Games that were Almost Great

[The Last Nomad]

Basically what the title says. What games have you played that were good or just OK or even awful, but were close to being much better, even great games?
Can you explain what kept them from being that much better?

A recent example for me would be the Terminator Salvation game. I bought it today and played through the first couple of chapters. At its base, its a decent 3rd person shooter with some very nice graphics and animations. It even has decent voice acting and characters. The T-800s (or whatever the skinless versions of Arnold S are called) are pretty damn hard to kill which makes them really fun to fight. The few other machines I've fought have been quite unique and fun to fight too.
It really does a good job of setting the atmosphere of a bleak war where the machines are trying to wipe out the humans only.
From what I've heard its only about 4 hours long (Which is awful for any game) and has no extra features. If the game had some extra features such as team deathmatch or something like fighting off waves of machines or other things that would occur in such a war would make the game great. and the campaign would need to be a lot longer too.

 

[Iwata]

As of late, probably "Homefront". The MP is fun and all, but I buy games for the single player. It was fun in that regard... while it lasted. It felt like a tutorial. I know shooter campaigns are usually short these days, but Homefront's felt like the tutorial for one of those short campaigns. And just when it started to get fired up... roll credits, game over.

A shame. I liked the story, I liked the setting, and it had some really fun maps and setpieces, but it felt like it was holding something back the whole time, and never delivered.

 

[The Wykydtron]

MGS2, then every single cutscene past the halfway point started being an hour long, Vamp shows up to invalidate about 2 hours of gameplay, nothing is said once when it can be said fifty billion times and the plot goes up the fucking wall. Also Rose.


2 words. Fuck. Nanomachines.

I'm still on the Metal Gear RAY boss fight, but i looked up enough shit to get the jist of the ending. Basically Kojima was being a prick. I'll watch an LP of it just to get some perspective but "prickish" can't be far off the mark.

EDIT: Oddly enough I was ok with Raiden, his constant objections to anything anyone said were hilarious.

And the cool/important cutscenes were far outweighed by the pointless recap/convoluted bullshit cutscenes.

Funny that the infinitely better MGS3 is the one where the word Metal Gear isn't even mentioned (presumably)

 

[Amethyst Wind]

Bayonetta. It's a great way to fill an afternoon because everything is overplayed in terms of story/characters/dialogue etc to the point of hilarity and the mechanics are pretty sound.

The only thing that really lets the game down is the extra abilities, which are next to damn useless and not worth the grinding it takes to unlock them.

Also there's really nothing to do after completing the game once.

A great rental, terrible purchase.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

MGS2, then every single cutscene past the halfway point started being an hour long, Vamp shows up to invalidate about 2 hours of gameplay, nothing is said once when it can be said fifty billion times and the plot goes up the fucking wall. Also Rose.


2 words. Fuck. Nanomachines.

I'm still on the Metal Gear RAY boss fight, but i looked up enough shit to get the jist of the ending. Basically Kojima was being a prick. I'll watch an LP of it just to get some perspective but "prickish" can't be far off the mark.

EDIT: Oddly enough I was ok with Raiden, his constant objections to anything anyone said were hilarious.

And the cool/important cutscenes were far outweighed by the pointless recap/convoluted bullshit cutscenes.

Funny that the infinitely better MGS3 is the one where the word Metal Gear isn't even mentioned (presumably)

Funnily enough I got the HD Collection yesterday. Started with MGS2, got a bit bored, went on to MGS3. I first played MGS2 years ago, with no prior knowledge to the previous game. It felt like my mind went through a blender, I had no idea what the fuuck was going on xD

 

[tippy2k2]

Heavy Rain

Don't get me wrong, it was a really good game. However, at it's core, the game is basically a mystery movie. What good is a mystery movie if you know who done-it?

To change it to great, it really should have had it so that the killer's identity changes every time you play based on your decisions. All of the main characters have actions that could point them as the killer, not to mention a large cast of NPC's who could also be the killer.

 

[The Madman]

Alpha Protocol

Story-wise it's fantastic but as an entertaining game it just sort of falls apart in places thanks to the mediocre combat mechanics, utterly imbalanced skill trees, and stupid irritating boss fights. Shame because otherwise all the parts are there for a genuinely stunning rpg experience. Dialogue was sharply written, conversations believable, the characters interesting and the story intriguing. Even the basic 'idea' of the gameplay was good, it's just in the execution it all sort of fell apart.

