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[Currygan]

haven't played Diablo 3 so it's Darksiders 2. Those blokes need to learn a thing or two about pacing, puzzles and collecting stuff


TERA Online. Heralded as one of the must buys, it's just a boring game with no endgame and terrible artstyle. Frogster's customer support has the be the worst of all times

 

[Neff]

FFXIII-2 I'd say. I loved FFXIII despite its shortcomings, and the sequel looked like it was going to make good on fixing them. And it did, to a point. But what killed it was the ridiculous (after XIII!) story, characters, and non-sidequest dearth of challenge.

Loved everything else.

 

[Durante]

I can't decide between Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3.

Actually, I think it's Diablo 3, after ME2 I didn't expect all that much from ME3. They got some things right for D3, like getting an interesting skill set together, but character progression and itemization are just too bad. Never mind about the story.

 

[T.O.P]

Diablo 3 and GW2

a huge mess the first and an incedibly boring mmo the second

 

[Blue Ninja]

I think that dubious honor goes to AC3. By no means a bad game, but it could've been so much more.

 

[Zia]

I am interested to see the legacy of games like Diablo III and Mass Effect 3. In the last couple of years, there's been a shift away from embracing games purely because they have a base level of playability, polish and features -- the aforementioned, Uncharted 3, Assassin's Creed 3, Gears of War 3, etc. Which is not to say an outright rejection, but an unease. I think it's healthy, but it'll be interesting to see if these monstrous AAA games that a large amount of enthusiasts were disappointed in are reevaluated when next-gen rolls around and there's a dearth of them.

 

[90TilInfinity]

Being a huge of the SSX franchise, the 2012 effort really disappointed me. It's not a bad game by any means, and I did enjoy some of my time with it, but I truly expected to put 50-60+ hours into it. Unfortunately design choices put me off. Pits in races aren't such a huge deal, but when they're in Trick events it becomes an issue, in particular when you get big air (something every SSX game encourages). The rewind feature doesn't exactly solve that problem, but rather makes it all the more frustrating. Other concepts like freezing to death or losing oxygen were just silly to me.

While I do give EA Canada props for trying (and in some ways succeeding, such as Trick controls) to redefine SSX by adding more mechanics, there's genius in simplicity, and a game like Pure has shown that speed, big air and flash can deliver an amazing trick-racing game. If anyone else was a fan of Tricky/SSX 3 but not big on this year's SSX, I'd suggest Pure. It's amazing.

Honorable mention for Hitman Absolution.

 

[Adam Prime]

I really did not enjoy 2012's GAF GotY, Journey.

 

[trw]

There's been many disappointments from sequels this year but for me it has to be Assassins Creed 3 just because they fucked so much up. The things the AC2 trilogy had that made it special was the freerunning, the climbing on interesting architecture and the sandbox combat (play AC:brotherhood or revelations without countering and using smokebombs and it can actually be fun). All these things were fucked up in 3.

1) The freerunning
Due to them trying to 'refine' it to just a button they went from 3 states (walking, running in low-profile and running in high-profile/climbing) to just two. This means that there is no way to just run in the game without trying to climb every last thing in the environment and stumble up walls you can't climb and jumping off ledges that you dont want to. In trying to making the system simpler they made it harder to control. Baffling that the change went through testing when they had such a good system in place.

2) Climbing on architecture
This is a little bit due to the setting. America just doesn't have interesting things to climb compared to older countries. I can't even remember a single interesting building from 3 where as in earlier AC games there were always fun stuff to climb. They also had more interesting mission variety due to this (especially revelations) with cathedrals etc etc. This hurt the game a lot since it seems they had to just make missions that relied on eavesdropping in boring environments and sneak around bushes, no form of verticality which was the series strength.

