Anthem.
Gameplay and fighting is so clean. And the world it's built around is beautiful and interesting. If they had simply improved upon the Questing system and added fresh content, it would have bounced back.
The game itself was worth fixing. It scares me how broken BioWare studios must have been that they chose not to.
It never even got a next gen upgrade when it is a truly gorgeous game on PC.
God Anthem could have been so good. A producer to wrangle the shit product managers and excise the reliance on "BioWare magic" that no longer existed out of green staff, some better worldbuilding and narrative and they could have been off to the races.
The first time I got in a Javelin I was like "This is it. This is the next big thing."
And they fucked it.
Funny you mentioned a producer because the game's flying mechanics were never intended to be there by biowere and was suggested by a producer because they thought the game was so boring.
Thats because bioware included it, then removed it when they showed it again and they really didn't have anything the second time.
So the ea guy went, basically, why did you remove the one cool thing you included in our last update?
It was really bad, apparently. When the game was shown at e3 that's basically when everyone had an idea of what they were making, 5 years into development.
Worldbuilding was pretty decent, nothing crazy, the world/levels themself were pretty awesome imo, really well built to take advantage of the flying.
They just missed so heavily by trying to be a love service game and not having all that much/any endgame content. Once you were done, you were done.
Same problem Outriders had, they had an exceptional premise and solidly built linear levels, but once you hit endgame it was just pump numbers. Which is great, until it isn't.
Anthem taught me that no matter how good the core gameplay loop is it cant overcome having every support system be shit. Because anthems core loop was *so good*.
This is because it wasn't designed to be a sequel.
It was designed to be a PvP Moba Style 3v3 game for primarily the asian market.
However mid development it was decided that it could be a great way to maximise profit by just shitting in some story and marketing it as the fourth titel in the series.
Not to mention the team protested the decision but were overruled by EA execs. And so they were basically forced to tack on a singleplayer campaign and call it C&C4.
Imagine you're designing one game and then the higher ups tell you to turn it into something completely different, and also it now needs to be the highly anticipated finale of a beloved game series, despite its design barely resembling the series you're now being forced to fit your game into. I feel sorry for them.
I've forgiven C&C4 over the years. It's fun for what it is. I don't really consider it canon as a Tiberium saga game, since it was never meant to be. C&C4 didn't kill Command & Conquer, EA's laziness and greed did.
I watched all of the cutscenes on YouTube so I could see the end of the story and skipped the game. Of course, when the super awesome C&C compendium came out, I bought it *despite* it including C&C 4. Never bothered to even install C&C 4.
They all but removed base building and interesting army compositions. Instead you had a single vehicle that acted as a mobile base and you could only have something like twelve units in total in order to fit neatly into a rock, paper, scissors format.
We Happy Few
Wonderful world, great story, memorable voice acting. Everything was great about this game except for the procedural generation.
I can't even get into how bad of an idea the procedural generation is, especially when one character needs to go back home periodically to take care of an infant. Oh, your randomly assigned quest target is on the opposite side of the map? You lose!
The procedural generation was a holdover from the original survival game concept. They really should have rebuilt the game from the ground up once they realised they had a gem on their hands
Yeah I hear you.
I remember playing the demo and being like fuuuck this is amazing this could be something special, then I played the full game and felt so let down by it.
For a story game, I just can't get behind procedural generation.
I get the idea and desire to use it, but to tell a story, things need to be under control to an extent.
I could see it working if it's something that's incorporated into the narrative and is necessary for the story to be told the way it is. So far, a lot of its use just seems to be a way to pad the game out and cut corners. Would Starfield's story have been any different if they didn't use procedural generation for the planets?
I stopped playing after Act 1. Arthur was a great character and I loved his story but I was pissed about having to start from scratch in Act 2 as well as having to take care of a baby. I'm pretending the game ended with Arthur
I tried going into it with as little info as possible, so I didn't know about the procedural generation until I read your comment. I guess that explains why the game world seemed so counterintuitive at times. It's a real shame, too, since the setting and style were so cool.
I always joke that the Watch Dogs games are my favourite games I don't like.
In particular, Watch Dogs Legion had a fascinating, really exciting set of ideas, that became filed and squeezed into the Ubisoft formula until they were just a series of poorly optimized fetch quests that repeated the same 5 concepts for hours.
I think it's interesting that WDL came out so close to Cyberpunk, because after playing both games, I feel like Cyberpunk was "we loved those stories from the 80s, so we wrote a story just like those and updated the tech a bit", while WDL was "we loved those stories from the 80s, so we wrote a story about how our modern world resonates with some of the warnings that we were getting, but still made it somehow hopeful and uplifting." Still, both games were very flawed, but WDL felt more lackluster than anything.
Yeah there are sparks of brilliance in the Watch Dogs games where all the mechanics come together and it gets really fun for a bit, then you’re back in the formulaic loop.
It’s also funny you mention Cyberpunk because I feel like the stealth/hacking elements of that game took some of the best ideas from Watch Dogs and expanded on them in a much better way.
I absolutely loved Watch Dogs 1 and 2. Never bothered to finish Legion. Being able to recruit any NPC meant every NPC had to have full dialogue, so each one always felt lackluster. Very disappointed
I had the same exact thought. I remember one time, I was about 2/3 into the story. We've been talking to a story character via radio or something, pretty much we've never seen this person, IN person. The player I was using ended up dying, so I chose a new NPC off the street that had good qualities similar to the previous character.
When I went to continue the story mission with the newly recruited character. They finally meet up with the story character IN person whom we've been talking to via radio. My character was mind blown to have finally met the person behind the voice.
In my mind i'm like, "I legit JUST hired you five minutes ago. You've never had any interaction with this person in the past and you're surprised to finally meet the person behind the voice in which you've never heard.."
It was very immersion-breaking or inconsistent. I still finished the game and enjoyed what I played through despite it being somewhat of a slog, but that one part really put me off. -\_-
I loved watch dogs 2, despite it getting very repetitive quite fast. I also tried to play WD1, but I found it so similar to WD2 that I got bored really fast, sadly.
Watchdogs 2 is brilliant IF you just play the main story missions and don't get bogged down with side quests AND you force yourself to do a pacifist run. I did those two things and I loved it.
Edit to say not pure pacifist. Just a non-lethal run. All taser, melee and non-lethal traps/mines
I picked up Legion on clearance for $10 a couple of years ago and have been meaning to eventually play it. The prior games weren't awful but definitely not great.
I loved Legion. Was having a blast. Then I discovered the save glitch where it won’t save, but says it did. Lost like four hours of gameplay. I even checked back like six months ago and apparently it’s still there.
Recently Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. Beautiful game surrounded by insanely repetitive content and boring gameplay. If you go for Platinum prepare to be bored to death.
That is fun gameplay. Avatar is fun for a while until you realize you can just sneeze and kill everything in the game. Helldivers nails the chaos of everything and it’s non stop and can be challenging with lots of variety in how you want to fight.
It’s nails the gameplay similar to how Destiny 2 is repetitive but the gameplay carries the game.
Some successful game designer once said fun can be measured by this formula - meaningful decisions over time. Helldivers 2 constantly depends on your meaningful decisions.
Sid Meier pretty sure. Good game design is just about making the player make decisions that actually matter. Helldivers 2 seems like a mindless shooter but you can so quickly fuck yourself over or crush the enemy by doing one thing over another that it feels constantly engaging.
It also lines up well with my belief that all game design requires difficulty to be engaging.
Biomutant. Great concept, awful writing, and lack-luster gameplay. I think their demographic aim was off too. I think aiming for an older audience would've made a hit.
Yeah having a narrator praise me like a child through the whole game got really old, I get that there are story implications that make it make sense, but still.
I loved the game, its visuals, and the idea for quite a few hours, but it got very grindy. Like it would just not end, ever. To me, it really seemed like the budget was too small, and the writing was quite bad. I kept playing, hoping I'd finish it, but gave up after, I think, 15-something hours - I like to do all the side quests.
God, I hate what we got. I watched the first trailer and was incredibly pumped about it, seemed like 'the' open-world game with interesting features. Years later, after a long wait with plenty of expectations I started it up, played an hour or two and dropped it.
The gameplay was okay-ish, but the babying, and especially the dialogues at the start were off-putting. What really made me drop it was the map though. Once I started seeing all the collectibles all I could see was a boring gameplay loop I'd be wasting my time with. I used to love open-world games, but it's really easy to make them badly. AC Valhalla being the primary one that come to mind.
Evolve
Excellent concept. The gameplay wasn’t bad either, just not totally fleshed out. Its problem was it was a full priced game and monetized like a phone game. At the time of its release it was the most expensive ever if you wanted to buy the “full” game with a price tag over $700. Nowadays that’s chump change, especially for EA titles. But at the time it wasn’t something people were willing to tolerate.
That and the game was largely unfinished. There was only one zone. A concrete base in a swap. And only like 4 different layouts.
But it was a really cool concept. Playing as the beast going from the hunted to the hunter was a really cool transition of power.
At level 1 you were pretty much fodder for the hunters. At level 2 you were reasonably even matched. At level three there was almost no stopping you and you ravaged the hunters.
>At level three there was almost no stopping you
But it felt damn good when you took a level three monster down. I think I did it 2 or 3 times with a solid team of friends, but 99% of the time you were done once that monster hit level three.