Still a decent game and definitely worth playing if you're an rpg fan. But it could have been so very much more. Pity!

 

[DoPo]

Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Awesome game but Activision sort of ruined it. It was built on basically a beta version of the Source engine and as such it's quite buggy. Also, Activision pushed the devs (Troika Games) to release the game as early as possible, which meant the with HL2 (they couldn't release it earlier because HL2 should have been the first game running on Source). It could have been way better. Forget the bugs, we can live with that, I've read previews and Troika intended to have a bigger open-er world. Well, at least more sandbox-y. It just didn't happen.

 

[Pseudopod]

KOTOR 2 is the first game to come to mind. It was rushed and very buggy with a lot of planned content not included in the release. It was a very, very good game, but stopped short of being great thanks to the lack of polish and just how much near complete content was left out.

 

[Wayneguard]

KOTOR 2 is the first game to come to mind. It was rushed and very buggy with a lot of planned content not included in the release. It was a very, very good game, but stopped short of being great thanks to the lack of polish and just how much near complete content was left out.

Oh God how much kotor 2 fits this topic. Shit just didn't work in this game; but, that didn't stop it from being utterly fantastic. It's just that it could have been so much better.

 

[ImProvGamr]

I'm going to put Star Ocean: Till the End of Timeon this list. I loved disc one: it had a great plot, interesting characters and pacing, and a fun although difficult battle system. For disc two though, the plot became impenetrable, the difficulty spiked WAY up with enemies that had simply cheap attacks, and by the end it had become such a convoluted mess that I had lost enjoyment in the game.

It's polarizing, really: disc one is a game I'm willing to hold up as one of my favorite RPGs of all time, while disc two is one that I consider one of the worst.

 

[LookingGlass]

Bloodlines, and KOTOR 2 are perfect for this thread,as previously mentioned. They just needed a more patient publisher to give the developers more time. Argh.

To go in a bit of a different direction... Crysis. The first half of the game was absolutely fantastic... but all of the "approach each encounter however you want" business goes flying out the window when you encounter aliens who take several dozen bullets to take down.

 

[The Wykydtron]

MGS2, then every single cutscene past the halfway point started being an hour long, Vamp shows up to invalidate about 2 hours of gameplay, nothing is said once when it can be said fifty billion times and the plot goes up the fucking wall. Also Rose.


2 words. Fuck. Nanomachines.

I'm still on the Metal Gear RAY boss fight, but i looked up enough shit to get the jist of the ending. Basically Kojima was being a prick. I'll watch an LP of it just to get some perspective but "prickish" can't be far off the mark.

EDIT: Oddly enough I was ok with Raiden, his constant objections to anything anyone said were hilarious.

And the cool/important cutscenes were far outweighed by the pointless recap/convoluted bullshit cutscenes.

Funny that the infinitely better MGS3 is the one where the word Metal Gear isn't even mentioned (presumably)

Funnily enough I got the HD Collection yesterday. Started with MGS2, got a bit bored, went on to MGS3. I first played MGS2 years ago, with no prior knowledge to the previous game. It felt like my mind went through a blender, I had no idea what the fuuck was going on xD

Yeah I played MGS2 way way back when I was like... fucking 11 or something. Had no idea about anything. So i went with the HD collection too! Half the game is in some sort of bizzaro world where you and your girlfriend stop to have several domestics over the phone during a critical mission, Vamp crosses the line between "hard to kill badass" to "walking Diabolus Ex Machina" pretty fucking hard and nothing makes sense

I'll probably start a rage thread about it at some point, feel free to ignore it.

Still Snake and Otacon's brohug scene was badass and rather touching at the same time. Almost makes up for the entire second half of the game. Almost.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Fortune Summoners would certainly be a lot better if it didn't have so many broken bridges and no indication of who the carpenter for that particular situation is. Looks nice, plays decently (though getting mobbed by flying enemies will leave you hurting) but there's a lot of sections that are nearly impossible to pass, and not due to a lack of skill or experience, but because I haven't spoken to some unnamed NPC in an out-of-the-way corner of the map that the game never even hinted was there.

[/rant]

 

[VincentR]

I recently rented RAGE, and I got about 7 hours into the campaign; before this, I had only experienced the Wasteland Legends (or whatever it's called) multiplayer portion of the game on Nightmare difficulty with a friend - and that seemed pretty okay, although we died a lot.

