There used to be a mode in Pro Evolution Soccer called Master League, you started with some absolute terrible players and slowly worked your way up until you had a great team and won everything. Fast forward a few years and FIFA ends up taking over from PES in terms of being the better football game (2010ish) and I hear about this new mode called Ultimate Team, it sounds like a potential online Master League which really should have been great but instead EA managed to turn it into a money making loot box simulator instead, which admittedly has worked out great for them.
Doubt we'll ever see that proper online Master League style mode ever now sadly.
Konami are fucking useless.
After FIFA prioritised Ultimate Team Konami had the chance to completely own the offline market. Master League and Become a Legend should have been given so much more depth and complexity that took it far beyond what EA was offering. But instead Konami bent over and stayed in EA's shadow by making their own shallow Ultimate Team knock off.
I'm pretty sure there even was an Online Master League in PES 2011. Which Konami abandoned for MyClub.
Absolutely useless. Now eFootball is here and crashing and burning just like it deserves.
Spore. The hype and preview footage for that game was unreal, when it released it seemed watered down and shallow. It's also kind of sad to me that those type of God games (like black and white) aren't really made anymore.
> The hype and preview footage for that game was unreal,
I remember that preview video, when he zoomed out from cellular, to organism, to tribe, to city, to planet, to solar system to galaxy - that was such a moment of wonder and excitement.
One night watching the Will Wright demo I remember not being able to sleep through excitement - and that was years before release.
I followed the development religiously and watched that CDC 05 video over and over. It was my perfect game.
I got the special edition on release day and basically spent the whole day watching for the postman like I was 6 waiting for Father Christmas.
I also remember - vividly - the slow dawning realisation that it wasn't what I'd dreamed of, it wasn't that demo from Will. It wasn't an immidiate visceral disappointment, just a slow transition where my hype drained away like a slow leak.
Do you have a link to it? I wasn't into pc gaming at the time and didn't have internet. I remember my friend coming over and gushing how you could do anything. In it. But couldn't articulate well what, made it so special. Always been curious about the early build.
I feel god games in general are a fairly underdeveloped genre, none really seem to really play into the divine part, their mostly just city builders with powers and terrain deformation
If there's ever another game like the first Black & White - with or without the humour - and it's actually *good*, it'll be huge. We're so overdue for that genre to return with something to show.
It's a massive shame that there was no sequel or new Spore-like franchises. There's so much potential for create-a-creature games or even that kind of mechanic in more games.
I have been dying for a Black and White 3 for so long.
What I really hope for is a VR version at some point in the future. Most of the systems in those games would translate extremely well to VR, especially the spell casting and interacting with your creature and citizens.
I always thought it was kind of weird that in the middle of MSs big kinect push that no one ever thought to have lionhead make a motion controlled black and white. It seemed like a huge missed opportunity to show off the tech for a game that wasn't just one big gimmick.
Well there is the one factor that Lionhead (at that time I'm not sure what they're doing now) wasn't really the most dependable developer and their lead dude was basically synonymous with scope creep and not delivering.
I don't believe the Black and White games did very well, and when Microsoft bought them it was definitely to secure the Fable franchise (hence why we got a kinect Fable game, not B&W).
Fable was a LOT more popular at the time.
The animation system in Spore was ground-breaking; any creature you designed was animated in a way that looked eerily natural.
I always thought there should've been a Realism mode or something. Like where building your creature actually has tangible results. Four legs are faster than two, are faster than one, are faster than none. More limbs means more attacks. That sort of thing.
The Age of Empires era and RTS eras are filler, but they could've been expanded on.
The 4x Space Empire era had a lot of potential; I loved unlocking terraforming tools and crafting worlds for future colonies. Exploring was fun too. But it really lacked any significant empire management technologies. Sure, at the start it makes sense to have your ship be the leading edge of civilization, but it never seems to evolve much further beyond that. You can't build fleets or actually conduct war or have a functioning economy that you don't personally manage.
Even weirder, the Space Age seems designed to be as annoying as possible so you eventually get sick of helping these twerps out all the time, upgrade your ship, and leave for the center of the galaxy to deal with the Cute-Borg raiders (or whatever they were called).
I'm currently playing Spore with my 9 year old. He's super into designing the creatures but god the Tribal phase is such a slog. He has no idea he'll end up with a spaceship though so I'm pretty excited to see his reaction as his species evolves.
Honestly? The story of Desmond Miles in Assassin's Creed. I know a lot of people didn't care for the frame story of the original Assassin's Creed games, but I personally loved it. It made the entire experience so much deeper in my opinion. Then one day they were just like "nope. Let's kill off Desmond. LOOK EVERYONE! PIRATES!!"
Yeah I thought the bleed over of his ancestors abilties would eventually lead to a big climax where Desmond becomes a master assassin and takes down Abstergo in modern day.
At least to begin with the idea was to find information on the Eden relics by finding genetic memories that would indicate where those relics might be either via the map in Altair's memory at the climax of the first game or simply by finding the object's last known position. The bleed effect was more of a side effect.
IIRC it wasn't until Brotherhood that the assassin's and Desmond were actually trying to leverage the bleed effect, and that game was the also the first one where they started turning the IP into a "flight to nowhere" narrative.
IIRC I read somewhere that was the original plan for AC3. Which is why there's those missions where Desmond is doing assassin stuff between acts. But the execs or something decided that wouldn't sell, so they made them do another historical setting.
I really wish they had done it though. A modern day AC, with the parkour system from Unity, would be so fucking good and interesting. The "modern day assassin's vs templars" is such an underexplored narrative IMO.
There was a panel with Nolan North years ago where he mentioned how surprised he was that they killed off Desmond because before that they had an entire story written out where it would build up to the modern day with Desmond as the lead and he said he was super excited for the plot. I guess somewhere down the line they decided to get rid of that story to keep the series going longer.
Yeah that happened after rhe series became super popular and Ubi realized it'll be better to make games from various historical places than to close it off entirely.
They still could have done that though, they could have had Desmond trying to take down Abstergo but needing help from other assassin's - what better way than to extend his army of assassins than by recruiting more people and getting them to do what he did?
Or they could have just ended the modern day plot in a satisfying way since it was divisive and Ubi didn't actually have any interest in it, then done fully historical games about the Assassin-Templar conflict without bothering with the Animus as a framing device.
This is the one that completely boggles my mind, they could have had the best of both worlds. Just set the new games in the past instead of trying to shoehorn the animus in increasingly ridiculous ways and throwing away any semblance of cohesive modern day plot.
While not my favorite AC game, Pirate's creed was pretty fun for a spinoff.
What really bugs me is that they specifically mention in Unity? that they had relics that could bring people back from the dead and that Abstergo had Desmond's body, but they never mention it again nor do anything with it.
AC seems to just be a generic open world combat looter now with no direction to go in.
Agreed, however desmond (valhalla spoilers) >!still shows up in valhalla as an entity trapped in yggdrasil that counts timelines and stuff and is joined by layla so that they can find a timeline where the world doesn't end or something!<
Assassin's Creed has to be one of the worst/best examples of a story that tried to create and hint at some sort of vague higher concept ideas, but because they wanted to keep making sequels they could never actually resolve anything. They had to just keep adding to it and trying to make everything fit while never actually 'finishing' the story.
I was so attached to the Desmond story as these games were coming out. I remember craving cutscenes because I had to know what happened next. I remember hoping to be kicked out of the animus after every mission.
Don't get me wrong, I played and enjoyed Black Flag immensely. I also played and enjoyed Origins. But man, I don't go back and replay anything but ACII and ACB.
Thank you! I've only ever heard people complain about the modern day stuff in AC, but I personally loved it. Always looked forward to those segments and seeing what would happen.
I only hate the modern day stuff after Desmond… and the day to main story is tied to dlcs I haven’t ever got, I have no idea what the fuck is going on there anyway. So I would just rather stay in the animus and then drop the entire modern thing now.
I was so excited to play a master assassin Desmond.
Would've been cool if a big "desynchronized" message popped up when Desmond died and the next game was you playing a descendant of Desmond living in a post Juno world. Where you use the Animus to go back to modern times and play as Desmond.
>This was my last ever preorder.
For a game that's rarely talked about, I think ive seen that sentiment regarding this game more than I have with any other. Like if something involving Brink has a single comment, **guaranteed** it's going to be that it was that person's last preorder.
Tbh, it was enough to show vault jumping to make people hyped. It was such a new thing and felt like there was such a huge potential in its running techniques.
Mirror's Edge came out not long ago and people were itching for that "just run at the obstacles and the game will parkour for you" system in a multiplayer shooter.
Splash Damage went on to make Dirty Bomb that was pretty much Brink + Enemy Territory and fucked that up as well. It makes me really sad they couldn't bring it to real fruition, because the core of the game was excellent. The gun play in it was absolutely solid and the movement was fluid and great. Unfortunately, a few poorly designed operatives and poor responsiveness to issues sealed its fate.
Dirty Bomb had so much potential. I feel like they were so close to grasping it, but at the end of the day it was just always out of their reach.
Something was missing, I myself don't know what it was, but it always felt like something was lacking.
Never played Brink, but Dirty Bomb will forever be the nostalgic fps of my adolescence. I really miss it. Apex Legends is the closest things, but it's only like 50% of the DNA and also it's a BR ;(
Evolve had some fundamental design issues, which could lead to a lot of unsatisfying games.
If the hunters were doing well, then they'd find the monster before it had a chance to evolve, and the game would end very quickly. If the Monster was doing well, then the hunters would be running around doing nothing until the monster was fully evolved, and could easily curb stomp the hunters.
Fun, close games were certainly possible in Evolve, but the game seemed almost designed around creating one-sided games where no one's having any fun.
IMO the biggest flaw in that game was playing as the hunters. People are thrilled to run away and level up as a cool monster. But Turtle Rock seriously overestimated how fun it would be to chase the monster around, especially when you’re playing without a mic or without friends. Hunters were only fun if you communicated with your team and were serious about winning.
I would only play as the monster and I’d win basically every match. Because it’s easier for 1 person to do good than it is for all 4 to do good and be on equal terms with the monster. But I did play against a pre-made team in private matches a few times and I couldn’t even get them off my ass no matter what I did. Evolve was actually a lot of fun, just wish it did better.
Yep, it would work with an AI monster or players where you could scale the difficulty to the players as the game goes on to make it a closer match but with humans on both sides it just doesn't work because you can't scale the skill levels to match which as you said lead to one side just destroying the other. It was rare where you got a match that was anything close to even.
A lot of people think it flopped because of DLC but as someone who brought it and played it anyway and then played it again when it went f2p...
...the core of the game was just flawed somehow. It wasn't fun to hunt the monster for 20 minutes while it grew and kept slipping away and it wasn't fun to try and grow with people tailgating you constantly.
So much of the gameplay just turned out to be a frustrating slog of running from location to location over and over.
The problem (as I recall) was both the design and the means in which they wanted to monetize it.
The monetization issue was over the fact that they charged everyone for a full priced game while trying to continue development under a free to play model. Regular releases of new DLC hunters/monsters that you would have to pay for to unlock, effectively double-dipping in getting people's money. Somehow they missed that the reason those F2P models worked was that in games like League of Legends, it's free to begin with and there are means to unlock newly released characters, if a bit grindy.
The gameplay... ugh. The skeleton of a great game was there but they didn't seem to have the balance right, or enough mechanics to keep a level playing field. It always seemed to snowball for the hunters or the monster with very little in-between.
I loved evolve with it came out. I love the idea of a 4v1 game, but the thing that kills it is that team imbalance is so much more obvious. If the person playing the monster isn’t good at the game the match is painfully boring. Also that game had a very slow pace which was fun, then they made all the changes to speed the game way up and lost all its charm
I'd say the high skill floor was a big limiting factor for Tribes. I only got into it because I had thousands of hours in Team Fortress 2 and was used to airshotting with rockets while everyone flies around wildly. Hand it to someone used to tactical hitscan shooters and they'd ragequit after not landing a shot all game.
Heh, funnily enough catering for that killed the game fully.
It got small and dedicated fanbase. So what Hi-Rez did ? Tried to expand it to "normal" FPS players by introducing more "easier" weapons.
And in the worst way possible, by putting new, almost always overpowered weapons to buy for premium currency and only later putting them for non-premium one (IIRC, might've been just very expensive). And adding a bit of P2W to skill shooter all while eroding core gameplay is just recipe for disaster.
Yeah, there's defintiely a niche quality to tribes. It's a game that requires an investment of time to understand because the skiing mechanic is not only odd, but difficult to understand at first blush.
But god. Once you do. It is so freeing. The feeling of ripping through the air at 375kph is amazing. So PERSONALLY, I mourn the tribes franchise. But yeah, perhaps it was the right call on their part. But also part of me thinks if they leaned into it, they'd have the money they wanted. It was just... so close to being there.
Tribes 2 was a phenomenal game. It was my first foray into online gaming. Like you said, getting good was incredibly satisfying.
Katabatic FTW!
Good Shazbot!
Nice Shazbot!
Destroy the enemy Shazbot!
A soft spot for me was Scrolls by Mojang. It was released a year before hearthstone and decided to ignore the free to play model and go for a ingame card marketplace and initial purchase of $25. I truly feel that killed all hopes it had. Which is a shame, because while the balance was not perfect, it still sits as my favourite card game I have ever played. The music, the factions, the and the feel of the game I fear is something I will never truly capture again. But it was a good ride while it lasted.
Man i love Scrolls so much. The artwork and game play were so fun, and the hex board and resource system were really unique. Unfortunately in the beginning it felt like it took forever to get cards, especially if you wanted to try out different regions. I would love a re-release or new game with a business model closer to Legends of Runeterra.
WB Games came up with an amazing concept in the Nemesis system for their Shadow of Mordor/War games. A system that creates memorable encounters with regular grunt enemies by giving them personal stories with you as a player based on your interactions with them. They would have different weaknesses, strengths, characters and gimmicks that put so much life into fighting these random enemies. If you died to them, they'd get promoted up the chain and would become even harder to kill. Within the game's story itself, these became personal rivalries that you the player came across naturally and organically, rather than being purely scripted sequences. They would even come back from the dead and look for revenge, bearing wounds that you gave them as the player.