3) Combat
The combat has never been good in the series but now they took away high-profile/low-profile and instead made context sensitive buttons that don't have any sense of what I want as a player. Context-sensitive buttons work when they are the only things you want to do, but with a wide array of tools and moves there is no way a context system could work and it doesn't in AC3. Want to drop that weapon? Bad luck now there is an enemy in front of you and you can't use that button anymore. Want to jump? Bad luck now there is an enemy in front of you and you have to hit him instead. Also taking away the radial menus was a terrible terrible terrible idea. I didn't want to use the tools I had available since it took forever to change weapons/tools.

In conclusion AC3 just because they managed to fuck up all the things that they had almost perfected in the past (yes combat was far from perfect but better than in ac3).

 

[Disguises]

Halo 4. Just feels off.

Oooh, controversial and also an opinion I agree with. Bought it at the midnight launch, played through the campaign a bit and just didn't get in to it. Started off loving the multiplayer and praised some of the features it borrowed from Call of Duty, but later on started to dislike it. Haven't got round to completing it yet. Probably still will, but usually I would have done it in a couple of sittings.

Added to that - Borderlands 2. Absolutely loved the first and put in nearly 100 hours. I felt things in the second one were too slow. So many sidequests, a massive world which made things longer to do, I felt it took longer to level up and decent weapons were hard to come by. So far I have NEVER found a weapon that is a higher level than me which means I miss out on the drive to make me want to play the game and level up further to use these weapons. Once again, I will complete it at some point, but I'd much rather play the first.

Basically - I probably hyped both up in my mind too much before launch. So disappointed that I don't like borderlands though

 

[Jarnet87]

Diablo 3 hands down. It's also the only game I bought all year lol.

 

[Alboreo]

Planetside 2. My roommates and I were extremely hyped for it. We played it together and they hated it so much that they immediately got drunk afterwards to try to forget about it.

Also, Guild Wars 2. I loved and played the hell out of the beta, but when it was finally released it felt like I had nothing to work towards and played for about ten hours before stopping.

 

[VALIS]

Sleeping Dogs maybe. There's some cool stuff about it (like the fighting system) but so much jank, too. The car handling is atrocious, the dialog is bad even for video games, it's not very sandboxy at all. Stupid GAF hype.

It's an okay game, I don't hate it, but it's fallen well short of what I hoped it would be.

Now if we're just talking bad, that's SSX. Hot garbage.

 

[BibiMaghoo]

FFXIII-2

It was a worse game than 13 by quite a margin. No party to choose from, selecting levels, replying them with minor changes multiple times in a playthrough. No summons, Awful story, paradox ahoy.

And by god, that ending...

Worst game I have played in quite some time, let alone this year.

It was very shiny though, ill give it that.

 

[Snipes424]

Diablo 3 and Blizzard as a company.

 

[drkOne]

Has to be Diablo 3, considering how hyped I was...

 

[c0Zm1c]

Guild Wars 2.

Every time I try to play it I'm just reminded of how superior Guild Wars 1 is. Then I log out.

 

[Data West]

Darksiders 2.

I kind of knew what to expect with Max Payne 3, Diablo 3, Mass Effect 3, AC3, etc.

 

[Creamium]

Darksiders II. First hours were promising and for a while I thought we'd get something that could outclass the original, but it all quickly unraveled. Dungeons became a chore to play through and there was way too much padding. The

Spoiler

Earth section

is the worst, at that point it feels like you're wasting time on shovelware.

 

[HiddenSentry]

I've played a ton of games listed in this thread, but I have to say that I pretty much liked them all. Played a ton of Diablo 3, but it's not my top ARPG of the year (That goes to Path of Exile by a country mile). I enjoyed SSX immensely, mostly by doing nothing but trick runs and choosing my tracks carefully. It was flawed, but not terrible. Darksiders 2 I liked as well, but it didn't exactly transcend the first one and become the masterpiece THQ wanted, I think.