Spoiler: What I thought was good about RAGE

But back to the core game; it was a lot of fun controls-wise and just general game-play wise. I loved the "feel" of the guns, if you know what I mean. Firing the pistol felt like I was actually shooting something; I realize you can't really hold the gun or feel its weight, but the sound of its shots was deep and satisfying, and maybe it had a bit of visible recoil that made me feel better about myself. In addition, it did some noticeable damage; it could make enemies flinch, knock them down if a head-shot didn't outright kill the enemy, and even on the hardest difficulty, normal enemies usually went down with a clip at most.

And that applied to all of the weapons, from what I could see. Shoot someone with the shotgun at close range, they go flying, or they get knocked on their ass.

In addition, the driving gameplay was fairly well-done too, in my opinion. Granted, I don't play many racing games or driving simulators, so I have no idea how it stands up to those; I'm sure it's probably nothing in comparison, because the game isn't completely designed around driving a vehicle. But for what it does in the game, it seemed to do it pretty well. The vehicles (I found three different ones - not sure if there were more) handled pretty damn well, the weapons on them were okay, and you weren't forced to use them for long stretches of time - maybe a couple of minutes at most. But if you DID enjoy them, then there was a whole racing game inside of Rage's campaign that you could play as much as you wanted.

Speaking of mini-games, there were also a couple of those in Rage. You had some holo-gambling (with the most GENEROUS odds I have EVER seen, heard-of, or even imagined) to win some easy money. You've got the racing action, where you can race against the A.I. in the campaign with several different settings (no weapons, machine guns, or missiles), and maybe some more choices - I didn't go past the beginner section with that. Finally, there was what is essentially a trading-card gambling mini-game as well. You could find cards with different stats/abilities through-out the campaign, and then use them to build decks of three different point values (similar, I'd wager, to many trading card game point systems) in an easy, medium, hard, type of deal, depending on how much cash you wanted to bet, and how many cards you wanted there to be available in each person's deck.

Spoiler: What I didn't really like about the game

However, with all that being said, the game really feels like it dropped the ball in certain big ways. Particularly in the story area. The game starts with a cool video showing the "end of the world" jazz. The game starts, and you are quickly attacked by two unknown enemies, and just as quickly you are saved by a mysterious good Samaritan named Dan Hagard. He talks to you a bit about what's going on, takes you back to his place, and then immediately asks you to go to a hide-out for some guys and WIPE THEM OUT.

This guy, who did just save my life, yes, is now asking me to essentially commit genocide on a portion of the (I assume) few remaining humans on the planet? And the thing is, his reasoning is that they're going to cause trouble for him and (supposedly) the playable character in RETALIATION for the two guys Dan just killed. And the thing is, these "bandits" clearly aren't just mindless killers - despite what Dan claims - because you and Dan drive past a group of them right after murdering two of their friends. As long as they didn't know we had killed their friends, they seemed to go by the live and let live (until otherwise convenient for them, I'm sure - but still) philosophy. But the first thing this guy tells us when we get back to his place is "these guys are terrible, and they're probably going to come for revenge - go to their base, and KILL EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM that you find."

And the thing is, a lot of missions - perhaps even a large majority of them - are like this. By the end of my ~7 hours of campaign, I've killed so many people that have never even done anything to harm my character or even harmed anybody that I witnessed, that I'm likely a worse criminal than any of these "bandits" could have possibly been. Which leads to another gripe with the story I had - the major bad guys in the story.

I was introduced to the "Resistance" in very brief passing probably 5 or 6 hours into the game. I'm going to assume that was certainly the half-way point, because I can't see Rage being more than 10 - 12 hours long, and that was with me spending a fair bit of time screwing around in the wasteland, and doing side-missions. Mean-while, I've also heard whispers of some "Authority" group around the wastes as well. But I've never actually had any contact with either one. Until suddenly, 7 hours in, I'm tasked with helping the Resistance save a captured friend from the Authority - which, of course, involves me killing a whole lot of Authority people. But the thing is - why? I've never met either of these groups of people until I'm suddenly tasked with an unquestionable quest to go mess with the Authority.

