Which Steam games do you regret buying and why?

Spare-Flair

Supreme [H]ardness
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There are a bunch of Steam games I've bought, mostly because they seemed cheap at the time but I regret purchasing them and I wish I could return them. What are yours and why?

Borderlands + all Borderlands DLCs - This was the most disappointing game of the year for me. I was hyped for it and bought a 4 pack to play co-op with my friends because us PC gamers have been shafted for good co-op games for so long. The game had no story, the ending was stupid, the game was repetitive, the missions were all the same and the story for each mission was bland and boring. The FOV was stuck at an awful 60 forcing me to map my run button to the change FOV command causing bouncing of the FOV at times giving me a headache. I even bought the DLCs to play with my friends but they have even less story and are even less fun. This game screamed potential but halfway through development they switched to the cel shaded look and ditched the serious storyline for the comedy one and then it just got sillier and stupider and incongruent. A lot of the game was stuck in console port mode but fortunately there was a lot of possibilities with ini editing.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 - Another game I bought because I craved co-op so badly. It was okay but I'd never play it again. I had enough Vegas after the first game and again, the FOV was stuck at a horrible console setting of 60.

Bad Company 2 - Don't need to explain this one. Many people have shared their sentiments with how few maps there are and how all the maps are so narrow and focused on chokes. I bought this because I wanted to play with a friend but it's not the game I wanted (64 player large map Battlefield type game) and I haven't touched it in months.

Street Fighter IV - Bought to fight friends online. Played as Sagat and beat all of them but going onto the actual online portion for matchmaking console style sucked. I don't like the art style in this game and I don't like getting my ass kicked every single time I go online by people who care too much about this game. It stopped being fun quickly.

Commandos 1, 2, 3, etc. - Bought them out of nostalgia but they were totally broken and Steam doesn't give a damn about fixing their lazy dos/win95 ports. Won't even work in Vista/7. Bugged and broken even in XP, wouldn't save, resolutions sucked, etc. Eventually had to find cracked exe's from 10 years ago to even be able to play the game by hex editing certain files (Steam's exes have different checksums and are encrypted) to fix problems Steam wouldn't.

Titan Quest & Immortal Throne - Bought to play with friends in co-op (hmm, seems to always be the case) but the game wasn't for me. The storyline was lacking and it was just a hack and slash, click on everything, click to attack, click-fest resulting in seriously bad wear and tear to Mouse 1 and carpel tunnel syndrome.

Eve Online: Tyrannis - No idea why I bought this. I thought it was cheap or something. I don't want to play spreadsheets in space and wouldn't ever pay a monthly fee to play any MMO. I guess I wanted to have it in case I ever wanted to have no life at all.
 
Call of Duty: Black Ops: It was so buggy and bad that I got Steam to give me a refund for it right after the initial form email autoreply with a single email further back to them...

As to the OP's: Bad Company 2 I love, have since pre-order month-long head-start demo. Yeah, it was a bit short on maps at launch but if you weren't expecting Battlefield 3 from it, it's a solid game.

SF4: Same thing, I love it. I get trounced by some people, but the more even matches are pretty common and damned fun when they happen.

Haven't tried the rest listed :).
 
What? Steam gives refunds? Since when? Damn, I should have asked for one for some things. The Commandos pack for one. The damn things wouldn't even work in Vista/7.
 
The Witcher, because I paid 20$ and A DAY LATER it was 5$ on sale.
 
Civilization IV. The gameplay was not what I was expecting. I like Age of Empires and was told that I would enjoy this game but I didn't. Played it for 4 hours when I first got it a few months ago and haven't played it since.

Red Orchestra. Didn't care for the game at all, played an hour or so.

GTA 3, and Vice City. These don't work properly with the Xbox controller so I am a little bummed about that. I have GTA:SA as well but didn't install that since I figured it may have the same problem with the controller as the other 2. I have GTA 4 on the 360 so I didn't bother getting it for the PC.

I just bought a few games recently but haven't installed them, Batman AA, Metro 2033, Railworks 2,
 
Discliples 2 Gold. It worked for about 15 minutes, now it just hangs at load screen.

Everything on my ex gf's games list.
 
Bioshock 2. I paid $34 for that piece of shit. Inferior story to the original, poor graphics that hadn't been improved at all compared to the first, and a pathetically short campaign.
 
Farcry 2 - boring as sin. Very strange because its great looking game and when it is fun it's awesome but its endless unskippable repetition.

Final Fantasy XI - Never even got my online account working. Fought with my bank and square for two days and gave up.