No, my most disappointing game by far would be The Walking Dead. And not because I didn't like the story or playing it. What made it crash and burn for me was technical bugs. It currently will not boot up on this computer, and I'm sick and tired of playing technical support to this hacky game. I've lost my savegame twice (I only played through 3). The most unfortunate part is that I still have the damn save, but because I somehow overwrote/lost/never had some triplicate of a prefs.prop file, it's useless. The Walking Dead is not the worst game of the year for me (it could have even been the best), but it definitely qualifies as disappointing. I've even considered generating random choices and carrying onward, but at that point Lee and the other characters become so impersonal and not MINE, that nothing would carry the same weight. Argh.

 

[Won]

Diablo 3 of course.

Bosses in Nightmare and Hell probably still don't drop any good loot, because fuck you, player!

 

[Salz01]

Diablo 3. Everything outside the first ACT, is boring to slog through. It's almost as if two separate companies made the game. Loot is boring, and after all these patches, it still is boring. Not looking forward to the PvP portion of it anymore because I don't want to grind loot for it. Just having the AH alone doesn't make me want to touch PvP, because of all the people that will pay to win.

Diablo 3 deserves every single bit of bad press. I don't feel sorry for the team. They just failed.

 

[Hero of Canton]

Hitman Absolution by a country mile! Turn the Hitman series into a Conviction knock-off and add in a completely BROKEN disguise system, eurgh!

This. And not even a good knock-off.

I'm not sure it's my most disappointing, because I had a feeling it wouldn't be brilliant. Same goes for NSMB2, which was fine, but since when was 'fine' good enough for a Mario game?

With that in mind, Assassin's Creed III might be my biggest disappointment. I don't think it's as terrible as some do - the linear privateer missions and ship battles were excellent, and I still really like the multiplayer - but Connor was a charisma black hole compared to Ezio, and put in the shade by his own dad. In fact, playing as Haytham caused its own problems, not only because it meant the narrative build-up was incredibly slow, but because he was much more fun than Connor.

It's been a pretty disappointing year for AAA games in general, actually. Few of the big hitters really wowed me, and I find myself with mid-budget games like Gravity Rush and Binary Domain alongside a bunch of indies in my personal GOTY list.

 

[MightyHedgehog]

Still RE6. It's barely related to what most people, including myself, associate with RE's core strengths. It's an action-shooter/boss-rush and not a game that focuses on finding your way through interesting locales, laced with quieter tension that explodes in bursts. RE6 is like a fireworks show that, annoyingly, never seems to fucking end.

 

[sublimit]

RE6.
From gameplay to graphics it was one of the biggest disappointments ever.

 

[jjasper]

Mass Effect 3. Really don't understand what the hell they were thinking with the story and the ending. Also the straight corridor shooting was pretty bland.

I guess runner up would be Halo 4. It isn't bad, it just feels off.

 

[HigherLevel]

Halo 4

 

[solarus]

Darksiders 2.

 

[BrokenEchelon]

Could've sworn we had this topic a few months ago.

Still Diablo 3.

I thought I would play that game for years.

 

[BroggieDoge]

Gotta go with SSX that game just came and went with me. After years of wanting a new SSX and finally getting it I was just very underwhelmed overall. It wasn't the worst game I have ever played but I just had no desire to play it. After the initial weekend I played I was just done. Traded it in and never looked back or regretted getting rid of it. I would have been happier with a proper well made HD port of one of the older games with online implemented.


Other honorable mentions... Tony Hawk HD, 007 Legends, and Madden 13


EDIT: Damn I forgot about NG3... Game was ok but did not deserve to have the NG stamp on it. Basically ok game - shitty NG game.

 

[Malvingt2]

RE6

 

[ViewtifulJC]

I could go with Halo 4. After waiting on that game for years, I played it for a few days and now I never want to play it again. Then there was RE6, which crapped the bed, but I kinda expected it to after all those GIANT BROWN SHOOTING GAME trailers.

But Ninja Gaiden 3 still reigns above them all for shitty disappointing sequel of the year. It removes so much of the depth from NGB(and to a lesser extent, NG2), and replaces it with half a dozen QTE variants repeated over the entire game, and one-dimensional combat. It's like all your worst fears about your favorite video game franchises becoming "accessible" and losing so much about what made them classics. Even the fuckin' upgrade Razor's Edge is mediocre at best.

