Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
Cyberpunk 2077 CD project red was the golden boy after Witcher 3 and the dlcs. They could do no wrong. Of course their next game was gonna be critically acclaimed GOAT right? Nope. Dumpster fire. Couldn’t play it for more than 30mins without it crashing. Unimmersive and confusing. That’s when I learned corporate greed has no limits
Honestly the worst about CP2077 wasn’t even the bugs. I also pre ordered it and while the performance was kinda shit and there was a bug or two, it was still playable. Yes we shouldn’t let it slip but unfortunately it’s also kind of the standard these days.
However the game was shallow af and not at all matching what we had been told for years. The whole, create your own story from scratch? Yea you choose some background option, have a 1 min cutscene and then that’s basically it. We had been told that would be hours of gameplay depending on the option and it was a short cutscene.
The whole city was supposed to feel completely alive and you were told that you would be able to do whatever you wanted. That wasn’t close to true either. Plenty of stuff like that.
Luckily I had bought it on GOG to support CDPR because I had loved the Witcher games. Was able to refund it entirely and never locked back. Not even looking to play it anytime soon and maybe ever.
I only played the beginning of the street kid and was so disappointed when the cutscene kicked in. Like that was it? 3 separate pathes that connect to themselves after what? Like 30 minutes? Was totally borked on Linux in the beginning anyways. I am waiting for the new patch. Hopefully this one is gonna be good
God I hope I don’t add starfield to this list!
It’s a modern bethesda title. Not to be pessimistic, but you should probably lower expectations for it. It has a high chance to be 1. Buggy. 2. Shallow and derivative in both mechanics and story. 3. Full of DLC and shady monetary models. Bethesda succumbed to corporate greed and formulaic design principles a long time ago.
See, that’s the part that baffles me about Starfield. I’m hyped as fuck for it, since a bethesda space game is exactly what I want (and let’s be honest, aside from the horse armor back in oblivion, their DLCs have been pretty solid with some misses)… but whenever I read people hype about it, it seems like they are expectont a completely different game, made by IDK, rockstar or something.
I was hoping Cyberpunk 2077 would be an answer closer to Deus Ex than what we got with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But the skill tree and upgrades weren’t doing it for me. Not to mention the game running like shit and being rushed out the door.
Still salty that we lost out on the conclusion of the DeusEx trilogy because Eidos Montreal ended up doing the Avengers game that no one even remembers or talks about now.
To me it was immersive af, except the Johnny Silverhand levels, even though I played on a weaker rig that I have currently and the framerate wasn’t great. What I did was focus on the story and largely ditch the open world aspect, since I hadn’t been fond of this type of games for some time anyway. I played it almost a year ago and don’t remember it notoriously crashing, or at all tbh, but maybe I was just lucky.
I’m very curious about Phantom Liberty, although being a patient gamer, I’ll probably wait a bit before buying it to see if it’s any good.
RDR2, I eventually caved and bought it after months of friends telling me how good it is. But the movement and control scheme are just so bad it instantly ruined the game for me. Even qwop has better controls.
Same here! It seems like a great game otherwise, but I just couldn’t get immersed in it because of the controls. Didn’t feel like I was playing as Arthur so much as watching him and hoping he’d do what I want.
YES!
I’ve been a PC gamer for 25 years, and RDR2 is by far thebmost annoying control setup. Everything feels laggy due to the emphasis on fluid and realistic animations.
Plus it suffers feom the same issue as GTA5: “Press Key to progress story”. They both seem more like open world tech demos to me.
Good graphics, though. But graphics don’t matter if the gameplay is good.
The Outer Worlds… Hyped so much for it… Even snorting through my nose at the outer wilds… Thinking they use to similar name just clicks
Now the outer wilds is one of my favorite games of all time. And the outer world is currently sat in my steam library with less than 10 hours. Just couldn’t engage me.
Mirror´s Edge. 9/10 on Steam. I bought it during the last sales. The gameplay is playing again and again and again the difficult jumps until you make it. It’s boring.
I recently replayed that game after 10+ years. I think I could count the number of difficult jumps that required more than two attempts on one hand. The game is like $1-2 on a sale and you can beat it in 3 or 4 hours. I thought it was fun, but I could see how it would be disappointing if your expectations were higher than minimal.
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst was much better IMO. Actual story. Decent characters. Free roam. Side quests.
ME has some cool first few levels, and then it barely evolves from that.
Yeah initially it felt really cool, but got old really fast. It just felt like doing the same thing over and over again.
I agree, ME wasn’t for me either.
I’m not disappointed at the game but on myself.
I patiently waited for Elden Ring to go on sale, excited to play it. But the reality is i don’t have enought time to play.
So what happens is I die a few times, restart my progress, die a few more, then my IRL game time has ran out. And I’m still where I started, no progress made,.
If i consistently evade enemies just to get far on the map, then what I’ve done is stunt my character progression and just horse around the map. I mean that’s not playing, it’s being a tourist inside the game.
