car destruction intermission is inexcusable.

Jackbox Party Pack 4

Every year I buy these because they're great fun to play around Christmas with the family or with friends throughout the year but the line up of games this time around is by far the weakest. I'd love a new You Don't Know Jack but it feels like they'd rather make a new Fibbage or Quiplash.

I want to say Mass Effect Andromeda but I never played it. I totally would have but the word-of-mouth and my secondhand understanding of how badly EA royally fucked its staff in that production made me decide against it.

I will say I'm saddened by how little i attached to Splatoon 2. I don't think it's bad by any means but I just went "Man, this sure is Splatoon" and just kinda left it after a week or two. Compared to how obsessive I was for the first, this saddens me.

Yakuza Zero. The pacing is molasses slow, and after maybe 20 hours in I am struggling to continue to play this. I am a huge fan of the series and this one is just painful for me.

NieR: Automata

Andromeda for sure - Shadow of War really hasn't snagged me in the same way as the first. Could be like the guys said on the bombcast where the first was just SO new and during a relatively dry year that it surprised, but this one feels bigger but less inspired.

Mafia III was also a big let down, the story and direction were good for a bit but once it opened up I just totally lost interest as it lost direction. I'd much rather they scale back the open world part of that game and tell an incredible story.

I'd have to say Wolfenstein II. I was in love with the first, and even really enjoyed The Old Blood. I wasn't a fan of watching cutscenes every 15 minutes. It felt like the game was all too happy taking the control out of my hands to SHOW me a cool story, rather than letting me EXPERIENCE it. Sure, it had some fantastic moments, and some of the writing was awesome, but I simply felt like it wasn't worth the price of admission (at least now.)

I was also relatively unhappy with how they displayed all of the political stuff. Sure, the Nazis are evil and disgusting, we get it. Yes, the object of the game is to kill Nazis. But instead of once again letting us EXPERIENCE how bad they are first hand (which the first game allowed us to do often,) this game feels more like all that is taken for granted. The story has some gaping holes in it, but I was willing to forgive those. I also wasn't a fan of Grace, the leader of the BRM. I accept that showcasing a black revolutionary front could have been great if it was handled well.

It wasn't.

She was shown as a complete asshole, someone willing to ridicule and talk shit to all of the Kreisau circle from the start, even dictating the way their operation should be run. Despite the original cast doing so much in the first game, they were relegated to willing supplicants as soon as she showed up. She was hardline, tasteless and obtuse. I would have much prefered collaboration between the groups rather than some form of dominance heirarchy (something which the Nazis are ostracized for and quite rightly.)

I just wish the writing had more of a deft hand applied to it. It seems they tried to cash in on the current political climate with it's story while offering nothing new to the series narratively.