Your Single Biggest Disappointment Gaming Wise.

[Starbird]

You know, that game that looked amazing, you were sure would be amazing, salivated over every piece of news or developer interview, preordered/rushed out to buy...and were horribly let down by.

For me:

- Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Ah, when devs just straight up lie. Almost all of the features they announced were not in the game (dynamic day/night shifts with tactics involved in both states, base shields etc). The graphics shown in all the previews (and on the back of the box!) were prestaged snapshots that looked nothing like the game in motion. Which looked like arse. Nearly everything good about Command and Conquer was absent or ruined - from overpowered base defenses, to landscape deformation allowing artillery to troll by making the entire map unbuilable, to instant capture/sell engineer strats...blah.

- Hellgate: London. When a bunch of very talented people have the coolest sounding concept ever, incredible previews...and then once it hits Beta everything goes silent. Eventually the game squeaks out onto shelves and you realize that somewhere between awesome concept and fun ARPG, they decided to very hurriedly try and make it into WoW. Badly.

What to do then? Well, how about offering a very pricey Lifetime sub. I mean...how much money would you have saved if you had paid $200 upfront for WoW and never paid another sub? We will also give you access to all forthcoming expansions and content.

Then you release one new map, preview another, pocket the cash and shut down the servers. Sigh.

- Unreal Tournament 3. Not only was the insanely fun bot campaign from UT/2003/2004 turned into some nonsensical story based rubbish with horrible writing and hideously bad structure, but almost everything that made 2004 such a classic - the amazing Assault maps, the gorgeous 'clean' graphical style, the speed and grace and punchy, original weapons were gone. With added grit, powerarmor and consolification. At least the hoverboards were cool!

- Half-Life 2. *Gasp!*. Okay, okay, I've definitely gone back on this a bit over the years. HL2 is an amazing game. However so many things I loved from the original were removed. Boss fights? Gone. Varied and creative enemies? Gone. Awesome, insane weapons that could carry more than a few shots? Gone. HL2 was great, but it wasn't HL1.

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

Spore: It was supposed to be this evolution simulator with a healthy serving of Star Trek-style space travel (visiting new worlds, influencing their civilizations).

Followed development for years as that ambitious goal slowly dwindled into: Here's five popular game mechanics watered down for small children. BUT WITH GOOGLY-EYES!

 

[seris]

My biggest dissapointment is probably planetary annihilation. we were promised a full campaign and story but all we got was a galactic conquest sort of game mode, along with only a fraction of the promised units available at launch. the game is so far from what was promised that it has less stuff in it than Total Annihilation had, the game it was based off of. They seriously dropped the ball hard, and im glad i only payed 7 dollars for it during a steam sale.

Also about half life 2, why do you think there are no boss battles in it? theres several sections where you fight boss-like enemies, the first i can think of being the hunter chopper when you have the airboat. After that you shoot down a gunship (followed by more later in the game) and i also consider the final portion in the citadel as a boss fight.

 

[StatusNil]

No contest whatsoever, it's Mass Effect 3, and always will be. Heartbreakingly disrespectful of a series I adored. I'll never trust a developer like I used to trust Bioware again.

I guess I don't even need to explain the specifics, since everyone likely knows by now. Suffice to say it was a trash bonfire of the universe.

 

[SoreWristed]

Killzone : shadowfall

It seems kind of dickish to say this. But i was expecting my grey, bland but solid, storydriven shooter like the series had been up until that point. What i did not expect was forced stealth, cardboard armor, coversitting simulator I got from this one.

Prince of Persia

or Prince of Persia : Prodigy as I believe it was called in the US. Basically another example as with KZ:SF, it broke from the established gameplay. I truly believe the devs just wanted to try something new and amazing, but there is no excuse for how utterly bad this game is. The combat in this game sucked balls, it was difficult but in a sucky way. There was only one way to defeat some enemies and the timing window on that was too small and failing it was punished by near death.
I don't see how it got such reviews as it did, I felt cheated out of a real PoP title.

