Video Games What was the most disappointing game you ever played?

[Skulloco]

Destiny. Here's why.

Picture this big, fancy new restaurant opening up just down the street from you. Everybody is jazzed about it from children who think being cool is cool, to older folks who actually know what the internet is. So this restaurant is promising you these amazing dishes that you've never heard of from seafood to steak to burgers to dessert. Man, this place sounds rad. So you make plans with your homies to reserve a seat.

It's opening day! You get your seat and you and your fellow fleshbags are wicked hyped for this food. The waiters/waitresses look fancy as fuck, they're funny and entertaining, the interior decor is dope tingz. This food will actually be bonkers. So you get your order in. Feeling good. Feelin' fine as wine if wine were good.

Then you see it. Your food on its way on those dumb little push carts. It rolls up to your table and the waiter removes the lid. As the stream escapes there it is. The thing your ordered. It's a turd. And as you look up you see your waiter in full sprint running out through the back. As the back doors swing open you see one microwave and that's it.

Follow me for more stupid analogies.

 

[Honeymead]

Cyberpunk had ALL of my hype since it was first announced and it was honestly such a bummer how totally opposite that it was from what they were advertising. I could never get over the system they made for ~crowd control~. Looking a different direction and suddenly everyone is a different person when you look back. Completely immersion-breaking and would piss me off every time I'd see it for no reason at all lol.

 

[Vertex]

Haven.
There was hype about the relationship aspect but that along with the battle system, lack thereof, were pretty much annoying. The characters mostly too.

 

[Abyss]

First one that pops into my mind is Infamous Second Son. I absolutely love the Infamous series, and I do love a lot about this game as well. However, the further into the game I got the more I fell out of love with the game. One event in particular kind of ruined the story for me. That said, I don't regret playing it, because there was still a lot that I did enjoy!

I will echo feeling disappointed with Cyberpunk. I had such high hopes for that game, but I will also admit that I was really disappointed that there's no in game equivalent to cinematics from the trailer.

 

[Fraised]

Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon... at least when compared to the other entries in the series before it.
I had really been looking forward to it when it was new, having been told it was a lot like a love letter to the previous games. In practice, though, the sharp difficulty curve and finite amount of recruitable Pokes + quests turned me off.

I don't mind a challenge, or even that the series decided to mix up the formula a bit after several entries in a row of more or less the same things. And I could perhaps just be a bit of a scrub since I haven't played any other roguelike games apart from these. But it feels as though Super makes the player ridiculously dependent on items and hiding behind your teammates to even stand a chance against common enemies; your attacks do scratch damage, while the wild Pokémon in each dungeon can knock you out in one or two hits. Add on Tiny Reviver Seeds -- the ones you'll be more likely to have in your bag -- only bringing you back with a fraction of your health, and it's pretty easy to get locked into a Cycle of Hurting, and every dungeon seeming to drag on... I want to finish it some day just for completion sake, but I haven't really enjoyed playing this game at all. I'm glad that Rescue Team DX has stayed pretty faithful to the original Red/Blue, though whether or not the series will return to its roots if a totally new game comes out, or go back to the new direction Super tried to take, I'm curious to see.

Also, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I was really excited for it while it was still in development, and sad when it had gotten delayed for a bit... but I've scarcely played the game since actually buying it. It feels unfinished compared to New Leaf, which is disappointing because of how much potential this game has.

 

[Cosmo]

I mean.. When I get hyped for a game, it usually comes out pretty solid or at least close enough that I don't regret it. Like Cyberpunk, I expected and wanted something like a futuristic GTA meets the story and character complexity of Vampire: The Masquerade, something to really push the bounds of what an RPG could be. Yea, wasn't exactly that. Still was a solid enough game, buggy, but enjoyable so I wasn't disappointed enough to really note it.

I think the two games I was most hyped and disappointed over was... Tyranny by Obsidian and Stellaris by Paradox.

