What games let you down the most?

A couple for me:

The Movies. I remember when this was first announced it sounded amazing. I couldn’t wait to play and make movies using the games tools and then I got it and the game was lack luster and the movies you made weren’t all that great since you had to play the game to open all of the tools. I ended up just ignoring it after a short while.

The recent Sim City. I am sure others would also include this game on their lists. The server issues. The small areas available to build in. The lack of real simulation. Take your pick.

Master of Orion 2. Yeah not 3. Three was just a shit game. Two which is almost universally loved was disappointing to me. I liked much of it but it just felt like more work and less fun than the first one.

I am sure i could think of more but there are a few. How about you?

Yeah, the most recent Sim City is high on the list, especially considering how the SDMB crew had a large pool of players ready to try and make something grand out of it.

Elemental: War of Magic was Stardock’s spiritual successor to Master of Magic, and its launch was historically awful. They went a long way towards making it right, though, and it’s a good game now.

Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was… okay. But it was Bioware, man. It was supposed to be the droids I was looking for.

Spore is a classic response to this question. My God what an awful game.

Patriot was the land-based successor to Harpoon. It was terrible.

MOO3 is a very easy choice.

Star Wars: Rebellion was a 4X Star Wars game and was indescribably terrible.

A series that has always disappointed me was, well, SimCity. Except for the first one, they’ve mostly been very good, but none of them were really great. SC2 had play balance issues, SC3 was better but had about ten missed opportunities to be truly wonderful, SC4 was so fucking hard it was silly and of course the last one was awful. Unline the Civilization series, which has for the most part kept getting better, SC has been a mixed bag.

Black & White, a game that was far less than the sum of it’s parts. The whole idea of the Creature was great, hurling villagers around was hilarious and the tutorial was one of the best introductions to any game I’ve ever played, but it all went downhill from there.

The runes mechanic just didn’t work for me, and most damning of all the game constantly crashed to desktop once the first level was finished. There were some brilliant ideas in it but it was just so disappointing. I never even tried the second one.

Skyrim. It was supposed to be this great epic thing, the greatest action RPG ever made, but I just didn’t get that out of it. I found it to be a near endless series of “go to location A; talk to this person; go to location B; talk to this other person who sends you to a dungeon; fight your way through a labyrinthine dungeon to retrieve the goal object; exit the dungeon; repeat.” Granted, that’s the formula for all action RPGs, but even if Skyrim is the pinnacle of the genre, it’s still the same tired formula. Frankly I got a exponentially more enjoyment out of Dragon Age: Origins.

2014 Superbowl

Mass Effect: Maybe because I had just played DA:O and so was expecting more “Dragon Age in Space” but the controls annoyed me and the plot didn’t grab me. Supposed to be such a great series but I felt nothing for it and quickly gave up.

Civilization III: I think they fixed it up as time went on but it launched a buggy, terrible mess. Tried playing it maybe two or three times and was so disgusted that I quit the series until I picked up Civ 5 on sale years later.

Dragon Age 2: I’m tempted to just leave it at “Enough said” but, for those unfamiliar, they took a much praised game and dumbed down its tactical combat into button mashing and went from kingdom-spanning to “Let’s just reuse three tilesets the entire game and quit for lunch”. Plus ridiculous retcons and plot inconsistencies with the original, etc. Dragon Age 3 is on the horizon and it has gone from a “must buy at release” to a “I’ll get it when it’s $5 on sale in ten months”

Battlecruiser 3000:AD!!!

Derek Smart, you arrogant bastard!!! I spent years anticipating that game.

This game right here. I even liked the combat (boss fights excluded), despite the silly waves of enemies appearing from thin air and most of the plot stuff didn’t quite piss me off … until the end. The ending was so stupid and such a “screw you!” moment where it explicitly demolished and made irrelevant whatever you had done by that point that it really, actually made me angry at the game.

On the positive side it made me skip buying ME3 until just recently, so I got it for a few euros on an Origin sale and completely missed the ME3 ending controversy, getting to play the revised ending instead. As a result I really enjoyed that game and had no complaints about it.

Wildstar, i’ve never seen a company put so much effort into a game nobody wanted.

Star Wars: Rebellion is a great one I forgot. MOO but Star Wars! How could it go wrong?! How indeed!

