I was a huge fan of the original Half-Life mod and was super stoked when the sequel was released. To be honest, I still love the game.
But it is not without its problems. Mainly, the game remains very unbalanced in terms of teamwork and individual player skill. This makes it very hard for new players to jump in and enjoy, since they will probably have the shit stomped out of them by veteran players who always join the same team.
It is slowly killing what little community remains.
Invisible war was another casualty of the awkward phase when they wanted to do Pc games on consoles that simply didn't have the horsepower to run them. The games ended up being neutered both technically and in gameplay. And in the end both Pc and console players were left out in the cold.
See also Thief 3
Thief 3 wasn't nearly as bad as IW was though.
Something weird I've seen several times is people talking about how bad Thief: DS was compared to the first two games and then when describing something great about the series they always pick... the Cradle.
I dunno, maybe it's just one guy who keeps doing it.
The Cradle was extremely memorable and was done extremely well, it's actually one of the best crafted levels in gaming in terms of the atmosphere it was able to create, not just in the context of the Thief series. So, that doesn't really surprise me.
It still doesn't mean that as a whole, Thief 3 wasn't a step back from the first two games in several areas. So the views are still both correct, even subjectively.
I'm just saying, the first two games being so much better, surely there's another level at least nearly as good that would be able to serve as an example.
Song of the Caverns is a Thief Gold exclusive level that is often regarded very highly. Life of the Party is considered one of the best Thief 2 levels as well.
Invisible war was another casualty of the awkward phase when they wanted to do Pc games on consoles that simply didn't have the horsepower to run them. The games ended up being neutered both technically and in gameplay. And in the end both Pc and console players were left out in the cold.
See also Thief 3
Thief 3 wasn't nearly as bad as IW was though.
Something weird I've seen several times is people talking about how bad Thief: DS was compared to the first two games and then when describing something great about the series they always pick... the Cradle.
I dunno, maybe it's just one guy who keeps doing it.
The Cradle was extremely memorable and was done extremely well, it's actually one of the best crafted levels in gaming in terms of the atmosphere it was able to create, not just in the context of the Thief series. So, that doesn't really surprise me.
It still doesn't mean that as a whole, Thief 3 wasn't a step back from the first two games in several areas. So the views are still both correct, even subjectively.
I'm just saying, the first two games being so much better, surely there's another level at least nearly as good that would be able to serve as an example.
Song of the Caverns is a Thief Gold exclusive level that is often regarded very highly. Life of the Party is considered one of the best Thief 2 levels as well.
Was just going to say Life of the Party. Legendary.
Invisible war was another casualty of the awkward phase when they wanted to do Pc games on consoles that simply didn't have the horsepower to run them. The games ended up being neutered both technically and in gameplay. And in the end both Pc and console players were left out in the cold.
See also Thief 3
IW and Thi3f weren't all the fault of consoles. The lead engine guy quit halfway in, if I remember right, and left the team with this nightmare shitpile of an engine that no-one knew how to work.
and they were forced to make it run on 64 megs of ram
Thief 3 was better but remember how all the level were divided up. consoles were the reason
The tiny and uninspired city. The underwhelming attempt at a ten year story arc. The asset reuse. The map layout reuse. The wave-based encounters. The botched combat. The fact that the plot doesn't go anywhere for 40 hours up until the last moments of the game. None of this? Really?
The one thing I can say that the game did do well was the characters and how they broke away from the familiar Bioware archtypes. Other than that, utter garbage of a game.
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Watch Dogs. It's a good game, but no one would argue that it lived up to the massive hype. I played it on the 360 so I didn't care much about the graphical downgrade outrage, and I enjoyed my time with the game but then one day I just stopped playing it and never came back. It's a good enough action game with well-design missions but it's utterly generic, awfully written and ultimately pointless.
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LoS2. The first game is one of my favorite games of the series and it got me so hyped for the second game, especially after reading previews on various websites that pushed how varied the game is and how exciting it felt, so I went ahead and pre-ordered it. It arrived about two weeks after the reviews came out, and I kept thinking to myself "Well it can't be that bad, can it? I did read all of those previews where they played for a few hours and went away so excited, so it can't be a total disaster, right? And heck, I enjoyed RE6 and that was poorly received, so maybe I'll get a kick out of LoS2."
Played it for a day and half. Reached a puzzle where I had to turn on a water sprinkler to put out a fire so that Dracula, Prince of Darkness could cross a hallway. Never came back.
Also, there was something with mice that really pissed people off.
To keep this thread from being locked: any particular reason?
Really promising indie game with a hyped launch and big financial success story, that abruptly lost all momentum immediately after going on sale and dropped off the face of the earth for reasons still unknown. One of the more inexplicable early access flops because by all accounts the project could have been a success, but the dev just gave up on it.