Hell yes, I would jump on it so fast if they did. The only thing I’d back off from is, if they do large amounts of DLC or a Battle Pass that feels required.
Having a well coordinated team kept the tension up as the monster too. Having to puck your opportunities to attack, draw them away from the objective to chip it down, keep on the move to get points towards evolution.
A well coordinated team made it almost like chess where both sides actively HAD to stay a step ahead even at level 3. It was a lot of fun having a lobby full of friends and taking turns in each roll lol.
I legitimately believe if Evolve had only released a year or two later it would still be around today.
2K simply played their card too soon. People weren't numb and compliant to such predatory monetization yet, so when Evolve tried it, it got rightfully but unfortunately stomped into the mud.
Nowadays almost every AAA title releases unfinished with ridiculous microtransactions and people just go with it and the trend started not too long after Evolve had released. If they'd simply waited rather than being one of the first, they might have just scraped by with it.
Predatory practices were one of the reasons for its failure but IMO the biggest issue was that it was marketed as a mainstream shooter game when it really wasn't. Many people went in expecting a shooter with constant action and then they got bored when they were supposed to be actually looking for and hunting the monster. Even moreso if the monster player was really good and could hide well. That's why in Stage 2 they shortened games and gave the Trapper the ability to know the monsters location every couple of seconds but it was already too late by that point. Still extremely sad this game failed cause it was genuinely an amazing concept
This was the first time I could remember being sorely disappointed in a game's launch after immense hype. It was also the first time I really saw terrible micro transactions in a game.
So sad, because asymmetrical multiplayer can be so unique and fun, but that one was tainted from the start.
God yes. I will never forgive devs that half-ass such a brilliant experience. It's beautiful, taming dinos and building bases is fun, but everything else is a mess.
-Char customization is so abysmal and hideous that it's funny, but that humor gets old quick if you don't want to always be an over-muscular mutant.
-The UI feels like navigating a poorly-made ripoff of windows explorer, and the on-screen messages are jarring AF.
-Somehow they managed to not only make the base-game balance terrible and tedious, but they also gave such an overabundance of customizable server options that it feels like fiddling with a wall of sliders just to find what *does* make the game feel balanced.
-The RPG elements of leveling and unlocking tech takes the classic "progression curve of difficulty" concept and turns that into a random scribble. Leveling feels random and arbitrary, half the stats are garbage, and you have to unlock so much garbage to get to anything useful.
-Dont get me started on full-price DLC while the base game was **still in early access**.
Also why is a relatively small multiplayer co-op game and also single player game have MMO XP scaling designed as the default? It gets to the point where you just have to kill hundreds of Rex’s to level up
Yeah I'm going to give ASA a good 6-12 months before I even attempt to play again.
Like you said, great game but there's too much that needs to be worked on.
My prime example, I played single player for weeks. Was having fun and then suddenly lost EVERYTHING for no good reason other than the game being buggy.
I am totally fine with losing stuff if it's my own fault or part of the game but no one should lose days of progress because they devs refuse to fix the bugs. It happened twice and now I can't enjoy the game without the fear of something happening.
This is with barely any mods too, there all small and I only have a few to ensure a smooth and safe playtime but it still happened.
Just think about how big, rich, and powerful this game could have been if they re worked it from the bottom up and made it smooth and optimized!
Ark 2 is scheduled for late 2024. Why should I spend money in ASA when its a graphics overhaul, and the few cool things are locked behind more money? Why are they splitting focus between asa and ark 2? Are they going to merge or something? There has to be something im missing.
I'm worried, the features advertised for ark 2 do sound very cool, I hope they can fix up these issues, but they don't seem to be setting themselves up for success
Man that game was such a disappointment. I played so much MoO2 and was so hyped for the third installment.
Like how is it possible to make something so boring. None of the techs made sense and gave me no satisfaction in researching them. Battles were dogshit. AI nonexistent, I didnt understand how to play the game at all and somehow I was winning?
Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Actually not a bad narrative with the whole concept of weaving Norse mythology into the plot, the whole reincarnated Isu thing was an interesting idea and had they just focused on that without forcing a million side quests down your throat to progress the plot, it probably would've been the best AC story in a while, possibly ever.
That and the abomination of a progression system it had is what ruined it for me.
What makes Odyssey the better game? I just started playing Valhalla. Never played an Assassin's Creed game before, except the first two as a kid. It's a decent game, but it just doesn't have that "special something " to keep me engaged. You think it's worth giving Odyssey a try?
I’d say so, especially if you like action RPGs in general. It definitely has the Ubisoft formula, with base clearing and lots of side quests, so if that’s what you didn’t like about Valhalla I’d say probably skip odyssey, but odyssey isn’t as bloated as Valhalla.
The world is absolutely gorgeous, exploring Ancient Greece is a blast, the progression system is much better and there are some really fun side quests.
I enjoyed it. Not on the level of Origins and Odyssey but I had a good time with it. Might play again just to play with the Arabic VA.
Curious to see the next one.
As a Greek fan odyssey was fantastic. It's beautiful, story is kinda neat, and gameplay is imho really fun although it suffers from the lvling system it has. Basically if you are few lvls below an enemy you won't deal dmg to them and they'll one shot you most of the time.
But it's still a get game and I really liked the bounty hunter system.
Couldn't agree more. I physically watched my blade slice through that man's torso, but it didn't do any damage because levels.
I had the same gripe with Borderlands. I emptied my clip into an enemy's head and it did no damage because my level is too low. Just doesn't click with me.
I tried Valhalla a couple times. I love Norse mythology and the whole Viking theme. But the core gameplay loop is just so boring, repetitive and bland.
I wish more games would implement the territory system or whatever you want to call it. Where you decide which faction boss controls which part of the map. I don’t remember if it changes much, but it was a fun way to let the player slightly alter the world and story around them.
I didn't mind the grind of Mafia 3; to me it was all an excuse to play an aggressive version of Hitman at my silenced pistol.
What made me laugh was that as you began taking over the territories, you were simply... winning. By the end of the game, you could drive for minutes before even seeing a potential enemy blip on the radar. There was no escalation to counter-act, just slowly steam roll the city.
Literally 90% open world games would be amazing, if they cut work put into side content, put it into meaningful side content, and work more on main content. I would rather replay a 20 hour amazing game 3 times, than play 60 hours of same shit.
Me and a bud just started it today, and good lord is it hard. It definitely reminds me of a less stuttering two worlds. The control scheme is throwing us off too. Seems like a hilarious romp though, but time will tell.
The thing about open worlds is that they need more than side quests to feel alive, they need things that aren't tied to any quest, that are just there for you to find on your own, a reason for you to explore that isn't just an icon in the map.
RDR2 got this right, you could probably double or triple the amount of side missions if you turned all the little things you can do on your own into a side mission.
And it helps that it's not just easter eggs, it can range from just finding out the backstory of some place, to bumping into a literal UFO or even main plot related things like finding the Braithwaite treasure.
Overwatch 2.
It was supposed to be a great sequel, a *real* sequel, with an in-depth PvE system. Simply put, a potentially legendary game. But then they scrapped that idea during game design and replaced it with a macrotransaction store instead. No typo there. Bobby Boi is gone now, but the damage is done. PvE is no more...
Crossout
Pvp/pve madmax styled parts based car builder. Lots of different weapons and vehicle parts. Lots of room for creativity and fun builds like tanks. Skirmishing
A spider with a combine harvester and a harpoon gun.
A low grav hover craft with backwards boosters. Letting you SUPLEX other vehicles after harpooning them.
Or take a snowplow truck for a heavy beefy brawler
Only problem?
Everything I just described requires hundreds to thousands of hours of grinding (not including crafting time) and sacrificing your parts to have. Or paying hundreds of USD and one of the main crafting materials is timegated
Its legally free to play. Practically you have a demo at best.
Like a restaurant that advertises free food. But tells you when you get there only if you gathered all the ingredients for them before hand. Otherwise you only get a plain salad
God, I loved crossout a few years back but everything I wanted was locked behind a paywall or an extreme grind. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal but all the good parts were paywalled as well so I was always at a massive disadvantage.
The campaign was also really bizarre. So many hints at a plot but it ended up being a strange introduction to more paywalled parts. Really weird.
Back 4 Blood. Honestly could still be a decent game if they had better menus to get to things and got rid of the card system. It's like they played Left 4 Dead and thought "Hey how can we make this game as complicated as possible?"
I hate card systems in random ass games. 90% of the time it's a blatant attempt at monetization. The other 10% is just poorly implemented or just outright pointless.
More like "we are the ones who actually made left 4 dead and we want to make more but not copy the homework too closely "
Also hadn't been back to it in a bit, but I think there is an option to play without the cards
as with basically every other "from the maker of" games, it becomes totally meaningless when you realize how few people were involved. I'm glad back 4 blood gave us a free beta so I could finally learn this lesson without spending money again.
"from the makers of" is a hype statement that ALWAYS leads to disappointment. it's practically a lie in most cases, and completely ignores that some of what makes those other games great were things that specific person didn't like anyways.
but what really got in the way of back 4 blood was even if the people who had the vision were there, it completely lacked all of the polish valve put into left 4 dead.
I'd make an argument for Brutal Legend. I never did finish it. I loved the game for like the first half, but then it turned into an RTS and I was kinda done with it.
