What game (or games) would you have liked to have turned out perfectly?

[Strayal]

In the wake of certain recent games that haven't quite lived up expectations, I find myself wondering... What if things had gone differently? What if the devs got halfway through crafting their massive pile of horrible ideas, shady practices or non-existent quality assurance procedures and just turned away from it all.

So I ask you, Escapists: What's that one game you wish had turned out flawless? Maybe it lived up to every unrealistic promise the creators spouted off for it. Maybe the hype fell far short of the masterpiece it became. However it happened, the game is the ideal version of itself - instead of the steaming pile of refuse it really is.

For me, that game will always be Unlimited SaGa. Yes, I know I'm old. Yes, I completely understand you might never have heard of it, or have since indulged in any number of chemicals or procedures which have lovingly scrubbed the game from your memory... you lucky *******, you. For me, the pain runs too deep to ever escape from it.

So, I love SaGa Frontier. I loved it so much that, when I first rented it, I played it for literally 36 hours straight. Admittedly, some of that time was spent staring glassy-eyed at the screen, while my brain tried desperately to piece together what it could. I played until I was so sleep-deprived I was hearing things. Such are the splendors of youth well-spent.

Either way, I loved that game so much, when I went to return it I ended up buying it right then and there - so I could keep going. Then, when SaGa Frontier 2 came out, I played the crap out of it as well. It never did have the same spark as the first, but it was inoffensive enough where it was a worthwhile play-through. Then came Unlimited SaGa.

I am long-winded, I know. It is both a gift, and a curse - yet, in defiance of either definition, I find myself utterly unable to explain how disappointed I was with Unlimited SaGa. It plagues me, more than a decade later. The worst part was, I defended it. I saw ads, and reviews, and I told my friends that, "Hey, SaGa Frontier didn't get great scores either!" I carry the burden of that shame with me like a pall, and such is the ambit of its abhorrent grasp that I find myself struggling with the question: "Am I still capable of love?"

As much as it deviates from my own thread here, I don't even care if it had turned out perfectly. Unlimited SaGa could've been an uninspired rehash of SaGa Frontier and I still would've enjoyed it. Ideally, it would've been everything the previous games did right, but bigger and better - more story-lines to play through, a larger roster with deeper, more interesting characters to recruit and interact with... things like that. Really, though, I'd have taken anything over what it actually turned out to be.

That said, the Romancing SaGa remake they did for PS2 was pretty neato.

So yeah, what's your Unlimited SaGa?

 

[Veylon]

Elemental: War of Magic. I was really hoping that was going to be the Master of Magic 2 that some of us have been waiting for all this time. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

 

[DefunctTheory]

...I'm honestly not sure.

I want to say Doom. I bought it during the Steam sale, playing it for 119 minutes, and then refunded it. I felt like it was too slow, too padded, and the arenas were unimaginative and the mechanics, while functional, were uninspiring. After 119 minutes, I didn't want to play anymore - All I could think about was playing Bulletstorm (Another game I bought at the same time) again. I would have preferred more streamlined levels rather then arenas and hallway chaff. A more even armory ramp up. For the story to be thrown out and a return to the true, 'Demon+Doomguy=Awesome' formula without any real explanation.

But, everyone else thought it was good, so I guess it really doesn't fit into the 'make perfect' narrative, since its something in my thats off.

Going back further, I would say Dark Souls 3. It was too fast paced for me, and the first couple of levels were so bland that I was completely unwilling to push through them to find out more. But again, everyone else loved it, so I'd be an ass to try and change it.

Going back some more... ok, Fallout 4. There's something we can all agree was flawed. And easily fixed - Actually populate the world with interesting stuff, make the Vaults something worth actually going through instead of the most boring 'dungeons' in the game, fix the busted dialogue system (I'd rather have a silent PC with a ton of varied options then a voiced one that gets to choose between Angel, Demon, and 'Who Gives a Shit'), create some actually interesting stuff to differentiate the factions, and make the Institute an honest to God villain organization instead of some nice faced bullshit where they're all cool and you can't even ask them the tough questions.

 

[Strayal]

But, everyone else thought it was good, so I guess it really doesn't fit into the 'make perfect' narrative, since its something in my thats off.

Don't worry about the games being truly, objectively bad like Unlimited SaGa undeniably was. Just a cursory glance, during a bit of masochistic curiosity, showed me there was at least one misguided soul who thought that blasphemous font of putrescence warranted a perfect ten. A TEN. That is a depth of self-delusion from which there is no ascension.