World of Warcracft : Mists of Pandaria

I hated myself for keeping up my subscription until the launch of pandaland. It had such promise, but it had nothing in comparison to BC or WotLK. It had no urgency, the story didn't make any sense and it basically made both the alliance and the horde look like the continental version of Mr. Bean. I also couldn't help feeling their visuals had something to do with the succes of Kung Fu Panda. The devs said it wasn't, but come the fuck on...

 

[Scarim Coral]

Alone in the Dark, all of the trailers I saw was the Xbox 360 and I was a fool to believed it will be the same for the Wii version especailly when I saw no Wii version trailer until later.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Ultima IX, and it's not remotely close. Something like ME3 would've had high ranking due to the utter calamity of the ending, which was so bad it almost retroactively ruined the excellent trilogy that spawned it. But Ultima IX makes ME3's ending look like Hall of Fame material. If you're ever curious to know why, check out Spoony's excellent retrospective. He gives several hours to Ultima IX alone, and it is both hilarious and extremely depressing.

http://spoonyexperiment.com/game-reviews/ultima-retrospective/page/2/

For lesser disappointments/runner ups, you'd have ME3, Spore, and a host of MMOs that all failed to dent World of Warcraft.

I also couldn't help feeling their visuals had something to do with the succes of Kung Fu Panda. The devs said it wasn't, but come the fuck on...

The devs were not lying. Pandarens existed in WoW lore long before Kung-Fu Panda. I'd say it was an unusual occurrence of pop cultural overlap, but putting a classic Asian animal (the Panda) into classically archetypal Asian situations (Kung-Fu, lots of hokey "Oriental" mysticism) is the sort of high-concept gibberish we've come to expect from both Hollywood and Blizzard.

I think MoP ended up being a pretty strong expansion, mechanically. In terms of tone it was a bizarre departure though.

 

[ninja666]

>Thread name: Your Single Biggest Disappointment Gaming Wise
>OP posts four

On topic: Dark Souls 2. After how amazing and well done DS1 was, they simply couldn't fuck it up. All they had to do was simply make more Dark Souls. And they dun fucked up. Everything about this game was so wrong, I stopped playing after 6-8 hours, ditched it and never looked back. They even effectively managed to break elements that worked fine in the first game. Worst 60 bucks ever spent.

 

[hybridial]

I'd have to go with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I loved Link to the Past.

I loved Ocarina of Time.

I loved Majora's Mask

I couldn't even being myself to like Wind Waker. Sailing was horrendous, combat felt poor, half the game was filler, 90% of the map was filler, there were no good dungeons and I didn't care for the story as a whole.

I know it wasn't a bad game as such, but in no way did it even close live up to my expectations, and that's what disappointment is about.

 

[Recusant]

So many to choose from... Spore was a poor mockery of what was promised. Mass Effect 3 had a terrible ending, but what most people seem to forget is that it also had a terrible story, dragging down everything good the previous games had made; the ending was just the cherry on top of the sundae of crap. Ultima 9 had an even worse ending, but the rest of the game wasn't so bad. SimCity MCC was so awful I seriously considered demanding a refund even though I didn't buy it (I played a friend's copy on his computer). But they all pale in comparison to the bastion of awfulness that was Master of Orion 3. I have, on and off, spent the last twelve years trying to come up with a single way in which the game was equal to its glorious predecessors. I have failed. The closest I've come is thinking that it might be a supernatural curse of some kind, leveled on... someone to destroy the strategy genre and leave it a gutted, hollowed-out wreck. And if it weren't for Paradox, the curse might well have succeeded. So, though it was something awful, it was still something big that it almost pulled off.