Agreed. I hadn't heard anything about the game and I randomly saw my brother playing it one day and thought it looked really promising. I decided to throw some money at the dev to support getting the game into a finished state, hasn't been updated once since I bought it.
Makes me sad because it really did have the potential to be awesome.
LoS2. The first game is one of my favorite games of the series and it got me so hyped for the second game, especially after reading previews on various websites that pushed how varied the game is and how exciting it felt, so I went ahead and pre-ordered it. It arrived about two weeks after the reviews came out, and I kept thinking to myself "Well it can't be that bad, can it? I did read all of those previews where they played for a few hours and went away so excited, so it can't be a total disaster, right? And heck, I enjoyed RE6 and that was poorly received, so maybe I'll get a kick out of LoS2."
Played it for a day and half. Reached a puzzle where I had to turn on a water sprinkler to put out a fire so that Dracula, Prince of Darkness could cross a hallway. Never came back.
Also, there was something with mice that really pissed people off.
I was suckered by the awesome demo in the very beginning, where all the knights and a clockwork golem are attacking the castle. For a tutorial level getting you used to the controls, it was pretty thrilling but the final game did not keep that pace up at all.
Is she fighting or practicing her dance choreography?
She actually Dances for all her moves. Regular shots are her keeping a beat and Specials are more intricate moves. Too bad she has Tank Controls and the score system is just weird.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
The tiny and uninspired city. The underwhelming attempt at a ten year story arc. The asset reuse. The map layout reuse. The wave-based encounters. The botched combat. The fact that the plot doesn't go anywhere for 40 hours up until the last moments of the game. None of this? Really?
The one thing I can say that the game did do well was the characters and how they broke away from the familiar Bioware archtypes. Other than that, utter garbage of a game.
I have the unpopular opinion. I really liked DA2 a lot, easily as much as the first one. The tiny environments didn't make me happy, but t was the constant repetition that held it back from greatness for me. The combat I actually rather enjoyed.
But for me, it was actually the story that I enjoyed the most. I'm kind of sick to death of saving the world from the big archdevil of baby eating or whatever. Confining the story to a city, its history, and its politics? That's an RPG I can get behind.
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
PN03 is amplified in it's terribleness by being the only part of the Capcom Five to stay Gamecube exclusive. And man, the Capcom Five... Produced some legendary games, utterly failed at what it was trying to do - make the Gamecube look more "grown up"
Resi4 and Viewtiful Joe are the 2 gems of the 5, and they got enhanced ports to the PS2 (console wars ran rampant tho - and personally I thought Resi4 took a dip in the graphics and performance in the port, but so much new content between them)
Killer 7 is an odd duck - it has a cult following, and I've had some fever dream fun with it, but holy shit is it a weird game, and there is no way it was ever gonna shift Gamecubes.
There was a Panzer Dragoon/Kid Icarus ripoff in the works as one of the titles, but it got cancelled (or possibly eventually turned into Kid Icarus: Uprising many a year later?)
And the fifth and final was PN03. Woof. Compare to those other titles. Yeeah.
Not long after announcing the whole endeavor, Capcom clarified that they had "misspoke" and that the Five were never meant to be Gamecube exclusive. This is... a dubious claim, given how it was announced at the time. I remember a lot of "rar rar FOR GAMECUBE! THIRD PARTIES FOREVER!"
Not long after announcing the whole endeavor, Capcom clarified that they had "misspoke" and that the Five were never meant to be Gamecube exclusive. This is... a dubious claim, given how it was announced at the time. I remember a lot of "rar rar FOR GAMECUBE! THIRD PARTIES FOREVER!"
Not long after announcing the whole endeavor, Capcom clarified that they had "misspoke" and that the Five were never meant to be Gamecube exclusive. This is... a dubious claim, given how it was announced at the time. I remember a lot of "rar rar FOR GAMECUBE! THIRD PARTIES FOREVER!"
Not to mention the Playstation 2 already had, like, the Capcom 20 and Sony wasn't bragging about it. Onimusha, Maximo, Devil May Cry, Breath of Fire, etc.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Quirky, fun, cartoony marketing campaign. Don Bluth meets Firefly meets classic WoW. So excite.
But then... well, first the publisher, NCSoft, killed my main MMO of the time, City of Heroes. The "why" depends on who you ask, but tends to come down to "wasn't making as much as they wanted." This does not bode well for a quirky, niche-appeal, very "Western" game under their corporate overlordship, and killed a lot of my own personal enthusiasm, hope, and willingness to give them more money.