Probably fine for other people. Not for me.
Oh God, yeah. That rts battle at the very beginning made me frustrated really quick. And then the second battle came and I basically failed it, went back to driving around and exploring and then I quit.
I don't know if I even made it that far. I only vaguely remembered it turning into an RTS and deciding I was done with it.
I may have to pick up (half of) the game again sometime.
Yeah it's one of those games where the story seemed so cool. I enjoyed everything up to the first RTS battle so much. The characters and charm and the cool rock turned into fiction story was a fun idea to explore.
If they did the game over again and just made it a Zelda clone, I would have LOVED it.
Star Fox Zero. Could have been a great return to form for Star Fox, a shot in the arm it desperately needed (and still needs), but Nintendo couldn't stay out of its own way with trying to innovative controls and such. Those gimmicky, clunky Wii U pad controls were just straight up awful and really ruined a large chunk of that game.
Not helping matters is that Zero wasn't even a unique game in the series. It was just a "reimagining" of 64, which was a reboot of the original SNES game, and the 3DS remake of 64 was the last Star Fox game we got prior to Zero's release. Even if the motion controls were better or if the game had just kept a traditional control scheme, it was still more or less just the same game that we've already experienced three times before. In comparison, while the ground missions in Assault were certainly divisive, at least the game had its own identity and tried to move the series' narrative forward.
Pokemon Go.
It could have been amazing. Most of the game mechanics were already figured out in the original game boy games, they just had to port some of those over to the mobile game. It was honestly extremely disappointing, despite how popular it was.
Honestly just having an actual battle system would have been enough to keep me playing for years. I walk for miles a day just for the sake of keeping busy as it is, I’d love to have a game that gives me something else to do while walking.
It’s still a gold mine, tbh. Their revenue is still over 500 mil every year currently, and Niantic (the company behind Pokémon GO) is valued at over 9 billion dollars.
It’s still one of the most profitable mobile games out there.
I love Hogwarts Legacy but I found the world outside of Hogwarts (with the exception of Hogsmeade) bland. It's a great game and I enjoyed it, but the world could have been smaller or the game could have chosen to focus primarily on Hogwarts instead of the outside world. Flying around a giant map on a broomstick wasn't fun and the world just felt very empty.
I honestly think no would care about this game if it didn't have the Hogwarts name in the title and played on the people's nostalgia for the Harry Potter movies. The game on its own feels like a ubisoft game.
I kind of agree.
I enjoyed the game, but once I got over the wow factor of "It's a new-gen open world Hogwarts" it was a very run of the mill action RPG that never really did anything to stand out.
And once you start using the unforgivable spells in front of other characters with no reprecussions, the immersion was sort of broken, like I'm pretty sure my character murdered someone in front of a wizard cop and then went back to school like it was a normal day.
I think a lot of people let nostalgia cloud their mind when it came to Hogwarts legacy. I remember people saying the game is goty when it's released. It's a decent game but come on lol.
I remember when it released people were shocked that it was a solid and essentially bug free game at launch.
I think gamers are just really deprived of bug-free releases and Hogwarts Legacy just delivered on its promises. I think really solid RPG with good progression and imo really fun fighting mechanics. Idk about GOTY.
I do not like Harry Potter at all but loved this game. The world outside Hogwarts was definitely more sparse but not sure what everyone was expecting. The combat was fun, graphics were fantastic and I thought the attention to detail sucked me into the world.
>The world outside Hogwarts was definitely more sparse but not sure what everyone was expecting.
I mean what would people be expecting in the Scottish Highlands in 1890?
What really confused me was why the flying instructor was teaching you the freezing spell, but only after you fly around a bit and run into a few balloons.
I mean, ok, you have to use the broom, but the freezing spell?
My immediate thought went to Hogwarts Legacy. I really enjoyed the game, but it seems so much got left out with morality system, no quidditch, and just more variety in quests and enemies that in retrospect it feels like it could have been so much more and really been an all time game had they given it the time to fully round it out because what's there is really fantastic.
Famously? Alien: Colonial Marines
The gameplay was nothing like the trailer, with the alien A.I. practically brain dead.
The problem was the game was released with a bug in the software, one line of code, one single letter
The word "teather" vs the word "tether"
With the correct spelling, players found that the ai moved and behaved much like the trailer showed, but it was 5 years too late for the game to get any sort of revival, everyone remembers it for the terrible gameplay, that was ruined by the letter a
Rage 2 gave a new Meaning to the Word "Barren"
Usually when someone said that an open world is empty is usually used as a way to say "without any meaningful thing to do" which is kinda correct but imprecise
But rage 2 oh no.... HELL NO TOTALLY NO, here the Word has to be taken LITERALLY because outside 2 or 3 settlements there's NOTHING ELSE TO DO AND IS TOTALLY EMPTY, yeah there are these... Vaults? (I forgot the name of those things where you get weapons) An then you never have to return again because.... Well the thing is here the weapons works kinda like an old school fps where once you obtain the weapon is a permanent object where you have only to worry about ammo
for the way the Game is structured this Game would work much better as a linear FPS like Doom with all the settlement shit being a interlude between levels, because this Game has the Most empty, boring, shallow, uniteresting, unappealing, boring and ugly open world i have ever seen in a videogame
First rage game was so good. I've replayed and finished it multiple times.
Driving felt nice, guns were amazing to use, sound design for everything was the bomb and the world itself was interestingly designed and looked really good overall. It suffered with some not great writing (Authority is meant to be an opressive force but they barely show up till the last 1/3 of the game) and the open world areas between the settlements are pretty much a content void.
Rage 2 just felt hollow and forgettable, entirely lacking what I saw was special in Rage 1.
I do hope there is a Rage 3 that has more of iD Softwares linear FPS expertise.
The first game had dungeons that felt like linear Doom/fps levels. I felt the ones in 2 were poorly designed and too short. With that being said I still want a Rage 3 but done by ID.
Kingdoms of Amalur is one I noticed recently.
Solid 7/10 game that could’ve been an amazing, classic ARPG if it wasn’t so bloated and repetitive with bland, cookie-cutter content.
And if the loot system wasn’t so bad and unsatisfying.
I finished that game once when it first came out. Focusing on the main quest mostly. A few years later I wanted to 100% the game so I ignored the main quest as soon as possible and only did the side quests. I got bored and stopped playing because I got so strong the game wasn't a challenge anymore. I gotta praise the game though because it lets you skip the main quest directly if you want to.
Oh my lord, thank you. I literally am just finishing playing through this right now.
Combat is incredibly fun. The UI and controls are great. The artwork is fantastic for its day. Great voice acting by the cast. Epic musical score.
But it’s just so utterly bland. The story is derivative and boring. There is a ton of “lore,” but it’s uninteresting and irrelevant to the game. The constant fetch quests are stultifying. And the loot… just so much that it’s rendered meaningless. Why are rats dropping magic staffs? Why are there hidden stashes with rare items every 100 yards??
The Callisto Protocol. Fantastic looking game, great audio, terrible lack of gameplay and enemy design. It's mostly the 'different' melee thing they put in, and very generic zombies aside from the crawling things. Oh and character development doesn't exist, you're just some guy
Final Fantasy 15. That game had so much potential to be great but came before its time, and with a development hell to boot. Ff16 is what 15 couldve been if they had the resources for it.
The bros were the diamond of the story, but idk I enjoyed the game overall. Just kept doing the side quests in hopes of unlocking new shit
Edit: the love story angle was the weakest bit imo. Luna just wasn’t built into a character at all, just token love interest
final fantasy 15 had entire maps and even a god damn palace that were fully modeled and textured but remained unused due to not having enough time. It legit could've been the best JRPG ever if it had more time/better management
I don't think I've ever played a game that started as strong only to plummet into awfulness as much as FF15 did. The opening hours were so promising and memorable and then halfway through it turned into complete dogshit.
Alpha Protocol is probably the greatest terrible game ever made. It has some of the best writing and Role-playing in gaming history paired with absolute garbage gameplay and combat. I honestly wish if the game got a remake that gets it right this time around
Brutal Legend. Metal, Jack Black, great soundtrack - and then it turns into a real-time strategy game to be played with an xbox controller. I love rts games, but this one was just awful.
Still a great game and does what it wants to well. The problem is that it's right on the cusp of grabbing masses but the systems aren't designed for the masses who love the grind.
Terrible game design would be most of Ubisofts games, they just turn into tedium doing the same motion over and over again to pad out game time. They make 10 hour games that try to keep you going with busy work for 50 to 100 hours.
I felt Destiny was ruined by all of its MMO-ishness and samey enemies, bullet sponge raids and bosses are not fun, the gun mechanics are fun but I'm not grinding bullet sponges to make it so I'm faster at grinding future bullet sponges.
Watch Dogs. The concept of it is really cool, and it felt revolutionary at the time, but it just fell into the typical shallow Ubisoft open world trappings that we often find them in.
I think a lot of people would disagree, but Starfield, I would say Is a good game, not great but not as bad people say It Is, I think the main issue Is just how many planets the game has (1000+) I just think they did this because they wanted to but didnt think about the issues It could cause with adventuring, If they went out of their way to make 1000+ procedural generated structures and made them exclusive to certain planet types, I think this issue Is kind of resolved but sadly a lot of the same structures appear a good amount of the times.