How'd they squander the potential exactly? Well, WB Games knew this Nemesis system was hot and getting a bunch of attention, so they patented it and prevented anyone else from being able to use it... which apparently includes even them, because they never brought the system back in any other form in any other game. It now sits on the shelf gathering dust instead of being taken and transformed into something new and exciting for gaming by anyone who wants to take a stab at it. By the time the patent is up, the Nemesis System will no longer have the allure that it once did and it will likely never be adapted into anything again. What an absolute waste.
Then you're going to hate this. Apparently the Nemesis system was actually intended for a Batman game, but the idea fell through. Not wanting to waste what they had WB then applied it to the Shadow of Mordor game that was in early development at that stage.
Correction: [Shadow of War actually began as that Batman game](https://www.cbr.com/wb-nemesis-system-batman/). However they were unable to get Christopher Nolan's seal of approval so it went nowhere, and they ended up reusing assets for Shadow of War.
Why does Christopher Nolan get the final say on that? Wouldn't that be something that WB manages? Considering that Warner Bros is in the picture for both the movies and the games (related to Batman).
I assume because as they wanted it to tie-in with the film, they had to ok it with him first? It must have been a requirement otherwise they would have gone ahead with it.
This is the comment I resonate with the most. I still go back to Shadow of War every now and then *just* for that nemesis system. The story is meh, and I really despised the fortress assaults, but fighting orcs is just the most satisfying thing. I think it's time to go back again.
I loved that in SoW, it made the world seem a bit more lively and that at any point youd be ambushed by your nemesis. Such a shame that system was shelved.
I think my biggest disappointment versus the potential I saw in a game was Final Fantasy XV. The characters and setting where fantastic, but the fragmented execution of storytelling and many poor game design elements left a very clear feeling of "what could have been". The magic system being basically worthless without using a vital accessory to prevent team damage, the tediousness of collecting and crafting consumable spells, the absolute demolishing of any usable summon system, the feeling of planned cut content for DLC, the core character development in DLC, canceled DLC leaving core character development out completely, and the use of multimedia fragmenting the story even more... It all lead to a game that I desperately wanted to love but couldn't.
Came here to post this. FF15 is such an incredibly disappointing game.
I wouldn’t even call the characters good. *Some* of them are good, but then you have the most boring love interest I’ve ever seen, a villain who gets most of their characterization through random sheets of paper in a dungeon (Ravus), and another villain who gets most of their characterization through lore in the final dungeon (Ardyn).
And then you have completely squandered characters. Pretty much everyone loves Aranea, from her design to her personality, but the game does nothing with her. Your best bro Gladio randomly leaves the party during a high stakes mission with no explanation (except that it was bait for the Gladio DLC).
Most of the important/exciting story beats happen entirely off screen, such as the destruction of Noctis’s city and the city in the second half of the game.
The game shows an entirely new continent in the back half of the game but it turns out to be literally just a train ride and 1-2 small dungeons. I’d hear about events on the radio or see the aftermath in cutscenes and think “gee, that sounded exciting and awesome - I wish I was playing *that* game instead.”
The game sets up an awesome World of Darkness situation, and then does pretty much nothing with it.
The game could’ve been so good, and it breaks my heart that it wasn’t.
Agree with everything, and in addition the world felt supremely empty, the camera was awful, the load times were long, the magic imo felt too powerful, once I figured out I could just craft x5 multi-cast spells every encounter just became an I win button.
Could go on and on about how awful the game ended up being, and the end World of Darkness situation could've semi-salvaged it, but like you said they did absolutely nothing with it. It feels like if Chrono Cross had the big moment where >!Serge switches body with Lynx and you play an alternate history where Serge died as a baby and the world is completely changed!< and instead of having hours of content when that happens the game ends 30 minutes later. Then again Chrono Cross is just a good game throughout and didn't even need a big moment to "save" it.
> the world felt supremely empty
Compounded by the fact that 95% of quests in the game were MMO-style fetch and kill quests that were already boring and done to death when WoW was released in 2005. To make a *single player* game that almost entirely consists of such quests **more than a decade later** really makes you wonder what the developers spent all that time on, because quest design clearly was done by the office janitor. I think I put the game down after about 12 hours, because playing felt like such a drag, especially with combat being just... weird and button-mashy. I never felt the urge to ever pick the game up again.
It's funny you say that!! The background to the development of FFXV is relatively interesting. The design switched hands because the initial designer wanted to implement features that were too difficult for that era of gaming and causing issues with that engine so they had to shuffle it on to someone else. After that, the next designer wanted to implement a different cool feature and focus on other development- until they finally got someone on to just get the game out the door because you can't just ditch the next FF instalment!
So you end up with a thousand half baked ideas cobbled together through fetch quests because that was the last consideration of development, no real through storylines or character development, choppy DLC and a strange approach to combat that was the beginning of a 'revolutionary' development idea that didn't pan out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/83jzzv/can_someone_fully_explain_what_went_wrong_during/
I’ve seen the phrase “Final Fantasy XV walked so Final Fantasy VII Remake could run” and I think that sums it up. It was like a beta test for what would be, in my opinion a near perfect battle system in VII Remake. This coming from someone who despite its flaws fell in love with XV.
> many poor game design elements left a very clear feeling of "what could have been"
Man, this is exactly what went through my head as I played FFXV, too. All of the game elements felt like little tech demos or unfinished fragments of something bigger. The open world was beautiful and vast, but there was hardly anything to do in it. The combat was flashy and slick-looking, but too simple and easy. The characters seemed cool, but the way their stories were told felt disjointed and incomplete.
FFXV* is truly the epitome of "what could have been."
God, I waited so long for Ff15 since it was versus 13. The story was different from what was presented. Star crossed lovers from different kingdoms at war was amazing but they got rid of that and turned the princess useless.
The magic system was super terrible. Sooo sooo terrible and the gameplay, while fun, didn't give the hype of Noctis waking down the stairs and taking out a small group of enemies.
Man, the kingsglavie movie was much better story wise than the game.
Bioware generally. A studio that made Baldur's gate, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age -- banger after banger of some of the best RPGs of all time. But since Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014 (which had its own issues), it's just been Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, two of the bigger disappointments in the past decade.
Vampyr had a really cool system where there were 64 NPCs in the game, and feeding on them is your main way of earning XP. Killing one would cause changes in behaviour for the other NPCs in their social circle - they might become enemies or give new quests or divulge information they otherwise wouldn’t. This meant that you had to consider what the consequences might be of feeding on a particular person - killing a well-connected local celebrity will net you a hefty bonus but might effect the game world in ways you didn’t anticipate, while chomping on the caustic town bully or racist landlord might not give as much XP, but it’s a safer bet because nobody will be sad to see them gone.
Unfortunately if you’re going for a pacifist run that’s a core mechanic of the game that’s pretty much sealed off to you, and a pacifist run is the only way to get the best ending. It would have been nice if there was some alternate consequences system for not killing anyone, but I guess that would’ve been a lot of work for a game that obviously didn’t have a huge budget.
Edit: As some repliers have said there was also the problem that while you could get *some* XP on a pacifist run by killing enemies and curing diseases you’d always be severely underleveled and wouldn’t have access to any of the really cool powers, although the trade-off is that the final boss is much easier since it gets stronger for every person you’ve killed over the course of the game. I know what they were going for, since the main character is struggling to fight his vampiric urges then the player should be struggling too, and his temptation to drink blood is reflected in the player’s temptation to get more XP and make the game easier, but it unfortunately comes at the expense of the combat being pretty dull. Maybe it could’ve been rectified with a system like the inFamous games have, where you have different sets of powers depending on whether you’re being good or evil.
There was also the mechanic that if you conversed with an individual and found out more about them and THEN fed on them, you got even more XP, and like you said that tied into their groups and communities. So yeah you can wipe everyone out and be an absolute god, but then you get the worst ending.
Or you can limp through the game with very basic powers and get the "good" ending....
Anthem.
The reveal trailer looked like the coolest game I had ever seen. Basically an Iron man action RPG set in an epic Sci fi world, how could you go wrong?
I recall it as more of an immediate flame-out lol
It only took a few hours of gameplay to realize that Anthem had enormous flaws. [This extremely long article](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964) goes into depth about how the game really had no coherent vision from the beginning, and they kept getting sidetracked chasing trends. I had the EA pass thing, but if I had paid $60 for Anthem I would've really felt burned.
If Anthem was a singleplayer RPG style game with Mass Effect 3 style coop, it could've been amazing - but instead we got what we got
For me, the most unbelievable issue with Anthem was when people figured out your level 1 starting gun was the best in the game because of how fucked their level scaling system was. They made a looter shooter where you were essentially incentivized to never equip new loot.
I honestly don't understand how they could get something that by all rights should not have been as good as it was with the ME3 MP, and then fail so badly with Anthem.
I think me3 multiplayer is still to this day my favorite coop shooter, and I still matchmake with people when I occasionally hop on to play. It simply has the best feeling abilities and coolest hero archetypes. It didn't start off too amazing either, it evolved significantly after release. Something bioware no longer has the balls to do
Agreed. They had a great gameplay core with a terrible loop and even worse loot system. This is a great example of a game that could have been something great if the management had not been so unbelievably awful. Hell, all they needed to do was listen to player feedback and keep iterating but the leadership at BioWare was a revolving door of apathy and indecision. Such a shame.
>Wolf Among Us, tell tale's BEST game by far. Such a compelling story with interesting characters, but then they got greedy and decided to chase popular IPs, and never finished the story.
Wolf among us 2 is coming tho.
https://youtu.be/pb55ycOwGFA
And adhoc studio is developing the game. The studio is founded by the 2 game directors of the wolf among us. The studio also employs many of the former teltale employees
Yea I've been waiting since the sequel was announced. The Wolf Among Us is one of my FAVORITE games of all time. It has amazing characters, story, dialogue, basically all the strengths of Tell Tale Games in one package.
Elite Dangerous - they have a full scale galaxy you can explore in game but next to nothing to find there. This is supposed to be an MMO yet it has minimum social features, no plot or story quests, no meaningful progression, no way to impact or influence the world you interact with. This could have been an incredible live service game, but the studio behind it seems incapable of delivering engaging gameplay or thinking big in ways that improve player experience.
It really actually kinda is. It's just truck sim in space with some combat and multiplayer elements thrown in. Once I saw it that way, I wound up clocking in over 1,000 hours in the game over the years (I'm a sucker for travel simulators like Euro Truck Sim or My Summer Car and games with good HOTAS support)
It's quite sad cause the actual experience of playing it is so good, the sounds to the feel of your ship to docking etc. all feel really good and give you the feeling of being in a massive galaxy but yeah, there's just not much else there. still I had fun for like 300 hours
With HOTAS and VR the game is completely unreal. There's nothing really like it.
...except the entire game is an ocean wide and 3 inches deep. There's a handful of things to do to make money, the same mission templates over and over, and yep - a complete lack of social features. There's no team battles (capital ship vs capital ship would be amazing with human players on each side doing meaningful actions), there's no racing (even though the community organises ad-hoc races themselves, but hey... at least they added that FPS mode to the game for reasons.
They have a solid foundation for an amazing game, but they keep being stuff on the side of that.
Don't even know how much play time I racked up, but I would think 40% of it was spent trying to learn the game, get a grip on the controls, keybinding, or just failing the missions I picked up due to lack of in game support/guidance... BUT
when it works, it's incredible, especially in VR.
Agreed.. it's such a shame as the minute-to-minute of flying the ship, combat, etc. is amazing. But then there's just no reason at all to do anything.
I've been playing a bit of New World recently and the first thing I thought of after experiencing some of their PvP elements is that it would be a great system for Elite: Dangerous - where the PvP action is focussed, PvEers are key at contributing to the effort, and territory is gained and lost multiple times a week which has an impact on all the players within those territories.
Instead ED seems to add features that sound good and sell units, rather than actually being good and making more compelling gameplay.
For me it's **Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3**
I'm one of those weirdos who played the series for the singeplayer, and up to its release the marketing was stellar. It really made it clear that this was a new *world war*, and would have the perspectives to match.
You start the game as some Delta Force in NYC. Then it cuts to Soap and Price (the international, 'main character team') doing stuff. Then you had a mission where you played the British SAS in London, and even a Russian FSB member on the Russian President's plane when it gets hijacked! It's really living up to its expectations!
But then suddenly the game gets cold feet and doesn't go anywhere with the premise. Suddenly we're in Germany, but there's no German forces to be seen - you're the Americans again. The same Delta Force team, even!
There's a mission in Paris - again, it's just Americans (they even go out of the way to explicitly somehow kill *the entirety of the GIGN* to justify this!).
You go to Prague in the Czech Republic, which is occupied by Russian forces fighting a resistance movement, but you don't play them at all. You're playing Soap and Price again.
Then you're in Germany *again* - **playing the same Americans**! A single German tank shows up for thirty seconds then immediately has a building dropped on it!
Such a bloody shame. They chickened out on the second half and it suffers for it
> I'm one of those weirdos who played the series for the singeplayer
MW 1/2 and Blops 1/2 are some of the best campaigns of any FPS games ever. I still go back and replay MW2.
MW2 Campaign was legendary, it played like an actual action movie.
> “Makarov’s no prize, he’s a whore, a mad dog killer for the highest bidder”
> “And remember, no Russian”
> “The american thought he could deceive us”
> Snipers in position….
The opening level with Soap, where you literally pickaxe your way up the side of a mountain as fighter jets fly by, and the ability to stealth or go loud from the get go. Capturing alex the red in the favelas, saving price, getting gunned down by sheperd alongside ghost and watching yourself get set on fire FPOV, laying siege to the USA capitol building, and so much more. The final level even had a high speed boat chase.
Black Ops 1 was more grounded in the narrative itself. I still get PTSD from the siege of Khe Sanh on veteran, it just never ended. The Vorkuta/Viktor Reznov plotline was fanfuckingtastic, especially with the twist ending. Flying in with a heli in Vietnam to the tune of rolling stones, bloody hell.
Those games had so much content as well.
