Topic: Biggest Gaming Disappointments

It's pretty difficult to be genuinely disappointed by a game these days - what with huge marketing campaigns, multiple trailers, 'let's plays' and dozens of readily available professional opinions distilled to even a single page easily found online.

But what have your biggest gaming disappointments been?

A whole game?

A boss?

An ending?

For me - we can head back to the relatively peaceful winter of 2008...
My PlayStation 3 was rocking the likes of Time Crisis 4, the blindingly pretty Haze and the promise of The Force Unleashed was beginning to feel hollow.

All of that paled to insignificance though - as I had recently acquired the most impressive console I had ever (and still) owned. The NTSC-J PlayStation 2 Slim Cinnabar Red model SCPH-90006CR. Beautiful, tiny, quiet and just ran and ran for hours on end, no crashes or grumbles - all on a regular figure 8 plug with no external power brick.

I'm a sucker for a good (and sometimes bad) shmup! I'd buy PAL games if I could, but I'd begun buying a few NTSC-J titles that I'd been coveting for a while. Fairly quickly adding the likes of Espgaluda II, DoDonPachi and Raiden III to my collection.

I'd read rumblings that my favourite MedaDrive shmup, Thunder Force IV was getting a NTSC-J only PS2 sequel (I still don't own V ). This became confirmed, so off to Play-Asia I went and pre-ordered Thunder Force VI.

Winter arrives and so does Thunder Force VI. It's here, in hand and real . The box art is... OK - no problem, it's just box art; the rear screen shots look a little muddy, but again - it's just the picture on the box.
At this point, my hopes of Gradius V level of love and care are still high. This could still be a stunning, engaging and celebrated swansong for Thunder Force...

...alas. Thunder Force VI remains my biggest gaming disappointment.
Graphically, the presentation rarely veers from serviceable. The front end is pleasant and in game, the ship models, enemies and backgrounds are largely pleasing - though the style of explosions suit neither a late PS2 game or the rest of the art style in general. I'd read that some shmup alumni had been drafted to work on TF6, and some of that shows. Movement, control, breadth of weaponry and a general fan service are where the game shines - though the whole thing does feel like product born of an intended fan service rather than a sequel. It bears that neon familiarity of oh so much 1980's inspired content that we see today - designed to please and evoke nostalgia.

Musically, TF6 is a bit of a damp squib, it's been a while since I played - as I just thought of this as a topic - but I recall being singularly disappointed with the lack of 'tunes'.

Bosses and fighters from the series do delight - and therein lies a big part of the problem with the game:

Thunder Force VI is really easy. It's also really short. Instead of the things from the previous games in the series being little nods and bonuses contained within TF6, they are TF6 - it feels almost like a tech demo, a show reel to show just how a Thunder Force game could be realised on PlayStation 2 hardware.

A single run, even at hardest difficulty will cost you no more that 25 minutes - without using a continue. Within a very short space of time, you have seen and heard all that the game has to offer, the best of that being getting to pilot the Rynex again through the same stages. Damned shame.

How about you?

Final Fantasy 8 for me. Not a bad game, but didn't live up to 7 which blew me away.

And MGS5. A great game in many ways, but not the complete package it should have been.

@kyleforrester87 I get that with 8. I'd never encountered the series or even played as deep an RPG since A Link to the Past.
I had the demo for 8 on my PC at the time and just couldn't deal with how different it all seemed!

Hmmm ... there are many games I would consider over rated, but this is a slightly different question. Disappointment doesn’t necessarily imply the game was bad - just that it didn’t live up to lofty expectations.
As such, the game that comes to mind would be No Man’s Sky. I hate to pile on this game which received so much vitriol. I know that the developer has gone above and beyond to correct some of the game’s shortcomings. And the game as it stands today has been enhanced quite a bit. Unfortunately you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and when I booted up NMS I was expecting to be blown away for hundreds of hours of space exploration bliss. Well, after about 15 hours I just grew tired of it. I have never gone back to it and I have mentioned elsewhere on this site about how I tried to sell it back about a year ago and all they were offering was like $2 so I have kept the game. So maybe one day I’ll put it back in and try to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. But until then, it remains one of my gaming disappointments.

@Th3solution The writing was on the wall with NMS, I felt. Some of the comments from the designers may have been misleading but I long argued prior to launch that it would be unlikely to engage players long term given the procedurally generated world. I did get it at launch but was quite apprehensive.

Actually, I ended up enjoying it more in the end, and the game seems better than ever now.

@kyleforrester87 @Th3solution
Sadly - there certainly was some misleading (the online banner on the box, for example) but I'd never felt I wasn't getting what I expected with NMS.
The difference from NMS as it is now and launch is almost night & day though.

