Sure, each person has to decide for themselves how best to spend their gaming dollar and hour. But what is subpar? I’ve been hearing Bioware is going downhill since Baldur’s Gate. If you want to tell me Andromeda was a disappointment, by all means, it’s your call. Just don’t follow that up by telling me, oh I didn’t play it, the reviews were bad.
I’ll agree with you there. Animation was never an issue for me. (even if i could see the ways to minimize ithe problems by keeping the camera intelligently motivated, but they couldn’t spare the time to do it because #content/#ubistuff)
The real problem is that the Mass effect franchise went to another galaxy, and didn’t find it in itself to exhibit a fraction of the weirdness or excitement the original did in the Milky Way.
It’s very rare for me to buy a “new” game, but I think these are 2017 games which most disappointed me:
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Civ 6: Mostly love all previous versions. Only owned for less than a week (Steam sale), but after 2 veeeerrrrryyyy looooonnnggg games, it is more boring and tedious than fun.
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The Long Dark: I found it interesting to learn all of the survival techniques, but once learned, it just seemed repetitious and not at all …suspenseful? Fun? I simply lost interest. I tried both the story and sandbox mode, and both left me with the same feeling of “meh”.
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Dragon’s Dogma: The console version may be fantastic, but battling the interface on PC and trying to figure out how to accomplish even the most simple tasks was unintuitive and frustrating for me. Very similar to Dark Souls in this way, and this is what makes it NOT fun at all to me, but apparently orgasmically fantastic to everyone else.
I would consider that a lot of us, including myself did buy the game (pre-order, digital deluxe edition) and to varying degrees, liked it less than you. Then we were told that we wanted to kill bioware (laugh), we were just following some review bombing campaign against andromeda, our issues were fake, etc.
People solely basing their buying decisions on metacritic is a “problem” to some degree, but when you have limited gaming funds and don’t want to read tons of multi page reviews, i can kind of understand. There are games that i loved that are under that 80% mark and saw direct consequences (IE fallout new vegas). Obviously like you, for the games i really liked, i do not feel the score is accurate to how good i feel the game is.
Dawn of war III: I am a huge warhammer fan and i loved the previous dawn of war games. I have all of the expansions and i liked both different game designs (dawn of war 1 & 2). I was certain that #3 would pick one design and alienate fans of the others, but i thought i would be fine since i liked both. I was wrong, how wrong i was.
With the changes made in 3, it is clear they have no clue what made the previous games good and i have no confidence they will get out of their slump.
I will not be buying another dawn of war game. Relic, once loved by me, has now lost my trust. This game is WAY above any other games in disappointment for me. I almost want to stop my list right now to be fair to the other games on it.
Agents of Mayhem: Huge fan of saints row. This seemed like a game made a decade ago. I was expecting the worlds in open world games to improve, not get worse. I won’t say this game is not worth playing if you’re a fan the genre, but there are so many vastly better, very similar games, some even made by the same developers.
I liked Torment, but after reading Tom’s thoughts on it, i do agree that i was somewhat disappointed by it. Torment does not reach anywhere near the levels of Pillars of eternity, Tyrant, or divinity original sin. Still certainly worth a buy if you like story based rpgs, but play those games first.
I forgot about DoW 3.
Sorry, scratch everything i wrote above. DoW 3 is just about is as disappointing as one can speak objectively about games. By far the most disappointing game that i’ve played that was released in 2017.
Well that’s a whole other thing. I’m trying to restrict my argument, ok well then my annoyance, with buying decisions coming down to score aggregates. I’ve never disagreed with someone who played the game and decided they didn’t like it, or that the game was flawed - that’s plain as day. But I do believe that if people could get past what people tell them are game breaking flaws they might find something to enjoy there. Especially now that it’s down in the $10, $15 range - why not roll the dice? They don’t make many games like Mass Effect, and it looks like they may not be making them again for some time.
I only really have 2 disappointments for 2017 games because they were the only 2 I was looking forward to that let me down.
1) Endless Space 2: After enjoying Endless Space more than most, I was looking forward to ES2. There is just something about it that makes the game much more boring than the first. It is probably some combination of the AI not really doing a heck of a lot. Maybe the new rules were too complicated for it. It struck me as having more busywork than ES 1. I don’t think the UI does the job to help me keep track of the characteristics of the planets enough so I need to keep click on things more than I want to. I played 2 games at release and never went back.
- Dirt 4: Same as Rock8man. The random tracks just didn’t have the personality of the hand crafted ones. At first I was excited about the random tracks, but then they got stale.
These were were some minor disappointments because I was never really hyped ahead of time.
1) Prey: As a whole I did like the game and am glad I played it, but I just never really liked the visual design of the enemies.
2) Battle Chasers Night War: After the dungeons looked cool with the traps and stuff, the traps just never really had much impact on the play. I was also disappointed I couldn’t progress past a certain part without grinding, so I quit.
3) Solar Settlers: Another game I enjoy, but I liked Axes and Acres quite a bit better. Solar Settlers seems much more ,limited in gameplay.
Have you played around with the super sampling options? It’s not a great engine for VR, but a 1.3x or higher setting makes it perfectly playable if your rig can handle it, and the added immersion is great (especiallly if you have a wheel, of course).
I’m still experimenting with various settings in ATS. I need to find someone playing the game with a 1070 and copy that person’s config.
DoW 3 tops the list. I’m a 40k fanatic and I didn’t get beyond mission 3. Somersaulting terminators my arse. I played DoW + Armageddon mod more this year.
Oh yeah I forgot about DOW3. All the fans forgetting about it tells you everything.
I need a video or explanation of this.
I generally am one to try to find the fun in games more than finding issues with them, but I’ll have to join the Mass Effect: Andromeda disappointment camp. I did play all the way through the ending, and I enjoyed it overall, but not nearly as much as I did the original trilogy. I feel like the series peaked at ME2 and has suffered since from attempts to widen its appeal.
I was fine with the galaxy, and I thought the twins as the main characters actually worked. My biggest issues were with the combat system – I missed being able to pause and choose biotic attacks for both myself and my crew. Plus, not being able to equip my crew members was disappointing.
And The Witcher 3 really spoiled me for side quests. I’ve never finished an ME game having only done about 60% of the available quests before. But seriously: Explore a planet for ingredients for a bar? So many of the side quests just looked like they were designed to make you spend time driving around.
That said, I did like the story, I had no issues with the animations, and I hope that Bioware/EA take the right lessons from this and don’t kill or hibernate the series. I’d still love to play more in this universe, but without stripping so many of the elements that made ME 1-3 great.
I guess some exposure is better than none, but Tooth and Tail didn’t deserve to be here. It’s a fantastic game, and it’s emphasis on short matches means that you can actually have multiplayer be the focus, even for someone who usually doesn’t like multiplayer. Plus 4-player split-screen in an RTS! How amazing is that?
My guess is that @tomchick top 10 list will be based purely on the games that allow his avatar to look the most like Sarah Palin.
Decent criteria to be fair.
NFS Payback was also disappointing.