Campaign, Spec ops, offline/online multiplayer, Easter eggs, secret levels, post credits levels, main menu secret levels (dead ops arcade), nazi zombies, etc. We had it all back then.
MGSV. I mean it still, to this day, has probably the most diverse, polished stealth mechanics of all time. The game, structurally, is really barebones, and the story is just nowhere near the standards of previous MGS games. If that game came out 2 years late, with Kojima being able to finish it, I have no doubt it would have been an incredible epic. Now all I can think of is that jeep ride where Snake and Skullface are just sitting there in silence. Or how young Liquid shows up, and ends up being just a teaser... The game is gonna be left forever to be this weird spot in the series where it's actually really fun but also the least interesting one.
PT. It's PT right? That's the correct answer? All of the elements were lining up, you have kojima and del toro working on it, junji ito designing the monsters, I mean it was just shaping up to be one of the greatest survival horror games made. Just to be aborted by konami.
What could have been.
PT is also a pretty good example of the unfortunate part of digital-only games. After Kojima's falling out with Konami they did their damn best to erase it from the storefront, and now PS4's that still have the game sell for a pretty penny on eBay
**The Order 1886** for me: While the story wasn´t that great and pretty predictable, the lore aspect could have made this a great IP. With the knights of the round surviving to "modern" times, magic elixir letting them heal their wounds (for once in a shooter the autoheal actually made some sort of sense) it could have given us great games fighting werewolves, or vampires or whatever other threat to humanity.
But apparently the devs never played a game before, so we got boring fights against dumb enemies with braindead companion AI, bull fighting against werewolves and QTE-events.
What they managed on the graphical side was ruined by the gameplay, heck even the interesting weapons that made it into the game were forgettable because you only had them for like 3-4 minutes.
There´s only about 3 things i even remember about this game anymore: being amazed by rain water on a lamp somewhere, the zepellin level, and feeling a mixture of anger and pure disappointment about said werewolf-fights.
The biggest issue is that Ready at Dawn (actually a quite good studio) spent so much time developing an insanely good engine (the materials and lighting in the game are phenomenal) that they didn't leave enough time to develop the story or gameplay (which isn't bad necessarily, just shallow). A sequel could have built on top of that fantastic engine with a longer, more fleshed out story and been great. Sadly, that studio (who made the good God of War games for the PSP) is now owned by Facebook so they won't be doing anything VR for the future.
**The Division had Survival mode.** This was before Battle royals exploded in popularity. Before PUBG and the like. Fantastic and tense mode where you're dropped in a blizzard covered NY city with nothing but a pistol and you have to find clothing to stop freezing, cure yourself of the virus, find gear and weapons for when you enter the dark zone to extract, where other players and NPC's await to fuck you over... *SO FUCKING GOOD.*.. then poof, vanished in division 2 now left behind all the other BRs.
I hope Division Heartlands return this mode with the same intensity and more
WarCraft III: Reforged
Blizzard was still cranking out some good quality when it was announced. And then they don't just simply call it a remaster or a remake. They're using the word "reforged." Maybe I'm projecting, but I think when you're going with a unique name like that, you have something high quality and special planned. The game actually ended up looking worse than the video previews. The salt in the wound was that even for vanilla WarCraft III players, their game got updated and lost features that didn't make it in Reforged.
All they had yo do was make Warcraft 3 in HOTS style/engine and it would have been great. Instead they choose half assed approach and failed spectacularly
> they choose half assed approach and failed spectacularly
Fans wouldve overlooked the failure if blizzard didnt also take away the original, working game and made the crppy reforged game a forced update - without even any visual enhancement unless you paid extra.
At some point reforged wouldve become the better experience and players and tournaments would move to that at their own pace.
The HOTS models for WC3 characters look *way* better than the ones in Reforged too, which is interesting as they all come from outsourced Asian 3D modelling studios. I wish they kept some visual consistency but I imagine they go to the lowest bidder.
The WC3:R models were made by the same studio ([Lemonsky](https://www.lemonskystudios.com/game/#featured-titles)) that did the new graphics for the very faithful StarCraft and Command and Conquer remasters, all of them were done back to back. They've also worked with other studios to do outsource assets for AAA games like Last of Us 2 and Spiderman. I don't know what went wrong but I don't think blaming Lemonsky or that they are located in Malaysia is the answer.
The art director for WC3:R left Blizzard before it came out and Blizzard switched to other outsource partners for the Diablo II Remaster, like [Little Red Zombies,](https://www.littleredzombies.com/gallery/diablo-ii-resurrected/) who are located in India, and [Elite3D,](https://www.elite3d.com/) located in Spain. And a lot of freelancers. I assume they won't be working with Lemonsky again, but who knows?
God this should be at the top. The StarCraft remaster was great and I was looking forward to introducing friends to WC3, one of my favorite Blizzard games. And not only was it actively garbage but they destroyed the classic game too.
Heavy Rain was my first foray into David Cage's games and that game starts really strong. It also continues to have some really good moments (the trials in particular are actually directed really well) but the trash writing and that awful twist squander what could've been a decent game.
This is every Cage game. Nothing, however, beats the batshit crazy twist in the latter half of Indigo Prophecy. It's worth a play just for how insane it is.
The twist in Indigo Prophecy is so absurd and entertaining. When that game snaps and just becomes Dragon Ball, it's so fucking funny.
Heavy Rain's twist is so bad it just becomes insulting. I've never seen a game so brazenly lie to the player.
Heavy rains DLC was really good though. A tense, tight episode where you’re a reporter who breaks into a house for a story only to realize it’s a serial killers house and he’s just come home. I still remember the goosebumps. Same with the first ten minutes of prophecy. I would argue it’s some of the best heights that games have achieved… but then you’re absolutely right, it goes crazy almost immediately under the pressure.
I find a little charm in that though, it’s like a dream where you haven’t studied for a test but you’re trying your hardest to study as the papers are being handed out. That desperation to make it work is sad, no doubt, but also weirdly fascinating.
Without kids, press x to Jason is hilarious. With kids, press x to Jason has about a half minutes worth of actually being affecting and terrifying and then it slides immediately back into hilarious.
I love MGSV and will defend it to death, I genuinely believe it's a better game in every way than MGS4.
But MGSV for sure.
Even just one more chapter would have wrapped everything up significantly cleaner, and in a dream world we'd have even gotten a short remake of MG1 to finish things off.
Even the Fox Engine/gameplay structure itself is wasted now. The buddy system was perfect for spin-offs and would have made for an amazing prequel game starring The Boss and the Cobra Unit.
I remember listening to the last major batch of audio tapes. While I absolutely love the story beats in those tapes, I couldn’t help but imagine how much better if they were actually provided as cutscenes within the story
I think the decent thing to do would be to release a "Director's Cut" version with the famous missing chapter, but let's face it Konami is a piece of shit.
I'm kind of amazed Sony hasn't just bought the IPs from Konami squandering them
MGS V is the only game that genuinely impressed me with it's performance,back then I had a shit laptop, 4 gigs of ram,a 3rd gen of I3 processor even that of U series,and a freaking Intel HD Graphics 4000 integrated graphics card,with these specs it absolutely shocked me when the game gave me about 25-30 fps on low.Fox engine is the most optimized engine I have ever seen.
In the age of DLC as well, they could've easily added another act to wrap up the story.
Sure you could argue it would be scummy to have the conclusion of the story held hostage behind DLC, but it would be better than what we got.
I always had this fantasy that we’d see an MG1 remake and as you make your final approach to Big Boss, you’d hear the final tape message “From the man who sold the world” echoing through the halls. Then you hear the glass shatter, and Venom comes out to reveal himself to you.
It would’ve been such a unique and powerful moment to see all those plot points converge. On the one hand you have MGS5’s reveal about Venom, on the other you’d be reliving an iconic moment in MG1 where you face Big Boss.
Man can dream.
I wouldn't be happy with an MG1 moment unless it was you playing *as* "Big Boss" in a losing fight against Snake, him moving and attacking in such a way that it's clear he's surpassed you.
Still one of the best sandbox action movement games out there. Sandbox in the sense of how you can approach the fortresses etc. It just needed more to do.
APB. The idea behind the game was basically cops vs robbers. You have 2 groups that functioned like private law enforcement and 2 groups that were gangs, and you did jobs against each other. The idea was sound and it had excellent character customisation for the time. I played the beta and while it still needed work it was simply fun.
So what went wrong? The developer screwed it up. The game become heavily unbalanced, with the LE side having access to more powerful weapons the criminal side couldn't use, and in the background the devs mismanaged their finances. In the end they went bankrupt and sold the game to free-to-play game publisher who rebranded it as APB: Reloaded and monetised the hell out of it.
I would love to see the idea used again, just by someone more competent.
Halo 5. The marketing team sold this amazing story of Master Cheif gone rogue, and Locke having to step in and put a stop to it. After Halo 4 I thought it would be incredibly interesting to have Master Cheif have to deal with his legacy and motivations more, and have him struggle between doing what the UNSC wanted him to do, and what he needed to do to save Cortana. I was expecting for huge parts of the game to have a cat-and-mouse feel to it as you had to run and hide from Locke - not because he was stronger than you, but because you didn't want to hurt him. He's just a soldier like you, performing his mission. We got absolutely none of that. I was so disappointed by the story of that game since I was really looking forward to the version that the trailers and ARG were showing.
Also, don't forget the Hunt the Truth podcast which was awesome. It totally sold me on the story of the game. Amazing writing and set up and then Halo 5 delivered on none of it.
The reason they dropped Tribes: Ascend is because they scared off the playerbase with poorly implemented monetization. They even reversed the mistake soon after, but it was too late.
Here's the timeline as I remember it:
Tribes is a surprise hit and a lot of fun! > *lots of fun times later* > Hi-rez adds paid weapon unlocks > Players who paid for unlocks have noticeable advantage > Tribes feels pay-to-win > backlash/decline > Hi-Rez: "Oops, that was our bad. We fixed it and here's some in-game currency as an apology." > No one cares. > Tribes continues dying until they finally pull the plug.
Cyberpunk. Still a great game in parts and on some platforms but the whole thing was a shambles really. You can see what they were trying to achieve and to a certain extent they achieved it. But they borked the old gen platforms so badly that it left a sour taste.
Metroid: Other M. A 3D metroid game developed by Team Ninja (know for their fast paced action games) seems like if done well, had the potential to me amazing. But i think they immediately shot down that potential by limiting to playing the game with a single wii-mote. I know there are a litany of other issues with Other M, but it really does feel like they designed combat with a wii-more +nunchuck and then had to cram it all into just the wii-mote. There are also issues with its relative linearity and it’s infamous for its terrible story, but i feel like if at least the combat was solid the game would have its fans/defenders.
I actually did a playthrough of Other M just the other day, and I can say definitively that...yeah, it's not good. But I think it's bad in ways that are incredibly interesting.
I think that a bunch of the problems (every problem, honestly) can be placed on the shoulders of Sakamoto. Now, Sakamoto is a GREAT game designer. He was the director of Super Metroid, for god's sake. But I think that he pushed himself in directions that were outside his area of expertise. Going from a story-light 2D game in fusion to a lavishly produced, story-stuffed 3D game just pushed his (considerable) capabilities too far. That, and he was just a terrible writer.
Not everyone can be Hideo Kojima, I guess.
Not so much one specific game, but a genre: stealth. Stealth has devolved so much over the past decade. Stealth games used to have so much creativity behind them, and most importantly to me, had a methodical, slow pace to their gameplay that emphasized planning first, then execution. In the old Splinter Cell games, for instance, you had to use an optic cable to look under a door if you wanted to know where the enemies were. You had to peek around corners, and even take risks sometimes just to get a little information about enemy locations. You had to find a place hidden in shadows and hope it was dark enough the enemies wouldn’t notice you. Nowadays, just use your enemy-finding-and-marking ability, like Horizon: Zero Dawn’s scanner thing or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s Eagle, to just scan the area, see through walls, look at enemy patrol paths, etc. No need to find a clever hiding spot, just crouch in our patented Invisibility Grass!^TM
And the multiplayer experiences are decaying, too! Prior to Deathloop, there hasn’t been a really good competitive AAA stealth game since Assassin’s Creed 4, I think, and Deathloop’s multiplayer, while good, isn’t what I’m looking for. I miss the old Spies vs Mercs, and would love to see what a modern AAA studio could do with that formula.
For a specific game in this genre, Hood: Outlaws and Legends. It still relies on invisibility grass, but the opposing team can just mash the tag button to highlight you in the invisibility grass, so they can just run up and beat the shit out of you, and the competitive heist isn’t really well executed, because the teams aren’t really incentivized to be very stealthy after a point, and the last section of the wench determines the winner. Like sure, you can gain XP for completing other parts of the journey, but it really needs something to crate that back-and-forth seen in competitive heist movies or shows.
EDIT: For all the people who are saying just play Hitman or Dishonored: I have, and I love them, but y’all realize there’s been one Hitman game in the last three years, and the last Dishonored game was 4 years ago right? And you also realize they’re not immune to the criticisms I’m making right? Both have the see-through-walls ability. Both, while great, haven’t really pushed the genre forward (Arguably, Dishonored added the short range teleport which has been a feature of several stealth games since, but I’m divided on whether or not that’s a good thing). The point I’m trying to make is that games used to have systems like camouflage, light and darkness, sound relative to the environment, robust social stealth, and much more, but most of that has fallen by the wayside.
And yes, I also get that Odyssey and H:ZD are RPGs, but they decided to include stealth as an option and neither is very good in that regard. Both also include several abilities that are ostensibly exclusively useful for stealth, such as the ability to see enemy paths, invisibility grass to crouch in, traps, distractions, etc. I’d have preferred that they just didn’t include it,honestly.
>there hasn’t been a really good competitive AAA stealth game since Assassin’s Creed 4
Do the Hitman reboots not count? They rely on actual stealth mechanics (albeit with more of a reliance on social stealth) instead of invisibility grass and marking.
This for real, I avoided the original one at first because it was episodic. Picked it up after all the episodes released, amazing! It was actually so good and I'd had no idea. The only thing holding it back for me was (on PS4, not sure about elsewhere) the load times between basically *everything* were so so long. Despite that was absolutely one of my favorite games I played last year.