@kyleforrester87 Yeah, I was a little too quick to buy into the hype of the trillions of possibilities of the game, etc, etc. Many like yourself were more realistic about expectations. When I pre-ordered the game I remember the girl at the store saying that she wasn’t planning on buying it because she thought it would get boring too quickly. I was surprised to hear that from a hardcore gamer and GameStop employee. That should have been my first warning to temper my expectations.

@KALofKRYPTON it did have online functionality day one, to be fair. And the developers said it was unlikely you'd see anyone. I think they had good intentions there - they wanted to add to the feeling that you were in a shared universe. Perhaps they incorrectly assumed the universe was so big we'd never know otherwise? Of course some people (rightly) jumped on them for that.

In recent times it's Mafia 3. There's bits of that game that are absolutely superb (the cutscenes, story, & atmosphere), but the gameplay is mostly repetitive dross and needed a huge pair of editorial scissors to cut a lot of the garbage out of it. It's still not a bad game overall, but it just could've been great.

Not a particular game itself, but one of my biggest gaming disappointments is how The Getaway franchise has been absolutely wasted and thrown away. The first game was one of the strongest PS2 exclusives, Black Monday was ok but failed to make any improvements, and then obviously when Getaway for PS3 got cancelled it was a huge shame. Every year I hope they'll ressurect those plans but each year makes that seem more unrealistic.

Finally, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, which was a complete joke right from the start.

@kyleforrester87 It did, but the box says 'multiplayer' I think - Murray didn't do enough to climb down from that, and Sony clearly wanted to sell as something significantly more than it was. My experience of watching everything Murray was putting out were right in line with what I got from the game.

@roe Wasn't The Getaway slated for PSVR? Or am I wrong there?

Watchdogs - looked so promising and not just from the graphics. I could have dealt with the apparent downgrade in graphical quality, but it was the gameplay i was more disappointed in. Such a bore to play and with a drab leading character.

Two sequels to games that I loved on PS3:

South Park The Fractured But Whole. Great game, but not what I wanted after the Stick of Truth.

Ni No Kuni 2. Loved the first game, but I really disliked this one.
Too grindy, forgettable characters & no Studio Ghibli.

Those are two that stand out to me. Hard to be genuinely disappointed unless I’m already invested in the series.

Oddly, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. I loved the New Order and Old Blood and was hyped for the full sequel. While I thought the story was better and it looked/sounded great, I thought the gameplay and level design was inferior to the original. I thought that game wanted you to play stealth but didnt design the levels that way. It made it frustrating in places.

It is a good game, I played it through but I was just possibly too excited for it.

yeah i agree with you on that one, TFBW wasn't as good as Stick of Truth and i think the issue was they completely changed the game play and battle systems, SOT's was perfectly fine and they should have stuck with that

anyway for me Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was a huge disappointment, it had weak story and weak characters, something that MGS had in past games was strong, albeit silly characters and i'll be honest the switch to an Open World was also a bad decision, MGS worked better as a linear experience

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: I backed this one as soon as it went live on kickstarter, but this game was incredibly shallow, easy, and lacking in character compared to the other games in the series. Cripplingly disappointing.

Zero Time Dilemma: It's definitely not a bad game, but also nowhere near as well-written as the two previous entries in the series. Between the questionable story logic and the weird, stilted "movie style" presentation... yeah, I was disappointed.

Corpse Party: Blood Drive: I platinumed it, as I absolutely love this series, but... it was a bad game. No ambiguity about it. The engine had issues, the gameplay was annoying, the new characters sucked, the story was very different from previous games,and there was way too many weird moments that took away from the game.

Mass Effect 3 by far for me. It had nothing to do with the ending, I just thought that most of the game from the very beginning was a major letdown and the consequences of choices made from the previous games felt rather meaningless. I did like Traynor, though.

I appreciate games these days can cost an absolute fortune to make. Even so, when a game is very clearly released unfinished with seemingly at least a 3rd of the game content not there as the developer ran out of time & money, it's very frustrating to see. Even more so when reviews online don't bother to mention this.

Metal Gear Solid 5 and Final Fantasy 15 are obvious casualties here, huge game names, an incomplete game pushed out the door. The first gave up on the last third of the game's missions and simply had you repeat old missions on much higher difficulty. The latter, where to start? Most noticeably, half the story seemed to be missing, corners cut everywhere. And the characters you meet, there's no real chance at getting to know any of them. And of course seeing certain parts of the story clearly signposted for dlc was poor form.

Metal Gear Solid V. The story is rubbish, and you just do the same thing over, and over, and over again.

@KALofKRYPTON Cool opening story, although I'm sorry to hear it was such a disappointment. And good idea for a topic, as I'm sure we've all had moments like these!