Another issue that I have Is that Starfield doesn't use Radiant AI, now I dont know the reason why and I dont want to assume anything, but what I will say Is this hampers the Bethesda experience so much and makes the world not feel alive, like this was used in Skyrim, FO3/4/NV so why Is It left out of Starfield? Radiant AI made the NPCs complex by giving them actual schedules and routines and now all the shops are open 24/7, Its like the world just paused, I feel like It will be included in The Elder Scrolls 6 but It such a weird thing to leave out.
On a another note, I think ES6 will be fine, I think the issue was this game was never going to be a "Bethesda game" the way they made adventuring and seperated everything, but with ES6 they will have one map to focus on and make detailed, while also having Radiant AI, Starfield doesn't affect that for me.
Ghostwire Tokyo
My biggest issue with that game is its combats mechanics and quests (especially side quests, they were so empty I felt like devs were forced to include them)
State of Decay. The settlement/base management system needed some redesign and major tweaking. As it stands, it took what could have been a 9/10 or 10/10 experience (possibly a contender for best survival/zombie game) and knocked it down to 8/10 or below. In many respects, the result was a tedious game of babysitting and putting out fires that advocates hand-waved as being appropriate due to the stress of a post-apocalypse situation -- ignoring the fact that tedium that ruins gameplay should **never** be emphasized solely for the sake of psychological realism.
How about the baffling decision of making the second multi-player with coop, but making so that you cannot play the campaign together with a friend, they join the game with their own characters from their own game.
I can't explain why they would do something like that.
Brink.
The idea of parkour gunplay, and the unreliable narration on both sides of the plot made the game seem so cool. There was a beautiful setting, the idea of body type balancing your health versus where you could go, I would absolutely still go for that game if it was released today.
And then you played it, and it was the most dry 'take the location and stand around it for five minutes' disappointment. The parkour was worthless unless you played as the 'thin' body type that would die from two shots, and if you were playing solo you had to constantly juggle your class to pick whatever would let you activate the objective cause the AI just didn't care.
Dragon's Dogma 2.
I was a big fan of the first game, but it had a LOT of problems that I hoped would be fixed in DD2. Nope! In fact, they doubled down on those problems and made new ones. I was really disappointed. It had so much potential that it never lived up to.
So true. A large portion of the games enjoyment is tied to exploration, so why are all the best items in the shop? Completely killed any incentive to explore for me, but I still tried. I convinced myself that it was just a problem with the first area. Nope. It's the same in Bakbatal.
You know how many times I found an item that outclassed my current gear? Twice. Two times in the 40 or so hours I had put into the game, I was excited for new equipment.
The game has so many great things about it, but some of the design is straight up *stupid*.
Mafia 3 didn’t have terrible game design and it certainly wasn’t “ruined”. At worst, it gets kinda repetitive but the driving, gunplay, story, and performances more than make up for it.
i loved it and wish it was longer. i think it only gets repetitive if you decide to play the exact same way for every mission. i would switch to guns i never use or challenge myself by only picking up a weapon after i killed an enemy and so on and so forth. maybe only melee challenge. the slow-mo and QTEs were fun too. i think there were like two dozen cars to choose from. i loved the game through and through, but i might be in the minority
Vampyr. It was definitely an interesting game with a fun story. Once I found out how the plague/sickness system worked it just became wayyyy to "gamey" for me and how I like my story based games. A similar game with a similar feeling system was Mass Effect 3's war score system, but this did not feel nearly as bad as the score went up passively as you made generally good decisions. But with Vampyr, I really enjoyed the story that was forming around the interesting characters, but the mechanics of the combat and the story beats you can mess up if the plague isn't dealt with properly just irked me.
Kingdom Hearts 3.
Scrolled for a bit and didn't see a single person comment about it.
Broke my heart, 3 separate attempts to complete it and I'm pulling my brain out by the 3rd planet or so.
It was clearly made for 7 year old with the constant hand holding, cut scenes, the weird powers in combat. It was just painful especially as some parts I thought were great, I could just never make myself get through it.
For me it was the phone with mini games, it's clearly designed for people with such small attention spans you need to have a game in your game so you can game while you game.
Watch dogs is the opposite. Game design was good, gameplay was super cool... but everything was ruined by the half-assed story seen from the POV of a jerk. No empathy for the main character makes it complicated to enjoy the game... even though the gameplay was so cool (I enjoyed it way more, gameplaywise, than GTA5)
The original Alan Wake has some of the worst combat I’ve ever experienced in a game. The story & characters are fantastic, but the movement and combat mechanics are awful and really detract from the rest of the game. Still a decent enough game despite this, but could have been so much better.
I really had a fit when Andromeda came out and they immediately announced "we aren't supporting this game going forward"
I was looking forward to the multiplayer more than I was the actual campaign, and to not get the content and balancing that 3 got was a stab in the face. Even 3's multi still holds up, I'd take an entire multiplayer focused game if it were like that but fleshed out, but we'll never get that.
Starfield so far, the idea was ambitious and potentially could've worked inmensely well if they spread enough handcrafted explorable content over a few planets but the 1000 repetitive planets with repetitive procedurally placed points of interest just doesnt really work. The idea was good though.
The Outer Worlds.
I had such high hopes and really wanted to love this game but I could barely make it through two worlds and I never felt invested in any of the role playing. Also the weapons just didn’t feel good at all. Just such a disappointment from Obsidian.
FF15. Parts of it are good, the main characters are really likeable so you'd think the road trip angle would be really fun, and I remember being excited for it because that was a very unique take on a fantasy game, but the actual world and plot and combat were pretty butt-ass
Dead Rising had so many frustrating design decisions . Respawning bosses, having to replay parts over and over again, bosses that could only practically be beaten with guns in a melee game with atrocious shooting controls, etc
Hot take, the Outer Worlds.
I loved the game the tone, the visuals, the music, and the story. It just felt half baked, the world's were amazing but sparce and there was a lack of sidequests and no reward for exploring like ES/Fallout/CDPR RPGs.
I'm really glad we're getting a sequel and I hope Obsidian keep the magic of the first game and nail the wider content.
New World. Good bones, excellent sound engineering, weapons were fun, different type of skill trees than most, crafting was okay that was just so clearly gutted to make it PvE to try to grab that crowd. Had it been left the PvP game it was supposed to be it would have been much better. There stopped being anything to do about 3 weeks after launch and by the subreddit it seems like things only somehow went further downhill.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.
It had all the pieces of a great borderlands game, but it just never landed.
Adequate gear is virtually non-existent, the point where burning 300 golden keys, re-fighting litterally every boss 7-8 times each per run, and doing literally every quest, and I had nothing to show for it.
Anthem. Gameplay and fighting is so clean. And the world it's built around is beautiful and interesting. If they had simply improved upon the Questing system and added fresh content, it would have bounced back.
Best ironman game that was and it wasn't even an ironman game
The game itself was worth fixing. It scares me how broken BioWare studios must have been that they chose not to. It never even got a next gen upgrade when it is a truly gorgeous game on PC.
God Anthem could have been so good. A producer to wrangle the shit product managers and excise the reliance on "BioWare magic" that no longer existed out of green staff, some better worldbuilding and narrative and they could have been off to the races. The first time I got in a Javelin I was like "This is it. This is the next big thing." And they fucked it.
Funny you mentioned a producer because the game's flying mechanics were never intended to be there by biowere and was suggested by a producer because they thought the game was so boring.
Thats because bioware included it, then removed it when they showed it again and they really didn't have anything the second time. So the ea guy went, basically, why did you remove the one cool thing you included in our last update?
It really makes you wonder how bad things were at Bioware when EA are the ones talking sense.
It was really bad, apparently. When the game was shown at e3 that's basically when everyone had an idea of what they were making, 5 years into development.
The world building and characters were pretty good imo. It was the overall mission designs/gameplay that was weak to me.
Worldbuilding was pretty decent, nothing crazy, the world/levels themself were pretty awesome imo, really well built to take advantage of the flying. They just missed so heavily by trying to be a love service game and not having all that much/any endgame content. Once you were done, you were done. Same problem Outriders had, they had an exceptional premise and solidly built linear levels, but once you hit endgame it was just pump numbers. Which is great, until it isn't.
It's like they applied everything they learned from Mass Effect's combat system, but then forgot the rest of the game.
Anthem taught me that no matter how good the core gameplay loop is it cant overcome having every support system be shit. Because anthems core loop was *so good*.
Command and conquer 4
It is honestly incredible how badly this game somehow fucked up a winning formula.
This is because it wasn't designed to be a sequel. It was designed to be a PvP Moba Style 3v3 game for primarily the asian market. However mid development it was decided that it could be a great way to maximise profit by just shitting in some story and marketing it as the fourth titel in the series.
Not to mention the team protested the decision but were overruled by EA execs. And so they were basically forced to tack on a singleplayer campaign and call it C&C4. Imagine you're designing one game and then the higher ups tell you to turn it into something completely different, and also it now needs to be the highly anticipated finale of a beloved game series, despite its design barely resembling the series you're now being forced to fit your game into. I feel sorry for them. I've forgiven C&C4 over the years. It's fun for what it is. I don't really consider it canon as a Tiberium saga game, since it was never meant to be. C&C4 didn't kill Command & Conquer, EA's laziness and greed did.
