Nothing game specific but in general the entire regression of the MMORPG genre.
From the whole 'massive world to live in' ideal to what now seems to be the series of hubs to flip between.
Changing from character progression/skill based systems to twitch based players skill systems.
From subscription based payments models to FTP models.
From everything you do in the game defines your character to how much real world money you spend defines your character.
The whole genre is a mess.
I blame it mostly on the popularisation of WOW that attracted the massed of unwashed, uneducated, uninterested and uninvolved who care little about playing a game together with others but more on strutting around pretending pixilated greatness is a measure of cool.
MMORPG's have steadily chosen to embrace systems and ideals from of genres without seeming to realise that other games do those things better and MMORPG's are not the place for such systems/ideals.
Everybody says it's the MMORPG to play. I have tried to get into the game on three occasions, from the 2004 initial release, to the later releases of Wotlk and the expansion after that (forgot the name). And that's just the official game, not to mention the several other attempts on some less-than-legitimate servers. Everytime I tried the game, for some reason I simply cannot last more than a week before I'm too bored to keep going. Not saying the game is bad, but it certainly is not for me.
Civilization IV. They did such a great job of diagnosing everything that they ought to improve on from previous Civilization games, and then they decided to make it single-threaded using Python, giving it the worst case of badly-coded syndrome of any game I've ever seen, so that you constantly have to wait on the game to do stuff.
A lot of games that I haven't been terribly impressed with weren't really huge disappointments as I didn't expect them to be very good in the first place.
My biggest disappointment was way back when UO failed to get control of the rampant PKing. They got close, but a few things ruined it and allowed the "grief" to continue.
That caused the complete ruin of the concept of open PvP worlds.
And even today, no one is willing to build an open PvP world with the kind of justice system that would actually restrict it. Had they done that, "worlds" could have been built where in cases of actual reasons for PvP in the context of the lore and politics could be performed.
Instead of "worlds" with meaningful politics and player interactions we have these gamey fields of pre-casted player actions.
My big disappointment was WoW with the Paladin class, I waited 6 years to have a DPS role that would work, and again and again each time they had a chance to fix it never did. Then end up with worst CM ever on the forums, and many lies what said that they would do.
When came around befor BC they did end up buffing to a point that level 60 was not balance then with the community out cry of nerf. Then end up nerfing paladin DPS then level 70 it was broken after all the nerf they did trying to balance a game around 60 when level 70 was the next level a month later.
There's been a few over the years. Recently I had high hopes for Wildstar and Archeage but within 10 minutes I knew Wildstar was just another been-there-already theme park and Archeage had that crappy Labour Point thing going on that did nothing but limit the game too much.
Every time I start a new game with my friends and waiting for the moment where our teamwork is paying off. When we can separate and the progression we make doesn't change.
Grumpy touched on it. The entire regression of the MMO is whats doing it for me. They are slowly removing what used to be staple offers in the game and replacing them with less than entertaining gimmicks so they don't have to work on anything more than graphics, sound, themeparks, and pvp. The genre started out as a way for a whole world to be developed and then they just stopped bothering when everyone freaked out over how great the theme park was for LOTRO. There's been nothing but regression ever since, to the point the devs are even complaining that they can't wow people with graphics anymore.
I finally broke and went back to EQ2. I've spent the last 9 months decorating houses. I've barely played the quests at all and haven't even touched on anything resembling pvp (not that I would anyway. I can't stand pvp). There hasn't been a single game in existence that's been more than a theme park or pvp game for at least a decade. Unless you count the old ones.
I forked over 69,99 for an uncut-key (import) after falling for the tons of lies Gaute, Ellingson and this Thorvaldson (sp?) guy spread...also on this site. I still hold a grudge against mmorpg.com for selling out as a platform of this scam (as this site was literally owned by Funcom at that time), but when it turned out that the game missed a million features, they never called Funcom out or asked any tough questions on that in the many interviews after release.
On the other hand i sold my beta-account für 50 bucks to some guy -who hopefully never bought the game afterwards.
Second comes LOTRO. I was SO hyped about that game and almost bought the lifetime-sub like many of my friends did. I didn't even finish the initial 30 days that came with the box....