 

[Islandbuffilo]

Now, I'm not one to be too picky with games, even with genres I'm not to fond of. As long as the game works properly (for the most part) and doesn't give me severe motion sickness I can usually get a decent amount of entertainment from it. All in all its extremely hard for me to find games disappointing, enter Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect was a series I bought on accident and I surprisingly liked it, a lot. I had beat 2 a few months before 3 was coming out and I was pumped. I pre-ordered, thinking I'd get the day one dlc (I would not have been able to play the game without Javik) for free, nope. Went to pick it up, my total was about $100+ (Taxes in my state are insane) and I didn't even get the best pre-order bonuses; no hoody, no dog, only the N7 Valkyrie and the Defender armor. That's really all I got out of the $100 game with a menagerie of loose ends, plot holes, disappointing reveals, and a anti-climatic rectonning nonsensical ending. Mass Effect 3 was first and so far only disappointment I've experienced in gaming ever.

Spore was a poor mockery of what was promised.

I forgot about spore, I was having fun with spore, it was just the technical issues EA couldn't seem to grasp that made me refund it.

 

[dohnut king]

Another vote for Master of Orion 3. Master of Orion 2 was arguably the best strategy game ever when it game out. MOO3 was sub bargain bin awful and effectively murdered the series.

 

[Yan007]

I'll have to say Final Fantasy XIII-2. Unlike a lot of people here, I liked FF 13 enough and enjoyed the ride in 13-2, until the end. I know what they were going for, but I 100%-ed the game and even with all the DLC, it feels like the devs took a huge shit on my face with that ending where all your efforts have been in vain.

 

[Signa]

I can't remember having a bigger disappointment than when I played Supreme Commander 2. Thankfully, it was just the demo. I eventually bought the game when it went for cheap, but I'm still yet to have played it. I'm sure there is a passable game in there somewhere, but as a followup to the best RTS ever, I could not have been more disappointed.

 

[Nooners]

Sonic Heroes. As a kid I loved all the main Genesis games and even tolerated 3D Blast, and enjoyed Adventure 1 and 2, but Heroes broke me. I never finished the storyline for a single team. That was the last Sonic game I bought, and it was all downhill from there. After I saw Unleashed's Were-hog I curled into a corner and cried, wondering what my childhood mascot had done for Sega to mistreat him so horribly. And then Sonic Boom did it all over again...

At least I still have Sonic 3 and Knuckles.

 

[Yan007]

I don't know if it counts, but the cancellation of Megaman Legends 3 was also a huge disappointment for me.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Mass Effect 3. I like it now, enough to not be disappointed as much. But the first time I played it I was disappointed that the exploration element was gone, and then that ending happened. Oh my god, I still remember. I was fuckin' livid. Furious as I've never been before. In denial. I didn't think that a video game could make me feel betrayed. That's honestly how I felt. I was shocked at how stupid it was that I fully embraced the Indoctrination theory. Yeah, I was one of those. I went through all 5 stages of grief.

 

[Hawki]

Halo 4.

That said, Tiberian Twilight would be a close second. On one hand, I knew Tiberian Twilight was going to be...lacking, beforehand. On the other hand, least I could actually finish H4.

 

[Sonicron]

That's an easy one. My single biggest disappointment in gaming is...

Dark Millennium.

Yes, it's a game that never saw the light of day. This might seem like a bit of a cop-out, but there's really no alternative for me in this regard. I'm quite likely the person on the planet with the absolute least amount of fucks to give when it comes to multiplayer games, and Dark Millennium was actually set to make me change that eternal status quo.

A full-fledged MMO set in the W40k universe? All core factions involved as either PCs or NPCs at launch? Massive areas allowing for extensive exploration? Big dungeons and massive map-wide events? ... and squad-based real-time TPS combat to top it all off?

ALL OF MY YES.

I absolutely adore this particular dystopian science-fantasy cosmos, and to sweeten the deal further the game was in development at Vigil Games, those talented lads and lasses who made the two brilliant Darksiders games before going down the plughole along with THQ. Dark Millennium was already years into development, with quite a bit of promising in-game footage out and about, and because THQ couldn't get their shit together I and thousands of other W40k fans got to taste the bitter, rancid taste of absolute disappointment instead of the exciting online romp we'd been promised.

So there you have it. Another nerd whining over what could have been. Feel free to point and laugh.