What a damn shame. Save us, Bayonetta 2

 

[Omni]

Assassin's Creed III. Such diappointment

 

[Bulk_Rate]

Res. Evil 6 sad to say.

Beat 1-3 back in the day, CV, 4 (3x) and 5 (3x) and thus RE6 was a no-brainer for me. The demo actually had me stoked and then the game itself progressively disappointed me the more I played.

I can deal with the FOV and some of the janky controls, but the terrible start-stop pacing of the action killed it for me. I am currently playing Dead Space on PC for the first time to detox myself.

 

[Nocturnowl]

My answer here is still the same as it was a few months ago when this topic was last addressed.

Rhythm Thief
A selection of musical minigames tied together with an adventure game approach and outlandish mystery plot looked to be the rhythm gave equivalent of Professor Layton which i'm sure was its inspiration.
Unfortunately the game falls flat on its face in pretty much all areas. The central cast are mostly weak and have to try and carry the ho-hum plot along to no real success with the most interesting plot point seemingly left for a sequel that may never arrive. The adventure part of the game is almost insultingly simple with everything spelt out for the player complete with an ever present guiding path that prevents you from solving tasks yourself until the game lets you (and simultaneously outright tells you). The rhythm games are a mixed bag ranging from a few fun ones to frustrating gyro control madness and they get quickly repeated over what is a short 6 hour long experience anyway.
An interesting idea that's poorly executed.

Runner up spot to The Last Story which felt like it tried to do too much with the wii hardware making it rather unpleasant to actually play with an iffy framerate and causing my console to sound like it's on the verge of death. Though i'd stop short of saying it was actually bad, it just needed to be on stronger hardware I think.

 

[Levyne]

Not sure. Didn't play too many games this year that actually released this year.

Maybe XIII-2. It wasn't bad, but I think it's 2nd place out of my two game list.

 

[Lunchbox]

mass effect 3, starchild fuck you for ruining one of my favorite universes

diablo3, it's not fun

ssx, it's fun, but the devs decided to take away the fun with dumb caves full of insta death sequences

max Payne, another great game that suffers from rockstars now signature shitty controls. same will happen to GTA5

 

[ironcreed]

Resident Evil 6. Had so many ups and downs with that game that it made me feel bipolar.

 

[Rokal]

Could've sworn we had this topic a few months ago.

Still Diablo 3.

I thought I would play that game for years.

I've seen the topic at least 3 times now this year. And yes, the answer is still Diablo 3.

It was this year's Dragon Age 2, but without a good excuse for being so terrible. At least Dragon Age 2's problems can be mostly explained by the short development time. Diablo 3 managed to be the shitty product it is solely because of clueless designers.

6+ years and all they managed to create was a short bare-bones campaign with a boring and unsatisfying loot system.

 

[Ridley327]

Well, it sure sounds like that I may not have been missing much by skipping out on most of the fall's big titles after all!

With that in mind, they'd all be hard-pressed to match the disappointment brought upon by Quantum Conundrum, a game with a great pedigree that is equaled only by how thoroughly it bungles all of its potential with a mix of unremarkable puzzle design that relies far too heavily on trial and error, ghastly aesthetics, and finding a way to render the services of John de Lancie null and void with a profoundly terrible script.

 

[Shaneus]

But Ninja Gaiden 3 still reigns above them all for shitty disappointing sequel of the year. It removes so much of the depth from NGB(and to a lesser extent, NG2), and replaces it with half a dozen QTE variants repeated over the entire game, and one-dimensional combat. It's like all your worst fears about your favorite video game franchises becoming "accessible" and losing so much about what made them classics. Even the fuckin' upgrade Razor's Edge is mediocre at best.

What a damn shame. Save us, Bayonetta 2

You should never have had such lofty expectations of NG3. Without Itagaki at the helm, the game was doomed to failure (just look at the bare-bones ports of NG1 and 2 to PS3).

