Games that could have been amazing!...buuut sucked?

piscian18

[H]F Junkie
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Jul 26, 2005
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Dying Light is on sale today and it occurs to me that game could have been easily game of the year, in my heart anyway, if they had just tweaked a few things like giving you more interesting weapons or not browning the shit out of everything. The Story was weak at best but with this kind of game I could have forgiven it if it were a little less blah all around. I still have an overall good opinion of Dead island because it was so pretty and original. I'd missed out on the atrocious launch.

I bet theres a game youre like "Oh yeah that game was..no nvm that sucked" what was it? why?
 
ill try:

Interstate 76 nitro pack. car combat ala twisted metal with a 70s funk groove.
fun right? nope, absolute crapload.
graphics were passable, if you're a fan of brown polygons (mechwarrior 2 had less going on on-screen and still managed to do it better). controls i recall as being ponderous, cutscenes (such as they were) were low quality 3d animations almost devoid of shading, wrapped up in what i can only assume was a sub-standard implementation of Smacker video given the incessant artifacting. user interface for menus and car customization was firmly in the "handwritten pen on sheet of paper" style.
apparently it had a plot, but it was clearly anything but memorable.

first, and to date, only game ive ever tried to return to the store for a refund
 
LOL

Way of the Warrior (3DO). I wanted to love it but it was just fundamentally shitty. The graphics and soundtrack were great. The gameplay and characters...not so much.

Also, countless other games of that era.
 
ill try:

Interstate 76 nitro pack. car combat ala twisted metal with a 70s funk groove.
fun right? nope, absolute crapload.
graphics were passable, if you're a fan of brown polygons (mechwarrior 2 had less going on on-screen and still managed to do it better). controls i recall as being ponderous, cutscenes (such as they were) were low quality 3d animations almost devoid of shading, wrapped up in what i can only assume was a sub-standard implementation of Smacker video given the incessant artifacting. user interface for menus and car customization was firmly in the "handwritten pen on sheet of paper" style.
apparently it had a plot, but it was clearly anything but memorable.

first, and to date, only game ive ever tried to return to the store for a refund

Seriously!! Interstate 76 was awesome.
 
I have a love-hate relationship with Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason. The storyline, is awesome. The gameplay is standard. Gorgeous graphics, that weren't optimized. Great level design, but very slow paced. Ask me for a unique horror game, I'll recommend it, if I know you want to play it for the story alone.
 
MGS5
+ Some decent stealth play, still not the best stealth on the market (Dishonored).
- The story is absolute garbage
- One of the most repetitive games I have played this gen
- The Open world is awful and the game should have simply been an sandbox with open areas
- The economy system is terrible
- The real-time wait times on development of items/resources was idiotic and plain bush league
- The fulton system pretty much trivialized the stealth gameplay
- FOB were pointless
- Online was a shit show
- The dialogue was cringeworthy along with the writing, Kojima is overrated.
- The plot was straight out of a Japanese B-movie
- The gunplay was pretty bad


One of the most overrated games I have played, the second being Uncharted 2.
 
Skyrim.

Out of the box -

-crafting was broken and dull
-the ui was (and still is) probably one of the worst, if not the worst video game ui's I've used
-removal of all stats in favor of a heavily gated and points-wasting perk system. This could have been OK had the perk trees been better crafted
-over the top "epic chosen one" storyline(s)
-leader of the mages guild with no magical skill required
-killing 50 dragons with your bare hands really reduces the impact and importance of having dragons be a major part of the main quest
-picking factions gave you different quests, but didn't really impact the world in any major way
-I killed the Emperor and nobody reacted or even mentioned it ever in the game. Zero impact
-no real non-combat roleplaying abilities (persuasion, intimidate, charm, etc.)
-removal of Major/Minor skill groups allowed you to completely break your character, especially with the way the game is level scaled
-fuck level scaling forever
-endless sea of Draugr
-stop using this game engine: bugs, 60fps physics issue, ugly
-fewer spells, fewer abilities, less character build customization
-enemy AI still terrible
-every guard has had some sort of knee injury, and oddly has the same voice
-removal of permanent birth signs and many race based abilities
 
Skyrim.