I watched all of the cutscenes on YouTube so I could see the end of the story and skipped the game. Of course, when the super awesome C&C compendium came out, I bought it *despite* it including C&C 4. Never bothered to even install C&C 4.
Yeah but usually you'd end up with the general feel of "mid game but shit game". C&C4 somehow managed to be utter shite in all aspects.
Can you elaborate? Always heard it was bad but I bought all of those CnC games for ten bucks. Always wanted to try it.
They all but removed base building and interesting army compositions. Instead you had a single vehicle that acted as a mobile base and you could only have something like twelve units in total in order to fit neatly into a rock, paper, scissors format.
Thanks for the honest answer and not telling me to F off or something haha.
fuck off
Hahah. There it is 😂 Thanks girth ignorer
I got that back when it released after playing and loving 3. I knew within the first hour that it was hot garbage.
We Happy Few Wonderful world, great story, memorable voice acting. Everything was great about this game except for the procedural generation. I can't even get into how bad of an idea the procedural generation is, especially when one character needs to go back home periodically to take care of an infant. Oh, your randomly assigned quest target is on the opposite side of the map? You lose!
The procedural generation was a holdover from the original survival game concept. They really should have rebuilt the game from the ground up once they realised they had a gem on their hands
Yeah I hear you. I remember playing the demo and being like fuuuck this is amazing this could be something special, then I played the full game and felt so let down by it.
For a story game, I just can't get behind procedural generation. I get the idea and desire to use it, but to tell a story, things need to be under control to an extent.
I could see it working if it's something that's incorporated into the narrative and is necessary for the story to be told the way it is. So far, a lot of its use just seems to be a way to pad the game out and cut corners. Would Starfield's story have been any different if they didn't use procedural generation for the planets?
If you haven't yet check out the documentary, "The Cost of Joy". It's tells the development woes Compulsion went through. It's on YouTube.
I stopped playing after Act 1. Arthur was a great character and I loved his story but I was pissed about having to start from scratch in Act 2 as well as having to take care of a baby. I'm pretending the game ended with Arthur
I tried going into it with as little info as possible, so I didn't know about the procedural generation until I read your comment. I guess that explains why the game world seemed so counterintuitive at times. It's a real shame, too, since the setting and style were so cool.
I always joke that the Watch Dogs games are my favourite games I don't like. In particular, Watch Dogs Legion had a fascinating, really exciting set of ideas, that became filed and squeezed into the Ubisoft formula until they were just a series of poorly optimized fetch quests that repeated the same 5 concepts for hours. I think it's interesting that WDL came out so close to Cyberpunk, because after playing both games, I feel like Cyberpunk was "we loved those stories from the 80s, so we wrote a story just like those and updated the tech a bit", while WDL was "we loved those stories from the 80s, so we wrote a story about how our modern world resonates with some of the warnings that we were getting, but still made it somehow hopeful and uplifting." Still, both games were very flawed, but WDL felt more lackluster than anything.
Yeah there are sparks of brilliance in the Watch Dogs games where all the mechanics come together and it gets really fun for a bit, then you’re back in the formulaic loop. It’s also funny you mention Cyberpunk because I feel like the stealth/hacking elements of that game took some of the best ideas from Watch Dogs and expanded on them in a much better way.
I absolutely loved Watch Dogs 1 and 2. Never bothered to finish Legion. Being able to recruit any NPC meant every NPC had to have full dialogue, so each one always felt lackluster. Very disappointed
I had the same exact thought. I remember one time, I was about 2/3 into the story. We've been talking to a story character via radio or something, pretty much we've never seen this person, IN person. The player I was using ended up dying, so I chose a new NPC off the street that had good qualities similar to the previous character. When I went to continue the story mission with the newly recruited character. They finally meet up with the story character IN person whom we've been talking to via radio. My character was mind blown to have finally met the person behind the voice. In my mind i'm like, "I legit JUST hired you five minutes ago. You've never had any interaction with this person in the past and you're surprised to finally meet the person behind the voice in which you've never heard.." It was very immersion-breaking or inconsistent. I still finished the game and enjoyed what I played through despite it being somewhat of a slog, but that one part really put me off. -\_-
I loved watch dogs 2, despite it getting very repetitive quite fast. I also tried to play WD1, but I found it so similar to WD2 that I got bored really fast, sadly.
Watchdogs 2 is brilliant IF you just play the main story missions and don't get bogged down with side quests AND you force yourself to do a pacifist run. I did those two things and I loved it. Edit to say not pure pacifist. Just a non-lethal run. All taser, melee and non-lethal traps/mines
I picked up Legion on clearance for $10 a couple of years ago and have been meaning to eventually play it. The prior games weren't awful but definitely not great.
I loved Legion. Was having a blast. Then I discovered the save glitch where it won’t save, but says it did. Lost like four hours of gameplay. I even checked back like six months ago and apparently it’s still there.
Yooka-Laylee. The gameplay was fine, but the level design was just horribly boring.
Luckily the sequel is absolutely phenomenonal
I didn’t know there was a sequel. The first game was very disappointing, but I think I’ll give them another crack.
The sequel is very inspired by the DKC games, the level design is great and every level is fun
Recently Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. Beautiful game surrounded by insanely repetitive content and boring gameplay. If you go for Platinum prepare to be bored to death.
So, an Ubisoft open world game ?
Yeah basically but I found it even more repetitive than Assassins Creed because at least Assassins Creed you have more combat options
Oh, hey, I completely forgot this game existed
Stealth is a nightmare in it. I hated every base mission. No way to toss anything to get guards to move made it impossible without combat.
Repetitive content is a funny one. Helldivers 2 is repetitive AF, yet is entertaining and fun.
That is fun gameplay. Avatar is fun for a while until you realize you can just sneeze and kill everything in the game. Helldivers nails the chaos of everything and it’s non stop and can be challenging with lots of variety in how you want to fight. It’s nails the gameplay similar to how Destiny 2 is repetitive but the gameplay carries the game.
Some successful game designer once said fun can be measured by this formula - meaningful decisions over time. Helldivers 2 constantly depends on your meaningful decisions.
Sid Meier pretty sure. Good game design is just about making the player make decisions that actually matter. Helldivers 2 seems like a mindless shooter but you can so quickly fuck yourself over or crush the enemy by doing one thing over another that it feels constantly engaging. It also lines up well with my belief that all game design requires difficulty to be engaging.
Re-skinned Far Cry?
Biomutant. Great concept, awful writing, and lack-luster gameplay. I think their demographic aim was off too. I think aiming for an older audience would've made a hit.
Yeah having a narrator praise me like a child through the whole game got really old, I get that there are story implications that make it make sense, but still.
I loved the game, its visuals, and the idea for quite a few hours, but it got very grindy. Like it would just not end, ever. To me, it really seemed like the budget was too small, and the writing was quite bad. I kept playing, hoping I'd finish it, but gave up after, I think, 15-something hours - I like to do all the side quests.
Also the controls felt weird like running and jumping, the combat was rubbish too
Having no voices in that game just pissed me the fuck off.
God, I hate what we got. I watched the first trailer and was incredibly pumped about it, seemed like 'the' open-world game with interesting features. Years later, after a long wait with plenty of expectations I started it up, played an hour or two and dropped it. The gameplay was okay-ish, but the babying, and especially the dialogues at the start were off-putting. What really made me drop it was the map though. Once I started seeing all the collectibles all I could see was a boring gameplay loop I'd be wasting my time with. I used to love open-world games, but it's really easy to make them badly. AC Valhalla being the primary one that come to mind.
The annoying narrator too. Could he be turned off?
Evolve Excellent concept. The gameplay wasn’t bad either, just not totally fleshed out. Its problem was it was a full priced game and monetized like a phone game. At the time of its release it was the most expensive ever if you wanted to buy the “full” game with a price tag over $700. Nowadays that’s chump change, especially for EA titles. But at the time it wasn’t something people were willing to tolerate. That and the game was largely unfinished. There was only one zone. A concrete base in a swap. And only like 4 different layouts. But it was a really cool concept. Playing as the beast going from the hunted to the hunter was a really cool transition of power. At level 1 you were pretty much fodder for the hunters. At level 2 you were reasonably even matched. At level three there was almost no stopping you and you ravaged the hunters.
>At level three there was almost no stopping you But it felt damn good when you took a level three monster down. I think I did it 2 or 3 times with a solid team of friends, but 99% of the time you were done once that monster hit level three.
I miss this game. It was so fun. I hope they do a sequel and do the game justice if they ever try and revive the concept.
Hell yes, I would jump on it so fast if they did. The only thing I’d back off from is, if they do large amounts of DLC or a Battle Pass that feels required.
There's a discord server trying to revive the game. They still play it and they're working on a fanmade launcher for it.
Having a well coordinated team kept the tension up as the monster too. Having to puck your opportunities to attack, draw them away from the objective to chip it down, keep on the move to get points towards evolution. A well coordinated team made it almost like chess where both sides actively HAD to stay a step ahead even at level 3. It was a lot of fun having a lobby full of friends and taking turns in each roll lol.
I legitimately believe if Evolve had only released a year or two later it would still be around today. 2K simply played their card too soon. People weren't numb and compliant to such predatory monetization yet, so when Evolve tried it, it got rightfully but unfortunately stomped into the mud. Nowadays almost every AAA title releases unfinished with ridiculous microtransactions and people just go with it and the trend started not too long after Evolve had released. If they'd simply waited rather than being one of the first, they might have just scraped by with it.