 

[matthewwhatever]

Darksiders 2, for many of the reasons already listed. I loved the first game, and thought this game strayed far too much from it -- basically, not enough action, too much RPG. Also, I absolutely hated the voice acting and the music - they made a game I was already feeling iffy about unbearable.

 

[eot]

Probably Mass Effect 3. Even ending aside it wasn't nearly as strong of a game as ME2, although it did have some of the best moments in the series.

Diablo 3 is up there too I guess, but my expectations for the game had gone down a lot by the time it actually came out. In a way I enjoyed it more than I expected to, but playing it I was still disappointed that it wasn't the game it could've been. It wasn't a game I was planning on getting because it seemed clear that it wasn't another Diablo 2, but I got sucked up into the hype and when you buy something you always get your hopes up more than you should.

 

[Unhandled Exception]

ME 3 followed closely by Diablo 3.

 

[Dantis]

Mass Effect 3
Persona Arena
Max Payne 3

Lots of other games. It's been a disappointing year.

 

[Dance Inferno]

So far I'd have to say Borderlands 2. It starts off really well, with a fantastic art style and great characters, but very soon you start to realize this game was designed around co-op and not solo play. Some of these missions are damn hard to do by yourself if you didn't get lucky and get just the right gun for the job, which is complete crap. If you're going to design a campaign, then make sure I can get through it without having to resort to luck and grinding out weapons.

Granted I still haven't finished it, so maybe I'll change my tune in a while. But so far, it's my choice.

 

[LuchaShaq]

Mass Effect 3. Outside of A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of thrones) Mass Effect way by MILES my favorite fictional universe. It way my star wars/ my star trek. At the end of 3 Walters/Hudson put a bullet in it's fucking head and pissed on it's corpse. I regret ever spending a penny/a minute on the series.

Diablo 3. It had less interesting loot/characters/areas/enemies than games that cost 10-20$. Outside of people farming for profit I just don't understand people who like that game. I feel like if it was named Devil 1 and made by snow entertainment people would have called this game a piece of shit but the Diablo/Blizzard name go a long way.

Assassins Creed 3. Not nearly as much as the above games. But they changed the combat to be more like batman (which I don't like), and focused too much on desmond with a shit ending. The naval combat was AWESOME. Would buy an Ubisoft open world pirate game with that naval combat as the skeleton of the game.

There's other stuff to, what a bummer of a year game wise. Probably my least favorite this generation.

 

[Concept17]

Planetside 2. My roommates and I were extremely hyped for it. We played it together and they hated it so much that they immediately got drunk afterwards to try to forget about it.

Also, Guild Wars 2. I loved and played the hell out of the beta, but when it was finally released it felt like I had nothing to work towards and played for about ten hours before stopping.

Planetside 2 is fantastic. The game requires a couple good sessions before it really clicks, but once it does, its amazing.

The problem with Diablo 3 isn't that its a bad game. (the story sucks, sure) Its that its not Diablo 2. I played it for more than enough hours to keep it off my 'most disappointed' list.

 

[Danny Dudekisser]

Final Fantasy XIII-2. It really looked like Square was on the right track to making the game a massive improvement over XIII. All it did was prove that Square can't design a game properly anymore.

 

[Floex]

Mass Effect 3 bar none. If there was modern story that I actually enjoyed in a game was this series. They destroyed it, awful dialogue, bringing back the worst characters, having to pay extra for a huge character to the universe (still annoys me in buying that), hardly interacting with the reapers, fucking Star child, fighting on earth when it felt nothing of the sort, just destroyed and made into a shit shooter

Ninja Gaiden 3, never played it but it annoys me so how this franchise has fallen. 1 was my top game of that gen, 2 was just a turd and 3 was appealing to idiots

Hitman, another game appealing to the lowest common denominator. A franchise killer game, I hope next studio working on this game gets it

Resi 6, all those people working on this and it turns they don't have a clue. Should be ashamed of themselves