Bioshock Infinite: Bought the biggest, most expensive collector's edition, and I will admit the Songbird statue is awesome. The game... well, the combat is really fun. Not as deep as it could have been, but it was entertaining. The world design was top notch, and for the most part the overarching themes didn't bother me, for the most part. The story was utter crap though. Overly pretentious hogwash, completely predictable, not the least bit original... just terrible. Burial at Sea just made it worse. Then Ken Levine pulled the ultimate dick move, fired most of the people whose hard work made his name known, and started working on 'small projects', which probably means mobile crap. Big disappointment from the game and one of the main people behind it. Won't be buying anything with his name on it ever again, though I will give the Bioshock franchise another chance.
From a technical standpoint, having possession of a physical version yet still being forced to download the game through Steam was really, really stupid.
Batman: Arkham Knight: God damn it. Do I need to explain? It still doesn't run right, and probably never will. I've played on console and, for the most part, it's awesome... until you run into the whole stupid 'Joker in the blood blah blah blah' bullshit subplot. The character is DEAD, okay? He's DEAD, and yet he still manages to be the main villain of the game, which completely and utterly destroys the entire point of killing him off in the first place. Myself and others considered Rocksteady's decision to bring the Batman / Joker dynamic to an end to be a bold choice, and a welcome one. Then they completely render it meaningless. Bravo!
Scarecrow deserved to be the main villain. His character design was amazing. His plan was intelligent, meticulous, and took into account multiple contingencies. His characterization was flawless, absolutely flawless, every bit the highly intelligent yet twisted man of science he was supposed to be. John Noble did an incredible job with the voice work, easily the best I've heard for the character in any medium. I simply cannot say enough good things about how they portrayed one of my favorite comic book villains. The best part? HE WON! Every part of his plan worked perfectly. The only thing he failed to do was break Batman publicly, shattering the hope he represented, and that only because of the whole stupid face-heel-turn of the Arkham Knight. He came closer to destroying Bruce Wayne and Batman than Bane did during Knightfall. Batman himself, and the fear he had once struck into the hearts of Gotham's criminals, was effectively dead.
Yet he still manages to take a back seat to a character who died at the end of the last one, in quite possibly one of the most idiotic manners possible. BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT!!! EVER!! EVEN IN COMICS!!
It's simultaneously one of the most brilliantly and most idiotically written games ever made.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
The introduction of the holocrons in SWG. Up until that point is was a very fun game but after those started popping up everyone abandoned their professions and started grinding every profession they could find. The auction house filled with all the grinded material selling for pennies on the dollar and people camped resource spots 24/7. It was had to find anything you needed and that was when the game started moving to hell in a hand basket.
Star Citizen The kickstarter said stuff like:
Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions
If too many people fly iron ore to the smelting plants of New
Pittsburgh, steel prices will drop. Buy low… sell high…
you hope.
and
You could be a trader, a miner or an industrial magnate. Amass
great wealth or just run enough missions to earn a comfortable living and upgrades
for your ship.
So I purchased the freelancer package and ship. 4 years later all we have is a PVP focused tech demo with no sign of any non-pvp related content ever coming inexcept in Chris Roberts marketing videos were he says anything to get sales. My industrial ship just sits there like a big joke, knowing it will never be useful until maybe 2020.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
#1: Age of Conan. The blatant lies from the original GD and his chubby PR-sidekick went from outrageous to hilarious.
#2: Guild Wars2 when Anet ninja-duced a new tier of armor (ascended) and later added legendary to their game.
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!! (repeat ad infinitum)
Probably the long awaited and overhyped Diablo III release and its RMT cash shop.
The itemization was so shitty in that initial release it was near impossible to itemize without using the auction house. It has scarred me so deeply I still don't play that abomination of a game.
Aion because I was still new to mmo's when it was announced and still believed that mmo's were more about creating worlds. I bought into the movies that were made, espeically one particular one where your character was running and then ended up climbing up an area.
When the game was released it didn't feel anything like it was advertised. Each server was supposed to be different based upon what the players did and weather was supposed to affect players, spells, etc.