@Rudy_Manchego Completely agree with you on the gameplay and level design of Wolfenstein: The New Colossus (I also didn't like the story as much, or at all, really). I was quite keen for it at launch, and it had looked stunning in sizzle reels, but the opening levels set the tone early on. You're aboard a massive Nazi skyship armed only with an axe... and somehow I was bored. They took an amazing concept for a level and delivered endless grey corridors that could've been lifted from anywhere. The middle levels picked up after New York (which was another great idea with terrible execution), but then it delivered you right back to that same skyship for a very weak finale. A great game bookended by crushing disappointment.

I can think of quite a handful of my own, which I'll try to keep as brief as possible...

Sonic Mania disappointed me, primarily because the new zones were so short. I was most looking forward to the Wild West zone, but then discovered that Act 1 was a Sky Chase rip-off (awesome train aside) and Act 2 was over in a minute. Things improved when I played as Knuckles and discovered his entirely-unique, much-longer Act 1 but, by then, the damage had been done.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst was a huge disappointment, not least in terms of story, where we were given some pseudo-style prequel-reboot instead of an actual sequel to the original, which ended on a cliffhanger, lest we forget. Beyond that, whilst the core gameplay mechanics had survived mostly intact, the sprawling open world city wasn't a patch on the clever, intricate individual levels we had before. Whenever I finished the first Mirror's Edge, I wanted to play it again. When I finished Catalyst (two days after launch) I was happy to move on, and haven't replayed it since.

Expectations are never too big with licenced games, but I always find something to love in them and will defend the majority. Two which personally fell short for me were the Bond games GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and 007 Legends. The former was another attempt by EA to try something different, and I applauded their creativity for the concept, which was great, but the game itself was a slow, straightforward shooter with only eight levels, most of which were prohibitively long to slog through (you could only save at the end). Controls were sluggish and the concept art gallery you unlocked at the end revealed a wealth of much, MUCH better gameplay ideas that were shelved, probably for time and / or budget.

Meanwhile, Activision's killing of the Bond game franchise in 2012 cannot be forgiven. The development schedule was crushing and it shows; great ideas from Eurocom's previous GoldenEye 007 Reloaded were missing or changed into a lesser form altogether, corners were cut in every department, and the whole thing screamed "bargain bin", from the hideous photo-montage cover art to the soundalike they claimed was Daniel Craig. I was so hyped, because the films they were revisiting were some of my favourites (finally, a game based on Die Another Day!) and I made sure I got my money's worth, but it's painful to revisit whenever I'm in a Bond mood.

Killzone HD was tough to play. I'd seen the upcoming footage of Killzone: Shadow Fall and knew I wanted to get into the franchise, and had also seen some excellent stuff from the PS3 sequels, but decided to start at the beginning. Perhaps less disappointment, more "Oh, what have I gotten myself into now?" because the original hasn't aged well at all, but that's often the danger in going back to older games. I've replayed all the others, but have never replayed the first.

Finally, speaking of going back to old games, Batman & Robin on PSone was a disappointment because I'd read about it and, on paper, it sounds AMAZING. Everything takes place in real time, in an open-world Gotham City. You must piece together clues to learn where and, more importantly, when Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy will strike, and intercept them before its too late. If you miss them, the game carries on regardless, making later levels tougher if your detective skills aren't up to scratch. Back at the Batcave, where you can analyse the scraps of information you've gathered and train in Wayne Manor, you can switch between Batman, Robin and Batgirl whenever you want, and they all play differently and have unique vehicles to drive freely around the pretty-darn-huge city. There's a full hand-to-hand combat system, as well as platforming sections, hidden areas and tons of gadgets.

So why isn't this game the greatest thing ever? Well, because it's on the PSone. It tried to do everything five, maybe six, years ahead of when it was possible. It's far too clever for its own good, and therefore almost impossible to play, because the ticking clock means you've got to be dead-on, all the time. On paper, however, I'd say it's an even better bat-game than anything under the Arkham name, and that's why it's such a disappointment to (attempt to) play.

...hmm. That wasn't brief at all. Sorry!

@LieutenantFatman in FFXV's defence (and being a huge FF fan take it how you will) BUT the game HAD to be released at that point otherwise Square would have been in breach of contract with both Sony and Microsoft

yes there was mismanagement behind the scenes and i won't deny that but keep in mind they also had to scrap the build they was working on because of issues with the game engine and while they could transfer some assets over they pretty much had to start from scratch and only had a few years to work on the version we got the DLC episodes were never going to be finished in time for release either for pretty much the same reason

still i enjoyed it's release version, did i feel there could have been more, sure but i was still satisfied with what we got