Both require a bit of explanation: Tyranny is an okay game with a great concept [of being a henchman of the big bad evil guy {Or woman, as it turned out} that had won] with a neat setting, I enjoyed the bronze age focus, however Tyranny felt rushed. It was short, it felt like it was missing an entire act, the ending was... Well, it was an Obsidian game, so, you can imagine. You know, just saying, 'It was an Obsidian game,' kind of explains it all, ergo, great in concept but wasn't actually finished.

Stellaris, to this day, is the only game I ever bought and then refunded. To clarify, the Stellaris of today, is not the Stellaris of release. Stellaris of today is an amazing 4x game that I adore [I bought it again after a friend I trust said it was completely rebuilt and changed with its 2.0 release] but the Stellaris of release was a train wreck. I loved Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, etc. So that IN SPACE? Just take my money [Especially with Paradox's infuriating DLC policy] but what I got was a halfbaked mess that had a ton of really horribly implemented mechanics and was bare of content. They had to completely rebuild the game from the ground up in their 2.0 release just to get people to come back to it and, I give them credit, they did a great job with the rebuild.

Of course, they didn't really seem to learn their lesson with the launch of Imperator and they had to rebuild that too, but hey, I didn't buy Imperator so jokes not on me this time.

 

[Reid]

Stardew Valley. So much hype over that game to the point where you would think people are getting visited personally by god himself. I just can't get into it... And I usually like simulators with management aspects but SDV is so... restrictive and I'm not a fan of energy bars.

Warframe, Destiny... Literally whatever shooty-pew peww game you can think of. Maybe I don't have the right type of personality for these games, but I don't know how people get addicted to p2p fps games. Unless you have other people to play with, it's just endless matches in the same map or something. I guess I prefer exploration rather than being stuck in one map lol

 

[Abyss]

Stardew Valley. So much hype over that game to the point where you would think people are getting visited personally by god himself. I just can't get into it... And I usually like simulators with management aspects but SDV is so... restrictive and I'm not a fan of energy bars.

Warframe, Destiny... Literally whatever shooty-pew peww game you can think of. Maybe I don't have the right type of personality for these games, but I don't know how people get addicted to p2p fps games. Unless you have other people to play with, it's just endless matches in the same map or something. I guess I prefer exploration rather than being stuck in one map lol

Shooty-pew peww is my new favorite name for the genre.

Warframe was cool and I want to love it, but I can't do grinding.....or figure out what order I'm supposed to do what and how

I'm not a huge fan of shooters, except I loved Borderlands and Doom 2016. Although I could finish Borderlands 3, because I felt disappointed with the direction they chose to take the Tales of the Borderlands characters in as well as some other plot developments. It doesn't help that my computer has a hard time running at a decent framerate when I play.

Things I value in a game:

Story/fun characters > Shooty-pew pewwness (Doom being an exception, kinda...I know Warframe has a story, but I haaaaaaaaaate grinding for upgrades).

 

[Nerdy_Bean17]

I’d say the worst game I played has to be pretty much any battle Royale they used to be fun but they got really boring

 

[Scarlet Fires]

KOTOR 2. This first game was one of my favorites, probably the first game I played for story and started a long love affair with bioware RPGS

The second just phoned it in. It's the "Has potential but does not apply self" of games. There were so many things that seemed cool but just fell flat, and then ending was a joke.

Yes, I realize that they had the release date unexpectedly moved up, yes I realize that was super unfair to the developers...doesn't change the fact that this game was trash.

I'm still wanting a remaster of both games because personally I loved the first KOTOR game. I can't count how many times I replayed it just because its my favorite. However, I was never able to get through the second one because I always ran into some kind of issue. To see the games remastered and the second one added to, so its more complete would be amazing.

 

[PerSephy]

Tales of Symphonia 2.

Being that Tales of Symphonia was the game I put the most hours in through my teenage years in my gamecube... I was so excited when I found there was a second part.
Couldn't get through 2 hours of game play. They took everything that was amazing and nostalgic about the first one and threw it away... then replaced it with the most annoying things their minds could think of.

