One that came to my mind that I haven’t seen mentioned yet was Messiah. I was loving what Shiny was doing back then, but Messiah came out and was a dud. Thankfully Sacrifice was around the corner.
Another vote for Spore
It was like the shoved five years worth of development into gameplay I would have expected from a free flash game.
Ummm…why can’t I be disappointed with all those disasters that led to it being such a bad game? This is at least the second time that someone on this forum has equated disappointed with surprised. I still don’t get it. Why do I have to be surprised by how bad it is to be disappointed in how it turned out? When they announced Lionheart, I was excited. By the time it launched, I was disappointed.
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor
This game had all the pre-release hype. Visuals were incredible, a spin off of one of my favorite games, and it was right when the D&D computer gaming was at its peak. I was drooling for this game for months. The day it released I bought the collectors edition and rushed home to install it in a fit of glee.
Within 5 minutes of playing I realized something was horribly wrong. It was like meeting a cute girl at a party, fumbling upstairs together in a haze of passionate kisses and alcohol. Then waking up the next morning beside a guy in drag with the radio playing an old devo song and a curious looseness of the bowels.
But does he call you afterwards? No. So what if you were cousins. You weren’t the only one that was embarrassed that Henry took pictures of us together and that those pictures got back to our family. That was an ackward thanksgiving. Grandma worried about inbred babies and though we tried to explain (in graphic detail) why that wasn’t a legitimate concern, she kept crying and telling me that “this family can’t stand another tard baby, not after your father.” Then we find out that grandma was sleeping with her brother. Everyone left thanksgiving crying and dad jumped off a bridge 3 days later.
Thats exactly what Pool of Radiance was like for me.
WWIIOL.
There are a lot of terrific disappointments on this list but I managed to avoid buying nearly all of them so for me personally it was Sid Meier’s Railroads. I payed full price for that steaming pile and it has permanently reduced Sid from Design God to Mere Mortal in my eyes – something that I thought would never happen.
I have played so many disappointing games in the past ten years that picking a top one would be hard as fuck. Of course, many of my disappointing games wouldn’t even register here, so I’ll keep it to high profile games.
With that in mind, I’d say it’s a tie between Oblivion and Diablo 2.
Now, as I can already feel thousands of panties being twisted in unison, allow me to highlight that “disappointing” and “bad” are not even remotely the same thing and if you think they are then you are an idiot.
My, preemptively calling people idiots is almost as fun as doing it after the fact.
Doom 3. It’s 2004; why are we still dealing with monster closets?
Either that or Escape from Monkey Island.
Fair enough, but could you at least explain WHY you found those two games disappointing then?
Game would have been 100% awesomarrr if it had Snake Pliskin as the main char.
Because neither of them delivered a better experience than games that came before. Diablo 2 never captured, for me, what made Diablo 1 so awesome. Part of that was because Diablo 2 didn’t have an ending, or at least not a reasonable one. Diablo 1, you could, after enough play time, perfect your character in terms of gear and build. Diablo 2, you simply couldn’t, and successive patches made things worse. Gear was never ending, sets weren’t useful because when you switched difficulties all your old gear was useless. The skill trees were complex and you couldn’t properly explore them to get a solid idea of what your character could do. Ultimately, as much as I played Diablo 2, it never enchanted me like Diablo 1 did.
Oblivion simply had no soul. It was a technically well implemented game which was empty of what makes a living breathing world. The game conflicted with itself in immersion breaking situations more often than not, was poorly balanced, and still suffered from the lack of interesting and well-written characters which was characteristic of all Bethesda offerings until Fallout 3. For all it was a huge open world game, it didn’t even come close to matching Ultima 7 in terms of quality of world building, a game which had come 15 years before it.
I’m going to agree with this. There was nothing from the previews that were in this game.
You know, really, I think a game should be disappointing based on the experience it delivered, and lacked, of its own accord, rather than because you bought in to ridiculous hype and marketing. Black and White shouldn’t be on a disappointing list, because it was never a good game. For a game to be truly disappointing, there has to be something you like in it, for it to let you down. If a game is just bad, then how can it be disappointing? At that point, you are comparing it to an idealized version you had in your head based on nothing concrete other than what you were led to believe.
At that point, might as well just nominate yourself for most gullible gamer.
I’d love to, but the dog’s barking up a storm and I can’t think straight. But I’ll try:
Doom 3: With such excellent tech behind the game, and the strides the FPS genre had made in narrative, level design, and (as a result) player immersion in the years since Doom II (with games like NOLF, Jedi Knight, and Half-Life leading the way), I was expecting something far more than a flashier, shinier version of its predecessors. To be sure, it is Doom we’re talking about, so I wasn’t expecting System Shock 3, but it astounded me how far the graphics and whatnot had come while the gameplay had barely changed at all. It was still just a cramped, repetitive corridor shooter, in the same dingy, claustrophobic space station environs. Consequently, it’s the first game I ever bought that I immediately wished I could return to the store, but by that time nobody took returns on PC games.
EMI: The story was less than compelling, the jokes fell flat, the art didn’t grab me, and the interface change didn’t work in its favor. I loved all three of its predecessors, but this one just took too many steps in the wrong direction. I’m not quite sure what went wrong; maybe it was the console influence?
Oh, I’d also like to add to my list Jedi Knight II, mostly because Raven’s level design sucks, and aside from improving the force powers and lightsaber combat, they didn’t do anything that met or exceeded the standard set by Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. But maybe LucasArts set the bar too high.
It is one thing to not live up to the hype, its another to ship a completely diffrent game than promised.
Sure. In the first one, you were mildly influenced by marketing, and in the second one, you bought the whole farm.
The definition of “disappointing” is “failing to meet expectations,” so no, there doesn’t have to be something you like about a game in order for you to be disappointed by it, and in fact, the only way you can find a game disappointing is if you expected it to be better than it was. So Black and White is a totally valid choice.
Anyway, it’s not as dramatic, but I’m going to go with Mercenaries 2, partly because I have a hard time remembering games I didn’t really like. Mercs 2 was okay, but after the groundbreaking brilliance of the first one, a mediocre GTA knock-off was a real let-down.
Maybe Risen. At the start of the decade Piranha Bytes achieved amazing things with Gothic, and at the end they couldn’t even reproduce it. I’d much rather cruise around Oblivion’s world today than go back to tiny island with the truncated plot.
Dragon Age. I have been a enjoying Bioware games since KOTOR, but have always wished they weren’t so ugly. With Mass Effect it looked like Bioware was starting to turn the corner a bit, and maybe the games weren’t going to be godawful ugly anyore. Sadly I was mistaken, as Dragon Age proved.
The Temple of Elemental Evil: A Classic Greyhawk Adventure - my favorite tabletop D&D module of all time, faithfully brought to the PC by a (then) superlative developer, only to be released as a buggy, nigh unplayable mess. Kudos to the devs and the community who tried to patch it back together, but this game should have been the ultimate D&D experience, and it never was. See also the aforementioned Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor for a terrible letdown.