And I think that was my major beef with the game over-all; I never really felt like I had a good reason for doing very many of the things I did. Sure, it started with Dan Hagard asking me to do something for him - sure man, I'll help you out, you did just save my life. "Wait, what? Wipe out every single person in this hide-out?" I actually made a joke about this to my friend several times during the game, "Haha, yeah man - my name's James. Oh, go murder everybody in this place? Because they stole some truck parts you want back? Sure."

Finally, I have to assume some sort of conflict is created, and then solved, absurdly quickly in the final couple hours of gameplay. Because at the 7 hour point, I had no problems or cares in the world; in fact, there's really no reason for my character to not just settle down with his ridiculous wealth and reputation, and just tell people to piss off. Sure, I was just drafted into the resistance apparently, but if they're the good guys, they wouldn't shoot me for saying no. So unless something suddenly happens "Oh my god! They're going to blow up the earth!", which would feel really shoe-horned in, and is then quickly solved - or god forbid, is left on a "to be continued" note, I don't even see the point in this game.

I'm losing my train of thought at this point, and I swear to god I didn't start out intending for this to be a short novel. My point in this: perhaps I'm over-thinking a simple game meant to be about killing things. Don't get me wrong - it was INCREDIBLY fun to play, and I might rent it again to finish it up. And I understand, from what I've read, that some more info is given later in the game about some of the bad guys - but I just don't understand why my character continues killing people up to the point WHERE he gets a reason to kill people; nobody has done anything to him, and there is no real global problem made apparent to me, that I'm needed to fix.

 

[J-Alfred]

I say Infamous (the first one). Interesting story, great sandbox, hours of fun to explore and run around in, even fun combat. but the controls just make everything a bit clunky, which leads to some frustrating deaths that you really should have been able to avoid.

 

[J-Alfred]

I recently rented RAGE, and I got about 7 hours into the campaign; before this, I had only experienced the Wasteland Legends (or whatever it's called) multiplayer portion of the game on Nightmare difficulty with a friend - and that seemed pretty okay, although we died a lot.

Spoiler: What I thought was good about RAGE

But back to the core game; it was a lot of fun controls-wise and just general game-play wise. I loved the "feel" of the guns, if you know what I mean. Firing the pistol felt like I was actually shooting something; I realize you can't really hold the gun or feel its weight, but the sound of its shots was deep and satisfying, and maybe it had a bit of visible recoil that made me feel better about myself. In addition, it did some noticeable damage; it could make enemies flinch, knock them down if a head-shot didn't outright kill the enemy, and even on the hardest difficulty, normal enemies usually went down with a clip at most.

And that applied to all of the weapons, from what I could see. Shoot someone with the shotgun at close range, they go flying, or they get knocked on their ass.

In addition, the driving gameplay was fairly well-done too, in my opinion. Granted, I don't play many racing games or driving simulators, so I have no idea how it stands up to those; I'm sure it's probably nothing in comparison, because the game isn't completely designed around driving a vehicle. But for what it does in the game, it seemed to do it pretty well. The vehicles (I found three different ones - not sure if there were more) handled pretty damn well, the weapons on them were okay, and you weren't forced to use them for long stretches of time - maybe a couple of minutes at most. But if you DID enjoy them, then there was a whole racing game inside of Rage's campaign that you could play as much as you wanted.

Speaking of mini-games, there were also a couple of those in Rage. You had some holo-gambling (with the most GENEROUS odds I have EVER seen, heard-of, or even imagined) to win some easy money. You've got the racing action, where you can race against the A.I. in the campaign with several different settings (no weapons, machine guns, or missiles), and maybe some more choices - I didn't go past the beginner section with that. Finally, there was what is essentially a trading-card gambling mini-game as well. You could find cards with different stats/abilities through-out the campaign, and then use them to build decks of three different point values (similar, I'd wager, to many trading card game point systems) in an easy, medium, hard, type of deal, depending on how much cash you wanted to bet, and how many cards you wanted there to be available in each person's deck.

Spoiler: What I didn't really like about the game

However, with all that being said, the game really feels like it dropped the ball in certain big ways. Particularly in the story area. The game starts with a cool video showing the "end of the world" jazz. The game starts, and you are quickly attacked by two unknown enemies, and just as quickly you are saved by a mysterious good Samaritan named Dan Hagard. He talks to you a bit about what's going on, takes you back to his place, and then immediately asks you to go to a hide-out for some guys and WIPE THEM OUT.