Then the beta. And the first hints that the endgame will be unrepentant hardcore grind - everything that people have been fondly remembering and asking for since vanilla WoW. Except... it's been ten years. The genre, the industry has moved on. Most of the people who used to like that sort of thing have moved on; they're adults with jobs and families now, and 40-man raids are just too much of a commitment. And many who look back with nostalgia are finding that actually doing it again isn't as much fun as they remember, for some reason...
Also, a box that you buy and then pay a subscription! Who does that anymore? (I stayed subbed to CoH its whole life, but I am apparently a vanishing breed... )
Now most of the developers have jumped ship, the situation for those who remain at the studio is reportedly dire, the vultures are circling and waiting for it to go F2P (if the Korean masters don't just shut it down), they've just now released the first promised content update to make single-player leveling more fun... and they're throwing out "come back for seven days! Please? pleeeeeease" emails.
Wildstar seemed like a game for people who wanted to play WoW but were burned out on WoW. While there's a lot of those people, they typically go back to WoW with each expansion.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
also I've always been disappointed that Perfect Dark never really got a worthy next-gen followup. Seems like a no brainer to me.
I am surprised Microsoft hasn't just started alternating years with Halo, Gears of War, and Perfect Dark so they have a first party shooter every year and each game would get a decent amount of dev time by not actually being a rushed annual release.
Or they could sell THREE FPS games per year!!!!
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
To keep this thread from being locked: any particular reason?
Really promising indie game with a hyped launch and big financial success story, that abruptly lost all momentum immediately after going on sale and dropped off the face of the earth for reasons still unknown. One of the more inexplicable early access flops because by all accounts the project could have been a success, but the dev just gave up on it.
Agreed. I hadn't heard anything about the game and I randomly saw my brother playing it one day and thought it looked really promising. I decided to throw some money at the dev to support getting the game into a finished state, hasn't been updated once since I bought it.
Makes me sad because it really did have the potential to be awesome.
As far as I know Cube World is still in development. The dev has gone over six months without an update before.
I think he didn't even want to do early access, but there was such a clamour after he started talking about the project that he went ahead with the caveat that he would not be pressured into changing how he was developing the game.
It's odd to call a game that hasn't had an official release as a 'failure' though.
I was a huge fan of the original Half-Life mod and was super stoked when the sequel was released. To be honest, I still love the game.
But it is not without its problems. Mainly, the game remains very unbalanced in terms of teamwork and individual player skill. This makes it very hard for new players to jump in and enjoy, since they will probably have the shit stomped out of them by veteran players who always join the same team.
It is slowly killing what little community remains.
I still play NS2 a few times a week - any indie game having an active community two years after release is hardly a failure.
I was a huge fan of the original Half-Life mod and was super stoked when the sequel was released. To be honest, I still love the game.
But it is not without its problems. Mainly, the game remains very unbalanced in terms of teamwork and individual player skill. This makes it very hard for new players to jump in and enjoy, since they will probably have the shit stomped out of them by veteran players who always join the same team.
It is slowly killing what little community remains.
I'd have to agree. Its not a massive failure or even poorly-made or anything, they just made some baffling decisions in the planning stage that sabotaged the entire project. For example, making their own FPS engine from scratch, rather than just using Source when the original had used the HL1 engine to great effect. They'd said that the reason for this was that the source engine simply wouldn't let them do what they wanted to do with dynamic infestation, which was probably true, but I'd argue that throwing out Source and making a whole new engine because you couldn't implement one feature, even a major one, was incredibly short-sighted and probably cost them years of development time.
The engine they eventually came up with was incredible considering it was basically written by one guy, but compared with the big boys like Source or Unreal or CryEngine its pretty piss poor. The performance was terrible in the beginning, and I doubt that's changed all that much. This was especially crippling given that one of the main draws of Natural Selection 1 was that being a Half-Life mod it could run on pretty much anything more powerful than a toaster. So suddenly you've got a bunch of NS1 fans who simply can't play NS2 because of the increased hardware requirements, and the ones that are playing are still having performance issues. Then of course the netcode was absolutely atrocious at launch, so even those who did have the super-computers necessary to play the game properly were experiencing crippling lag and de-sync issues. Not a great start!
Resi4 and Viewtiful Joe are the 2 gems of the 5, and they got enhanced ports to the PS2 (console wars ran rampant tho - and personally I thought Resi4 took a dip in the graphics and performance in the port, but so much new content between them)
I have the unpopular opinion of not liking RE4, although it's obviously not a valid game for this thread. But I will say that the PS2 version is. Extra content notwithstanding, it was a horrible port that really showed up the PS2's limitations compared to the Gamecube. It was absolutely bloody dreadful on the Sony machine.
At least on later versions (Wii, 360, etc) it finally combined the extras with not being technologically scaled back to the point of ridiculousness. It really was a huge tech showcase for the GC hardware.