 

[Merciless Medic]

sigh

Okay, so I got really hyped to play Cyberpunk 2077. But when I heard about the increasing hype getting to a point where it was getting almost overwhelming and the due date got closer, even with the extensions, I realized that I might be putting too much energy into it. I told myself "it'll be good, the guys who made Witcher were amazing with that series". But then the pattern-sensing and rational part of my brain was like "no, there is too much hype, even the developers were trying to get everyone all hyped up, there's just too much. With a standard set so high, they'll never make it up to expectations, and the stress will make a mess of a game."

The latter portion of my brain was right, but I denied it until I played it. It was pretty great when I played it, but the exploitations and the buggy nature of the game was something I didn't expect. I didn't want to keep playing the game, and I haven't even got to the point where Jackie died.... Yea... I play really slow. While everything was super detailed, I realized that the NPCs the developers bragged about being all unique and having their own little preprogammed goals - so if you keep following one, you'll find a random NPCs entire story arc - weren't all they cracked out to be. And, while I was following one, I saw one exactly the same model of the one I was following.

Though, the story scenes of what I have seen from my husband were absolutely amazing, the ending was an absolute bummer. I'll put it in a spoiler just in case.

Spoiler: Cyberbomb 2077 endings

It's like you'd expect there to be differences based on the choices you choose and the people you help along the way. However, once you reach the end, instead of giving you the option to stay alive and experience more of the world around you, it ends off with either:

• You dying in one ending as your character lives out the rest of their lives for the remainder of the three months after your plan to avenge the death of Saburo Arasaka,
• You uploading your consciousness into a chip similar to what Johnny Silverhand was put into as an alternative after you help avenge the death of Saburo Arasaka,
• You stopping your run short (as it does give you an option before you reach the end game when you talk to Mysty on the balcony),
• Letting Johnny Silverhand take over or living out the rest of your days with the Nomads and Panam (requires you to have done all side quests for Panam and the Aldecados and then doing the three last missions that includes them and specific dialogue options),
• Trap Johnny Silverhand in cyberspace and you become a legend (requires you to have done all side quests for Rogue and following specific dialogue options),
• A secret ending that is basically turning the difficulty up to nightmare which either allows you to take control of your own body at last or let Johnny Silverhand take over (requires high friendship with him).

That's it.... You don't get to do anything else after this. You either die, lose your body to Johnny, or live out what you can because you are just going to die anyway.

 

[BakaTheIdiot]

I have played four Call of Duty games: WWII, Black Ops 2, CoD4 on my DS, and Black Ops 3.

None of them were particularly good IMO. I just didn't understand the hype around them. You shoot things. That's it.

 

[Alchimique]

Fallout 76 was extremely disappointing to me. It lacked a lot in gameplay, but the storyline and characters also left a lot to be desired.

 

[Fist Full of Frogs]

Over the 550+ hours I've sunk into Payday 2 since middle school, I've gone from loving the game to absolutely resenting it. The Tijuana heist is when I stopped completely.

There is something really sad watching a game you grew up with get more and more brainless with every new update, all while the developers are trying to milk people for money with dlc meta weapons. It's still a good game, I'm just salty with the direction they are taking it.

 

[RogueJumi]

The entirety of the Castlevania games. I have no clue why but I just started playing a bunch of them back-to-back, and all I ever thought the entire time was "knock this off the backlog knock this off the backlog..." Amusingly I never felt like any game overstayed its welcome or the concept overstayed its welcome, either.

 

[Malphaestus]

Dragon Age Inquisition, the transferance from the Dragon Age genre's typical reliance purely on story-based gameplay, into time-sink grinding for map activities to progress the story as opposed to any innate desire to engage with the stupendously large maps they've crafted for the player. It was MMORPG-esque, in a way which mocks the lineage of Dragon Age up until that point. Unlike some, I never disliked Dragon Age 2, it was simply another experience which some people were not adaptive enough to appreciate when they wanted Dragon Age Origins, except 'better,' in traditional consumer nebulousness.