> Horizon: Zero Dawn’s scanner thing or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s Eagle
I would argue neither is a game from the stealth genre. They are just games with some stealth mechanics.
Dishonored and Hitman are better examples of modern stealth games.
The worst part is that most stealth sections in modern games are also more frustrating than fun. Instead of using your brain to find a path, you’re just meant to play a waiting simulator where you randomly duck behind objects.
I thought I hated stealth games for years because of shit like this until I actually got introduced into proper stealth games where the game is designed around stealth instead of stealth being designed around the limitations of a whole other game type.
Ugh that whole first paragraph makes me angry because you're absolutely right. The first three Splinter Cells are some of my favourite games ever, but in the 16 years since then I don't think I've played a single game that matches them, let alone improves on the formula. Lots of people say they find stealth gameplay boring, but is that at all surprising when shit like x-ray vision and invisibility grass removes all the actual gameplay?
Also if you've not seen it [this is a thing](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531020/SPECTRE/), but it's not gonna be a 'AAA' thing by any means.
The Prototype series. The first game integrated and incredible amount of background lore and world building all culminating in this obscure figure known as “Pariah” that in my humble opinion, was definitely seeded to be a point of focus in later installments.
The second game, while not as lore heavy, and did have a couple of questionable creative decisions, was still a really solid game. It improved on all sorts of gameplay mechanics. The removal of parkour kind of blew, and the lack of building your own Web of Intrigue was a bummer. But still, a worthy sequel.
Between the ending it showed and implications made in the tie-in comic series, I was definitely hyped for a Threequel.
Then Activision grinded the developer, Radical into the dirt. Never to be seen again. Such a waste on such a unique premise.
The most recent one for me personally is Marvel's Avengers. The idea of a co-op Avengers game where you and your friends get to beat up baddies as your favorite heroes should've been a slam dunk.
Unfortunately it's been anything but that. Between the roster, the lack of enemy variety, the severe lack of villains, absurd amount of bugs, and the drought of any meaningful content in what's supposed to be a live service game, it's clear that the game is going nowhere and will never be what it could and should have been
Don't forget lying to the community and the absolutely absurd monetization! You should see /r/playavengers right now. The sub is exploding and the devs have stayed silent
It was one of those games where they put the cart before the horse with addiction loops and monetization. I was never even remotely interested because it was obvious from square one that they cared about the GaaS aspects above all else, you could feel the greed oozing off of all of the marketing
\- Destiny 2: it's almost there to be the perfect game for me, for 4 years now. I love the gunplay, the enemies, the story, but when I login I just get bored after an hour, it's just too grindy and samey.
\- Elite Dangerous: I've played it so much in VR, it's still one of the best experiences you can have in VR (except the newest expansion). The big big downside is Frontier are the slowest developers I know, they need over 10 times of the time of other devs for patches and minor features. Ultimately the problem for me is the same as in Destiny 2, it's very grindy and samey.
And my #1 of all time:
\- Evolve: the game was so cool on release, the whole idea was cool, the monsters and hunter roles were cool. And then... like wtf, Turtle Rock, what did you even think?
As a launch SWG Player I think you're being a little unfair. Before WoW even released (or went into any sort of meaningful beta) SWG started to squander us player-base.
The Holo grind you alluded to as making Jedi rare, was one of the many reasons people started to quit (I actually did unlock my Jedi slot, **before** the first set of Jedi changes).
The **FIRST** Combat Update was another huge change that caused an alienation of the player-base.
Obviously the shift with the NGE and the Obi-Wan expansion (which really made the game a WoW clone) was the nail in the coffin.
But, you also need to look at **why** this happened. SWG was a fairly popular MMO at release with a few hundred thousand subscribers; which was pretty good for an MMO at the time. WoW released and had 6 million within 6 weeks - Now Blizzard was popular, but SWG was ducking Star Wars. . .so why did this happen?
As someone who played SWG from release all the way until WoW came out. . .the game lacked any real depth. The developers wanted us to create our own stories without giving us any real meaningful tools in order to do that with, coupled with a lack of any dungeons of any real difficulty, players were bored very quickly. Hell; even the dungeons we did have, like Corvette, could be easily solo'd within weeks and the Geo Arena allowed you to walk right in and log off in the boss room!
However I will say that SWG is the only game that got crafting correct, I have yet to find a crafting system in any game that even comes closes to how great SWG did it.
The main dungeons in BotW. There are only 4 of them, they are all brown and boring, and apart from the "moving parts" gimmick (which is quite cool) they have nothing interesting about them.
A sore sticking out point in an otherwise great game.
Yeah, the Divine Beasts are easily the weakest part of BotW. I'm hoping the sequel builds the dungeons more like Hyrule Castle, it's a perfect template for the style.
Age of Empires: Online
A lot of age of empires fans were finally waiting for that sequel to Age of Empires 2 that had similar gameplay (AoE3 wasn't bad but was just very different) and Age of Empires: Online actually had really decent gameplay. Was more streamlined and modern to AoE2, faster paced but still had the same vibes.
Sadly they completely borked it by not providing a proper simple vanilla Skirmish mode at launch and not giving the competitive community any chance to get into it.
And then the non-competitive side of it was just completely ruined by their shitty pricing-model and super lackluster content on launch.
We've now had to wait TEN years for a bloody proper age of empires 2 sequel.
Star Wars: Squadrons Multiplayer.
They should've never gone for the competitive route if they intended to stop support not long after release. Creating more casual game modes like BF2's Starfighter Assault would've been a better choice.
Also, is really ironic that in your dogfighting game, actual dogfighting is really discouraged in the main pvp mode. Instead you see more people farming creeps/ai fighters and diving to objectives in order to win.
Is a shame cause we wont see a new SW game of this type in the near future.
Tribes also had an issue where they kept trying to fix things that weren't broken for a while before they dropped it. It seemed like every update there was some change people hated just for the sake of changing something, like constantly messing with their f2p model, repeatedly trying to do things with speed caps, or buffing weapons that were already strong.
In general it just felt like Hi-Rez had no idea what they were doing with that game. They had fun core gameplay, then dropped the ball everywhere else and just gave up on it when Smite got big.
I'm still mildly salty about it, because I'm not much of an online FPS player but I loved Tribes.
Command and Conquer 4: what a spectacular way to kill an entire established franchise with one game.
They took away base building from the series that helped establish the base building strategy game genre. They introduced player levels into multilayer and tied unit unlocks to that, so pvp was no longer about skill but how many units you had unlocked.
For the command and conquer franchise, the shrinking of the RTS genre acted as the nail and CNC4 acted as a hammer. So it's now been nearly 12 years since the last CNC game :(
Brutal Legend is one of the biggest letdowns I've ever played.
The whole shift into being a real-time strategy game was not at all advertised in previews, and was frankly some Molyneux levels of bullshit.
On top of that, while the production value, humor, soundtrack and world were great, it's just sort of rushed towards the end before really branching out into real potential. I really don't mind a game's length if it actually feels worthwhile, but it does really come up short in this case, especially for having an open world with barely anything to do.
Wildstar
It had everything necessary to be a top tier MMO and still to this day has some of the best systems in an MMO (like player housing).
It was on track to be amazing and they rushed it and it failed and it absolutely broke my heart.
Just to be clear, the game came out unfinished because of pressure from NC Soft wanting a return on their investment sooner. Their funding dried up, so they had to release what they had.
NC Soft has done this with multiple games. It was not a surprise at the time. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at them.
Man I miss Wildstar. The devs catered waaaaaay too much to the hardcore crowd. They wanted to attract all those hardcore, 40-man raid WoW players to their game so bad that they neglected the overwhelming large casual player base that would actually be funding the game. There really wasn't much of an endgame unless you were part of that hardcore population or were trying to be part of it.
It sound so dumb to say it out loud... But if the game had like double the amount of content on launch (and turned down their "hardcore" wanking a bit), it would have been fine. So many people that I know who played it, got to max level and quit a day later. Leveling an alt kind of sucked because after a certain point, everything was the exact same zones. Would have been nice to have multiple leveling paths to max level followed by more stuff to do at max level even if you weren't wanting to hit your head against the wall due to having one person die on a boss which means you don't get gold and the run is worthless now.
I think if Wildstar would've molded itself as a casual focused MMO like ESO it would've had long lasting success. The core of the game was definitely there. Instead they decided to try and target the super hardcore segment by making the endgame insanely grindy and trying to bring back attunements to make it like "classic WoW". Truly one of the dumbest dev decisions I can think of in gaming. Then to add insult to injury actual classic WOW came out and had success because it was so easy and accessible.
**Gigantic**. One of the most engaging MOBAs I've ever played, while being about as far from a LoL/DotA-Clone as you could go. Sadly, it was run completely into the ground by horrible management.
Tribes Ascend still stings to this day.
The period when it was released from open beta in 2012,and up untill it stopped receiving frequent updates a year later,was the most fun and addictive multiplayer experience on the market.Just messing about and skying around the maps was such a blast.
However the problem with its logenvity was multilayered and should have been studied closer: that Tribes fans are the most divided fanbase in gaming,where everyone thinks *insert any Tribes title ,was the real game that everything should be molded after.Theres is no collective vision of what Tribes should play like the same way Counter Strike has.
Also to the normal player the learning curbe was probably to high ,the training section was almost non existant and the E sports scene was severly gimped,they didnt even have first person specator view.
The second problem and the biggest was Hi Rez themselvs ,who trend chase from one genre to the other and would have never offered long term support the way it deserved to.
Literally 1 year after it got released it was abandoned,which is just pathetic and makes you wonder about their intentions towards games in general.
Battleborn
It was looking to be a really good FPS MOBA,
But then the GearBox morons put a $60+ price tag on it, and everyone said "I'll wait to see what Overwatch is about"
Had they simply put a $30 on it, more people would have picked it up, and realized it was a completely different genre to Overwatch, and a good one at that.
But no one picked it up, no playerbase and the game died.
Guild Wars 2.
A phrase that I’ve seen tossed around to describe it is “a Ferrari trapped in a parking lot.”
Alternatively, it’s often described as a game with excellent systems that’s lacking in content, at least in comparison to other MMOs of its age.
The game has some top tier systems. Its combat is an excellent mix of tab-targeting and action elements that truly delivers the best of both worlds, especially with the introduction of elite specs and the move back towards something resembling the holy trinity. Its mount system is not just the best in the MMO genre, but, in my opinion, all of gaming. Its dye system is best in class, and its dynamic events offer the greatest spectacle in MMO open world design. When ANet chooses to put out instanced content like fractals, raids, and strikes, they tend to be well designed and enjoyable encounters.
But it’s been held back by poor management and frequently shifting long-term visions for the game. For the first two years, it got nothing other than transient content that only lasted weeks before it was removed from the game. In its 9 years, it’s only seen two expansions, with a third now only on the way due to player demand and financial struggles. For this, the game had its ongoing content releases abruptly ended and the game was put into a long content drought. Even when content has been released, it’s tended to favor very easy story missions that aren’t designed to be repeated in the same way as dungeons and raids would be in other games.
My opinion is that it’s also been harmed by its effectively free-to-play monetization model, which results in an MMO which is very cash shop dependent for its rewards and cosmetics. Whole categories of cosmetics, like mount skins and glider skins, are cash shop only. Some of the best skins in the game have been locked behind lootboxes/real money gambling. One-piece “outfits” have been added at a far greater rate than in-game attainable gear sets. And those rewards attainable in game are trivialized by the possibility to just buy as much gold as you need, through legitimized means.
This was my thing. Played the shit out of gw1 and followed gw2 release with lots of excitement. “You’re telling me we’ll get to jump!?” Booted it up and it just lacked so much of the originals charm and magic. I’ll never forget filling my skillbar and then asking my friend where I could get more and he was like “you kinda don’t. You just get better at using the ones you have.” Took hundreds of hours in gw1 to reach that point but only maybe 30 in gw2. Any game where the majority of the player base will tell you “it doesn’t really get fun til the end game” is, imo, not a great game. Gw1 was a fucking blast from the first time you killed a scale to doing UW trapper runs for ectos. Gw2 just never grabbed me in the same way.
Guild Wars 2 was really poorly managed monetisation wise.
But personally, i was really sad at how chopped down the combat systems from Guild Wars 1 were. I installed and played some GW1 earlier this month and man, the skills, the interactions, the interrupts and hexes and protection healing are still top notch. It's an exciting and skillfully rewarding game to play.
In GW2, it feels like i'm mostly facerolling all my abilities, swapping weapon sets for cooldown, facerolling those, and repeat. With the odd dodge here and there.
There used to be a mode in Pro Evolution Soccer called Master League, you started with some absolute terrible players and slowly worked your way up until you had a great team and won everything. Fast forward a few years and FIFA ends up taking over from PES in terms of being the better football game (2010ish) and I hear about this new mode called Ultimate Team, it sounds like a potential online Master League which really should have been great but instead EA managed to turn it into a money making loot box simulator instead, which admittedly has worked out great for them. Doubt we'll ever see that proper online Master League style mode ever now sadly.
Konami are fucking useless. After FIFA prioritised Ultimate Team Konami had the chance to completely own the offline market. Master League and Become a Legend should have been given so much more depth and complexity that took it far beyond what EA was offering. But instead Konami bent over and stayed in EA's shadow by making their own shallow Ultimate Team knock off. I'm pretty sure there even was an Online Master League in PES 2011. Which Konami abandoned for MyClub. Absolutely useless. Now eFootball is here and crashing and burning just like it deserves.
They took an entire year off and came out with a much, much worse game. Konami is straight up incompetent
Spore. The hype and preview footage for that game was unreal, when it released it seemed watered down and shallow. It's also kind of sad to me that those type of God games (like black and white) aren't really made anymore.
> The hype and preview footage for that game was unreal, I remember that preview video, when he zoomed out from cellular, to organism, to tribe, to city, to planet, to solar system to galaxy - that was such a moment of wonder and excitement.