To keep this thread from being locked: any particular reason?
Really promising indie game with a hyped launch and big financial success story, that abruptly lost all momentum immediately after going on sale and dropped off the face of the earth for reasons still unknown. One of the more inexplicable early access flops because by all accounts the project could have been a success, but the dev just gave up on it.
Agreed. I hadn't heard anything about the game and I randomly saw my brother playing it one day and thought it looked really promising. I decided to throw some money at the dev to support getting the game into a finished state, hasn't been updated once since I bought it.
Makes me sad because it really did have the potential to be awesome.
As far as I know Cube World is still in development. The dev has gone over six months without an update before.
I think he didn't even want to do early access, but there was such a clamour after he started talking about the project that he went ahead with the caveat that he would not be pressured into changing how he was developing the game.
It's odd to call a game that hasn't had an official release as a 'failure' though.
It's been five months since the dev last made any sort of public appearance, and I think over a year since the game received a patch. That's definitely a failure for any "early access" game which is sold on the promise of continued development, whether he eventually puts out a 1.0 or not. If he does I doubt it will be met with nearly the enthusiasm of the first release.
And for some unknown reason, no reviewer managed to understand how the controls worked.
(Apparently pressing one button while tapping in the direction you want to turn 90 degrees is a challenging concept. As hard as holding one button while tapping down/back to do a 180.)
Or what kind of game it was.
People thought is was some DDR shooter.
(More like a 3rd person shmup. Chains, bombs and all.)
P.N.03 was a good game with repetitive bosses (most repeated at least twice) What it lacked was polish. (A lot of polish.)
Problem was Capcom releasing a preview/teaser that had people thinking it was some rhythm based shooter.
I wouldn't say it failed to live up to it's huge potential, but sure ... I'l like it to be released a little more polished.
I sooooo much wanted a sequel to that one.
It took a while, but I think it was worth the wait.
(I also think it sort of paved the way for Bayonetta, but that's just in my head. I don't say that shit out loud.)
If I ever win the lottery, we'll be seeing a proper P.N.03 sequel.
Wait, I got it: Star Ocean 3: 'Til The End Of Time.
What a fucking travesty.
Whoa hey now, let's not get hasty. SO3: TTEOT was not bad, especially when compared to Star Ocean: The Last Hope. TTEOT was a functional JRPG with halfway likeable characters, and, IMHO, had an interesting plot twist. The Last Hope was slow, had annoying characters, and turned the anime tropes way past funny up to 11.
My favorite thing about that game was the combat system based on countering the enemy attacks. And you could only attack and counter attack the enemy that you had targeted.
Except that you literally could not change your target. Is there a guy close to you whose attack you want to counter? Too bad. The game randomly assigned the guy way across the battle space to you and any button press will slowly drag you over to him now matter how many times you try and attack the guy who is currently hugging you with melee attacks.
Quirky, fun, cartoony marketing campaign. Don Bluth meets Firefly meets classic WoW. So excite.
But then... well, first the publisher, NCSoft, killed my main MMO of the time, City of Heroes. The "why" depends on who you ask, but tends to come down to "wasn't making as much as they wanted." This does not bode well for a quirky, niche-appeal, very "Western" game under their corporate overlordship, and killed a lot of my own personal enthusiasm, hope, and willingness to give them more money.
Then the beta. And the first hints that the endgame will be unrepentant hardcore grind - everything that people have been fondly remembering and asking for since vanilla WoW. Except... it's been ten years. The genre, the industry has moved on. Most of the people who used to like that sort of thing have moved on; they're adults with jobs and families now, and 40-man raids are just too much of a commitment. And many who look back with nostalgia are finding that actually doing it again isn't as much fun as they remember, for some reason...
Also, a box that you buy and then pay a subscription! Who does that anymore? (I stayed subbed to CoH its whole life, but I am apparently a vanishing breed... )
Now most of the developers have jumped ship, the situation for those who remain at the studio is reportedly dire, the vultures are circling and waiting for it to go F2P (if the Korean masters don't just shut it down), they've just now released the first promised content update to make single-player leveling more fun... and they're throwing out "come back for seven days! Please? pleeeeeease" emails.
Wildstar seemed like a game for people who wanted to play WoW but were burned out on WoW. While there's a lot of those people, they typically go back to WoW with each expansion.
Eh, WoWs expansion isn't the problem(s) that Wildstar was/is facing. Wildstar's problem lays with design decisions(5-man dungeons hard enough to make pugging a nightmare, attunment, widespread bugs, god awful PvP design and balance, poor itemization issues making anything outside crafted and Raid gear useless, and the focus on large raids[20 and 40 mans] leading to massive roster issues for both hardcore and "causual" guilds), and a lack of content(there's almost no solo content/progression and promised regular updates have been delayed forever before moving to a quartly format[with almost no improvement to quality]). People were quitting in large numbers long before WoD came out(seriously, even world first guild's in Wildstar were losing 5-10 people a week. Attrition and the roster boss is a real problem).