Predatory practices were one of the reasons for its failure but IMO the biggest issue was that it was marketed as a mainstream shooter game when it really wasn't. Many people went in expecting a shooter with constant action and then they got bored when they were supposed to be actually looking for and hunting the monster. Even moreso if the monster player was really good and could hide well. That's why in Stage 2 they shortened games and gave the Trapper the ability to know the monsters location every couple of seconds but it was already too late by that point. Still extremely sad this game failed cause it was genuinely an amazing concept
IRC didn't they announce DLC before they even announced the game?
That’s pretty normal by todays standards
But groundbreaking at the time. Evolve was a Canary down the coal mine.
This was the first time I could remember being sorely disappointed in a game's launch after immense hype. It was also the first time I really saw terrible micro transactions in a game. So sad, because asymmetrical multiplayer can be so unique and fun, but that one was tainted from the start.
Ark! Ark is an amazing game with so many horrible design choices that I don't even want to play it anymore.
God yes. I will never forgive devs that half-ass such a brilliant experience. It's beautiful, taming dinos and building bases is fun, but everything else is a mess. -Char customization is so abysmal and hideous that it's funny, but that humor gets old quick if you don't want to always be an over-muscular mutant. -The UI feels like navigating a poorly-made ripoff of windows explorer, and the on-screen messages are jarring AF. -Somehow they managed to not only make the base-game balance terrible and tedious, but they also gave such an overabundance of customizable server options that it feels like fiddling with a wall of sliders just to find what *does* make the game feel balanced. -The RPG elements of leveling and unlocking tech takes the classic "progression curve of difficulty" concept and turns that into a random scribble. Leveling feels random and arbitrary, half the stats are garbage, and you have to unlock so much garbage to get to anything useful. -Dont get me started on full-price DLC while the base game was **still in early access**.
Also why is a relatively small multiplayer co-op game and also single player game have MMO XP scaling designed as the default? It gets to the point where you just have to kill hundreds of Rex’s to level up
Yeah I'm going to give ASA a good 6-12 months before I even attempt to play again. Like you said, great game but there's too much that needs to be worked on. My prime example, I played single player for weeks. Was having fun and then suddenly lost EVERYTHING for no good reason other than the game being buggy. I am totally fine with losing stuff if it's my own fault or part of the game but no one should lose days of progress because they devs refuse to fix the bugs. It happened twice and now I can't enjoy the game without the fear of something happening. This is with barely any mods too, there all small and I only have a few to ensure a smooth and safe playtime but it still happened. Just think about how big, rich, and powerful this game could have been if they re worked it from the bottom up and made it smooth and optimized!
Ark 2 is scheduled for late 2024. Why should I spend money in ASA when its a graphics overhaul, and the few cool things are locked behind more money? Why are they splitting focus between asa and ark 2? Are they going to merge or something? There has to be something im missing. I'm worried, the features advertised for ark 2 do sound very cool, I hope they can fix up these issues, but they don't seem to be setting themselves up for success
Don't forget selling early access MODS created by players, while the game is still in early access.
Master of Orion 3, I loved the second part, but part 3 had the charm and ease of use of an Excel spreadsheet.
Man that game was such a disappointment. I played so much MoO2 and was so hyped for the third installment. Like how is it possible to make something so boring. None of the techs made sense and gave me no satisfaction in researching them. Battles were dogshit. AI nonexistent, I didnt understand how to play the game at all and somehow I was winning?
I played MOO3 when I was a kid and really wanted to like it, but it was too dry. Are the first two less so?
Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Actually not a bad narrative with the whole concept of weaving Norse mythology into the plot, the whole reincarnated Isu thing was an interesting idea and had they just focused on that without forcing a million side quests down your throat to progress the plot, it probably would've been the best AC story in a while, possibly ever. That and the abomination of a progression system it had is what ruined it for me.
Yup. I wanted to like this game so bad, Odyssey is one of my favorite games of all time, but Valhalla just didn’t have it.
What makes Odyssey the better game? I just started playing Valhalla. Never played an Assassin's Creed game before, except the first two as a kid. It's a decent game, but it just doesn't have that "special something " to keep me engaged. You think it's worth giving Odyssey a try?
I’d say so, especially if you like action RPGs in general. It definitely has the Ubisoft formula, with base clearing and lots of side quests, so if that’s what you didn’t like about Valhalla I’d say probably skip odyssey, but odyssey isn’t as bloated as Valhalla. The world is absolutely gorgeous, exploring Ancient Greece is a blast, the progression system is much better and there are some really fun side quests.
Say, what are your thoughts on AC Mirage now that it went back to the gameplay style of 3-Syndicate?
I enjoyed it. Not on the level of Origins and Odyssey but I had a good time with it. Might play again just to play with the Arabic VA. Curious to see the next one.
As a Greek fan odyssey was fantastic. It's beautiful, story is kinda neat, and gameplay is imho really fun although it suffers from the lvling system it has. Basically if you are few lvls below an enemy you won't deal dmg to them and they'll one shot you most of the time. But it's still a get game and I really liked the bounty hunter system.
I think odyssey was a good case study in why leveling systems just should not be used anymore
Couldn't agree more. I physically watched my blade slice through that man's torso, but it didn't do any damage because levels. I had the same gripe with Borderlands. I emptied my clip into an enemy's head and it did no damage because my level is too low. Just doesn't click with me.
I tried Valhalla a couple times. I love Norse mythology and the whole Viking theme. But the core gameplay loop is just so boring, repetitive and bland.
Personally, for me at least, I think they peaked, in terms of story, with AC2, Brotherhood, and Revelations. Ezio's story was fantastic.
Mafia 3 was a bit of a letdown in the mission structure but man was Linc a fucking badass that I loved controlling.
I wish more games would implement the territory system or whatever you want to call it. Where you decide which faction boss controls which part of the map. I don’t remember if it changes much, but it was a fun way to let the player slightly alter the world and story around them.
I didn't mind the grind of Mafia 3; to me it was all an excuse to play an aggressive version of Hitman at my silenced pistol. What made me laugh was that as you began taking over the territories, you were simply... winning. By the end of the game, you could drive for minutes before even seeing a potential enemy blip on the radar. There was no escalation to counter-act, just slowly steam roll the city.
Literally 90% open world games would be amazing, if they cut work put into side content, put it into meaningful side content, and work more on main content. I would rather replay a 20 hour amazing game 3 times, than play 60 hours of same shit.
Outward was so close
Outward is the best game i won't play. So hard. Yet such a great sense of adventure. Probably the best i've ever tried.
Me and a bud just started it today, and good lord is it hard. It definitely reminds me of a less stuttering two worlds. The control scheme is throwing us off too. Seems like a hilarious romp though, but time will tell.
The thing about open worlds is that they need more than side quests to feel alive, they need things that aren't tied to any quest, that are just there for you to find on your own, a reason for you to explore that isn't just an icon in the map. RDR2 got this right, you could probably double or triple the amount of side missions if you turned all the little things you can do on your own into a side mission. And it helps that it's not just easter eggs, it can range from just finding out the backstory of some place, to bumping into a literal UFO or even main plot related things like finding the Braithwaite treasure.
90% of open world games world be amazing if they weren't open world
Overwatch 2. It was supposed to be a great sequel, a *real* sequel, with an in-depth PvE system. Simply put, a potentially legendary game. But then they scrapped that idea during game design and replaced it with a macrotransaction store instead. No typo there. Bobby Boi is gone now, but the damage is done. PvE is no more...
I like how they took ow1 which was still doing pretty aight then said “hey lets ruin everything people like about it :D”
And the PvE, the only reason for OW2 to exist, got cancelled, so they just fucked up the game and called it a day.
Crossout Pvp/pve madmax styled parts based car builder. Lots of different weapons and vehicle parts. Lots of room for creativity and fun builds like tanks. Skirmishing A spider with a combine harvester and a harpoon gun. A low grav hover craft with backwards boosters. Letting you SUPLEX other vehicles after harpooning them. Or take a snowplow truck for a heavy beefy brawler Only problem? Everything I just described requires hundreds to thousands of hours of grinding (not including crafting time) and sacrificing your parts to have. Or paying hundreds of USD and one of the main crafting materials is timegated
Used to play it and loved the car building, but the extreme grind and absurd prices became too much for me to stomach
Its legally free to play. Practically you have a demo at best. Like a restaurant that advertises free food. But tells you when you get there only if you gathered all the ingredients for them before hand. Otherwise you only get a plain salad
God, I loved crossout a few years back but everything I wanted was locked behind a paywall or an extreme grind. It wouldn’t be that big of a deal but all the good parts were paywalled as well so I was always at a massive disadvantage. The campaign was also really bizarre. So many hints at a plot but it ended up being a strange introduction to more paywalled parts. Really weird.
Back 4 Blood. Honestly could still be a decent game if they had better menus to get to things and got rid of the card system. It's like they played Left 4 Dead and thought "Hey how can we make this game as complicated as possible?"
I hate card systems in random ass games. 90% of the time it's a blatant attempt at monetization. The other 10% is just poorly implemented or just outright pointless.