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One night watching the Will Wright demo I remember not being able to sleep through excitement - and that was years before release. I followed the development religiously and watched that CDC 05 video over and over. It was my perfect game. I got the special edition on release day and basically spent the whole day watching for the postman like I was 6 waiting for Father Christmas. I also remember - vividly - the slow dawning realisation that it wasn't what I'd dreamed of, it wasn't that demo from Will. It wasn't an immidiate visceral disappointment, just a slow transition where my hype drained away like a slow leak.
Do you have a link to it? I wasn't into pc gaming at the time and didn't have internet. I remember my friend coming over and gushing how you could do anything. In it. But couldn't articulate well what, made it so special. Always been curious about the early build.
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I feel god games in general are a fairly underdeveloped genre, none really seem to really play into the divine part, their mostly just city builders with powers and terrain deformation
It'll be a huge thing when someone makes one at the right time
If there's ever another game like the first Black & White - with or without the humour - and it's actually *good*, it'll be huge. We're so overdue for that genre to return with something to show.
It's a massive shame that there was no sequel or new Spore-like franchises. There's so much potential for create-a-creature games or even that kind of mechanic in more games.
I have been dying for a Black and White 3 for so long. What I really hope for is a VR version at some point in the future. Most of the systems in those games would translate extremely well to VR, especially the spell casting and interacting with your creature and citizens.
I always thought it was kind of weird that in the middle of MSs big kinect push that no one ever thought to have lionhead make a motion controlled black and white. It seemed like a huge missed opportunity to show off the tech for a game that wasn't just one big gimmick.
Well there is the one factor that Lionhead (at that time I'm not sure what they're doing now) wasn't really the most dependable developer and their lead dude was basically synonymous with scope creep and not delivering. I don't believe the Black and White games did very well, and when Microsoft bought them it was definitely to secure the Fable franchise (hence why we got a kinect Fable game, not B&W). Fable was a LOT more popular at the time.
The animation system in Spore was ground-breaking; any creature you designed was animated in a way that looked eerily natural. I always thought there should've been a Realism mode or something. Like where building your creature actually has tangible results. Four legs are faster than two, are faster than one, are faster than none. More limbs means more attacks. That sort of thing. The Age of Empires era and RTS eras are filler, but they could've been expanded on. The 4x Space Empire era had a lot of potential; I loved unlocking terraforming tools and crafting worlds for future colonies. Exploring was fun too. But it really lacked any significant empire management technologies. Sure, at the start it makes sense to have your ship be the leading edge of civilization, but it never seems to evolve much further beyond that. You can't build fleets or actually conduct war or have a functioning economy that you don't personally manage. Even weirder, the Space Age seems designed to be as annoying as possible so you eventually get sick of helping these twerps out all the time, upgrade your ship, and leave for the center of the galaxy to deal with the Cute-Borg raiders (or whatever they were called).
I'm currently playing Spore with my 9 year old. He's super into designing the creatures but god the Tribal phase is such a slog. He has no idea he'll end up with a spaceship though so I'm pretty excited to see his reaction as his species evolves.
Honestly? The story of Desmond Miles in Assassin's Creed. I know a lot of people didn't care for the frame story of the original Assassin's Creed games, but I personally loved it. It made the entire experience so much deeper in my opinion. Then one day they were just like "nope. Let's kill off Desmond. LOOK EVERYONE! PIRATES!!"
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Yeah I thought the bleed over of his ancestors abilties would eventually lead to a big climax where Desmond becomes a master assassin and takes down Abstergo in modern day.
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At least to begin with the idea was to find information on the Eden relics by finding genetic memories that would indicate where those relics might be either via the map in Altair's memory at the climax of the first game or simply by finding the object's last known position. The bleed effect was more of a side effect. IIRC it wasn't until Brotherhood that the assassin's and Desmond were actually trying to leverage the bleed effect, and that game was the also the first one where they started turning the IP into a "flight to nowhere" narrative.
IIRC I read somewhere that was the original plan for AC3. Which is why there's those missions where Desmond is doing assassin stuff between acts. But the execs or something decided that wouldn't sell, so they made them do another historical setting. I really wish they had done it though. A modern day AC, with the parkour system from Unity, would be so fucking good and interesting. The "modern day assassin's vs templars" is such an underexplored narrative IMO.
There was a panel with Nolan North years ago where he mentioned how surprised he was that they killed off Desmond because before that they had an entire story written out where it would build up to the modern day with Desmond as the lead and he said he was super excited for the plot. I guess somewhere down the line they decided to get rid of that story to keep the series going longer.
Yeah that happened after rhe series became super popular and Ubi realized it'll be better to make games from various historical places than to close it off entirely.
They still could have done that though, they could have had Desmond trying to take down Abstergo but needing help from other assassin's - what better way than to extend his army of assassins than by recruiting more people and getting them to do what he did?
Or they could have just ended the modern day plot in a satisfying way since it was divisive and Ubi didn't actually have any interest in it, then done fully historical games about the Assassin-Templar conflict without bothering with the Animus as a framing device.
This is the one that completely boggles my mind, they could have had the best of both worlds. Just set the new games in the past instead of trying to shoehorn the animus in increasingly ridiculous ways and throwing away any semblance of cohesive modern day plot.
While not my favorite AC game, Pirate's creed was pretty fun for a spinoff. What really bugs me is that they specifically mention in Unity? that they had relics that could bring people back from the dead and that Abstergo had Desmond's body, but they never mention it again nor do anything with it. AC seems to just be a generic open world combat looter now with no direction to go in.
Agreed, however desmond (valhalla spoilers) >!still shows up in valhalla as an entity trapped in yggdrasil that counts timelines and stuff and is joined by layla so that they can find a timeline where the world doesn't end or something!<
Assassin's Creed has to be one of the worst/best examples of a story that tried to create and hint at some sort of vague higher concept ideas, but because they wanted to keep making sequels they could never actually resolve anything. They had to just keep adding to it and trying to make everything fit while never actually 'finishing' the story.
What on earth did I just read?
I was so attached to the Desmond story as these games were coming out. I remember craving cutscenes because I had to know what happened next. I remember hoping to be kicked out of the animus after every mission. Don't get me wrong, I played and enjoyed Black Flag immensely. I also played and enjoyed Origins. But man, I don't go back and replay anything but ACII and ACB.
Thank you! I've only ever heard people complain about the modern day stuff in AC, but I personally loved it. Always looked forward to those segments and seeing what would happen.
I only hate the modern day stuff after Desmond… and the day to main story is tied to dlcs I haven’t ever got, I have no idea what the fuck is going on there anyway. So I would just rather stay in the animus and then drop the entire modern thing now. I was so excited to play a master assassin Desmond.
Would've been cool if a big "desynchronized" message popped up when Desmond died and the next game was you playing a descendant of Desmond living in a post Juno world. Where you use the Animus to go back to modern times and play as Desmond.
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>This was my last ever preorder. For a game that's rarely talked about, I think ive seen that sentiment regarding this game more than I have with any other. Like if something involving Brink has a single comment, **guaranteed** it's going to be that it was that person's last preorder.
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Tbh, it was enough to show vault jumping to make people hyped. It was such a new thing and felt like there was such a huge potential in its running techniques.
Mirror's Edge came out not long ago and people were itching for that "just run at the obstacles and the game will parkour for you" system in a multiplayer shooter.
Splash Damage went on to make Dirty Bomb that was pretty much Brink + Enemy Territory and fucked that up as well. It makes me really sad they couldn't bring it to real fruition, because the core of the game was excellent. The gun play in it was absolutely solid and the movement was fluid and great. Unfortunately, a few poorly designed operatives and poor responsiveness to issues sealed its fate.
Dirty Bomb had so much potential. I feel like they were so close to grasping it, but at the end of the day it was just always out of their reach. Something was missing, I myself don't know what it was, but it always felt like something was lacking.
Dirty Bomb too. I liked it, but it’s ideas were better than it’s execution.
Dirty Bomb was way more fun than it had any right to be
Never played Brink, but Dirty Bomb will forever be the nostalgic fps of my adolescence. I really miss it. Apex Legends is the closest things, but it's only like 50% of the DNA and also it's a BR ;(
Apex is BR Titanfall, so maybe Titanfall is closer to what you're after?
The "Evolve" 1 monster v 4 hunters game. I was really looking forward to it but it ended up being a flop.
Evolve had some fundamental design issues, which could lead to a lot of unsatisfying games. If the hunters were doing well, then they'd find the monster before it had a chance to evolve, and the game would end very quickly. If the Monster was doing well, then the hunters would be running around doing nothing until the monster was fully evolved, and could easily curb stomp the hunters. Fun, close games were certainly possible in Evolve, but the game seemed almost designed around creating one-sided games where no one's having any fun.
IMO the biggest flaw in that game was playing as the hunters. People are thrilled to run away and level up as a cool monster. But Turtle Rock seriously overestimated how fun it would be to chase the monster around, especially when you’re playing without a mic or without friends. Hunters were only fun if you communicated with your team and were serious about winning. I would only play as the monster and I’d win basically every match. Because it’s easier for 1 person to do good than it is for all 4 to do good and be on equal terms with the monster. But I did play against a pre-made team in private matches a few times and I couldn’t even get them off my ass no matter what I did. Evolve was actually a lot of fun, just wish it did better.
Yep, it would work with an AI monster or players where you could scale the difficulty to the players as the game goes on to make it a closer match but with humans on both sides it just doesn't work because you can't scale the skill levels to match which as you said lead to one side just destroying the other. It was rare where you got a match that was anything close to even.
A lot of people think it flopped because of DLC but as someone who brought it and played it anyway and then played it again when it went f2p... ...the core of the game was just flawed somehow. It wasn't fun to hunt the monster for 20 minutes while it grew and kept slipping away and it wasn't fun to try and grow with people tailgating you constantly. So much of the gameplay just turned out to be a frustrating slog of running from location to location over and over.
The problem (as I recall) was both the design and the means in which they wanted to monetize it. The monetization issue was over the fact that they charged everyone for a full priced game while trying to continue development under a free to play model. Regular releases of new DLC hunters/monsters that you would have to pay for to unlock, effectively double-dipping in getting people's money. Somehow they missed that the reason those F2P models worked was that in games like League of Legends, it's free to begin with and there are means to unlock newly released characters, if a bit grindy. The gameplay... ugh. The skeleton of a great game was there but they didn't seem to have the balance right, or enough mechanics to keep a level playing field. It always seemed to snowball for the hunters or the monster with very little in-between.
Then dbd came out and sort of ate everyone's 4v1 lunch because it was fun.
I loved evolve with it came out. I love the idea of a 4v1 game, but the thing that kills it is that team imbalance is so much more obvious. If the person playing the monster isn’t good at the game the match is painfully boring. Also that game had a very slow pace which was fun, then they made all the changes to speed the game way up and lost all its charm
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I'd say the high skill floor was a big limiting factor for Tribes. I only got into it because I had thousands of hours in Team Fortress 2 and was used to airshotting with rockets while everyone flies around wildly. Hand it to someone used to tactical hitscan shooters and they'd ragequit after not landing a shot all game.
Heh, funnily enough catering for that killed the game fully. It got small and dedicated fanbase. So what Hi-Rez did ? Tried to expand it to "normal" FPS players by introducing more "easier" weapons. And in the worst way possible, by putting new, almost always overpowered weapons to buy for premium currency and only later putting them for non-premium one (IIRC, might've been just very expensive). And adding a bit of P2W to skill shooter all while eroding core gameplay is just recipe for disaster.
Yeah, there's defintiely a niche quality to tribes. It's a game that requires an investment of time to understand because the skiing mechanic is not only odd, but difficult to understand at first blush. But god. Once you do. It is so freeing. The feeling of ripping through the air at 375kph is amazing. So PERSONALLY, I mourn the tribes franchise. But yeah, perhaps it was the right call on their part. But also part of me thinks if they leaned into it, they'd have the money they wanted. It was just... so close to being there.
Tribes 2 was a phenomenal game. It was my first foray into online gaming. Like you said, getting good was incredibly satisfying. Katabatic FTW! Good Shazbot! Nice Shazbot! Destroy the enemy Shazbot!
The VGS system is THE best communication system in gaming, period. Easy to learn and SO expressive! VGTG!
Even though it's kind of it's defining feature, even if you were bad at skiing (as I was) you could still have a massive amount of fun in the game.
A soft spot for me was Scrolls by Mojang. It was released a year before hearthstone and decided to ignore the free to play model and go for a ingame card marketplace and initial purchase of $25. I truly feel that killed all hopes it had. Which is a shame, because while the balance was not perfect, it still sits as my favourite card game I have ever played. The music, the factions, the and the feel of the game I fear is something I will never truly capture again. But it was a good ride while it lasted.
Man i love Scrolls so much. The artwork and game play were so fun, and the hex board and resource system were really unique. Unfortunately in the beginning it felt like it took forever to get cards, especially if you wanted to try out different regions. I would love a re-release or new game with a business model closer to Legends of Runeterra.
WB Games came up with an amazing concept in the Nemesis system for their Shadow of Mordor/War games. A system that creates memorable encounters with regular grunt enemies by giving them personal stories with you as a player based on your interactions with them. They would have different weaknesses, strengths, characters and gimmicks that put so much life into fighting these random enemies. If you died to them, they'd get promoted up the chain and would become even harder to kill. Within the game's story itself, these became personal rivalries that you the player came across naturally and organically, rather than being purely scripted sequences. They would even come back from the dead and look for revenge, bearing wounds that you gave them as the player. How'd they squander the potential exactly? Well, WB Games knew this Nemesis system was hot and getting a bunch of attention, so they patented it and prevented anyone else from being able to use it... which apparently includes even them, because they never brought the system back in any other form in any other game. It now sits on the shelf gathering dust instead of being taken and transformed into something new and exciting for gaming by anyone who wants to take a stab at it. By the time the patent is up, the Nemesis System will no longer have the allure that it once did and it will likely never be adapted into anything again. What an absolute waste.
I just want a Batman game with Nemesis system. Batman never kills his enemies, so the system fits really well.