Anyway. Opinions are fine here! Plus, I could think of several passable, mediocre games I would've loved to see in perfected form.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Devil May Cry 4.

There's so much great stuff in there. Multiple characters with different play styles, Dante can switch between 5 different fighting styles and 7 different weapons completely on the fly and the boss fights are great.

Then there's the...everything else.

The game is really only half a game. You get to the midway point and then you play the previous levels in reverse order. The dice "puzzles" are a chore, and the game COMPLETELY runs out of steam at the end. Capcom clearly didn't budget this game correctly because the end of the game is so dull I'd say that after the second Agnus boss fight you might as well put the game away and ignore finishing it.

Every boss is reused at least twice, some 3 times, and there's a boss rush right before the end of the game which not only doesn't make any sense, but is clearly just tedious padding for the sake of padding.

*sigh* What could have been.

 

[Saelune]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I wish it was objectively better than Morrowind, instead of being a lesser game. Oblivion removed a lot of stuff Morrowind had, but if it had only added, that would have been amazing.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Star Wars: Battlefront. We were teased with what a single player campaign--and I mean a REAL single player campaign, not like Battlefront II--would look like with the training missions, and even the cutscenes for the survival mode. The open battle multiplayer is fun in short bursts for me, but the game just lacks staying power. If it had a campaign though, oh man...that's what I would have done differently. Take those small cutscenes, those little stories, and build on them until I had a game that really felt like Star Wars from a grunt's point of view.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Resident Evil 6. Now hear me out! I did actually like it, but I'm well aware why people dislike it. But I maintain the premise, a multiple-interacting storyline take on terrorists using the G-virus to hit China and the US at the same time isn't inherently bad.
Just drop the Jake/Sherry story all together, make Chris's story more RE4 fun, and let Leon's be the real horror survival story.

It can work!

 

[Pyrian]

Deus Ex:Invisible War. That had the seeds of a fantastic game. It just needed larger levels, better characters, more animations, more impactful choices, heck even the graphics which were so good in the previews...

 

[EyeReaper]

I'mma go the easy route and say Mass EEffect 3. Mass Effect 1 is a classic, Mass Effect 2 is one of Bioware's greatest games ever, and ME3... is mechanically sound, and had really fun multiplayer?

Too bad not many people play RPGs for the mechanics.

I actually really liked the loadout system. The whole "the less weapons you choose the faster your cooldowns are" is a really unique idea that made biotic shepard actually fun. Too bad the thrilling conclusion to the space epic completely shit the bed, and Bioware were very adamant about shutting down any reasonable justifications (I still wish they would've just rolled with the Indoctrination theory, instead of whatever the fuck the space ghost child ending was supposed to be). Fingers crossed for Andromeda.

ooh, and Alpha Protocol. I wish I lived in a world where that game wasn't a complete son of a glitch and had a sequel or two.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Sonic the Hedgehog. Back in the early/mid 2000's, Sega was busily working on the first next-gen Sonic game and their task seemed pretty straight-forward: Make a game and get it to work on the three new consoles. One of the biggest problems was the fact that the Nintendo Wii was only a bit stronger than a Gamecube and thus, incapable of running a game like Sonic 06. A ton of time and resources were shifted so that SOMETHING with Sonic could be put onto Nintendo's new console. A game that would launch 3 months AFTER the flop that was Sonic 06 but let me not lose track, I want Sonic 06 to have happened perfectly.

I'm one of those mutants who really like Sonic 06. I've played through it, got the true ending though I haven't done all of the missions (I'm not THAT bad off after all). Sonic 06 strikes me as a great example of 'close but not good enough'. It was clear what the creators were going for and it was clear that a bit more polish in a few more places would have made a ton of difference. I just want to see what Sonic 06 would have been like if it were 100% complete. Imagine talking to an NPC once and getting a quest and doing the quest and talking to the NPC again with 2 loading screens or fewer!

 

[Trunkage]

Witcher 3. The ending was really unsatisfying. It would have been better not to add Skeliege in any shape or form. Many main quests felt like they were trying to drag it out. The side quests gave you insignificant exp, and usually no good reward. There was no incentive even starting most, as after a while they didn't feel any better than a Bathseda or Bioware quest and they had no impact on the story (except the Metz storyline). Also, the combat was boring. You could have a could of classes of weapons with different move sets to spice things up. It was so predictable that you can defeat enemies 10 levels above yours (which is a contributing factor to Skelliege being bad) Fallout 4 wasn't the better game but it kept things interesting and challenging. I cant say that about Witcher

Don't get me wrong, still game of the year.