And the worst of it is if you ask a bunch of people who played Wildstar, most people would tell you it had potential and that there's a good core of fun gameplay in there, but it's buried under so much bullshit and garbage.
I mean, go read the Wildstar thread if you want hear about what's wrong with it in detail. By large and large, people talking about what's wrong with Wildstar is the reason it's still even live(such as it is).
I'm almost tempted to call Wildstar a smashing success actually. Well the bugs and shit were obviously a problem and a shame. But in many ways, Wildstar perfectly hit the bullseye.
The dartboard they were playing on though was a dilapidated piece of junk in the dark corner of the bar that nobody wanted anything to do with anymore.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Lemme use this rocket launcher once. Oh, now I don't have ammunition for anything. Cool.
Deus Ex Invisible War
Let me just knock out this guard with a baton and oh god, his spine has telescoped. He crumpled over backwards! The back of his head is touching his heels what have I done? WHAT HAVE I DONE??
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Excerpt from the diary of Alex
Today, I threw a coffee mug at a little girl's head while her uncle was in the other room, killing her.
Later, I lied to her mother about her.
It was a good day.
Switch: SW-7690-2320-9238Steam/PSN/Xbox: Drezdar
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Wildstar was made by Burning Crusade-era WoW devs for Burning Crusade-era WoW fans, with all that entails.
Turns out all those Burning Crusade-era WoW fans who bemoaned such scrubcasual concepts like "accessibility" and "content that everyone should get to see" weren't quite as hardcore as they thought.
Who'da thunk it?
Edit: Though I'd probably attribute Wildstar's precipitous drop in players less to old-school WoWers having their rose-tinted glasses removed and more to all the people who got lured in by the admittedly awesome marketing campaign getting burned when they found out the actual product was an outdated dickpunch.
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Lemme use this rocket launcher once. Oh, now I don't have ammunition for anything. Cool.
Deus Ex Invisible War
Let me just knock out this guard with a baton and oh god, his spine has telescoped. He crumpled over backwards! The back of his head is touching his heels what have I done? WHAT HAVE I DONE??
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Excerpt from the diary of Alex
Today, I threw a coffee mug at a little girl's head while her uncle was in the other room, killing her.
Later, I lied to her mother about her.
It was a good day.
This actually was a thing that happened in my playthrough.
I don't know actual sales figures of it, but in addition to it being one of the biggest gaming disappointments to me, it didn't seem to last too long. That game is Dune 2000. I loved Dune2 and played it a ton and then when I heard Westwood was making a new one 8 years after the release, I couldn't wait. C&C and Red Alert were extremely fun games, so I figured it was about time they went back to Dune. I was so disappointed by how mediocre the game turned out to be. They disregarded a lot of the rules they setup from the original Dune2 (like Harkonnen forgoing light infantry because they considered them too weak) and all the sides were essentially the same minus their special weapon. The whole game just felt like it was a Red Alert mod.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of these will come down to personal preference:
Gears of War 2: I played Gears of War because it was a fun game, and if someone was cheating or being an asshole, they could be kicked. They then decided to do the Halo couch matchmaking system, which I sorely hate. Oh yeah, you can still run server-based games. But there's no map cycle. Every time the game is over, you have to then start up a new game again, and hope you get bites. Stupid. I spent most of my time playing Horde mode, which basically relied upon weird glitches in the game's physics to win.
Oblivion: I don't know how I can say that I hated a game that I sank so many hours into, but I'm doing it. What a colossal failure with the leveling system. I basically kept finding a fun game in there, and wanting to play it, and constantly restarting because the game immediately got unfun.
Arcanum: I was pumped for Arcanum when it came out. Steampunk + Magic was right up my alley. That interface, those graphics.....what the hell? I couldn't endure the damn tutorial. The interest was just sucked right the hell out of me before it was over.
On the list of games I thought I'd really like but which fell completely flat with me: Panzer Corps.
A light wargame (+) Set across all of WWII(+) Where you play as the germans for once (+) with a focus on unit preservation (+)
Every, single, fucking, scenario basically boiling down to 'ram your head against this strong point, then another, then another, in a strict time limit!' (- - - - - - -)
That game went from something I was excited for to completely dead for me in the space of about five levels.
There are several games I would add but when they came out I was to young and unconnected with the gaming world at large to judge the hype level and disappointment. However for my money Fable was hands down the most disappointed I have ever been with a game. Peter Molyneux made it sound like the second coming and it ended up being a mediocre action RPG. I have yet to forgive him for that. My friends and I would spend hours talking about the awesome features it was supposed to have. However given the existence of the sequels I imagine the game sold reasonably well.