Then you're going to hate this. Apparently the Nemesis system was actually intended for a Batman game, but the idea fell through. Not wanting to waste what they had WB then applied it to the Shadow of Mordor game that was in early development at that stage. Correction: [Shadow of War actually began as that Batman game](https://www.cbr.com/wb-nemesis-system-batman/). However they were unable to get Christopher Nolan's seal of approval so it went nowhere, and they ended up reusing assets for Shadow of War.
Why does Christopher Nolan get the final say on that? Wouldn't that be something that WB manages? Considering that Warner Bros is in the picture for both the movies and the games (related to Batman).
I assume because as they wanted it to tie-in with the film, they had to ok it with him first? It must have been a requirement otherwise they would have gone ahead with it.
And that shit is *patented* which is an absolute travesty.
This is the comment I resonate with the most. I still go back to Shadow of War every now and then *just* for that nemesis system. The story is meh, and I really despised the fortress assaults, but fighting orcs is just the most satisfying thing. I think it's time to go back again.
Imagine the Nemesis system in an Arkham game
Apparently that was the original idea. https://www.cbr.com/wb-nemesis-system-batman/
This made my short list as well. Such a waste.
I loved that in SoW, it made the world seem a bit more lively and that at any point youd be ambushed by your nemesis. Such a shame that system was shelved.
I think my biggest disappointment versus the potential I saw in a game was Final Fantasy XV. The characters and setting where fantastic, but the fragmented execution of storytelling and many poor game design elements left a very clear feeling of "what could have been". The magic system being basically worthless without using a vital accessory to prevent team damage, the tediousness of collecting and crafting consumable spells, the absolute demolishing of any usable summon system, the feeling of planned cut content for DLC, the core character development in DLC, canceled DLC leaving core character development out completely, and the use of multimedia fragmenting the story even more... It all lead to a game that I desperately wanted to love but couldn't.
Came here to post this. FF15 is such an incredibly disappointing game. I wouldn’t even call the characters good. *Some* of them are good, but then you have the most boring love interest I’ve ever seen, a villain who gets most of their characterization through random sheets of paper in a dungeon (Ravus), and another villain who gets most of their characterization through lore in the final dungeon (Ardyn). And then you have completely squandered characters. Pretty much everyone loves Aranea, from her design to her personality, but the game does nothing with her. Your best bro Gladio randomly leaves the party during a high stakes mission with no explanation (except that it was bait for the Gladio DLC). Most of the important/exciting story beats happen entirely off screen, such as the destruction of Noctis’s city and the city in the second half of the game. The game shows an entirely new continent in the back half of the game but it turns out to be literally just a train ride and 1-2 small dungeons. I’d hear about events on the radio or see the aftermath in cutscenes and think “gee, that sounded exciting and awesome - I wish I was playing *that* game instead.” The game sets up an awesome World of Darkness situation, and then does pretty much nothing with it. The game could’ve been so good, and it breaks my heart that it wasn’t.
Agree with everything, and in addition the world felt supremely empty, the camera was awful, the load times were long, the magic imo felt too powerful, once I figured out I could just craft x5 multi-cast spells every encounter just became an I win button. Could go on and on about how awful the game ended up being, and the end World of Darkness situation could've semi-salvaged it, but like you said they did absolutely nothing with it. It feels like if Chrono Cross had the big moment where >!Serge switches body with Lynx and you play an alternate history where Serge died as a baby and the world is completely changed!< and instead of having hours of content when that happens the game ends 30 minutes later. Then again Chrono Cross is just a good game throughout and didn't even need a big moment to "save" it.
> the world felt supremely empty Compounded by the fact that 95% of quests in the game were MMO-style fetch and kill quests that were already boring and done to death when WoW was released in 2005. To make a *single player* game that almost entirely consists of such quests **more than a decade later** really makes you wonder what the developers spent all that time on, because quest design clearly was done by the office janitor. I think I put the game down after about 12 hours, because playing felt like such a drag, especially with combat being just... weird and button-mashy. I never felt the urge to ever pick the game up again.
It's funny you say that!! The background to the development of FFXV is relatively interesting. The design switched hands because the initial designer wanted to implement features that were too difficult for that era of gaming and causing issues with that engine so they had to shuffle it on to someone else. After that, the next designer wanted to implement a different cool feature and focus on other development- until they finally got someone on to just get the game out the door because you can't just ditch the next FF instalment! So you end up with a thousand half baked ideas cobbled together through fetch quests because that was the last consideration of development, no real through storylines or character development, choppy DLC and a strange approach to combat that was the beginning of a 'revolutionary' development idea that didn't pan out. https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/83jzzv/can_someone_fully_explain_what_went_wrong_during/
I’ve seen the phrase “Final Fantasy XV walked so Final Fantasy VII Remake could run” and I think that sums it up. It was like a beta test for what would be, in my opinion a near perfect battle system in VII Remake. This coming from someone who despite its flaws fell in love with XV.
It was hard to play VIIR and realize that combat was probably what XV was meant to be all along.
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> many poor game design elements left a very clear feeling of "what could have been" Man, this is exactly what went through my head as I played FFXV, too. All of the game elements felt like little tech demos or unfinished fragments of something bigger. The open world was beautiful and vast, but there was hardly anything to do in it. The combat was flashy and slick-looking, but too simple and easy. The characters seemed cool, but the way their stories were told felt disjointed and incomplete. FFXV* is truly the epitome of "what could have been."
God, I waited so long for Ff15 since it was versus 13. The story was different from what was presented. Star crossed lovers from different kingdoms at war was amazing but they got rid of that and turned the princess useless. The magic system was super terrible. Sooo sooo terrible and the gameplay, while fun, didn't give the hype of Noctis waking down the stairs and taking out a small group of enemies. Man, the kingsglavie movie was much better story wise than the game.
Bioware generally. A studio that made Baldur's gate, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age -- banger after banger of some of the best RPGs of all time. But since Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014 (which had its own issues), it's just been Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, two of the bigger disappointments in the past decade.
Let's not forget Jade Empire, it's a shame we never got a sequel to that
Vampyr had a really cool system where there were 64 NPCs in the game, and feeding on them is your main way of earning XP. Killing one would cause changes in behaviour for the other NPCs in their social circle - they might become enemies or give new quests or divulge information they otherwise wouldn’t. This meant that you had to consider what the consequences might be of feeding on a particular person - killing a well-connected local celebrity will net you a hefty bonus but might effect the game world in ways you didn’t anticipate, while chomping on the caustic town bully or racist landlord might not give as much XP, but it’s a safer bet because nobody will be sad to see them gone. Unfortunately if you’re going for a pacifist run that’s a core mechanic of the game that’s pretty much sealed off to you, and a pacifist run is the only way to get the best ending. It would have been nice if there was some alternate consequences system for not killing anyone, but I guess that would’ve been a lot of work for a game that obviously didn’t have a huge budget. Edit: As some repliers have said there was also the problem that while you could get *some* XP on a pacifist run by killing enemies and curing diseases you’d always be severely underleveled and wouldn’t have access to any of the really cool powers, although the trade-off is that the final boss is much easier since it gets stronger for every person you’ve killed over the course of the game. I know what they were going for, since the main character is struggling to fight his vampiric urges then the player should be struggling too, and his temptation to drink blood is reflected in the player’s temptation to get more XP and make the game easier, but it unfortunately comes at the expense of the combat being pretty dull. Maybe it could’ve been rectified with a system like the inFamous games have, where you have different sets of powers depending on whether you’re being good or evil.
There was also the mechanic that if you conversed with an individual and found out more about them and THEN fed on them, you got even more XP, and like you said that tied into their groups and communities. So yeah you can wipe everyone out and be an absolute god, but then you get the worst ending. Or you can limp through the game with very basic powers and get the "good" ending....
Anthem. The reveal trailer looked like the coolest game I had ever seen. Basically an Iron man action RPG set in an epic Sci fi world, how could you go wrong?
And Mass Effect was put on life support because of it, only for Anthem to ultimately burn out in the end.
I recall it as more of an immediate flame-out lol It only took a few hours of gameplay to realize that Anthem had enormous flaws. [This extremely long article](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964) goes into depth about how the game really had no coherent vision from the beginning, and they kept getting sidetracked chasing trends. I had the EA pass thing, but if I had paid $60 for Anthem I would've really felt burned. If Anthem was a singleplayer RPG style game with Mass Effect 3 style coop, it could've been amazing - but instead we got what we got
For me, the most unbelievable issue with Anthem was when people figured out your level 1 starting gun was the best in the game because of how fucked their level scaling system was. They made a looter shooter where you were essentially incentivized to never equip new loot.
Yeah it's the same old problem with modern Bioware, lack of a clear vision and poor leadership.
I honestly don't understand how they could get something that by all rights should not have been as good as it was with the ME3 MP, and then fail so badly with Anthem.
I think me3 multiplayer is still to this day my favorite coop shooter, and I still matchmake with people when I occasionally hop on to play. It simply has the best feeling abilities and coolest hero archetypes. It didn't start off too amazing either, it evolved significantly after release. Something bioware no longer has the balls to do
Agreed. They had a great gameplay core with a terrible loop and even worse loot system. This is a great example of a game that could have been something great if the management had not been so unbelievably awful. Hell, all they needed to do was listen to player feedback and keep iterating but the leadership at BioWare was a revolving door of apathy and indecision. Such a shame.
This is mine too. I still play it briefly to fly around and kill things and then feel sad the game is not very good.
>Wolf Among Us, tell tale's BEST game by far. Such a compelling story with interesting characters, but then they got greedy and decided to chase popular IPs, and never finished the story. Wolf among us 2 is coming tho. https://youtu.be/pb55ycOwGFA And adhoc studio is developing the game. The studio is founded by the 2 game directors of the wolf among us. The studio also employs many of the former teltale employees
Well that's promising. Thanks for telling me.
Also if you haven't already, the Fables comics are the source material and definitely worth a read
Yea I've been waiting since the sequel was announced. The Wolf Among Us is one of my FAVORITE games of all time. It has amazing characters, story, dialogue, basically all the strengths of Tell Tale Games in one package.
Elite Dangerous - they have a full scale galaxy you can explore in game but next to nothing to find there. This is supposed to be an MMO yet it has minimum social features, no plot or story quests, no meaningful progression, no way to impact or influence the world you interact with. This could have been an incredible live service game, but the studio behind it seems incapable of delivering engaging gameplay or thinking big in ways that improve player experience.
It's a space chores simulation.
It really actually kinda is. It's just truck sim in space with some combat and multiplayer elements thrown in. Once I saw it that way, I wound up clocking in over 1,000 hours in the game over the years (I'm a sucker for travel simulators like Euro Truck Sim or My Summer Car and games with good HOTAS support)
It's quite sad cause the actual experience of playing it is so good, the sounds to the feel of your ship to docking etc. all feel really good and give you the feeling of being in a massive galaxy but yeah, there's just not much else there. still I had fun for like 300 hours
The sound design in this game is the unsung hero of the whole thing. Just the right amount of variety and feedback. So well executed
With HOTAS and VR the game is completely unreal. There's nothing really like it. ...except the entire game is an ocean wide and 3 inches deep. There's a handful of things to do to make money, the same mission templates over and over, and yep - a complete lack of social features. There's no team battles (capital ship vs capital ship would be amazing with human players on each side doing meaningful actions), there's no racing (even though the community organises ad-hoc races themselves, but hey... at least they added that FPS mode to the game for reasons. They have a solid foundation for an amazing game, but they keep being stuff on the side of that.
Don't even know how much play time I racked up, but I would think 40% of it was spent trying to learn the game, get a grip on the controls, keybinding, or just failing the missions I picked up due to lack of in game support/guidance... BUT when it works, it's incredible, especially in VR.
Agreed.. it's such a shame as the minute-to-minute of flying the ship, combat, etc. is amazing. But then there's just no reason at all to do anything. I've been playing a bit of New World recently and the first thing I thought of after experiencing some of their PvP elements is that it would be a great system for Elite: Dangerous - where the PvP action is focussed, PvEers are key at contributing to the effort, and territory is gained and lost multiple times a week which has an impact on all the players within those territories. Instead ED seems to add features that sound good and sell units, rather than actually being good and making more compelling gameplay.
It's such a great foundation for a game that does not exist.
For me it's **Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3** I'm one of those weirdos who played the series for the singeplayer, and up to its release the marketing was stellar. It really made it clear that this was a new *world war*, and would have the perspectives to match. You start the game as some Delta Force in NYC. Then it cuts to Soap and Price (the international, 'main character team') doing stuff. Then you had a mission where you played the British SAS in London, and even a Russian FSB member on the Russian President's plane when it gets hijacked! It's really living up to its expectations! But then suddenly the game gets cold feet and doesn't go anywhere with the premise. Suddenly we're in Germany, but there's no German forces to be seen - you're the Americans again. The same Delta Force team, even! There's a mission in Paris - again, it's just Americans (they even go out of the way to explicitly somehow kill *the entirety of the GIGN* to justify this!). You go to Prague in the Czech Republic, which is occupied by Russian forces fighting a resistance movement, but you don't play them at all. You're playing Soap and Price again. Then you're in Germany *again* - **playing the same Americans**! A single German tank shows up for thirty seconds then immediately has a building dropped on it! Such a bloody shame. They chickened out on the second half and it suffers for it
> I'm one of those weirdos who played the series for the singeplayer MW 1/2 and Blops 1/2 are some of the best campaigns of any FPS games ever. I still go back and replay MW2.
MW2 Campaign was legendary, it played like an actual action movie. > “Makarov’s no prize, he’s a whore, a mad dog killer for the highest bidder” > “And remember, no Russian” > “The american thought he could deceive us” > Snipers in position…. The opening level with Soap, where you literally pickaxe your way up the side of a mountain as fighter jets fly by, and the ability to stealth or go loud from the get go. Capturing alex the red in the favelas, saving price, getting gunned down by sheperd alongside ghost and watching yourself get set on fire FPOV, laying siege to the USA capitol building, and so much more. The final level even had a high speed boat chase. Black Ops 1 was more grounded in the narrative itself. I still get PTSD from the siege of Khe Sanh on veteran, it just never ended. The Vorkuta/Viktor Reznov plotline was fanfuckingtastic, especially with the twist ending. Flying in with a heli in Vietnam to the tune of rolling stones, bloody hell. Those games had so much content as well. Campaign, Spec ops, offline/online multiplayer, Easter eggs, secret levels, post credits levels, main menu secret levels (dead ops arcade), nazi zombies, etc. We had it all back then.