Out of the box -

-crafting was broken and dull
-the ui was (and still is) probably one of the worst, if not the worst video game ui's I've used
-removal of all stats in favor of a heavily gated and points-wasting perk system. This could have been OK had the perk trees been better crafted
-over the top "epic chosen one" storyline(s)
-leader of the mages guild with no magical skill required
-killing 50 dragons with your bare hands really reduces the impact and importance of having dragons be a major part of the main quest
-picking factions gave you different quests, but didn't really impact the world in any major way
-I killed the Emperor and nobody reacted or even mentioned it ever in the game. Zero impact
-no real non-combat roleplaying abilities (persuasion, intimidate, charm, etc.)
-removal of Major/Minor skill groups allowed you to completely break your character, especially with the way the game is level scaled
-fuck level scaling forever
-endless sea of Draugr
-stop using this game engine: bugs, 60fps physics issue, ugly
-fewer spells, fewer abilities, less character build customization
-enemy AI still terrible
-every guard has had some sort of knee injury, and oddly has the same voice
-removal of permanent birth signs and many race based abilities


<3

Glad to see I'm not the only one that really didn't like this game. And I gave it a fair shake too. Played at least 40 hours. The lack of consequences is what really killed the immersion for me though. You could go out and kill entire cities worth of people, but no one will take notice. No one will hate you or love your as a result. Every decision is only relevant to the immediate area.

Heck, even Fallout 1/2 did a better job with "Karma" than this game... and those were made in 1997 (IIRC). However that may be a testament to Chris Avellone's game design more than how poor Skyrim was/is.
 
Ecco the Dolphin, Defender of the Future for Dreamcast.

Had some good ingredients for an awesome experience. Marred by technical issues. The game clearly wasn't finished, but it still had some neat features:

1. Light shafts
2. Stencil shadows
3. High-quality textures
4. Water particles

The game graphically holds up very well today. Some of its graphical features, like stencil shadows, were omitted from the PS2 version.

The crying shame is that the framerate was erratic, and would drop for no apparent reason sometimes. The difficulty was horrible, and the game was clearly rushed. Certain levels didn't have any texture filtering applied to the skybox in the later levels (all other levels had it), and some of the music tracks loop prematurely, which leads me to believe it needed more time in the oven.

I'm disappointed to imagine what we could have gotten, had the developers had more time. All of those graphical effects at 60fps? Difficulty tweaks? Oh man - what a game it could have been.
 
Skyrim.

-stop using this game engine: bugs, 60fps physics issue, ugly

Not to nitpick (your points are valid and I agree with all of them), but I believe that the physics is V-Sync limited and not 60 fps limited. I play the game on my CRT's at 75 and 85hz and so long as V-Sync is not disabled in the .ini file, I don't have any physics issues. For whatever reason though, the game can't take 120 hz without physics going to shit though. I can't explain that one... :confused:
 
Skyrim.

Out of the box -

-crafting was broken and dull
-the ui was (and still is) probably one of the worst, if not the worst video game ui's I've used
-removal of all stats in favor of a heavily gated and points-wasting perk system. This could have been OK had the perk trees been better crafted
-over the top "epic chosen one" storyline(s)
-leader of the mages guild with no magical skill required
-killing 50 dragons with your bare hands really reduces the impact and importance of having dragons be a major part of the main quest
-picking factions gave you different quests, but didn't really impact the world in any major way
-I killed the Emperor and nobody reacted or even mentioned it ever in the game. Zero impact
-no real non-combat roleplaying abilities (persuasion, intimidate, charm, etc.)
-removal of Major/Minor skill groups allowed you to completely break your character, especially with the way the game is level scaled
-fuck level scaling forever
-endless sea of Draugr
-stop using this game engine: bugs, 60fps physics issue, ugly
-fewer spells, fewer abilities, less character build customization
-enemy AI still terrible
-every guard has had some sort of knee injury, and oddly has the same voice
-removal of permanent birth signs and many race based abilities

I agree with this as well. Skyrim is borderline awful at best without mods.
 