Lord of the Rings online changed quite a bit from launch. There were areas north of Bree that were just places you could explore. It was refreshing to find areas that weren't anything other than places in the world.
Slowly it became more boring, the main story had ridiculous aspects (like me bringing a basket of apples to someone and then having them bring the basket back) and I always hated the armor, weapon and character designs.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Ultima Online 2, or Ultima 10: Odyssey (also kind of UO 2).
In term of actual games though, WAR. WAR had so much good going for it, and it was an absolute blast in the beta and early on, but the game just fell apart, and it wasn't made well. The performance was just never there.
DAoC. Not because i hated the game. Dark Age of Camelot is my all time favorite. I list it as my greatest gaming disappointment because it was never marketed properly.(in my opinion).
I think i saw 1 add for it in a PC gaming magazine when it first came out, and that was it. It is still a great game, and i find myself always going back to it, even after 14 years.
The proverbial lightning in a bottle....if only someone would make a DAoC2
Nothing comes remotely close to how angry I was with FFXIV ver. 1 Before that I was a massive fanboy for the Final Fantasy franchise, and especially FFXI.
SE already had several years of experience running, designing, and developing a successful MMO with FFXI. The guy behind FFXI was the producer for FFXIV. They arrogantly and stupidly released the game in a state that was barely passable as a tech-demo.
Happily, they turned things around with the complete re-design and relaunch.
Comments
From the whole 'massive world to live in' ideal to what now seems to be the series of hubs to flip between.
Changing from character progression/skill based systems to twitch based players skill systems.
From subscription based payments models to FTP models.
From everything you do in the game defines your character to how much real world money you spend defines your character.
The whole genre is a mess.
I blame it mostly on the popularisation of WOW that attracted the massed of unwashed, uneducated, uninterested and uninvolved who care little about playing a game together with others but more on strutting around pretending pixilated greatness is a measure of cool.
MMORPG's have steadily chosen to embrace systems and ideals from of genres without seeming to realise that other games do those things better and MMORPG's are not the place for such systems/ideals.
Everybody says it's the MMORPG to play. I have tried to get into the game on three occasions, from the 2004 initial release, to the later releases of Wotlk and the expansion after that (forgot the name). And that's just the official game, not to mention the several other attempts on some less-than-legitimate servers. Everytime I tried the game, for some reason I simply cannot last more than a week before I'm too bored to keep going. Not saying the game is bad, but it certainly is not for me.
A lot of games that I haven't been terribly impressed with weren't really huge disappointments as I didn't expect them to be very good in the first place.
That caused the complete ruin of the concept of open PvP worlds.
And even today, no one is willing to build an open PvP world with the kind of justice system that would actually restrict it. Had they done that, "worlds" could have been built where in cases of actual reasons for PvP in the context of the lore and politics could be performed.
Instead of "worlds" with meaningful politics and player interactions we have these gamey fields of pre-casted player actions.
Once upon a time....
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
When came around befor BC they did end up buffing to a point that level 60 was not balance then with the community out cry of nerf. Then end up nerfing paladin DPS then level 70 it was broken after all the nerf they did trying to balance a game around 60 when level 70 was the next level a month later.
Warlords of Dreanor to me was the biggest disappointment in my gaming life.
I finally broke and went back to EQ2. I've spent the last 9 months decorating houses. I've barely played the quests at all and haven't even touched on anything resembling pvp (not that I would anyway. I can't stand pvp). There hasn't been a single game in existence that's been more than a theme park or pvp game for at least a decade. Unless you count the old ones.
I forked over 69,99 for an uncut-key (import) after falling for the tons of lies Gaute, Ellingson and this Thorvaldson (sp?) guy spread...also on this site.
I still hold a grudge against mmorpg.com for selling out as a platform of this scam (as this site was literally owned by Funcom at that time), but when it turned out that the game missed a million features, they never called Funcom out or asked any tough questions on that in the many interviews after release.
On the other hand i sold my beta-account für 50 bucks to some guy -who hopefully never bought the game afterwards.
Second comes LOTRO.
I was SO hyped about that game and almost bought the lifetime-sub like many of my friends did.
I didn't even finish the initial 30 days that came with the box....
