For me it’s Diablo II. Granted I’ve played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn’t grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don’t hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Lords of the Realm 3. I have no idea what they were thinking making everything real-time. Custom games were still fun for pitched battles, but the city management portion was yucky. They even had cool mechanics going on like different lords to put in charge of counties giving different abilities.
Heroes of Might and Magic VI. Five was one of the series’ best entries. I couldn’t even get VI to load without crashing. My fault for buying Ubisoft.
Call of Duty was a breath of fresh air when it came out in 2003. CoD2 improved the campaign, but had some mid multi-player. CoD4 was a decent “not Counterstrike.” Everything has been downhill since. Moving from WWII to present day was also a mistake and I blame CoD for white supremacists taking over online spaces. At least in Battlefield, people used to get banned for slurs. By CoD4, servers weren’t even bothering anymore.
Speaking of Battlefield, 1942 was GOAT. Vietnam was okay, but felt more like a mod (chasing America out of Hue was based, tho). Battlefield 2 limited how many bots you could play with…which defeated one of the main reasons to play. It’s all been downhill from there and they jumped on the “Modem
WehrmachtWarfare” train after CoD started getting that DoD fed money.There’s more, but these were my main focuses of hate.
Yeah what the fuck happened with HoMM 6?
Five was one of the series’ best entries.
Second only to 3.
Might be a hot take, but Mass Effect 2.
I love Mass effect, despite its flaws, but Mass Effect 2 was the game that derailed the series and basically forced Mass Effect 3 to have an unsatisfactory ending. So many concepts from Mass Effect 1 like the cipher, visions, Virgil, the Thorian were completely abandoned in favor of one giant video game length side mission. Sure the suicide mission was kind of cool, but at the end of Mass Effect 2 we learned almost nothing about the reapers from the last game.
But Cerberus is by far the worst mistake. From Shepard’s POV, they literally witnessed Cerberus do grotesque, inhumane experiments throughout ME1 only a month before game start but the writers forced us to join these space Nazis. Cerberus is comically evil and is constantly doing cartoon villain experiments. Also, the space Nazis somehow have it in their hearts to spend billions of credits so that Shepard can save humanity.
The main writer of ME dropped off during the writing of ME2 and they abandoned a lot of his ideas.
I loved the ME trilogy, but after ME1 it really wasn’t about the themes and ideas, just the characters.
Also looking back they’re some of the most lib propaganda games ever like jeez
Yeah I can sign off on this. As the series went on it became clear that Bioware wasn’t interested in a lot of the things that made ME1 such a breath of fresh air for video game sci fi and rpgs, and by the time you get to ME3 it’s like you might as well be playing a Star Wars game.
For me, every single armored core game after last raven. Like there is just a lot lost when the series becomes designed around a regular twin stick control setup over the “bad” control scheme that the game was designed around before 4/FA.
Like it just feels much more rewarding to play and beat, and every time I play 4/FA or 6, I almost always want to go back and play 3 and Silent Line again.
I haven’t played formula front, and I don’t remember when that released.
Overwatch 2. How they fucked up the maps, the matching, the ranking system are all case studies on how to not make a sequel.
But that’s not the worst fucking part that shocks me.
The worst part that shocks me to this day, is how they got me to actually miss loot boxes.
They fucked up with the prices for skins and hid all the semi valuable stuff behind a season pass that is always 20$.
I’m not paying ~1/4 the price of an entire AAA game for one season pass.
They didn’t even put the coolest skins in the season pass, those are like 10-15$ on their own.
FEAR 1 and Wolfenstein TNO were some of my favorite games of all time so it’s only natural their sequels fell short.
In FEAR 2’s case, while it’s a rock solid shooter in its own right, it’s so obvious just how much it was trying to fit in the mold of the “gritty modern military shooter” that was predominant at the time (especially MW2). Stripping the tactical shooter elements like leaning still irks me.