How about Devil May Cry 2? I remember it getting bad reviews and disappointing most fans. And considering it is bookended by 2 of the best games in its genre, much less the series, that seems like a pretty big failure. Then again my perception may be colored by just how awesome the third one was.
In retrospect I'm less annoyed because all I really remember is Varric and Aveline. But man oh man was that a letdown. Especially because I was playing as a Blood Mage, which undercut every single moment of the game.
Fable was a let-down, but it still sold well. I think that was part-overhype, part-whatthehellelsearewegoingtoplayonXboxthatresemblesanRPG? But that was reason enough to have sequels.
In the end, it really wasn't that bad of a game, either. It just wasn't the game it was supposed to be. Fable 2 and 3, on the other hand, were simply sold as sequels to the game people knew, and they were pretty good (Fable 2, in particular, will always have a special place for me).
I suppose this one is more a game that only turned out woefully mediocre rather than absolutely awful, but given its pedigree I think it qualifies.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star. It seemed like it might be a fresh take on things; while it's always hard to balance, a game with a focus on strong consumables can really make you feel like you're making impactful choices, and it looked like they planned to continue the Paper Mario tradition of playing around with the game world and the concept of paper-ness.
Then the game came out and everything felt limited. Stickers were essentially the only way to fight, so running out meant you were screwed. Sidequests and interesting paper-mario style diversions or worldbuilding were nonexistant. There were no chapters you played as somebody else, or even companions. Every new system seemed to limit Mario, and they took out almost everything that was the heart and soul of the Paper Mario games.
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I was a huge fan of the original Half-Life mod and was super stoked when the sequel was released. To be honest, I still love the game.
But it is not without its problems. Mainly, the game remains very unbalanced in terms of teamwork and individual player skill. This makes it very hard for new players to jump in and enjoy, since they will probably have the shit stomped out of them by veteran players who always join the same team.
It is slowly killing what little community remains.
Take one of the best fucking horror games in recent years and remove everything that made it scary.
Good job.
Song of the Caverns is a Thief Gold exclusive level that is often regarded very highly. Life of the Party is considered one of the best Thief 2 levels as well.
Was just going to say Life of the Party. Legendary.
Steam | XBL
and they were forced to make it run on 64 megs of ram
Thief 3 was better but remember how all the level were divided up. consoles were the reason
Huh. Weird.
The tiny and uninspired city. The underwhelming attempt at a ten year story arc. The asset reuse. The map layout reuse. The wave-based encounters. The botched combat. The fact that the plot doesn't go anywhere for 40 hours up until the last moments of the game. None of this? Really?
The one thing I can say that the game did do well was the characters and how they broke away from the familiar Bioware archtypes. Other than that, utter garbage of a game.
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Watch Dogs. It's a good game, but no one would argue that it lived up to the massive hype. I played it on the 360 so I didn't care much about the graphical downgrade outrage, and I enjoyed my time with the game but then one day I just stopped playing it and never came back. It's a good enough action game with well-design missions but it's utterly generic, awfully written and ultimately pointless.
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LoS2. The first game is one of my favorite games of the series and it got me so hyped for the second game, especially after reading previews on various websites that pushed how varied the game is and how exciting it felt, so I went ahead and pre-ordered it. It arrived about two weeks after the reviews came out, and I kept thinking to myself "Well it can't be that bad, can it? I did read all of those previews where they played for a few hours and went away so excited, so it can't be a total disaster, right? And heck, I enjoyed RE6 and that was poorly received, so maybe I'll get a kick out of LoS2."
Played it for a day and half. Reached a puzzle where I had to turn on a water sprinkler to put out a fire so that Dracula, Prince of Darkness could cross a hallway. Never came back.
Also, there was something with mice that really pissed people off.
Agreed. I hadn't heard anything about the game and I randomly saw my brother playing it one day and thought it looked really promising. I decided to throw some money at the dev to support getting the game into a finished state, hasn't been updated once since I bought it.
Makes me sad because it really did have the potential to be awesome.
I was suckered by the awesome demo in the very beginning, where all the knights and a clockwork golem are attacking the castle. For a tutorial level getting you used to the controls, it was pretty thrilling but the final game did not keep that pace up at all.
Is she fighting or practicing her dance choreography?
Enjoyin' her music, tappin' her foot, doesn't care about lasers whiffing past her face.
She actually Dances for all her moves. Regular shots are her keeping a beat and Specials are more intricate moves. Too bad she has Tank Controls and the score system is just weird.
I have the unpopular opinion. I really liked DA2 a lot, easily as much as the first one. The tiny environments didn't make me happy, but t was the constant repetition that held it back from greatness for me. The combat I actually rather enjoyed.