From a technical standpoint, having possession of a physical version yet still being forced to download the game through Steam was really, really stupid.
Batman: Arkham Knight: God damn it. Do I need to explain? It still doesn't run right, and probably never will. I've played on console and, for the most part, it's awesome... until you run into the whole stupid 'Joker in the blood blah blah blah' bullshit subplot. The character is DEAD, okay? He's DEAD, and yet he still manages to be the main villain of the game, which completely and utterly destroys the entire point of killing him off in the first place. Myself and others considered Rocksteady's decision to bring the Batman / Joker dynamic to an end to be a bold choice, and a welcome one. Then they completely render it meaningless. Bravo!
Scarecrow deserved to be the main villain. His character design was amazing. His plan was intelligent, meticulous, and took into account multiple contingencies. His characterization was flawless, absolutely flawless, every bit the highly intelligent yet twisted man of science he was supposed to be. John Noble did an incredible job with the voice work, easily the best I've heard for the character in any medium. I simply cannot say enough good things about how they portrayed one of my favorite comic book villains. The best part? HE WON! Every part of his plan worked perfectly. The only thing he failed to do was break Batman publicly, shattering the hope he represented, and that only because of the whole stupid face-heel-turn of the Arkham Knight. He came closer to destroying Bruce Wayne and Batman than Bane did during Knightfall. Batman himself, and the fear he had once struck into the hearts of Gotham's criminals, was effectively dead.
Yet he still manages to take a back seat to a character who died at the end of the last one, in quite possibly one of the most idiotic manners possible. BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT!!! EVER!! EVEN IN COMICS!!
It's simultaneously one of the most brilliantly and most idiotically written games ever made.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
Up until that point is was a very fun game but after those started popping up everyone abandoned their professions and started grinding every profession they could find. The auction house filled with all the grinded material selling for pennies on the dollar and people camped resource spots 24/7. It was had to find anything you needed and that was when the game started moving to hell in a hand basket.
Star Citizen
The kickstarter said stuff like:
If too many people fly iron ore to the smelting plants of New Pittsburgh, steel prices will drop. Buy low… sell high… you hope.
and
You could be a trader, a miner or an industrial magnate. Amass great wealth or just run enough missions to earn a comfortable living and upgrades for your ship.
So I purchased the freelancer package and ship. 4 years later all we have is a PVP focused tech demo with no sign of any non-pvp related content ever coming in except in Chris Roberts marketing videos were he says anything to get sales. My industrial ship just sits there like a big joke, knowing it will never be useful until maybe 2020.
#2: Guild Wars2 when Anet ninja-duced a new tier of armor (ascended) and later added legendary to their game.
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!!
(repeat ad infinitum)
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
The itemization was so shitty in that initial release it was near impossible to itemize without using the auction house. It has scarred me so deeply I still don't play that abomination of a game.
Aion because I was still new to mmo's when it was announced and still believed that mmo's were more about creating worlds. I bought into the movies that were made, espeically one particular one where your character was running and then ended up climbing up an area.
When the game was released it didn't feel anything like it was advertised. Each server was supposed to be different based upon what the players did and weather was supposed to affect players, spells, etc.
Lord of the Rings online changed quite a bit from launch. There were areas north of Bree that were just places you could explore. It was refreshing to find areas that weren't anything other than places in the world.
Slowly it became more boring, the main story had ridiculous aspects (like me bringing a basket of apples to someone and then having them bring the basket back) and I always hated the armor, weapon and character designs.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
In term of actual games though, WAR. WAR had so much good going for it, and it was an absolute blast in the beta and early on, but the game just fell apart, and it wasn't made well. The performance was just never there.
I think i saw 1 add for it in a PC gaming magazine when it first came out, and that was it. It is still a great game, and i find myself always going back to it, even after 14 years.
The proverbial lightning in a bottle....if only someone would make a DAoC2
Before that I was a massive fanboy for the Final Fantasy franchise, and especially FFXI.
SE already had several years of experience running, designing, and developing a successful MMO with FFXI. The guy behind FFXI was the producer for FFXIV. They arrogantly and stupidly released the game in a state that was barely passable as a tech-demo.
Happily, they turned things around with the complete re-design and relaunch.