The content in the game was good enough, which is to say the story and the expansion of the lore, and the world. But the 'activities' were cerebral suicide, and mind-numbing, traversing characterless landscapes only to chance upon an area which is 'slightly more aesthetically pleasing' only to have some hole in the world appear, forcing you to kill it in order to progress the story. Having to scavenge the landscape for minerals for senseless quests, and fighting hordes of foes only so that you can 'claim' a territory with vague implications (with, I believe, exceptions enough to number on one hand).

I enjoyed the combat enough, it was not revolutionary, but neither is that to be expected from Dragon Age. The key is the story, and has always been. The gameplay is complementary, but served only to benefit the story and complete the game. With Dragon Age Inquisition, I experienced the 'modernization' of Dragon Age in cruel fashion, forceful 'open worlds' which felt empty and bereft of purpose save for their visual appeal. They were stunning, but they did not hold the same allure as the adventures I had in Orzimmar, the immense story contained within the small hold of Redcliffe, and the greatly intimate tale of Hawke in his adventures across the Free Marches.

I felt from Inquisition a sense of longing for tales which never were, and a disappointedness in the game's open world mechanics, which seemed soulless. Things which could have been ignored had Inquisition been a better game, but alas, the open-world was essential to its market appeal, and was intimately woven into the game's story. I am a part of the clan who disdain the open world. There are fashions to make it a compelling thing, namely if you have a story which makes you interact with the map which was made for the game, but Inquisition did not have this. It had resource requirements and material grinding.

With the DLCs, they rectified most of the issues innate to the game upon its release. But I did not retain interest for the title enough to humour them.

 

[Bixi]

League of Legends was the most disappointing for me. The characters and lore are pretty cool, but unfortunately when you play LoL, you have to deal with LoL players, which are just insufferable. I'm not very good at the game and I could never get better because I was getting told to kms every 10 seconds [shrug]

 

[GarnaalProductions]

Yeahhh that's gotta be The Outer Worlds for me, tbh. Its trailer and the general vibe it embodied drew me in the first time I saw it; there was something so fascinating and exciting about being able to play a sci-fi game that wasn't all chrome-played ships and mecha-alien-Spartan-supersoldiers with blasters. The fact that it came from the same studio that produced the famous Fallout: New Vegas likely did its part at raising the bar too, yet at the end of the day it was just.. ehh.

Not a bad game per say, not at all, but it wasn't anywhere near as flashy and thrilling as the promotion material made it out to be. Combat was wonky, character interactions were kinda awkward, I dunno, might just not be my cup of tea, though that doesn't mean that I can't say I'd expected more of it.

That said though, with boredom getting to me, I might just give it a chance sometime soon. Who knows, maybe actually being able to read the text on TV will help me enjoy it a little more, lmao

 

[RiddleMe]

Don't hate me but... Kingdom Hearts III. I was probably just expecting so much more from my favorite childhood game.

 

[Hootle]

Yakuza: Like a Dragon. I understand them wanting to do something different, it just doesn't feel like the Yakuza I've known and loved. I get the new character, new things. Don't get me wrong, turn based games are some of my favorite games to play as far as some JRPGs. I just really don't like it for a Yakuza game. I spent a couple of hours just fighting in battles without ever warming up to the battle system.

 

[BakaTheIdiot]

Another for me: Star Wars Battlefront. Not 2: 1. Truthfully neither of the Battlefront games are particularly good to me, but I at least expected 2 to be predatory in its monetization. 1 just isnt very good. It feels... unfinished. It's like the idea was half-started, then abandoned, then picked up by a random intern and published.

That, or maybe I'm just salty for losing all the time lmao

 

[GojiBean]

Destiny.