Final Fantasy XII let me down quite a bit. I had a lot of fun playing it and its battle system was great, but the story and characters were terrible and it was a huge disappointment for me.

Brink and Homefront. Ugh.

In a minority here, I’m sure, but for me: MGS4. I’ve been absolutely mad for the series ever since the first MG came out for NES; the original Metal Gear Solid was the reason I bought a PS1. I still play it now and then, and I still get choked up in a few spots. It’s that damned good. MGS2 was… well, it was MGS2. But MGS3 was back on track, and so I was absolutely crazy for MGS4.

Unfortunately… pretty much the worst of Hideo Kojima. The gameplay was great, when they let you play the game, but the plot, even for a guy who’d been playing since the beginning, was completely opaque–despite the cut scenes that were basically hour-long powerpoint presentations trying to explain it. sigh I have high hopes (again) for the next one set back in the days of Big Boss.

But… but didn’t they get rid of David Hayter? They can’t be good!

Sorry, like 90% of the reason I like Metal Gear is just so I can hear David Hayter say “Metal Gear!?”

What, nobody said Deus Ex: Human Revolution yet? Number 2 was, well, not the equal of the first. But DEHR was quite underwhelming. I can’t think of any other game where a major part was so bad (the boss fights) both mechanically and thematically that they were remade.

Doom 3 could have been good, should have been good. I replayed the original Doom series some time ago and it was several times better than Doom 3.

I think you have a different opinion that most people. The standard internet groupthink is that the second game (Invisible War) is unredeemable trash, and HR is a good and more or less worthy successor except for the boss fights.

For me, Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It’s a shame, because I really dig the plot I got to see and what I’ve heard about the game. But the train bullshit is just. So. Fucking. Boring. It is 900x worse than sailing in Wind Waker, which I actually liked. Playing this game makes me understand why people gated the sailing in that game. Especially since if you make a wrong turn or get RNG’d the randomly roaming enemy trains can instantly get you a game over.

GTA IV was a massive let-down in comparison to San Andreas, especially considering the more powerful console(s) it appeared on. Not only did they strip a lot of what made San Andreas so very much fun, the main protagonist was an angsty and uninteresting sad-sack, and your choices are meaningless, someone has to die, so it’s just too bad for poor Niko Bellic.
Luckily, the DLC’s were pretty damn fun, and GTA V is pretty damn epic so I’m over it.

Dragon Age 2, previously mentioned in this thread, was a let-down as well, though not on the same scale as GTA IV, and not to the degree the other gamers in this thread expressed. I wanted more of Origins, but bigger and better, and the second game didn’t deliver. Still enjoyed it quite a bit, and played the hell out of it, but my expectations were very high so it was disappointing.

Yeah, that game sucked. At least for me it wasn’t so much that I was looking forward to it so much as it “looked interesting” when on a $5 sale at Steam.

Everquest’s third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, was to be huge with new player models, mounts, a Bazaar for players to sell their wares at, tons of new content including high end raids, etc. It was released in such poor condition that it essentially broke the game for a week. The models were animated terribly. The Bazaar didn’t actually work for nearly a year. The high end content was incomplete and the developers artificially locked the players out and left them grinding dull endless quests for “entrance” when it was all a ploy to keep them out of the unfinished areas. Lower end systems were crushed by the new requirements and lack of optimization. I wound up leaving the game for six months while they fixed things. Everquest’s only saving grace was that there wasn’t really a decent alternative MMORPG to jump ship to yet.

I still see Planescape: Torment recommended from time to time. I picked it up after reading a few OMG YOU MUST TRY THIS GAME posts. I was able to get into it a little but it soon became a race to see if the lame combat or the flavor text bonanza would get me to quit first. The text won. Still, a valuable experience, because if I see somebody recommend that game I know we have terribly divergent taste in games.

Fallout New Vegas was a big letdown because I liked F3 a lot. FNV felt empty, linear, and kept crashing. I only got to the dam.

I might have been able to enjoy Dragon Age: Origins if I hadn’t played Skyrim first.

I loved Railroad Tycoon I, never got to play RT II and III (probably never will now). I did get to play Sid Meier’s Railroads! Man, I could hardly wait to get that one out of the case. When I did, it just didn’t gel for me. Too much chrome, not much challenge. That’s not the only time old Sid (or whoever he let use his name) let me down: the Colonization remake was a disappointment.