Mass effect I and II
Warhammer 40k all

and anything else I bought and never got around to playing. Drives me crazy that I spent so much money thinking these would never go down in price...*sigh*
 
I think I got Fallout New Vegas on Steam and I regret it because it has to be the most bug-ridden POS game I have ever purchased. Bar None.

Haven't played it since 10-28-10 because I was so put off of it due to the craptastic coding.
 
keep in mind...if a game does not work..its on the developers not "steam" Valve is not responsible for other people's games.
 
keep in mind...if a game does not work..its on the developers not "steam" Valve is not responsible for other people's games.

Steam is the store that we purchase the software from. As there is no ostensible consistent return policy, are we simply supposed to accept broken crap with no recourse? If software is put on the service, it should be sufficiently vetted and tested to make sure it works.
 
Steam is the store that we purchase the software from. As there is no ostensible consistent return policy, are we simply supposed to accept broken crap with no recourse? If software is put on the service, it should be sufficiently vetted and tested to make sure it works.

ummm sure so lets blame every store? lets blame best buy for the software that work on my machine that i built 10 years ago? no they are not responsible. So blaming Steam/Valve is stupid. However asking valve for a refund is not stupid. Valve should give refunds based on the community having such horrid problems. That i dont disagree with :)

Ill add bioshock 2 to the mix...game was repetitive
 
There are a bunch of Steam games I've bought, mostly because they seemed cheap at the time but I regret purchasing them and I wish I could return them. What are yours and why?

Borderlands + all Borderlands DLCs - This was the most disappointing game of the year for me. I was hyped for it and bought a 4 pack to play co-op with my friends because us PC gamers have been shafted for good co-op games for so long. The game had no story, the ending was stupid, the game was repetitive, the missions were all the same and the story for each mission was bland and boring. The FOV was stuck at an awful 60 forcing me to map my run button to the change FOV command causing bouncing of the FOV at times giving me a headache. I even bought the DLCs to play with my friends but they have even less story and are even less fun. This game screamed potential but halfway through development they switched to the cel shaded look and ditched the serious storyline for the comedy one and then it just got sillier and stupider and incongruent. A lot of the game was stuck in console port mode but fortunately there was a lot of possibilities with ini editing.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 - Another game I bought because I craved co-op so badly. It was okay but I'd never play it again. I had enough Vegas after the first game and again, the FOV was stuck at a horrible console setting of 60.

Bad Company 2 - Don't need to explain this one. Many people have shared their sentiments with how few maps there are and how all the maps are so narrow and focused on chokes. I bought this because I wanted to play with a friend but it's not the game I wanted (64 player large map Battlefield type game) and I haven't touched it in months.

Street Fighter IV - Bought to fight friends online. Played as Sagat and beat all of them but going onto the actual online portion for matchmaking console style sucked. I don't like the art style in this game and I don't like getting my ass kicked every single time I go online by people who care too much about this game. It stopped being fun quickly.

Commandos 1, 2, 3, etc. - Bought them out of nostalgia but they were totally broken and Steam doesn't give a damn about fixing their lazy dos/win95 ports. Won't even work in Vista/7. Bugged and broken even in XP, wouldn't save, resolutions sucked, etc. Eventually had to find cracked exe's from 10 years ago to even be able to play the game by hex editing certain files (Steam's exes have different checksums and are encrypted) to fix problems Steam wouldn't.

Titan Quest & Immortal Throne - Bought to play with friends in co-op (hmm, seems to always be the case) but the game wasn't for me. The storyline was lacking and it was just a hack and slash, click on everything, click to attack, click-fest resulting in seriously bad wear and tear to Mouse 1 and carpel tunnel syndrome.

Eve Online: Tyrannis - No idea why I bought this. I thought it was cheap or something. I don't want to play spreadsheets in space and wouldn't ever pay a monthly fee to play any MMO. I guess I wanted to have it in case I ever wanted to have no life at all.


You seem to just be buying games without actually reading the descriptions of the games or researching them first. No wonder your disappointed.

i.e. Titan Quest a Hack n Slash , Who would have thought!:eek: you can tell just by looking at the screenshots that it is.

Now to be fair I have purchased a few stinkers in my days ( Hellgate London), but it rarely happens due to the fact that I have enough common sense to do a little research before spending my money.
 
world in conflict is probably my biggest regret, it just wasn't the game I hoped it would be.
 
Borderlands and Vegas 2 are cracking games.