For Wolfenstein 2, they tried to shake up the gameplay formula of TNO/TOB but the end result was something I was never quite satisfied with. To list some issues, Stealth went from being hilariously too easy to being a convoluted mechanic that I rarely ever used after the first engagement. Them splitting the Assault Rifle of the first game into the SMG and StG took away the entire point of the AR being a reliable weapon that was competent in most situations and replaced it with a useless peashooter (on higher difficulties) and cheesable death cannon respectively.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK isn’t a bad game, but it does feel like a 70 dollar add-on to BOTW. It just didn’t capture the magic.
I really hope that they find some synthesis between the BOTW formula and the classic Zelda formula, TOTK was really disappointing on that front and I don’t want 3D and 2D Zelda to remain schism’d in terms of design the way they currently are.
It’s such a fucking shame that the discourse around TOTK is completely dominated by stupid shortsighted “70$ DLC” arguments. TOTK is one of the most exciting sequels I have ever played. It’s everything people want when they buy a new console generation, except on the same old hardware. The toolset the game gives you to solve puzzles is absolutely insane, ascend and recall alone are genius ideas and they all fit together absolutely perfectly. They could not have made that game had they also made a new map and I am so glad they didn’t.
Me, when Hyrule blows up and is reset again
I like TotK but the engineering mechanic is pretty laborious. You have a lot of freedom but only a small percentage of what you try works, and because of the clunky interface it takes a LONG time to make multiple attempts.
As much fun as it was building ridiculous vehicles and crucifying Koroks, it got tiresome pretty quickly. It actively dissuades me from going back to it as much as past Zeldas.
Only having 2 of the 3 axes to rotate things on is the worst part of that imo
That’s one that didn’t really vibe with me, an interesting case of my hype going down the more I actually learned about the game before it came out.
I was feeling it until about half way through and then it fell off for me really hard. I think the building concept was cool as hell but felt like it wasn’t incorporated into the game. I feel if it had to be a Nintendo franchise maybe something like Pilot Wings could have gotten a boost with that idea, PW has usually doubled as a tech demo anyway. Have an open world with stuff you can build with, maybe some light combat for raiding materials or whatever and then make the rest of the game based around those vehicles. Have it be about racing the vehicles you make. You could even fo a multi player that’s like City Whatever from Kirby Air Ride where all the players get dropped into a space and have a certain amount of time to get a vehicle together before a series of races with that vehicle.
For totk once I built a good hover bike I never had to be resourceful again. I didn’t try a second play where I didn’t get the paraglider or auto build and that did make the game better. Just not being able to paraglide makes it so you need to build stuff and no auto build means you have to use what’s around you. There were a fee things I couldn’t so but I manages to do the main quest and most side quests with it
I love and truly adore a niche Space RTS game called “Star Ruler” that came out
10-odd14 years ago. With the ‘Galactic Armoury’ mod, it’s so fucking cool. You get to run your empire while designing and build ships of increasing complexity, and eventually insane sizes, custom fleets with a mothership with a repair bay with a big laser (or ten thousand tiny lasers) or you can harvest/blow up a star and eventually you can build giant thrusters on your planets and fly your planets around like they’re spaceships and fill them with rocket silos and shield generators and ugh. The only game I’ve enjoyed to seriously incentivise fundamental tech tree specialisation, too.Star Ruler 2 had none of that, and made me spend most of my time dealing with a frustrating diplomatic cards system, and it had a decent ship builder, but it just wasn’t the same. It’s probably objectively an okay game, but my disappointment was huge, all I wanted was a better engine, sleeker UI, tighter interfaces, nicer graphics, etc. and it was instead basically just a different game.
I still regularly replay SR1, something about it captures an aspect of my imagination nothing else has.
maybe not “came to”, i disliked the old republic when they said it would be an mmo and destroyed all hope of a third single player bioware rpg
does new vegas -> fallout 4 count?
Warcraft 3 was my absolute favorite game back then, I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
Needless to say, the followup being the somewhat successful Word of Warcraft made sure there would never be an actual sequel in a genre I actually like lol. And then much later they decided to “reforge” the game and the less is said about that, the better
It’s wild that they bungled WC3 reforged when SC Remastered was such a home run. They even managed to shake up the pro meta a bit by fixing the old sprite limit bug and making Valkyries viable, and it turns out that doesn’t break the game!