A lot of them you are meant to run past, you don’t get meaningful xp from mobs until you get to late game secret areas, early game just Google where dungeons are, ride torrent to them and kill bosses for levels
You mean, grinding on mobs won’t give me meaningful xp? So it’s the bosses that I need to kill.
Each enemy gives you a set amount of runes (souls) that you can use to level up, harder enemies give more.
I can agree wholeheartedly. I found Elden Ring to be a very boring game.
May I offer some unsolicited advice.
-
Your damage output is as important if not more important than “getting gud”. The more damage you do, the fewer attacks you have to dodge. That’s kind of the secret to all these Souls games.
-
Damage and damage mitigation come from stacking many many small, incremental bonuses and upgrades. The most important upgrade for damage is upgrading your weapon with ores. Pick one weapon (eg. Longsword) and invest all ores into it.
-
It’s possible to suicide-run into dangerous areas for upgrade and powerful items since you don’t lose items that you’ve picked up upon death. You can collect mid and high-tier ores this way even at low level.
-
It’s perfectly okay to farm exp from higher level, non-bosses. It’s low risk since you’ll be near a rest site. A good example is killing Vulgar Militiamen from the Farum Greatbridge site in the most northeast area of Caelid. You can horse yourself there ignoring everything.
-
If you’re still having trouble, do each step in the following video as you feel comfortable. https://youtu.be/GYI5Z3jhKB4
-
Fallout 4…
I was patient on it. Mostly involuntary, but patient still. It was incredibly disappointing. So many amazing features from 3 and NV was gone. Speech is a joke. So you want to agree, agree but be an ass about it, disagree, or disagree and be rude about it.
Those are your options in every single encounter.
It’s a good RPG game overall. Just not a good Fallout game.
I was coming to this thread to answer the same. New Vegas was probably my favorite game of all time, with it’s unique charm and creative blend of stories and character mechanics. I couldn’t make it past 5 or 6 hours of the FO4 (I really wanted to give it a chance), before I dropped it for good. Bethesda wanted to make an action shooter with a twist, and they did a good job of that, but it lacked the creative “it” factor that made me sink 600+ hours in NV across multiple playthroughs. Just talking about it makes me want to boot it back up right now!
Spore. 'nuff said.
I’m going to call it now and say Starfield…
Yep…
That demo thing they did a while back looked pretty lack-luster.
“make any ship you can imagine” while they cycle through like 5 premades, 2 of which have the exact same cockpit…
Stiff character models again, too. The lead animator must be the bosses nephew or something.
Horizon Zero Dawn
I thought this would be right up my alley but I really did not like the protagonist and the fighting and exploring seemed kind of boring.
The Last of Us
This game gets praised all the time but it felt too limited and ‘on rails’ whilst the gunplay and stealth was not for me.
Horizon is my answer too. I was expecting an open world that felt alive, but instead it was a jam-packed theme park. You don’t hunt, you go to the right exhibit and kill everything within it. The entire herd is within a 50 meter radius, go nuts. Go away and come back later and it’ll be full again, exactly where it says so on the map, jammed between other points of interest with extensive, contrived looking plarforming challenges connecting it all. It’s like a zoo and a vending machine had a baby but we’re supposed believe it’s a big open natural world. Great concept, garbage execution. I felt like Bobby Hill hunting at La Grunta.
Lol, I enjoyed the game overall but that really is a perfect description of it’s biggest problem. It could have been so much more if they had been willing to take a risk and make it a little less game-y.
HZD has genuinely some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding in gaming, but the kicker is that you have to play about half the game to get to it and it’s all told in flashback because the actual interesting stuff is what happened to get to this point rather than what’s happening now.
If blasting bits off knockoff Zoids isn’t doing it for you, then you’re going to run out of steam before getting to it.
100% this. I almost dropped it because it took half of the main quest line to do anything interesting. But once I got there I was enamored. My friend and I just played through the game for the first time and we both had the same opinion: the story of what is currently happening is boring. The story of what happened in the past to get to this point is amazing. They did a bad job of making me care about the present day characters.
I’m so glad I didn’t read about HZD. I got it on sale and saw that it was similar to Assassin’s Creed. Being thrown into it without any expectations definitely helped.
I like the combat (as a person who constantly plays archers). The bows, traps, looting and fighting robot dinos was pretty cool. Figuring out how to take them out and aim at specific weak spots is fun.
The world is still pretty weird and honestly I would have dropped the game after a few hours too if I didn’t like the archery so much. The story as a whole is pretty good after beating it. But the delivery of it all kinda sucks.
Outer Wilds. I just don’t understand why everyone loves it so much. I thought it was boring.
There’s moments in the game that really hit. Just a amazing wow experience. Its been a few years and your comment still makes me think about it.
And if they didn’t, totally understandable.
How far did you get?
I played a few hours. I thought the idea and the art design was cool. It just didn’t wow me. I do plan on giving it another try though.
Yeah the beginning can be slow and a bit directionless, but it’s definitely worth sticking with it imo.
I’ll give it another try. It took 2 tries for me to like Death Stranding and I ended up loving it. So sometimes it just takes multiple times.