Fallout 4
Star Wars Battlefront

Fallout 4 is a buggy mess with dated graphics and is pretty much the same as the previous ones. They played on everyone's nostalgia for the Fallout series, and it worked. They made a shitload of money with minimal amount of work. Couldn't even be bothered to use a new engine. Would have cut into profits.

SWBF is BF4 skinned to look like Star Wars with slightly better graphics. Same DLC division bullshit as the Battlefield games. Dumbed down gameplay. It's "pew pew" instead of "bang bang". Nothing ground breaking at all. Could have been great, but will be dead within a year.

Both could have been amazing, but the companies value profits over pleasing the customers. Unlike CD Projekt Red, they don't understand that if you make an amazing product and please the consumer, the money will come.

I know fanboys are gonna flame, so have at it.
 
Titanfall

so much potential wasted...game didn't suck but it should have been so much better
 
Fallout 4
Star Wars Battlefront

Fallout 4 is a buggy mess with dated graphics and is pretty much the same as the previous ones. They played on everyone's nostalgia for the Fallout series, and it worked. They made a shitload of money with minimal amount of work. Couldn't even be bothered to use a new engine. Would have cut into profits.

SWBF is BF4 skinned to look like Star Wars with slightly better graphics. Same DLC division bullshit as the Battlefield games. Dumbed down gameplay. It's "pew pew" instead of "bang bang". Nothing ground breaking at all. Could have been great, but will be dead within a year.

Both could have been amazing, but the companies value profits over pleasing the customers. Unlike CD Projekt Red, they don't understand that if you make an amazing product and please the consumer, the money will come.

I know fanboys are gonna flame, so have at it.

Agree with this as well. I got F4 pretty cheap from CDkeys so not that big of a deal, but the game really suffers in a number of ways the biggest being the boring, repetive quests. They aren't even on the same planet as Witcher 3 in this regard. The gunplay is much improved over F3, and the world is a bit more interesting to explore. But I think this is def a game that will need mods (like Skyrim) to move it outside of mediocre territory. It also hurts that the game looks like shit graphically and runs like dogshit in any of the city areas (read: basically the southern portion of the map). I can't tell you how many quests are repeated and end with ".... so clear out those ghouls/raiders..'' ad nauseum.

Exploration is really the only driving force for me to finish the game....and mods, those glorious mods will be glorious.
 
Fallout 4 is a buggy mess

I've played Fallout 3, New Vegas, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim on both PC and consoles before & after numerous patches. I can literally count on one hand the amount of bugs I experienced during my play through in Fallout 4 (PS4 version & got all the trophies) and I only had ONE crash the entire time. I didn't rush through the game and played at my own pace of exploring damn near everything I could find.

Fallout 4 has been the smoothest gaming experience of a Bethesda title for me yet.
 
I've played Fallout 3, New Vegas, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim on both PC and consoles before & after numerous patches. I can literally count on one hand the amount of bugs I experienced during my play through in Fallout 4 (PS4 version & got all the trophies) and I only had ONE crash the entire time. I didn't rush through the game and played at my own pace of exploring damn near everything I could find.

Fallout 4 has been the smoothest gaming experience of a Bethesda title for me yet.

You must be lucky. I've never seen more comments, videos, and gifs about weird bugs on any AAA game, and that includes Arkham Knight. Take a look at /r/gaming, it's a Fallout 4 bug repository now.
 
You must be lucky. I've never seen more comments, videos, and gifs about weird bugs on any AAA game, and that includes Arkham Knight. Take a look at /r/gaming, it's a Fallout 4 bug repository now.

It's blown out of proportion, the amount of glitches in FO4 are much less than any of Bethesdas previous games. And Arkham Knight bugs aren't bugs, the whole game is just broken performance wise. Remember Battlefield 3? How about the FIFA games? UFC? There are entire subreddits devoted towards those games. As far as r/gaming all I see is positivity, the amount of "check out what I did in Fallout", "look what I found" posts heavily outweigh the rest.
 
E.T ---what a mess. There is a reason they buried the damn thing in a landfill.
 
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 could have been the title that brought the series back to popularity. It was a buggy mess, with mediocre cartoon graphics and stale maps. Not a fun game by any means! Probably the biggest game letdown I've experienced.
 