This game showed so much promise in its initial concept and presentation. And it was developed by Bungie who started the Halo franchise. But alas... Destiny disappointed me on a level few other games ever have, and likely more than any other game ever will.

Let's start with the two most aggravating things for me: The lack of legitimate worldbuilding, and the god-awful enemy AI.

The worlds in Destiny are huge. But they're about as deep or rich with lore as a tablespoon of water dumped onto the sidewalk on a sunny day. Despite how big the world maps are, there's nothing to do except kill the constant spawned enemies. And 99% of the NPC's throughout these world maps (if there even are any) are non-interactable or just say a single line of dialogue over and over and over again with no thought or effort put into their existence beyond simply taking up that little bit of space. Even a few unique lines of dialogue giving tiny hints to the world history of the map they're on would go a long way to giving us at least something to sink our teeth into and provide us with just that tiny bit more understanding of the world we're on and the lore behind what happened before our awakening. But no. The NPC's that you can talk to spit out useless lines of dialogue that accomplish nothing and give you nothing to go off of.

Now the enemy AI... Dear Bungie, why? The enemies themselves are the exact same every single spawn with no variation whatsoever. Same place. Same number. Same weapons and tactics. And there's no adaptive AI either. So you are free to just sit and snipe their heads off and they will never learn or adapt to what you're doing and try to do anything different about your interference. They just continue to walk out of their spawn point and move the same way every time while presenting themselves as free headshot targets. No threat. No interest. No adaptability. No nothing. Just "here I am, please shot me... In the face!"

For Bungie, this level of low-effort on the part of the worlds and NPC's which inhabit the worlds and the enemy AI is beyond pathetic.

Sub-par "Bosses" is the next issue I have. They have oodles of health and take forever to kill. But that's about it. There's nothing on the journey to their location that shows they've been there, nor does anything give any hints as to their "destructive power" that you're always being warned about in the mission description. Normally, even in an indie game, I'd expect the path to the boss to show me something that hints at what's to come. For example a hint in the form of more and more damaged surroundings when approaching a boss that uses a lot of firepower. Enemy bodies sliced to ribbons in greater numbers as we get closer to a boss relying on blades. SOMETHING. But no. Bungie puts no effort into foreshadowing the boss fights or giving you any sense of tension or dramatic buildup leading to the fights. Just "follow the path to the boss and then enjoy the show!" There's only so much that kind of losing strategy can accomplish, Bungie. I thought you of all studios would know that.

Next is the lack of things to do overall. It's as if the game was designed purely for the "follow the enemy-ridden path to the boss" formula and nothing else. There's no real minigames to enjoy either alongside friends or NPC's, the latter of which would be really cool because it would give more life and depth to the world if the NPC's joined you in minigames with unique dialogue to show they're not just there to take up space and have more of a life and set of hobbies and interests outside of being a mannequin. There's no unique conversations that happen with NPC's depending on the time of day in the Tower or whatever map you're on. There's no sub-plot story missions which compliment the main narrative. There's no unique missions you can undertake alongside the faction leaders who could be NPC's assisting you with said mission. There's nothing. The entire game is based around "follow the path and kill the boss." That's it. There's nothing else to do except Strikes, PVP, Strikes, occasional story missions as you progress that part, Strikes, and uh... Oh yeah. Strikes. The same Strikes over and over again, mind you. Nothing new about a single repeat.

After Bungie split from Activision, I thought things would genuinely get better. But they didn't. The same lack of effort in the worlds, NPC's, and enemies remained. And they're not beyond fixing or adding to without breaking anything that currently exists. And with all the time Bungie's had to make something more of their game's world and lore, why they haven't done anything with it is beyond me.

Destiny as a game is a lot of flash, but absolutely zero substance. And games like that from a high-profile game development company are usually the most disappointing when they have a reputation and legacy like Halo to live up to.

 

[Retro Blossom]

Don't come at me, but imo, Mario Kart was disappointing -

 

[Ardere Onasis]

Either Destiny 2, or Darksiders 1