I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
yesssssssss there is another
I also. I still have about 5GB of custom Warcraft 3 maps I passively downloaded over so many years. I can’t let go, they were too great. WC3 continues to have been the portal to some of the best TDs to ever exist.
wc3 TD games consumed a large portion of my childhood. i know theres quite a few decent standalone TD games now but its not the same
ugh i sort of wish this were me but i also enjoy those memories and don’t want to taint them.
either way i wanna say there are sites where people upload some of the old maps for redownload, you could always contribute to something like that! (if you wanted)
Fair point, I’ll have a look and see if I can re-share 'em.
Dozens!
I’d love to buy Reforged just for the fantastic-looking Warcraft 2 mod but I feel dirty paying any sort of money to reward that lousy attempt of a remake (and I don’t think it’s been cracked). Plus, I absolutely despise Battle dot net, so there’s that.
It’s cracked. Tho there were no ql improvements, so it’s somewhat clunky to play. The StarCraft remastered is also cracked. I did not know about the warcraft 2 mod, thanks.
“Get yer finger outta that bunghole”
And the ever popular: “I think I’ll use my human call. I’m so wasted, I’m so wasted”
Midtown madness 2 didn’t feel the same as the original to me.
Does Elden Ring count?
As a follow-up to DS3 (yeah I’m not counting Sekiro in this), enemies move too quickly, boss movesets a little too erratic and the world way too open for my tastes. I’m a grown-ass person with things to do, I don’t wanna waste the two hours I have to myself each day dicking around and getting dicked-down for exploring some corner of the map, only to find loot that doesn’t apply to my build. It doesn’t respect my time.
I also don’t think I’m alone in thinking that replayability is harmed by making progression more of a slog than other Souls games. I need to grind more enemies (that are spread out, mind you) to level up my VIT stat so I don’t get 1-shot by bosses.
Build variety and boss-runs were definitely improved over other entries, I will admit. If these QoL improvements were made in a Bloodborne follow-up (peak souls imo), it might be the best Souls game made. Maybe I’ve outgrown the franchise tho; the tryhard-edgelord culture it invites is not for me.
A smaller Elden Ring would have been a less bad game but also a considerably less good one. When I played through that game at release I had absolutely no idea where the edges of that gameworld were, and it allowed me to be lost in it in a way no other game has managed to. I’d not trade that feeling for any amount of replayability.
Agreed. I love the world’s aesthetics and each area is peak game design but I’ve found myself not wanting to replay the game at all just because of how much of a chore it is to get through it all. I’ve played through DS3 about 30 times and I could play 30 more times and have no issue, Elden Ring I’ve only played about 7 times and that’s only to see how hard the NG+ cap is. The balance in difficulty is all over the place and I’m severely disappointed that some major bosses are weaker than others whereas Souls bosses always had a linear difficulty, if that’s the right way to put it.
Like you said about the weapon variety and skills being one of the best parts of the game, it still doesn’t get me to want to keep playing because of how huge it is and for little reward. Miyazaki said they won’t be as ambitious with further projects and I think that’s a good choice, I think they proved they could make an open world and they did but it just has many flaws. I’m kind of in a predicament between enjoying the world itself but also wanting that world to offer more in terms of enemy variety and things to explore and having been rewarded for that exploration because on one hand, you have a stellar game design that just fits perfectly with the lore, that being a world in decay for 5000 years until you reach it. From that level of discovery and detail to architecture they really did a good job. But on the other hand traversing through these areas on a new run just becomes tedious and most of my time is spent using Torrent to rush to a place I need to get to in order to progress the story which is all I want to do.
I think open worlds are a fad and give credit to FS for attempting it, they did a good job imo with every aspect of world building and design. But coming from DS3 where it’s more linear and you actually feel a solid progression I feel Elden Ring was lacking in that feeling of satisfaction. I think playing it for the first time was the best time I’ve had with the game but every other time I’ve played it I’ve just been turned off by how much traversal the game requires especially with how sparse areas are with items that don’t even fit with your build. I think the DLC being more compact helped solve this issue and brought back some of that Dark Souls-esque level design but at the detriment of again, having too many sparse areas with no reward at all. There were too many areas with little to no reward and you’re just left dissatisfied.