Diablo 3. It has made a bit of a comeback now but the game lost a lot of its momentum to the auction house shenanigans and balance issues. Now the game is fun and playable but suffers from a lackluster community due to a huge de-emphasis on trading and multiplayer activities.
Prototype 2. I loved the first one but the performance issues with the 2nd made the game unplayable.
Shattered Horizon. This game started as a great hard-scifi FPS with incredible graphics but somehow lost its momentum along the way. An update was released with extra weapons but they weren't balanced properly and the game play got stagnant with the same levels over and over. Eventually the company pulled the plug on support and the community died.
Starcraft 2. Nearly every one of my friends bought a copy (or two) of SC1 back in the day and we played it all the time. SC2 looked great when it came out and the single player campaign was amazing but something was lost along the way in multiplayer. SC2 feels more like a remake than a sequel. It doesn't help that the full-cost expansions hurt the franchise.
 
battlefield 2142 but not because the game sucked, but because the battlefield 2 fanboy community are a bunch of reject shitlords and ruined what could of possibly been one of the best battlefield games released up to that point.

enemy territories: quake wars, had so much promise but EA being EA and the developers doing everything they possibly could wrong sealed the fate of yet another good FPS game that wasn't a counterstrike/CoD copy cat.

supereme commander/SC:FA a game that was ahead of its time as far as multithreaded support goes ruined due to lazy development and trying to put a rush job on a game that had been in the making for 6 years at that point and could of taken another year to actually be finished correctly with out pissing anyone off. but in that failure it also took away a lot of features/engine technology that disappeared with it. at the time it was really the only engine that ever fully used every cpu thread that was available to it and even to this day there really aren't many games that can do that still. sad isn't it?
 
Diablo 3 - It is much better now and sometimes I play it but when it first came out, it was no good. If they kept the same mechanics as D2 had and had a skill tree, it would have amazing. I still don't like that the classes automatically gain all skills and the only thing that matters is gear.
 
I agree with this as well. Skyrim is borderline awful at best without mods.

I disagree. I have 150+ mods enabled and the game runs perfectly and looks better than most every other game in my collection. And this on an AMD system. Intel systems should have even less issue, but seeing I have none they should have none.

Actually though I have done a little tweaking in .ini files and such so I guess if you don't then I can understand your disappointment.
 
You must be lucky. I've never seen more comments, videos, and gifs about weird bugs on any AAA game, and that includes Arkham Knight. Take a look at /r/gaming, it's a Fallout 4 bug repository now.

Reddit shitlets are only spamming Fallout 4 gifs and memes because it's the uber megahype game of the moment that everyone's playing.
 
Reddit shitlets are only spamming Fallout 4 gifs and memes because it's the uber megahype game of the moment that everyone's playing.

You can't help but love Bethesda games though. I mean Battlefront was released last week and yet Fallout posts are still overwhelming reddit. It'll take Just Cause 3 to dethrone it.
 
Mafia 2. What a beautiful game that is. They fucked it all up by being greedy. Parted the game to pieces with their DLCs. It was an alright game but could have been great! I predict Mafia 3 to make this list as well based on what I have seen so far.
 
battlefield 2142 but not because the game sucked, but because the battlefield 2 fanboy community are a bunch of reject shitlords and ruined what could of possibly been one of the best battlefield games released up to that point.

2142 was awesome. it was the most balanced BF game to date and then the whole franchise got ruined by console shit in BC/BC2
 
Any Star Wars games.

Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Knight, Shadows of the Empire were amazing games. I would also argue SWG was a great MMO, I loved farming my gasses and minerals, fuck the haters.

2142 was awesome. it was the most balanced BF game to date and then the whole franchise got ruined by console shit in BC/BC2

What happened with 2142? I played for the first couple of weeks but then nobody else wanted to transition over and the game slowly died :(
 
Knights of the Old Republic, Jedi Knight, Shadows of the Empire were amazing games. I would also argue SWG was a great MMO, I loved farming my gasses and minerals, fuck the haters.



What happened with 2142? I played for the first couple of weeks but then nobody else wanted to transition over and the game slowly died :(

There was a particular upgrade you could unlock that made the game miserable. Like funky landmine or something everyone left in protest
 
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