I wasted my money on Crysis Warhead/Wars - should have learned from the original what shitty games they make for - Left 4 Dead 2 which I only played a little of for the holiday sweepstakes and only bought because it came with Metro 2033 for about £2, and Shattered Horizon because it has no community.
 
TF2, because it sucks awfully bad, i forgot why i got out of pc gaming and that is exactly why, super fast mindless numb kill anything that moves with a bunch of 12 yr olds.....blech
 
MoH - hardly 5 hours of single player campaign which was shoddy and disjointed, and the MP was just..m'eh. Just a re-hash of CoD series which is just as bad with the single player.

Civ V- Talk about a crash-fest. Two patches in and it still is less stable than Charles Manson.
 
ummm sure so lets blame every store? lets blame best buy for the software that work on my machine that i built 10 years ago? no they are not responsible. So blaming Steam/Valve is stupid. However asking valve for a refund is not stupid. Valve should give refunds based on the community having such horrid problems. That i dont disagree with :)

Ill add bioshock 2 to the mix...game was repetitive

Best Buy doesn't put out 5-10 year old games as new versions that are supposed to work on modern computers. Steam does. Brick and Mortar stores don't take game refunds obstensibly because of piracy but there is no reason for that on Steam. If Steam puts out old games that are supposed to work on a modern OS but it doesn't, you should be entitled to a refund and I should have asked for one but I was stupid and stubborn and tried to fix it myself with fan fixes that didn't work because the steam files are slightly different.
 
Titan quest was a diablo clone lol

Forgive me if my mouse finger in my late 20s isn't what it used to be at 15 years old. Titan Quest killed my finger and made me afraid for the survivability of my favorite mouse. Diablo 3 is an avoid because of this :)
 
Best Buy doesn't put out 5-10 year old games as new versions that are supposed to work on modern computers. Steam does. Brick and Mortar stores don't take game refunds obstensibly because of piracy but there is no reason for that on Steam. If Steam puts out old games that are supposed to work on a modern OS but it doesn't, you should be entitled to a refund and I should have asked for one but I was stupid and stubborn and tried to fix it myself with fan fixes that didn't work because the steam files are slightly different.

Steam is just a median, blame the companies making the games as well. Steam is not the only fault here :) i do agree, i bought CnC from the the first decade pack and had this problem with the original cnc
 
Steam is just a median, blame the companies making the games as well. Steam is not the only fault here :) i do agree, i bought CnC from the the first decade pack and had this problem with the original cnc

I think what bothers me most is that Valve games for the most part work awesomely and even work with Eyefinity/surround out of the box. Other devs lock their shit down and make it impossible to even fix bugs yourself.
 
Steam is just a median, blame the companies making the games as well. Steam is not the only fault here :) i do agree, i bought CnC from the the first decade pack and had this problem with the original cnc

Then Steam shouldn't put it out in the first place. It is the medium but it's direct delivery.

A better analogy than the Best Buy one you used would be what if you couldn't watch the videos you downloaded from Netflix? Netflix has an onus to make sure the content it delivers directly will work.

This is not a novel idea, Microsoft has a very strict and strenuous QA system for it's Xbox Live Marketplace games.
 
Games I regret buying:

Dead Space. I really dislike the controls and the combat was slow paced which made it lose the 'scary' feeling. I only played it for about an hour so maybe the combat would improve but the controls wont. I may get around to it but its going in the backlog.

Need for Speed Undercover. What a shitty game. Most Wanted is a million times better and even looks better. Could be the bloom in Most Wanted but Undercover looked like ass.

Flatout Ultimate Carnage. Not really a bad game but I didnt really enjoy it. I am playing Burnout Paradise and I enjoy it way more.

Clap Trap DLC for Borderlands. I enjoyed Borderlands and General Knoxx DLC and was looking forward to the Clap Trap DLC. I bought it on release and my friend and I beat it within a few hours. What a boring POS. I was thinking maybe it will get better and by the time it did start to improve, it was over. WTF. Waste of money.
 
You seem to just be buying games without actually reading the descriptions of the games or researching them first. No wonder your disappointed.

Descriptions and even demos can rarely stand in for actual gaming for a few hours. Like I said, most were bought because they seemed cheap on sales and were probably peer pressured purchases because I wanted to play with friends.

It's just the nature of Steam, like you can't erase your mistakes. The purchases you regret are there with you forever. Even if you uninstall them, they are still on the full games list haunting you! You can't sell them or throw them away to pretend they never happened!
 
Flatout Ultimate Carnage. Not really a bad game but I didnt really enjoy it. I am playing Burnout Paradise and I enjoy it way more.