This guy, who did just save my life, yes, is now asking me to essentially commit genocide on a portion of the (I assume) few remaining humans on the planet? And the thing is, his reasoning is that they're going to cause trouble for him and (supposedly) the playable character in RETALIATION for the two guys Dan just killed. And the thing is, these "bandits" clearly aren't just mindless killers - despite what Dan claims - because you and Dan drive past a group of them right after murdering two of their friends. As long as they didn't know we had killed their friends, they seemed to go by the live and let live (until otherwise convenient for them, I'm sure - but still) philosophy. But the first thing this guy tells us when we get back to his place is "these guys are terrible, and they're probably going to come for revenge - go to their base, and KILL EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM that you find."

And the thing is, a lot of missions - perhaps even a large majority of them - are like this. By the end of my ~7 hours of campaign, I've killed so many people that have never even done anything to harm my character or even harmed anybody that I witnessed, that I'm likely a worse criminal than any of these "bandits" could have possibly been. Which leads to another gripe with the story I had - the major bad guys in the story.

I was introduced to the "Resistance" in very brief passing probably 5 or 6 hours into the game. I'm going to assume that was certainly the half-way point, because I can't see Rage being more than 10 - 12 hours long, and that was with me spending a fair bit of time screwing around in the wasteland, and doing side-missions. Mean-while, I've also heard whispers of some "Authority" group around the wastes as well. But I've never actually had any contact with either one. Until suddenly, 7 hours in, I'm tasked with helping the Resistance save a captured friend from the Authority - which, of course, involves me killing a whole lot of Authority people. But the thing is - why? I've never met either of these groups of people until I'm suddenly tasked with an unquestionable quest to go mess with the Authority.

And I think that was my major beef with the game over-all; I never really felt like I had a good reason for doing very many of the things I did. Sure, it started with Dan Hagard asking me to do something for him - sure man, I'll help you out, you did just save my life. "Wait, what? Wipe out every single person in this hide-out?" I actually made a joke about this to my friend several times during the game, "Haha, yeah man - my name's James. Oh, go murder everybody in this place? Because they stole some truck parts you want back? Sure."

Finally, I have to assume some sort of conflict is created, and then solved, absurdly quickly in the final couple hours of gameplay. Because at the 7 hour point, I had no problems or cares in the world; in fact, there's really no reason for my character to not just settle down with his ridiculous wealth and reputation, and just tell people to piss off. Sure, I was just drafted into the resistance apparently, but if they're the good guys, they wouldn't shoot me for saying no. So unless something suddenly happens "Oh my god! They're going to blow up the earth!", which would feel really shoe-horned in, and is then quickly solved - or god forbid, is left on a "to be continued" note, I don't even see the point in this game.

I'm losing my train of thought at this point, and I swear to god I didn't start out intending for this to be a short novel. My point in this: perhaps I'm over-thinking a simple game meant to be about killing things. Don't get me wrong - it was INCREDIBLY fun to play, and I might rent it again to finish it up. And I understand, from what I've read, that some more info is given later in the game about some of the bad guys - but I just don't understand why my character continues killing people up to the point WHERE he gets a reason to kill people; nobody has done anything to him, and there is no real global problem made apparent to me, that I'm needed to fix.

I really wish my friends would put as much thought into why they like or dislike things as you did. It would make gaming discussions so much more interesting.

 

[Korten12]

KOTOR 2 is the first game to come to mind. It was rushed and very buggy with a lot of planned content not included in the release. It was a very, very good game, but stopped short of being great thanks to the lack of polish and just how much near complete content was left out.

KOTOR 2 is the first game to come to mind. It was rushed and very buggy with a lot of planned content not included in the release. It was a very, very good game, but stopped short of being great thanks to the lack of polish and just how much near complete content was left out.

Oh God how much kotor 2 fits this topic. Shit just didn't work in this game; but, that didn't stop it from being utterly fantastic. It's just that it could have been so much better.

Well in that case, all blame could be put on Lucas Arts who cut their development time by a whole year and then when they asked if they could patch the game with all the restored content and fixes. They got flat out denied.

 

[GoAwayVifs]

Mirror's edge. Fun game for the first half, then everything goes to shit.

 

[Dagnius]

For me, It's Brutal Legend. The demo blew me away, the soundtrack was amazing, the art was 'metal' and as cheesy as he is sometimes, Jack Black fit the lead role perfectly. Then RTS/TowerDefense happened, a LOT.