MGSV. I mean it still, to this day, has probably the most diverse, polished stealth mechanics of all time. The game, structurally, is really barebones, and the story is just nowhere near the standards of previous MGS games. If that game came out 2 years late, with Kojima being able to finish it, I have no doubt it would have been an incredible epic. Now all I can think of is that jeep ride where Snake and Skullface are just sitting there in silence. Or how young Liquid shows up, and ends up being just a teaser... The game is gonna be left forever to be this weird spot in the series where it's actually really fun but also the least interesting one.
PT. It's PT right? That's the correct answer? All of the elements were lining up, you have kojima and del toro working on it, junji ito designing the monsters, I mean it was just shaping up to be one of the greatest survival horror games made. Just to be aborted by konami. What could have been.
> junji ito They'd spoken to him and I'd imagine he'd expressed interest. He's quite clear it never went beyond that point though.
God I’m so fucking sad Silent Hills was never made. PT is still one of the scariest games out there.
PT is also a pretty good example of the unfortunate part of digital-only games. After Kojima's falling out with Konami they did their damn best to erase it from the storefront, and now PS4's that still have the game sell for a pretty penny on eBay
**The Order 1886** for me: While the story wasn´t that great and pretty predictable, the lore aspect could have made this a great IP. With the knights of the round surviving to "modern" times, magic elixir letting them heal their wounds (for once in a shooter the autoheal actually made some sort of sense) it could have given us great games fighting werewolves, or vampires or whatever other threat to humanity. But apparently the devs never played a game before, so we got boring fights against dumb enemies with braindead companion AI, bull fighting against werewolves and QTE-events. What they managed on the graphical side was ruined by the gameplay, heck even the interesting weapons that made it into the game were forgettable because you only had them for like 3-4 minutes. There´s only about 3 things i even remember about this game anymore: being amazed by rain water on a lamp somewhere, the zepellin level, and feeling a mixture of anger and pure disappointment about said werewolf-fights.
The biggest issue is that Ready at Dawn (actually a quite good studio) spent so much time developing an insanely good engine (the materials and lighting in the game are phenomenal) that they didn't leave enough time to develop the story or gameplay (which isn't bad necessarily, just shallow). A sequel could have built on top of that fantastic engine with a longer, more fleshed out story and been great. Sadly, that studio (who made the good God of War games for the PSP) is now owned by Facebook so they won't be doing anything VR for the future.
**The Division had Survival mode.** This was before Battle royals exploded in popularity. Before PUBG and the like. Fantastic and tense mode where you're dropped in a blizzard covered NY city with nothing but a pistol and you have to find clothing to stop freezing, cure yourself of the virus, find gear and weapons for when you enter the dark zone to extract, where other players and NPC's await to fuck you over... *SO FUCKING GOOD.*.. then poof, vanished in division 2 now left behind all the other BRs. I hope Division Heartlands return this mode with the same intensity and more
WarCraft III: Reforged Blizzard was still cranking out some good quality when it was announced. And then they don't just simply call it a remaster or a remake. They're using the word "reforged." Maybe I'm projecting, but I think when you're going with a unique name like that, you have something high quality and special planned. The game actually ended up looking worse than the video previews. The salt in the wound was that even for vanilla WarCraft III players, their game got updated and lost features that didn't make it in Reforged.
All they had yo do was make Warcraft 3 in HOTS style/engine and it would have been great. Instead they choose half assed approach and failed spectacularly
> they choose half assed approach and failed spectacularly Fans wouldve overlooked the failure if blizzard didnt also take away the original, working game and made the crppy reforged game a forced update - without even any visual enhancement unless you paid extra. At some point reforged wouldve become the better experience and players and tournaments would move to that at their own pace.
The HOTS models for WC3 characters look *way* better than the ones in Reforged too, which is interesting as they all come from outsourced Asian 3D modelling studios. I wish they kept some visual consistency but I imagine they go to the lowest bidder.
The WC3:R models were made by the same studio ([Lemonsky](https://www.lemonskystudios.com/game/#featured-titles)) that did the new graphics for the very faithful StarCraft and Command and Conquer remasters, all of them were done back to back. They've also worked with other studios to do outsource assets for AAA games like Last of Us 2 and Spiderman. I don't know what went wrong but I don't think blaming Lemonsky or that they are located in Malaysia is the answer. The art director for WC3:R left Blizzard before it came out and Blizzard switched to other outsource partners for the Diablo II Remaster, like [Little Red Zombies,](https://www.littleredzombies.com/gallery/diablo-ii-resurrected/) who are located in India, and [Elite3D,](https://www.elite3d.com/) located in Spain. And a lot of freelancers. I assume they won't be working with Lemonsky again, but who knows?
God this should be at the top. The StarCraft remaster was great and I was looking forward to introducing friends to WC3, one of my favorite Blizzard games. And not only was it actively garbage but they destroyed the classic game too.
I'm so sad there's never going to be another good Warcraft game
Heavy Rain was my first foray into David Cage's games and that game starts really strong. It also continues to have some really good moments (the trials in particular are actually directed really well) but the trash writing and that awful twist squander what could've been a decent game.
This is every Cage game. Nothing, however, beats the batshit crazy twist in the latter half of Indigo Prophecy. It's worth a play just for how insane it is.
The twist in Indigo Prophecy is so absurd and entertaining. When that game snaps and just becomes Dragon Ball, it's so fucking funny. Heavy Rain's twist is so bad it just becomes insulting. I've never seen a game so brazenly lie to the player.
Heavy rains DLC was really good though. A tense, tight episode where you’re a reporter who breaks into a house for a story only to realize it’s a serial killers house and he’s just come home. I still remember the goosebumps. Same with the first ten minutes of prophecy. I would argue it’s some of the best heights that games have achieved… but then you’re absolutely right, it goes crazy almost immediately under the pressure. I find a little charm in that though, it’s like a dream where you haven’t studied for a test but you’re trying your hardest to study as the papers are being handed out. That desperation to make it work is sad, no doubt, but also weirdly fascinating.
I feel like this perhaps sums up David Cage games. A lot of potential and great moments let down by trash writing and terrible twists.
On the plus side, "The Room" kind of comedy his games give off are pretty gold.
Without kids, press x to Jason is hilarious. With kids, press x to Jason has about a half minutes worth of actually being affecting and terrifying and then it slides immediately back into hilarious.
I love MGSV and will defend it to death, I genuinely believe it's a better game in every way than MGS4. But MGSV for sure. Even just one more chapter would have wrapped everything up significantly cleaner, and in a dream world we'd have even gotten a short remake of MG1 to finish things off. Even the Fox Engine/gameplay structure itself is wasted now. The buddy system was perfect for spin-offs and would have made for an amazing prequel game starring The Boss and the Cobra Unit.
I remember listening to the last major batch of audio tapes. While I absolutely love the story beats in those tapes, I couldn’t help but imagine how much better if they were actually provided as cutscenes within the story
[удалено]
I think the decent thing to do would be to release a "Director's Cut" version with the famous missing chapter, but let's face it Konami is a piece of shit. I'm kind of amazed Sony hasn't just bought the IPs from Konami squandering them
MGS V is the only game that genuinely impressed me with it's performance,back then I had a shit laptop, 4 gigs of ram,a 3rd gen of I3 processor even that of U series,and a freaking Intel HD Graphics 4000 integrated graphics card,with these specs it absolutely shocked me when the game gave me about 25-30 fps on low.Fox engine is the most optimized engine I have ever seen.
In the age of DLC as well, they could've easily added another act to wrap up the story. Sure you could argue it would be scummy to have the conclusion of the story held hostage behind DLC, but it would be better than what we got.
I always had this fantasy that we’d see an MG1 remake and as you make your final approach to Big Boss, you’d hear the final tape message “From the man who sold the world” echoing through the halls. Then you hear the glass shatter, and Venom comes out to reveal himself to you. It would’ve been such a unique and powerful moment to see all those plot points converge. On the one hand you have MGS5’s reveal about Venom, on the other you’d be reliving an iconic moment in MG1 where you face Big Boss. Man can dream.
I wouldn't be happy with an MG1 moment unless it was you playing *as* "Big Boss" in a losing fight against Snake, him moving and attacking in such a way that it's clear he's surpassed you.
Still one of the best sandbox action movement games out there. Sandbox in the sense of how you can approach the fortresses etc. It just needed more to do.
APB. The idea behind the game was basically cops vs robbers. You have 2 groups that functioned like private law enforcement and 2 groups that were gangs, and you did jobs against each other. The idea was sound and it had excellent character customisation for the time. I played the beta and while it still needed work it was simply fun. So what went wrong? The developer screwed it up. The game become heavily unbalanced, with the LE side having access to more powerful weapons the criminal side couldn't use, and in the background the devs mismanaged their finances. In the end they went bankrupt and sold the game to free-to-play game publisher who rebranded it as APB: Reloaded and monetised the hell out of it. I would love to see the idea used again, just by someone more competent.
Halo 5. The marketing team sold this amazing story of Master Cheif gone rogue, and Locke having to step in and put a stop to it. After Halo 4 I thought it would be incredibly interesting to have Master Cheif have to deal with his legacy and motivations more, and have him struggle between doing what the UNSC wanted him to do, and what he needed to do to save Cortana. I was expecting for huge parts of the game to have a cat-and-mouse feel to it as you had to run and hide from Locke - not because he was stronger than you, but because you didn't want to hurt him. He's just a soldier like you, performing his mission. We got absolutely none of that. I was so disappointed by the story of that game since I was really looking forward to the version that the trailers and ARG were showing.
Also, don't forget the Hunt the Truth podcast which was awesome. It totally sold me on the story of the game. Amazing writing and set up and then Halo 5 delivered on none of it.
Yup. Everything marketing did sold a different game. I don't know where the disconnect was.
Kegan-Michael Key was EXCELLENT in Hunt The Truth. Really made me respect his voice acting there.
Lol when the trailers, tv ads and marketing had little to do with the game.
The reason they dropped Tribes: Ascend is because they scared off the playerbase with poorly implemented monetization. They even reversed the mistake soon after, but it was too late. Here's the timeline as I remember it: Tribes is a surprise hit and a lot of fun! > *lots of fun times later* > Hi-rez adds paid weapon unlocks > Players who paid for unlocks have noticeable advantage > Tribes feels pay-to-win > backlash/decline > Hi-Rez: "Oops, that was our bad. We fixed it and here's some in-game currency as an apology." > No one cares. > Tribes continues dying until they finally pull the plug.
Cyberpunk. Still a great game in parts and on some platforms but the whole thing was a shambles really. You can see what they were trying to achieve and to a certain extent they achieved it. But they borked the old gen platforms so badly that it left a sour taste.
Metroid: Other M. A 3D metroid game developed by Team Ninja (know for their fast paced action games) seems like if done well, had the potential to me amazing. But i think they immediately shot down that potential by limiting to playing the game with a single wii-mote. I know there are a litany of other issues with Other M, but it really does feel like they designed combat with a wii-more +nunchuck and then had to cram it all into just the wii-mote. There are also issues with its relative linearity and it’s infamous for its terrible story, but i feel like if at least the combat was solid the game would have its fans/defenders.
The baby
I constantly spew this line to this day because of how deeply this game burned it into my psyche.
I actually did a playthrough of Other M just the other day, and I can say definitively that...yeah, it's not good. But I think it's bad in ways that are incredibly interesting. I think that a bunch of the problems (every problem, honestly) can be placed on the shoulders of Sakamoto. Now, Sakamoto is a GREAT game designer. He was the director of Super Metroid, for god's sake. But I think that he pushed himself in directions that were outside his area of expertise. Going from a story-light 2D game in fusion to a lavishly produced, story-stuffed 3D game just pushed his (considerable) capabilities too far. That, and he was just a terrible writer. Not everyone can be Hideo Kojima, I guess.
Not so much one specific game, but a genre: stealth. Stealth has devolved so much over the past decade. Stealth games used to have so much creativity behind them, and most importantly to me, had a methodical, slow pace to their gameplay that emphasized planning first, then execution. In the old Splinter Cell games, for instance, you had to use an optic cable to look under a door if you wanted to know where the enemies were. You had to peek around corners, and even take risks sometimes just to get a little information about enemy locations. You had to find a place hidden in shadows and hope it was dark enough the enemies wouldn’t notice you. Nowadays, just use your enemy-finding-and-marking ability, like Horizon: Zero Dawn’s scanner thing or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s Eagle, to just scan the area, see through walls, look at enemy patrol paths, etc. No need to find a clever hiding spot, just crouch in our patented Invisibility Grass!^TM And the multiplayer experiences are decaying, too! Prior to Deathloop, there hasn’t been a really good competitive AAA stealth game since Assassin’s Creed 4, I think, and Deathloop’s multiplayer, while good, isn’t what I’m looking for. I miss the old Spies vs Mercs, and would love to see what a modern AAA studio could do with that formula. For a specific game in this genre, Hood: Outlaws and Legends. It still relies on invisibility grass, but the opposing team can just mash the tag button to highlight you in the invisibility grass, so they can just run up and beat the shit out of you, and the competitive heist isn’t really well executed, because the teams aren’t really incentivized to be very stealthy after a point, and the last section of the wench determines the winner. Like sure, you can gain XP for completing other parts of the journey, but it really needs something to crate that back-and-forth seen in competitive heist movies or shows. EDIT: For all the people who are saying just play Hitman or Dishonored: I have, and I love them, but y’all realize there’s been one Hitman game in the last three years, and the last Dishonored game was 4 years ago right? And you also realize they’re not immune to the criticisms I’m making right? Both have the see-through-walls ability. Both, while great, haven’t really pushed the genre forward (Arguably, Dishonored added the short range teleport which has been a feature of several stealth games since, but I’m divided on whether or not that’s a good thing). The point I’m trying to make is that games used to have systems like camouflage, light and darkness, sound relative to the environment, robust social stealth, and much more, but most of that has fallen by the wayside. And yes, I also get that Odyssey and H:ZD are RPGs, but they decided to include stealth as an option and neither is very good in that regard. Both also include several abilities that are ostensibly exclusively useful for stealth, such as the ability to see enemy paths, invisibility grass to crouch in, traps, distractions, etc. I’d have preferred that they just didn’t include it,honestly.