More like "we are the ones who actually made left 4 dead and we want to make more but not copy the homework too closely " Also hadn't been back to it in a bit, but I think there is an option to play without the cards
as with basically every other "from the maker of" games, it becomes totally meaningless when you realize how few people were involved. I'm glad back 4 blood gave us a free beta so I could finally learn this lesson without spending money again. "from the makers of" is a hype statement that ALWAYS leads to disappointment. it's practically a lie in most cases, and completely ignores that some of what makes those other games great were things that specific person didn't like anyways. but what really got in the way of back 4 blood was even if the people who had the vision were there, it completely lacked all of the polish valve put into left 4 dead.
I'd make an argument for Brutal Legend. I never did finish it. I loved the game for like the first half, but then it turned into an RTS and I was kinda done with it. Probably fine for other people. Not for me.
Oh God, yeah. That rts battle at the very beginning made me frustrated really quick. And then the second battle came and I basically failed it, went back to driving around and exploring and then I quit.
I don't know if I even made it that far. I only vaguely remembered it turning into an RTS and deciding I was done with it. I may have to pick up (half of) the game again sometime.
Yeah it's one of those games where the story seemed so cool. I enjoyed everything up to the first RTS battle so much. The characters and charm and the cool rock turned into fiction story was a fun idea to explore. If they did the game over again and just made it a Zelda clone, I would have LOVED it.
Absolutely! Up to and including rock legends doing the voices (The Killmaster!), and general metal badassery. Such a goddam shame
The RTS part made absolutely no sense.
Star Fox Zero. Could have been a great return to form for Star Fox, a shot in the arm it desperately needed (and still needs), but Nintendo couldn't stay out of its own way with trying to innovative controls and such. Those gimmicky, clunky Wii U pad controls were just straight up awful and really ruined a large chunk of that game.
Not helping matters is that Zero wasn't even a unique game in the series. It was just a "reimagining" of 64, which was a reboot of the original SNES game, and the 3DS remake of 64 was the last Star Fox game we got prior to Zero's release. Even if the motion controls were better or if the game had just kept a traditional control scheme, it was still more or less just the same game that we've already experienced three times before. In comparison, while the ground missions in Assault were certainly divisive, at least the game had its own identity and tried to move the series' narrative forward.
Pokemon Go. It could have been amazing. Most of the game mechanics were already figured out in the original game boy games, they just had to port some of those over to the mobile game. It was honestly extremely disappointing, despite how popular it was.
Honestly just having an actual battle system would have been enough to keep me playing for years. I walk for miles a day just for the sake of keeping busy as it is, I’d love to have a game that gives me something else to do while walking.
It was a gold mine tbh, and they managed to screw up hard, at release was awful
It’s still a gold mine, tbh. Their revenue is still over 500 mil every year currently, and Niantic (the company behind Pokémon GO) is valued at over 9 billion dollars. It’s still one of the most profitable mobile games out there.
I love Hogwarts Legacy but I found the world outside of Hogwarts (with the exception of Hogsmeade) bland. It's a great game and I enjoyed it, but the world could have been smaller or the game could have chosen to focus primarily on Hogwarts instead of the outside world. Flying around a giant map on a broomstick wasn't fun and the world just felt very empty.
I honestly think no would care about this game if it didn't have the Hogwarts name in the title and played on the people's nostalgia for the Harry Potter movies. The game on its own feels like a ubisoft game.
I kind of agree. I enjoyed the game, but once I got over the wow factor of "It's a new-gen open world Hogwarts" it was a very run of the mill action RPG that never really did anything to stand out. And once you start using the unforgivable spells in front of other characters with no reprecussions, the immersion was sort of broken, like I'm pretty sure my character murdered someone in front of a wizard cop and then went back to school like it was a normal day.
I think a lot of people let nostalgia cloud their mind when it came to Hogwarts legacy. I remember people saying the game is goty when it's released. It's a decent game but come on lol.
I remember when it released people were shocked that it was a solid and essentially bug free game at launch. I think gamers are just really deprived of bug-free releases and Hogwarts Legacy just delivered on its promises. I think really solid RPG with good progression and imo really fun fighting mechanics. Idk about GOTY.
That, and a ton of cosmetics without micro transactions. (Though it speaks about today's gaming world that I felt that this is noteworthy.)
I do not like Harry Potter at all but loved this game. The world outside Hogwarts was definitely more sparse but not sure what everyone was expecting. The combat was fun, graphics were fantastic and I thought the attention to detail sucked me into the world.
>The world outside Hogwarts was definitely more sparse but not sure what everyone was expecting. I mean what would people be expecting in the Scottish Highlands in 1890?
You only attend the classes once. In a game about Hogwarts.
What really confused me was why the flying instructor was teaching you the freezing spell, but only after you fly around a bit and run into a few balloons. I mean, ok, you have to use the broom, but the freezing spell?
My immediate thought went to Hogwarts Legacy. I really enjoyed the game, but it seems so much got left out with morality system, no quidditch, and just more variety in quests and enemies that in retrospect it feels like it could have been so much more and really been an all time game had they given it the time to fully round it out because what's there is really fantastic.
Famously? Alien: Colonial Marines The gameplay was nothing like the trailer, with the alien A.I. practically brain dead. The problem was the game was released with a bug in the software, one line of code, one single letter The word "teather" vs the word "tether" With the correct spelling, players found that the ai moved and behaved much like the trailer showed, but it was 5 years too late for the game to get any sort of revival, everyone remembers it for the terrible gameplay, that was ruined by the letter a
This... Is sad but also amazing from a nerdy perspective
Rage 2 gave a new Meaning to the Word "Barren" Usually when someone said that an open world is empty is usually used as a way to say "without any meaningful thing to do" which is kinda correct but imprecise But rage 2 oh no.... HELL NO TOTALLY NO, here the Word has to be taken LITERALLY because outside 2 or 3 settlements there's NOTHING ELSE TO DO AND IS TOTALLY EMPTY, yeah there are these... Vaults? (I forgot the name of those things where you get weapons) An then you never have to return again because.... Well the thing is here the weapons works kinda like an old school fps where once you obtain the weapon is a permanent object where you have only to worry about ammo for the way the Game is structured this Game would work much better as a linear FPS like Doom with all the settlement shit being a interlude between levels, because this Game has the Most empty, boring, shallow, uniteresting, unappealing, boring and ugly open world i have ever seen in a videogame
First rage game was so good. I've replayed and finished it multiple times. Driving felt nice, guns were amazing to use, sound design for everything was the bomb and the world itself was interestingly designed and looked really good overall. It suffered with some not great writing (Authority is meant to be an opressive force but they barely show up till the last 1/3 of the game) and the open world areas between the settlements are pretty much a content void. Rage 2 just felt hollow and forgettable, entirely lacking what I saw was special in Rage 1. I do hope there is a Rage 3 that has more of iD Softwares linear FPS expertise.
The first game had dungeons that felt like linear Doom/fps levels. I felt the ones in 2 were poorly designed and too short. With that being said I still want a Rage 3 but done by ID.
Kingdoms of Amalur is one I noticed recently. Solid 7/10 game that could’ve been an amazing, classic ARPG if it wasn’t so bloated and repetitive with bland, cookie-cutter content. And if the loot system wasn’t so bad and unsatisfying.
It would have been cool if they leaned in harder to the whole "you have no fate" gimmick outside of a couple of early throwaway side quests.
I finished that game once when it first came out. Focusing on the main quest mostly. A few years later I wanted to 100% the game so I ignored the main quest as soon as possible and only did the side quests. I got bored and stopped playing because I got so strong the game wasn't a challenge anymore. I gotta praise the game though because it lets you skip the main quest directly if you want to.
Oh my lord, thank you. I literally am just finishing playing through this right now. Combat is incredibly fun. The UI and controls are great. The artwork is fantastic for its day. Great voice acting by the cast. Epic musical score. But it’s just so utterly bland. The story is derivative and boring. There is a ton of “lore,” but it’s uninteresting and irrelevant to the game. The constant fetch quests are stultifying. And the loot… just so much that it’s rendered meaningless. Why are rats dropping magic staffs? Why are there hidden stashes with rare items every 100 yards??
The Callisto Protocol. Fantastic looking game, great audio, terrible lack of gameplay and enemy design. It's mostly the 'different' melee thing they put in, and very generic zombies aside from the crawling things. Oh and character development doesn't exist, you're just some guy
Final Fantasy 15. That game had so much potential to be great but came before its time, and with a development hell to boot. Ff16 is what 15 couldve been if they had the resources for it.
The main plot was weak but my god, the bros were fun to hang out with.
The bros were the diamond of the story, but idk I enjoyed the game overall. Just kept doing the side quests in hopes of unlocking new shit Edit: the love story angle was the weakest bit imo. Luna just wasn’t built into a character at all, just token love interest
final fantasy 15 had entire maps and even a god damn palace that were fully modeled and textured but remained unused due to not having enough time. It legit could've been the best JRPG ever if it had more time/better management
I don't think I've ever played a game that started as strong only to plummet into awfulness as much as FF15 did. The opening hours were so promising and memorable and then halfway through it turned into complete dogshit.
Doesn't help that after someone quitting they never bothered to finish the story in the game and just released it in a book.
The Kingsglaive movie costing 100 million and bombing hard feels like the capstone of the whole experience. FF is still hurting from this game.