But it’s like I said, as a fantasy game taking in every detail and traversing the world is spectacular but when all I want to do is fight things it just becomes much more of a chore and also the difficulty spikes is just over the top. Bosses are too overpowered, weapons, spells, incantations are overpowered too which can sometimes trivialize the game entirely. It just feels like an overall unbalanced tragedy for a game with peak design. But I hope they do learn from it with future titles. I don’t want an open world souls game again but if they’ve learned from Elden Ring then I hope they improve from the mistakes they did the first time around. But all things said, it is genuinely the best open world fantasy RPG you could play right now.
Dying Light 2 is one of the worst sequels I’ve ever played. The first game was excellent, they just fucked everything up in 2.
The Far Cry series was good up until 6. 6 is utter pish.
There was so much I loved with New Dawn, but then they padded out the gameplay to MMO levels of grinding and refused to add a NG+ to play with all the superpowers. Shame, I actually liked the basebuilding, but running oil back and forth sucked.
Magicka 2 is the exception that proves the rule “yes, even pve games need nerfs sometimes.” Being an unrestrained self-endangering idiot-god was fundamental to Magicka’s charm, and reducing the player’s threat to themselves and everything around them ruined that.
I’ve played a ton of Sims 4 but I hate almost everything about it except that i has group conversations. 2 and 3 are amazing games.
the saddest, most depressing thing about the sims is that ultimately the community just… laps it up. sims 4 is eternal now because its the most lucrative and popular the sims has ever been.
the upswing is that i like paralives’ artstyle.
Yeah ngl I’m no exception I buy every bit of DLC out of compulsivity. Even though I havent played in over a year. Its bad. Youre totally right though.
the dlc is easily pirated! (not to tell you how to live your life, just in case you didn’t know)
Can you pirate the dlc “onto” a legitimate purchase or would i have to pirate everything?
i just nabbed everything but i believe it should work the way you describe as well. searching “cs.rin.ru sims 4” should take you where you need to go.
To be clear, no judgement there. I spend DLC money on paradox games, when I can. I’m just too poor for sims.
(the dlc can always be pirated if you don’t wanna/can’t spend money on it.)
why not all of it
i like to provide options is all!
When the corpos declared “no Sims 5, Sims 4 forever and ever” when that isn’t even the best designed of the Sims sequels by far…
They’re also currently running one of my least favorite thing, a FOMO event. Its all actually like, free. Its not a battlepass (for now, lol). But I still hate the feeling of being FORCED to play a game I dont really feel like playing right now out of fear of missing stuff.
They also had a login bonus event a few months ago but at least all that required me to do was open the launcher like 6 times in the space of a month.
I hate FOMO pressure and I often quit games that push it too hard so I can break the toxic forced habit-forming they’re pressuring me into.
It took me being physically unable to play Destiny 2 for several months due to hip surgery to break the FOMO that game instilled in me. I thought I was stronger but damn do they know how to prey on the neurodivergent
I will always hate the treat defender take that “well this doesn’t bother me and I don’t have a problem with it so it shouldn’t affect anyone else unless they’re weak-willed” or some passive-aggressive lowkey calipers like that.
Hexbear was infested with that during the struggle session against international corporate sports gambling apps.
Dawn of War 1 & 2 were both great games in their own respective ways, then 3 came out and somehow combined the bad aspects of 1 & 2.
I remember. Relic saw that people generally liked the first game (and expansions) better but could not stick to a direction and came to an unsatisfying compromise between both. And because of that flop, we’re still resorting to modding DC and Soulstorm.
I’ve been holding onto hope for another shot with the successes of Space Marine 2, Darktide and Mechanicus showing that W40K has a future in games, but RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade. Relic’s less than stellar reception with CoH3 hasn’t helped.
RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade
Seriously though a 40K game has the potential to break out of the mire by turning towards the tabletop for inspiration. Imagine if it was kind of like Total War - build and customize your army, have your units gain experience and become elites, have a persistent online league where you can fight for territory with your guild (remember guilds?), etc. Based on how successful Commanders was in Starcraft, I would make a PvE campaign mode the banner feature and advertise it hard to people who like RTS as a concept but don’t go in for competitive PvP.