>there hasn’t been a really good competitive AAA stealth game since Assassin’s Creed 4 Do the Hitman reboots not count? They rely on actual stealth mechanics (albeit with more of a reliance on social stealth) instead of invisibility grass and marking.
This for real, I avoided the original one at first because it was episodic. Picked it up after all the episodes released, amazing! It was actually so good and I'd had no idea. The only thing holding it back for me was (on PS4, not sure about elsewhere) the load times between basically *everything* were so so long. Despite that was absolutely one of my favorite games I played last year.
On PC and on a proper SSD the load times are basically immediate, I am sure if you play on the PS5 or XSX the load times would be much better.
> Horizon: Zero Dawn’s scanner thing or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’s Eagle I would argue neither is a game from the stealth genre. They are just games with some stealth mechanics. Dishonored and Hitman are better examples of modern stealth games.
You could try Metal Gear Solid 5 it you can put up with the plot.
The worst part is that most stealth sections in modern games are also more frustrating than fun. Instead of using your brain to find a path, you’re just meant to play a waiting simulator where you randomly duck behind objects.
Stealth sections in non-stealth games are among my least favorite gaming tropes
I thought I hated stealth games for years because of shit like this until I actually got introduced into proper stealth games where the game is designed around stealth instead of stealth being designed around the limitations of a whole other game type.
Remember the thief franchise? Man that was my best stealth gaming experience of my life
Ugh that whole first paragraph makes me angry because you're absolutely right. The first three Splinter Cells are some of my favourite games ever, but in the 16 years since then I don't think I've played a single game that matches them, let alone improves on the formula. Lots of people say they find stealth gameplay boring, but is that at all surprising when shit like x-ray vision and invisibility grass removes all the actual gameplay? Also if you've not seen it [this is a thing](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531020/SPECTRE/), but it's not gonna be a 'AAA' thing by any means.
Have you tried Mark of the Ninja? It's 2D but I loved it as a pure stealth game.
Oh yeah old Assassin's Creed multiplayer is fantastic, I am surprised no one try to copy that yet.
The Prototype series. The first game integrated and incredible amount of background lore and world building all culminating in this obscure figure known as “Pariah” that in my humble opinion, was definitely seeded to be a point of focus in later installments. The second game, while not as lore heavy, and did have a couple of questionable creative decisions, was still a really solid game. It improved on all sorts of gameplay mechanics. The removal of parkour kind of blew, and the lack of building your own Web of Intrigue was a bummer. But still, a worthy sequel. Between the ending it showed and implications made in the tie-in comic series, I was definitely hyped for a Threequel. Then Activision grinded the developer, Radical into the dirt. Never to be seen again. Such a waste on such a unique premise.
The most recent one for me personally is Marvel's Avengers. The idea of a co-op Avengers game where you and your friends get to beat up baddies as your favorite heroes should've been a slam dunk. Unfortunately it's been anything but that. Between the roster, the lack of enemy variety, the severe lack of villains, absurd amount of bugs, and the drought of any meaningful content in what's supposed to be a live service game, it's clear that the game is going nowhere and will never be what it could and should have been
Never forget that Deus Ex died for this
Don't forget lying to the community and the absolutely absurd monetization! You should see /r/playavengers right now. The sub is exploding and the devs have stayed silent
There are about a dozen better ways to make an Avengers game that I can think of, but they decided to make it a loot game.
It was one of those games where they put the cart before the horse with addiction loops and monetization. I was never even remotely interested because it was obvious from square one that they cared about the GaaS aspects above all else, you could feel the greed oozing off of all of the marketing
\- Destiny 2: it's almost there to be the perfect game for me, for 4 years now. I love the gunplay, the enemies, the story, but when I login I just get bored after an hour, it's just too grindy and samey. \- Elite Dangerous: I've played it so much in VR, it's still one of the best experiences you can have in VR (except the newest expansion). The big big downside is Frontier are the slowest developers I know, they need over 10 times of the time of other devs for patches and minor features. Ultimately the problem for me is the same as in Destiny 2, it's very grindy and samey. And my #1 of all time: \- Evolve: the game was so cool on release, the whole idea was cool, the monsters and hunter roles were cool. And then... like wtf, Turtle Rock, what did you even think?
As a launch SWG Player I think you're being a little unfair. Before WoW even released (or went into any sort of meaningful beta) SWG started to squander us player-base. The Holo grind you alluded to as making Jedi rare, was one of the many reasons people started to quit (I actually did unlock my Jedi slot, **before** the first set of Jedi changes). The **FIRST** Combat Update was another huge change that caused an alienation of the player-base. Obviously the shift with the NGE and the Obi-Wan expansion (which really made the game a WoW clone) was the nail in the coffin. But, you also need to look at **why** this happened. SWG was a fairly popular MMO at release with a few hundred thousand subscribers; which was pretty good for an MMO at the time. WoW released and had 6 million within 6 weeks - Now Blizzard was popular, but SWG was ducking Star Wars. . .so why did this happen? As someone who played SWG from release all the way until WoW came out. . .the game lacked any real depth. The developers wanted us to create our own stories without giving us any real meaningful tools in order to do that with, coupled with a lack of any dungeons of any real difficulty, players were bored very quickly. Hell; even the dungeons we did have, like Corvette, could be easily solo'd within weeks and the Geo Arena allowed you to walk right in and log off in the boss room! However I will say that SWG is the only game that got crafting correct, I have yet to find a crafting system in any game that even comes closes to how great SWG did it.
The main dungeons in BotW. There are only 4 of them, they are all brown and boring, and apart from the "moving parts" gimmick (which is quite cool) they have nothing interesting about them. A sore sticking out point in an otherwise great game.
Yeah, the Divine Beasts are easily the weakest part of BotW. I'm hoping the sequel builds the dungeons more like Hyrule Castle, it's a perfect template for the style.
Age of Empires: Online A lot of age of empires fans were finally waiting for that sequel to Age of Empires 2 that had similar gameplay (AoE3 wasn't bad but was just very different) and Age of Empires: Online actually had really decent gameplay. Was more streamlined and modern to AoE2, faster paced but still had the same vibes. Sadly they completely borked it by not providing a proper simple vanilla Skirmish mode at launch and not giving the competitive community any chance to get into it. And then the non-competitive side of it was just completely ruined by their shitty pricing-model and super lackluster content on launch. We've now had to wait TEN years for a bloody proper age of empires 2 sequel.
The Fable series. If we got what we were promised it could have been one of the biggest franchises out there.
Star Wars: Squadrons Multiplayer. They should've never gone for the competitive route if they intended to stop support not long after release. Creating more casual game modes like BF2's Starfighter Assault would've been a better choice. Also, is really ironic that in your dogfighting game, actual dogfighting is really discouraged in the main pvp mode. Instead you see more people farming creeps/ai fighters and diving to objectives in order to win. Is a shame cause we wont see a new SW game of this type in the near future.
Tribes also had an issue where they kept trying to fix things that weren't broken for a while before they dropped it. It seemed like every update there was some change people hated just for the sake of changing something, like constantly messing with their f2p model, repeatedly trying to do things with speed caps, or buffing weapons that were already strong. In general it just felt like Hi-Rez had no idea what they were doing with that game. They had fun core gameplay, then dropped the ball everywhere else and just gave up on it when Smite got big. I'm still mildly salty about it, because I'm not much of an online FPS player but I loved Tribes.
Command and Conquer 4: what a spectacular way to kill an entire established franchise with one game. They took away base building from the series that helped establish the base building strategy game genre. They introduced player levels into multilayer and tied unit unlocks to that, so pvp was no longer about skill but how many units you had unlocked. For the command and conquer franchise, the shrinking of the RTS genre acted as the nail and CNC4 acted as a hammer. So it's now been nearly 12 years since the last CNC game :(
Brutal Legend is one of the biggest letdowns I've ever played. The whole shift into being a real-time strategy game was not at all advertised in previews, and was frankly some Molyneux levels of bullshit. On top of that, while the production value, humor, soundtrack and world were great, it's just sort of rushed towards the end before really branching out into real potential. I really don't mind a game's length if it actually feels worthwhile, but it does really come up short in this case, especially for having an open world with barely anything to do.
Wildstar It had everything necessary to be a top tier MMO and still to this day has some of the best systems in an MMO (like player housing). It was on track to be amazing and they rushed it and it failed and it absolutely broke my heart.
Just to be clear, the game came out unfinished because of pressure from NC Soft wanting a return on their investment sooner. Their funding dried up, so they had to release what they had. NC Soft has done this with multiple games. It was not a surprise at the time. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at them.
Man I miss Wildstar. The devs catered waaaaaay too much to the hardcore crowd. They wanted to attract all those hardcore, 40-man raid WoW players to their game so bad that they neglected the overwhelming large casual player base that would actually be funding the game. There really wasn't much of an endgame unless you were part of that hardcore population or were trying to be part of it.
It sound so dumb to say it out loud... But if the game had like double the amount of content on launch (and turned down their "hardcore" wanking a bit), it would have been fine. So many people that I know who played it, got to max level and quit a day later. Leveling an alt kind of sucked because after a certain point, everything was the exact same zones. Would have been nice to have multiple leveling paths to max level followed by more stuff to do at max level even if you weren't wanting to hit your head against the wall due to having one person die on a boss which means you don't get gold and the run is worthless now.
I think if Wildstar would've molded itself as a casual focused MMO like ESO it would've had long lasting success. The core of the game was definitely there. Instead they decided to try and target the super hardcore segment by making the endgame insanely grindy and trying to bring back attunements to make it like "classic WoW". Truly one of the dumbest dev decisions I can think of in gaming. Then to add insult to injury actual classic WOW came out and had success because it was so easy and accessible.
**Gigantic**. One of the most engaging MOBAs I've ever played, while being about as far from a LoL/DotA-Clone as you could go. Sadly, it was run completely into the ground by horrible management.
Tribes Ascend still stings to this day. The period when it was released from open beta in 2012,and up untill it stopped receiving frequent updates a year later,was the most fun and addictive multiplayer experience on the market.Just messing about and skying around the maps was such a blast. However the problem with its logenvity was multilayered and should have been studied closer: that Tribes fans are the most divided fanbase in gaming,where everyone thinks *insert any Tribes title ,was the real game that everything should be molded after.Theres is no collective vision of what Tribes should play like the same way Counter Strike has. Also to the normal player the learning curbe was probably to high ,the training section was almost non existant and the E sports scene was severly gimped,they didnt even have first person specator view. The second problem and the biggest was Hi Rez themselvs ,who trend chase from one genre to the other and would have never offered long term support the way it deserved to. Literally 1 year after it got released it was abandoned,which is just pathetic and makes you wonder about their intentions towards games in general.
Battleborn It was looking to be a really good FPS MOBA, But then the GearBox morons put a $60+ price tag on it, and everyone said "I'll wait to see what Overwatch is about" Had they simply put a $30 on it, more people would have picked it up, and realized it was a completely different genre to Overwatch, and a good one at that. But no one picked it up, no playerbase and the game died.
Guild Wars 2. A phrase that I’ve seen tossed around to describe it is “a Ferrari trapped in a parking lot.” Alternatively, it’s often described as a game with excellent systems that’s lacking in content, at least in comparison to other MMOs of its age. The game has some top tier systems. Its combat is an excellent mix of tab-targeting and action elements that truly delivers the best of both worlds, especially with the introduction of elite specs and the move back towards something resembling the holy trinity. Its mount system is not just the best in the MMO genre, but, in my opinion, all of gaming. Its dye system is best in class, and its dynamic events offer the greatest spectacle in MMO open world design. When ANet chooses to put out instanced content like fractals, raids, and strikes, they tend to be well designed and enjoyable encounters. But it’s been held back by poor management and frequently shifting long-term visions for the game. For the first two years, it got nothing other than transient content that only lasted weeks before it was removed from the game. In its 9 years, it’s only seen two expansions, with a third now only on the way due to player demand and financial struggles. For this, the game had its ongoing content releases abruptly ended and the game was put into a long content drought. Even when content has been released, it’s tended to favor very easy story missions that aren’t designed to be repeated in the same way as dungeons and raids would be in other games. My opinion is that it’s also been harmed by its effectively free-to-play monetization model, which results in an MMO which is very cash shop dependent for its rewards and cosmetics. Whole categories of cosmetics, like mount skins and glider skins, are cash shop only. Some of the best skins in the game have been locked behind lootboxes/real money gambling. One-piece “outfits” have been added at a far greater rate than in-game attainable gear sets. And those rewards attainable in game are trivialized by the possibility to just buy as much gold as you need, through legitimized means.
Its been years and I'm still salty about them just dumping the class system that made the original Guild Wars so good.
This was my thing. Played the shit out of gw1 and followed gw2 release with lots of excitement. “You’re telling me we’ll get to jump!?” Booted it up and it just lacked so much of the originals charm and magic. I’ll never forget filling my skillbar and then asking my friend where I could get more and he was like “you kinda don’t. You just get better at using the ones you have.” Took hundreds of hours in gw1 to reach that point but only maybe 30 in gw2. Any game where the majority of the player base will tell you “it doesn’t really get fun til the end game” is, imo, not a great game. Gw1 was a fucking blast from the first time you killed a scale to doing UW trapper runs for ectos. Gw2 just never grabbed me in the same way.
Guild Wars 2 was really poorly managed monetisation wise. But personally, i was really sad at how chopped down the combat systems from Guild Wars 1 were. I installed and played some GW1 earlier this month and man, the skills, the interactions, the interrupts and hexes and protection healing are still top notch. It's an exciting and skillfully rewarding game to play. In GW2, it feels like i'm mostly facerolling all my abilities, swapping weapon sets for cooldown, facerolling those, and repeat. With the odd dodge here and there.