But for me, it was actually the story that I enjoyed the most. I'm kind of sick to death of saving the world from the big archdevil of baby eating or whatever. Confining the story to a city, its history, and its politics? That's an RPG I can get behind.
Resi4 and Viewtiful Joe are the 2 gems of the 5, and they got enhanced ports to the PS2 (console wars ran rampant tho - and personally I thought Resi4 took a dip in the graphics and performance in the port, but so much new content between them)
Killer 7 is an odd duck - it has a cult following, and I've had some fever dream fun with it, but holy shit is it a weird game, and there is no way it was ever gonna shift Gamecubes.
There was a Panzer Dragoon/Kid Icarus ripoff in the works as one of the titles, but it got cancelled (or possibly eventually turned into Kid Icarus: Uprising many a year later?)
And the fifth and final was PN03. Woof. Compare to those other titles. Yeeah.
Not long after announcing the whole endeavor, Capcom clarified that they had "misspoke" and that the Five were never meant to be Gamecube exclusive. This is... a dubious claim, given how it was announced at the time. I remember a lot of "rar rar FOR GAMECUBE! THIRD PARTIES FOREVER!"
Row row Fight the POWA
Not to mention the Playstation 2 already had, like, the Capcom 20 and Sony wasn't bragging about it. Onimusha, Maximo, Devil May Cry, Breath of Fire, etc.
Wildstar seemed like a game for people who wanted to play WoW but were burned out on WoW. While there's a lot of those people, they typically go back to WoW with each expansion.
Or they could sell THREE FPS games per year!!!!
As far as I know Cube World is still in development. The dev has gone over six months without an update before.
I think he didn't even want to do early access, but there was such a clamour after he started talking about the project that he went ahead with the caveat that he would not be pressured into changing how he was developing the game.
It's odd to call a game that hasn't had an official release as a 'failure' though.
I still play NS2 a few times a week - any indie game having an active community two years after release is hardly a failure.
I'd have to agree. Its not a massive failure or even poorly-made or anything, they just made some baffling decisions in the planning stage that sabotaged the entire project. For example, making their own FPS engine from scratch, rather than just using Source when the original had used the HL1 engine to great effect. They'd said that the reason for this was that the source engine simply wouldn't let them do what they wanted to do with dynamic infestation, which was probably true, but I'd argue that throwing out Source and making a whole new engine because you couldn't implement one feature, even a major one, was incredibly short-sighted and probably cost them years of development time.
The engine they eventually came up with was incredible considering it was basically written by one guy, but compared with the big boys like Source or Unreal or CryEngine its pretty piss poor. The performance was terrible in the beginning, and I doubt that's changed all that much. This was especially crippling given that one of the main draws of Natural Selection 1 was that being a Half-Life mod it could run on pretty much anything more powerful than a toaster. So suddenly you've got a bunch of NS1 fans who simply can't play NS2 because of the increased hardware requirements, and the ones that are playing are still having performance issues. Then of course the netcode was absolutely atrocious at launch, so even those who did have the super-computers necessary to play the game properly were experiencing crippling lag and de-sync issues. Not a great start!
I have the unpopular opinion of not liking RE4, although it's obviously not a valid game for this thread. But I will say that the PS2 version is. Extra content notwithstanding, it was a horrible port that really showed up the PS2's limitations compared to the Gamecube. It was absolutely bloody dreadful on the Sony machine.
At least on later versions (Wii, 360, etc) it finally combined the extras with not being technologically scaled back to the point of ridiculousness. It really was a huge tech showcase for the GC hardware.
Steam | XBL
It's been five months since the dev last made any sort of public appearance, and I think over a year since the game received a patch. That's definitely a failure for any "early access" game which is sold on the promise of continued development, whether he eventually puts out a 1.0 or not. If he does I doubt it will be met with nearly the enthusiasm of the first release.
Yeah, great game.
And for some unknown reason, no reviewer managed to understand how the controls worked.
(Apparently pressing one button while tapping in the direction you want to turn 90 degrees is a challenging concept. As hard as holding one button while tapping down/back to do a 180.)
Or what kind of game it was.
People thought is was some DDR shooter.
(More like a 3rd person shmup. Chains, bombs and all.)
P.N.03 was a good game with repetitive bosses (most repeated at least twice) What it lacked was polish. (A lot of polish.)
Problem was Capcom releasing a preview/teaser that had people thinking it was some rhythm based shooter.
I wouldn't say it failed to live up to it's huge potential, but sure ... I'l like it to be released a little more polished.
I sooooo much wanted a sequel to that one.
It took a while, but I think it was worth the wait.