Same. I think it’s okay. I’ll give it another try eventually but nothing has really hooked me yet.
Elden Ring. I was looking forward to a more mainstream Dark Souls with a story written by GRRM, but it turns out I just don’t jive with those games at all, no matter how polished they are.
When I finally played Red Dead Redemption 2. I usually don’t play this type of big budget game, but my friends loved it and kept talking it up. I waited for years for a steam sale until it was finally about $20. Also, I loved outlaws (1997) and was pretty keen for another cowboy game.
An hour of listening to guys walk through the snow and I was out.
This resonated with me. The prolog is so long I didn’t finish either. I also tried Red Dead Online which was quicker to getting to the action, but just didn’t take with me.
I finished the prologue because I was told the prologue is slow. But the whole game is slow. I think people just get used to it. But I couldn’t. It’s too slow. I was chasing a bear and I was so bored that I put it down and never touched it again.
People complain about slow games?? I love that in not just rushing from A to B and to do stuff in the open world
The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion is probably my best answer. Remains the only modern Elder Scrolls that I’ve only played through once with no desire to return to. Feels clunky and sluggish, the world is washed out and bland, the enemy scaling is a slog, itemization is not interesting or impactful, the UI is uncomfortable, etc. While it does a lot of things better than Skyrim, I just can’t bring myself to enjoy the experience like I did Morrowind, and I admit I’ve sunk far more hours into Skyrim as well.
This one is wild to me. Oblivion very well be my favorite game of all time. I love the world it is set in so much. Skyrim is actually my answer for this question because I was expecting the game to to be as good as Oblivion.
I was going to say the same thing. I’ve still only played Skyrim once, but I’ve played through oblivion at least a few times. I played through Morrowind even more, but oblivion surpasses Skyrim without question for me.
For me it’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. After Breath of the Wild I was super hyped for a successor. When they announced they were gonna reuse the same exact game world I was a bit worried but thought it could work if they do it well.
Well here we are with like 90% of the content being reused. The gameplay is more interesting than Breath of the Wild and the dungeons are better and so is the story. But my main draw for Breath of the Wild was exploring the world. All this fun is missing in TOTK. The new parts of the world like the sky and underground are pretty bland and not quite as much fun to explore as an entirely new game world would be.
I really wonder what it is about TotK that makes for such wildly different opinions. Everything about TotK was a vast improvement over BotW for me. Up to and especially including revisiting the same locations to see how they’ve changed and exploring all 3 levels of the map to their fullest extent. I stopped playing BotW the moment I beat it after ~90 hours of play time. But I’ve continued to return to TotK nearly 300 hours in now, after beating it in about the same 90 hours originally. It’s just endlessly interesting wandering and getting sidetracked and finding / figuring out side quests.
I have a couple friends who beat it for the sake of beating the next Zelda game but the majority of my small circle continues to play, some even putting off beating it just to explore more. It’s very interesting seeing such different approaches, hearing what people focused on and how they tackled the openness. I’m not sure I witnessed the same phenomenon with games like Skyrim. Something about this one feels different at least. Hard to describe.
Personally, a lot of the “content” in totk feels like busywork for me. With botw I didn’t know that to expect so I was willing to explore. But now, I know there’s only so many things I can find - a shrine or a korok seed. Totk just adds more of those tiny rewards (like bubblefrogs) and it just doesn’t feel worth it. At best, you sometimes get an armor piece but I barely even used any of those. There was one interesting side quest I found on the great plateau and I kept wondering what I would find, and it was just a heart container.
If any of the exploration lead to something other than a marginal reward, I think I’d enjoy my time a lot more. Maybe it’s just because I played outer wilds between the games, and find story to be a much more interesting thing to find than an item.
Lmao, thank you. I said this yesterday and had people screaming at me. It’s a glorified standalone expansion. I thought the game was really good overall, but the fact that it was so similar to BotW really detracted from how good it was. If BotW didn’t exist and it was only TotK, it would have easily been a 9.5/10. But the fact that I had literally just played BotW made it feel more like a 6/10.
Hollow Knight. Finally bought this after getting the stream deck. I just remember thinking: This is it? This is what everyone has been raving about? I think I played it two or three times, then completely forgot about it.
Interesting, hollow knight is maybe my favorite game ever made. It’s always interesting to see how differently other people relate to things
Hollow knight takes a while to get into, the start is slow and difficult
Whenever I played Hollow Knight I maybe got an hour or two in and just stopped because I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t really given directions and I didn’t know where to go. I swear I spent an hour just looking for where to go and I fought only a couple enemies in that time.
I had just finished playing Stardew and Enter the Gungeon, and I was really tired of tabbing out to look something up in the wiki or a forum, so I just wasn’t willing to commit to another game without instructions.
i thought it was pretty awesome but dying was too costly and i was backtracking to save way too much. i think thats what my beef was, it was only for a few sessions at my brothers place years ago. plays great but exploring felt risky in a tedious way.
shovel knight… now there’s a knight who gets me.