 

[Recusant]

They very first video game I ever played, Star Raiders, on an Atari ST, filled me with wonder and promise of what the future would hold for this exciting medium. Star Raiders itself was an innovative game, and was held back only by the technological limits of the time. I looked forward and wondered what blowing away Zylon ships would be like in the decades to come (as Ronald Moore would eventually answer: very, very shaky). They eventually released an updated Star Raiders, in 2011, which managed the impressive achievement of having worse sounds than the version released thirty two years earlier. But that promise of "the glorious future", wherein wonderful games could be made that weren't held back by primitive technological limitations, stayed with me, buoyed on by M1 Tank Platoon's "someday everyone will have a 386", until 2003 or so, which means my "I wish this was better" game is X-Com: Apocalypse.

Unlike many of the games others have mentioned, Apocalypse turned out okay; but even a total newcomer to the series can quickly tell that it tried to do way, way more than it was capable of. Many of the features came off half-baked, or two-thirds-baked; like the real-time combat that enabled entirely new strategies but wasn't hammered out enough to work smoothly. Luckily, that was optional, but even without it, balance problems (why hello, toxigun-B! Goodbye, every other weapon!) and mechanical... stupidities, let's call them (sure, damaging a chunk of road that a tank is traveling on destroys the tank- what, doesn't it work that way where you live?), held it back from true greatness.

And if it had been truly great, the brand might've rebounded from the misfire of Interceptor and the... [CENSORED] that was Enforcer, and given us a proper third game (no, Terror From the Deep was a proper expansion pack; it wasn't really a new game). Further, it would've pushed harder for a more solid Fallout: Tactics, and not one but two wonderful series might've had their first twenty-first century installments not be hideous embarrassments to the name. Oh, what might have been...

 

[Mister K]

I love this game, but I'll have to say that Brutal Legend could use a better gameplay.

Now, Axing enemies, frying them with guitar solos and riding through the world in a Metal Car was fun, but the RTS element of the game wasn't implemented very well.

I wish Double Fine simply allowed for calling a single unit to aid with a specific task, while creating something like a dynamic background with two armies fighting (to create the feeling of massive battle) and also developed hack'n'slash elements a bit better.

 

[Dalisclock]

I love this game, but I'll have to say that Brutal Legend could use a better gameplay.

Now, Axing enemies, frying them with guitar solos and riding through the world in a Metal Car was fun, but the RTS element of the game wasn't implemented very well.

I wish Double Fine simply allowed for calling a single unit to aid with a specific task, while creating something like a dynamic background with two armies fighting (to create the feeling of massive battle) and also developed hack'n'slash elements a bit better.

I love BL, but I would have liked it better if they hadn't focused quite so much on the stage battles and if the storyline hadn't felt like big chunks were missing from it after you defeat Lionwhyte.

But I'm gonna go with ME3. Literally by remaking the entire game(sans the Citadel DLC).

 

[9tailedflame]

All of them? I mean i'd love for any game to live up to it's full potential and go off without a hitch, even if it's something i'm not into, it would still be great for any game to be the best it could possibly be.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I can guess Mighty Number 9 would be mention on here.

OT- No More Heroes 2 Desperate Struggle. I just wish the creator put more thought into the descision making than just cathering to the fan demands. Yes the fee entries was annoying to fame but that help PROLONG the game story! The minigames were just as fun and funny, making it retro 8bit was not fun nor funny!

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Mass Effect 3 and Assassin's Creed 3. Assassin's Creed 3's abysmal story and obviously rushed and uncoordinated gameplay and design were overshadowed by the year long controversy surrounding Mass Effect 3. Both games could have been great if they'd been treated with the respect they deserve. But alas, AAA publishers don't give a shit about actual quality of their products. Why would they when gamers are a bunch of impulsive children willing to pre-order something they know nothing about over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

 

[Hades]

When hearing the news about Mighty number 9 I always wish it would have all gone perfectly because that's how the story is supposed to go. A big industry man breaking away from the shackles of a jerk publisher to give the fans what they want and ensure everyone involved gains something.
The big industry man would get to work on his passion neglected by the publisher, the fans would get their Megaman back and even Capcom would gain something in the lesson that the IP they still hold has enough support to justify doing something with.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Dragon Age Inquisition (and DA2 to a lesser extent). After Origins it's been pure distilled essence of disappointment.