(I also think it sort of paved the way for Bayonetta, but that's just in my head. I don't say that shit out loud.)
If I ever win the lottery, we'll be seeing a proper P.N.03 sequel.
My favorite thing about that game was the combat system based on countering the enemy attacks. And you could only attack and counter attack the enemy that you had targeted.
Except that you literally could not change your target. Is there a guy close to you whose attack you want to counter? Too bad. The game randomly assigned the guy way across the battle space to you and any button press will slowly drag you over to him now matter how many times you try and attack the guy who is currently hugging you with melee attacks.
Eh, WoWs expansion isn't the problem(s) that Wildstar was/is facing. Wildstar's problem lays with design decisions(5-man dungeons hard enough to make pugging a nightmare, attunment, widespread bugs, god awful PvP design and balance, poor itemization issues making anything outside crafted and Raid gear useless, and the focus on large raids[20 and 40 mans] leading to massive roster issues for both hardcore and "causual" guilds), and a lack of content(there's almost no solo content/progression and promised regular updates have been delayed forever before moving to a quartly format[with almost no improvement to quality]). People were quitting in large numbers long before WoD came out(seriously, even world first guild's in Wildstar were losing 5-10 people a week. Attrition and the roster boss is a real problem).
And the worst of it is if you ask a bunch of people who played Wildstar, most people would tell you it had potential and that there's a good core of fun gameplay in there, but it's buried under so much bullshit and garbage.
I mean, go read the Wildstar thread if you want hear about what's wrong with it in detail. By large and large, people talking about what's wrong with Wildstar is the reason it's still even live(such as it is).
The dartboard they were playing on though was a dilapidated piece of junk in the dark corner of the bar that nobody wanted anything to do with anymore.
Excerpt from the diary of Alex
"...only mights and maybes."
Turns out all those Burning Crusade-era WoW fans who bemoaned such scrubcasual concepts like "accessibility" and "content that everyone should get to see" weren't quite as hardcore as they thought.
Who'da thunk it?
Edit: Though I'd probably attribute Wildstar's precipitous drop in players less to old-school WoWers having their rose-tinted glasses removed and more to all the people who got lured in by the admittedly awesome marketing campaign getting burned when they found out the actual product was an outdated dickpunch.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
This actually was a thing that happened in my playthrough.
Gears of War 2: I played Gears of War because it was a fun game, and if someone was cheating or being an asshole, they could be kicked. They then decided to do the Halo couch matchmaking system, which I sorely hate. Oh yeah, you can still run server-based games. But there's no map cycle. Every time the game is over, you have to then start up a new game again, and hope you get bites. Stupid. I spent most of my time playing Horde mode, which basically relied upon weird glitches in the game's physics to win.
Oblivion: I don't know how I can say that I hated a game that I sank so many hours into, but I'm doing it. What a colossal failure with the leveling system. I basically kept finding a fun game in there, and wanting to play it, and constantly restarting because the game immediately got unfun.
Arcanum: I was pumped for Arcanum when it came out. Steampunk + Magic was right up my alley. That interface, those graphics.....what the hell? I couldn't endure the damn tutorial. The interest was just sucked right the hell out of me before it was over.
A light wargame (+) Set across all of WWII(+) Where you play as the germans for once (+) with a focus on unit preservation (+)
Every, single, fucking, scenario basically boiling down to 'ram your head against this strong point, then another, then another, in a strict time limit!' (- - - - - - -)
That game went from something I was excited for to completely dead for me in the space of about five levels.
How about Devil May Cry 2? I remember it getting bad reviews and disappointing most fans. And considering it is bookended by 2 of the best games in its genre, much less the series, that seems like a pretty big failure. Then again my perception may be colored by just how awesome the third one was.
PSN:Furlion
In retrospect I'm less annoyed because all I really remember is Varric and Aveline. But man oh man was that a letdown. Especially because I was playing as a Blood Mage, which undercut every single moment of the game.
In the end, it really wasn't that bad of a game, either. It just wasn't the game it was supposed to be. Fable 2 and 3, on the other hand, were simply sold as sequels to the game people knew, and they were pretty good (Fable 2, in particular, will always have a special place for me).
Paper Mario: Sticker Star. It seemed like it might be a fresh take on things; while it's always hard to balance, a game with a focus on strong consumables can really make you feel like you're making impactful choices, and it looked like they planned to continue the Paper Mario tradition of playing around with the game world and the concept of paper-ness.
Then the game came out and everything felt limited. Stickers were essentially the only way to fight, so running out meant you were screwed. Sidequests and interesting paper-mario style diversions or worldbuilding were nonexistant. There were no chapters you played as somebody else, or even companions. Every new system seemed to limit Mario, and they took out almost everything that was the heart and soul of the Paper Mario games.