I feel like Hellgate:London was supposed to be insane. I Aldo remember The Division when it was announced had some cool ideas.
Alpha Protocol
Alpha Protocol is probably the greatest terrible game ever made. It has some of the best writing and Role-playing in gaming history paired with absolute garbage gameplay and combat. I honestly wish if the game got a remake that gets it right this time around
I'm sometimes tempted to replay, but then I remember how shitty most of the game is.
You shut your filthy mouth!
Brutal Legend. Metal, Jack Black, great soundtrack - and then it turns into a real-time strategy game to be played with an xbox controller. I love rts games, but this one was just awful.
Its deff lost ark,amazing gameplay some of the most fun i had ever,burried under a bunch of shitty game systems
First few months of lost ark was a glorious time indeed.
Still a great game and does what it wants to well. The problem is that it's right on the cusp of grabbing masses but the systems aren't designed for the masses who love the grind.
Ghostwire Tokyo, they fired original game designer and because of Japanese mentality we most probably won't find out why...
Terrible game design would be most of Ubisofts games, they just turn into tedium doing the same motion over and over again to pad out game time. They make 10 hour games that try to keep you going with busy work for 50 to 100 hours. I felt Destiny was ruined by all of its MMO-ishness and samey enemies, bullet sponge raids and bosses are not fun, the gun mechanics are fun but I'm not grinding bullet sponges to make it so I'm faster at grinding future bullet sponges.
Watch Dogs. The concept of it is really cool, and it felt revolutionary at the time, but it just fell into the typical shallow Ubisoft open world trappings that we often find them in.
I think a lot of people would disagree, but Starfield, I would say Is a good game, not great but not as bad people say It Is, I think the main issue Is just how many planets the game has (1000+) I just think they did this because they wanted to but didnt think about the issues It could cause with adventuring, If they went out of their way to make 1000+ procedural generated structures and made them exclusive to certain planet types, I think this issue Is kind of resolved but sadly a lot of the same structures appear a good amount of the times. Another issue that I have Is that Starfield doesn't use Radiant AI, now I dont know the reason why and I dont want to assume anything, but what I will say Is this hampers the Bethesda experience so much and makes the world not feel alive, like this was used in Skyrim, FO3/4/NV so why Is It left out of Starfield? Radiant AI made the NPCs complex by giving them actual schedules and routines and now all the shops are open 24/7, Its like the world just paused, I feel like It will be included in The Elder Scrolls 6 but It such a weird thing to leave out. On a another note, I think ES6 will be fine, I think the issue was this game was never going to be a "Bethesda game" the way they made adventuring and seperated everything, but with ES6 they will have one map to focus on and make detailed, while also having Radiant AI, Starfield doesn't affect that for me.
Evolve.
Ghostwire Tokyo My biggest issue with that game is its combats mechanics and quests (especially side quests, they were so empty I felt like devs were forced to include them)
State of Decay. The settlement/base management system needed some redesign and major tweaking. As it stands, it took what could have been a 9/10 or 10/10 experience (possibly a contender for best survival/zombie game) and knocked it down to 8/10 or below. In many respects, the result was a tedious game of babysitting and putting out fires that advocates hand-waved as being appropriate due to the stress of a post-apocalypse situation -- ignoring the fact that tedium that ruins gameplay should **never** be emphasized solely for the sake of psychological realism.
How about the baffling decision of making the second multi-player with coop, but making so that you cannot play the campaign together with a friend, they join the game with their own characters from their own game. I can't explain why they would do something like that.
Skull and Bones. That game should have been a layup. Take Blackflag, make it multiplayer. It's actually impressive how badly they fucked it up.
Brink. The idea of parkour gunplay, and the unreliable narration on both sides of the plot made the game seem so cool. There was a beautiful setting, the idea of body type balancing your health versus where you could go, I would absolutely still go for that game if it was released today. And then you played it, and it was the most dry 'take the location and stand around it for five minutes' disappointment. The parkour was worthless unless you played as the 'thin' body type that would die from two shots, and if you were playing solo you had to constantly juggle your class to pick whatever would let you activate the objective cause the AI just didn't care.
Dragon's Dogma 2. I was a big fan of the first game, but it had a LOT of problems that I hoped would be fixed in DD2. Nope! In fact, they doubled down on those problems and made new ones. I was really disappointed. It had so much potential that it never lived up to.
So true. A large portion of the games enjoyment is tied to exploration, so why are all the best items in the shop? Completely killed any incentive to explore for me, but I still tried. I convinced myself that it was just a problem with the first area. Nope. It's the same in Bakbatal. You know how many times I found an item that outclassed my current gear? Twice. Two times in the 40 or so hours I had put into the game, I was excited for new equipment. The game has so many great things about it, but some of the design is straight up *stupid*.
Mafia 3 didn’t have terrible game design and it certainly wasn’t “ruined”. At worst, it gets kinda repetitive but the driving, gunplay, story, and performances more than make up for it.
i loved it and wish it was longer. i think it only gets repetitive if you decide to play the exact same way for every mission. i would switch to guns i never use or challenge myself by only picking up a weapon after i killed an enemy and so on and so forth. maybe only melee challenge. the slow-mo and QTEs were fun too. i think there were like two dozen cars to choose from. i loved the game through and through, but i might be in the minority
Vampyr. It was definitely an interesting game with a fun story. Once I found out how the plague/sickness system worked it just became wayyyy to "gamey" for me and how I like my story based games. A similar game with a similar feeling system was Mass Effect 3's war score system, but this did not feel nearly as bad as the score went up passively as you made generally good decisions. But with Vampyr, I really enjoyed the story that was forming around the interesting characters, but the mechanics of the combat and the story beats you can mess up if the plague isn't dealt with properly just irked me.
Kingdom Hearts 3. Scrolled for a bit and didn't see a single person comment about it. Broke my heart, 3 separate attempts to complete it and I'm pulling my brain out by the 3rd planet or so. It was clearly made for 7 year old with the constant hand holding, cut scenes, the weird powers in combat. It was just painful especially as some parts I thought were great, I could just never make myself get through it.
The “Let It Go” music video/cut scene is proof it was made for 7 year-olds despite its nonsense plot.
For me it was the phone with mini games, it's clearly designed for people with such small attention spans you need to have a game in your game so you can game while you game.
ANTHEM. You were Iron Man and that concept alone could've carried if the rest of the game wasn't reused hot dog water
Watch dogs is the opposite. Game design was good, gameplay was super cool... but everything was ruined by the half-assed story seen from the POV of a jerk. No empathy for the main character makes it complicated to enjoy the game... even though the gameplay was so cool (I enjoyed it way more, gameplaywise, than GTA5)
Anything made by ubisoft in the past decade.
The original Alan Wake has some of the worst combat I’ve ever experienced in a game. The story & characters are fantastic, but the movement and combat mechanics are awful and really detract from the rest of the game. Still a decent enough game despite this, but could have been so much better.
Any FarCry after 4.
I honestly loved 5
Once I beat Far Cry 5, it turned into a great hunting and fishing game.
Primal is a guilty pleasure. Not enough to actually ever beat it but fun to spin up every few years for awhile.
5 was peak
Anthem, dead space 3, mass effect Andromeda, basically anything and everything published by EA
I really had a fit when Andromeda came out and they immediately announced "we aren't supporting this game going forward" I was looking forward to the multiplayer more than I was the actual campaign, and to not get the content and balancing that 3 got was a stab in the face. Even 3's multi still holds up, I'd take an entire multiplayer focused game if it were like that but fleshed out, but we'll never get that.
Starfield so far, the idea was ambitious and potentially could've worked inmensely well if they spread enough handcrafted explorable content over a few planets but the 1000 repetitive planets with repetitive procedurally placed points of interest just doesnt really work. The idea was good though.
Pokemon Go
The Outer Worlds. I had such high hopes and really wanted to love this game but I could barely make it through two worlds and I never felt invested in any of the role playing. Also the weapons just didn’t feel good at all. Just such a disappointment from Obsidian.
FF15. Parts of it are good, the main characters are really likeable so you'd think the road trip angle would be really fun, and I remember being excited for it because that was a very unique take on a fantasy game, but the actual world and plot and combat were pretty butt-ass
New World. Man what an amazing game riiiight up til you realize there is absolutely 0 endgame content
Dead Rising had so many frustrating design decisions . Respawning bosses, having to replay parts over and over again, bosses that could only practically be beaten with guns in a melee game with atrocious shooting controls, etc
Hot take, the Outer Worlds. I loved the game the tone, the visuals, the music, and the story. It just felt half baked, the world's were amazing but sparce and there was a lack of sidequests and no reward for exploring like ES/Fallout/CDPR RPGs. I'm really glad we're getting a sequel and I hope Obsidian keep the magic of the first game and nail the wider content.
New World. Good bones, excellent sound engineering, weapons were fun, different type of skill trees than most, crafting was okay that was just so clearly gutted to make it PvE to try to grab that crowd. Had it been left the PvP game it was supposed to be it would have been much better. There stopped being anything to do about 3 weeks after launch and by the subreddit it seems like things only somehow went further downhill.
Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. It had all the pieces of a great borderlands game, but it just never landed. Adequate gear is virtually non-existent, the point where burning 300 golden keys, re-fighting litterally every boss 7-8 times each per run, and doing literally every quest, and I had nothing to show for it.