Clap Trap DLC for Borderlands. I enjoyed Borderlands and General Knoxx DLC and was looking forward to the Clap Trap DLC. I bought it on release and my friend and I beat it within a few hours. What a boring POS. I was thinking maybe it will get better and by the time it did start to improve, it was over. WTF. Waste of money.

Damn, I forgot that bought Flatout! Well it was like $2 but it is sitting there haunting me!

Thanks for the info on Clap Trap. I almost bought it for $4.99 yesterday because of the "completionist" in me but then I remembered how much Borderlands sucks in exactly the way you mentioned. Boring and you keep thinking it will improve and then it's over.
 
Steam is just a median, blame the companies making the games as well. Steam is not the only fault here :) i do agree, i bought CnC from the the first decade pack and had this problem with the original cnc

Personally I think whoever takes my money is the one who should make sure my product works or refund it. It's up to Steam to whip the pubs and devs to get the game working since they pay them their share of the sale, or remove it from the store front if they refuse.

I can understand where there are fluke cases where one guy is having problems and you might not refund because he's the only one ever to complain, but some of these games probably have loads of people who can't run them because of OS incompatibilities or whatever that are unlisted.

Personally I'd like to see them list the warnings/incompatibilities or specific requirements of games on the cart page or remind people when they checkout that games are DX10 only or DX 11 only. I know I missed it on at least one game I bought, and it wasn't a big deal because I had a computer upgrade planned to take care of it..but I did miss the requirement because I wanted to make sure I got it in my cart along with a few others to see the total price and what not before I forgot and the sale ended.
 
Unreal Tournament 3. It felt like I was an engine tester, it was a shell of a game.
 
COD BlackOps

I played the story and it was OK, played the multiplayer once and went back to BC2. Haven't played it since mid-November.
Wish I could resell it.
 
Personally I think whoever takes my money is the one who should make sure my product works or refund it. It's up to Steam to whip the pubs and devs to get the game working since they pay them their share of the sale, or remove it from the store front if they refuse.

I can understand where there are fluke cases where one guy is having problems and you might not refund because he's the only one ever to complain, but some of these games probably have loads of people who can't run them because of OS incompatibilities or whatever that are unlisted.

Personally I'd like to see them list the warnings/incompatibilities or specific requirements of games on the cart page or remind people when they checkout that games are DX10 only or DX 11 only. I know I missed it on at least one game I bought, and it wasn't a big deal because I had a computer upgrade planned to take care of it..but I did miss the requirement because I wanted to make sure I got it in my cart along with a few others to see the total price and what not before I forgot and the sale ended.

Valve doesn't have time to test every single game on their service. It really just comes down to that. It would take a lot of time and money to do so.
 
What? Steam gives refunds? Since when? Damn, I should have asked for one for some things. The Commandos pack for one. The damn things wouldn't even work in Vista/7.

They sure do with well-worded emails :).

Steam is the store that we purchase the software from. As there is no ostensible consistent return policy, are we simply supposed to accept broken crap with no recourse? If software is put on the service, it should be sufficiently vetted and tested to make sure it works.

This. They won't give a refund if you just don't like the game generally as far as I can gather, but like any place, they can bend the policies in some cases ;).
 
Bf2. I bought this just so I can have a back up on steam. When downloaded and install, good luck getting the multiplayer to work. It say my key was invalid. Had to modify some files based on other steam bf community forum fixes. Oh and one more... When you update the punkbuster, 5 mins into game you get invaild program driver or someshit. You have to disable steam ingame :/
 
Valve doesn't have time to test every single game on their service. It really just comes down to that. It would take a lot of time and money to do so.

Yeah, but the people taking my money are still responsible for either refunding it or getting a working product to me. They can whichever is easier, but keeping the money should not be an option when you have a non-functional product day 1 especially if there are no warnings as to the chance that it may not work in certain conditions. It applies to DRM broken games as well as far as Im concerned.
 
Dead Space and Arkham Asylum. Both were (and still are) highly regarded by a lot of people but even though I picked them both up in sales, I didn't think they were worth the money.

And a couple that I've bought full price immediately before they've been in sales, but weren't necessarily bad games in themselves (Grid and EFLC in particular).
 
Yeah, but the people taking my money are still responsible for either refunding it or getting a working product to me. They can whichever is easier, but keeping the money should not be an option when you have a non-functional product day 1 especially if there are no warnings as to the chance that it may not work in certain conditions. It applies to DRM broken games as well as far as Im concerned.

There have been cases where Valve has issued a refund despite their general policy being "all sales are final". Its a case by case basis.
 
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