I am sure that everyone has been through this experience at least once in your life. You hear about a new game being released that sounds absolutely amazing. The trailers look breathtaking and you can’t wait to get your hands on the game and start playing. Before the big release you are looking up as much information as you can and speculating with friends or on forums on how fantastic the game will be. But when you finally start playing that long anticipated game your met with a huge wave of disappointment, the game just sucks.
In this article we are going over some of the most disappointing games that have been released in the last decade. Some of these games aren’t necessarily bad and might even have a dedicated fan base, but they’re all games that disappointed the masses upon release.
No Man’s Sky
This is probably the most notorious disappointing game that has ever been released. Just when hearing the phrase “disappointing video game” most people’s minds already wonder towards No Man’s Sky, and what a disappointment it was. After the game was revealed it was met with an enormous amount of hype. Many gamers couldn’t wait to get into a spaceship and start exploring a universe that would be entirely procedurally generated, which in theory meant that every planet would be completely different and that space would be endless. Certainly a dream come true for everyone that has every wished space operas weren’t just fantasy.
Soon after the game was released though, bad reviews and critique already start rolling in. It didn’t take a lot of time for people to be disappointed. Apart from the first 2 hours, which were by many players considered to be incredible, thegame felt very lacking. Although every planet was supposed to be different, it certainly did not feel that way. All planets felt very similar to each other and the gameplay became dull very quickly. Despite the game’s extremely lackluster release, the developers are still working and improving the game and it even has a small player base that do love the game for what it is.
Destiny
Destiny was supposed to be the greatest shooter that Bungie released since Halo. The studio had become well-known for their Halo franchise, which is probably one of the most popular shooters in history, and many fans were looking forward to their newest project. Destiny was hyped up to be THE game of the year and how could it not, it was developed by the guys that did Halo, surely they know how to make a good shooter. However, soon after release many players realized that the gameplay was just centered around shooting the same monsters over and over while a weak underlying story line was taking place.
Despite the game not living up to initial expectations, Bungie worked hard to improve upon the vanilla game and have even released Destiny 2. The games have gathered a reasonable following of fans that genuinely love the game and it has to be said that despite being disappointing on release, it’s definitely not the worst game in this article. Destiny 2 did a lot of things better than the first one but it’s still not the next legendary shooter that we thought we would receive from Bungie.
Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2
Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 were complete disappointments for many players but for reasons that were hardly gameplay related. In terms of visuals and audio it’s probably the best Star Wars game that has ever been released. DICE completely nailed the entire Star Wars feeling. The gameplay was also fine, nothing too innovating but it’s a fun shooter that does a few things different to make it feel more like Star Wars, such as having playable Jedi and Sith Lords in the game. The disappointment from the games though, come in the form of loot boxes & micro-transactions.
Many fans really enjoy the games on a base level, however, some of the most popular items were locked behind enormous paywalls. Especially Star Wars Battlefront 2 was notorious for this design as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader required such an enormous amount of grinding that it’s almost considered to be impossible. The entire controversy got so bad that Disney had to step in and tell EA to change the way the handled the game. Despite being two of the best Star Wars games to date, they were just huge let downs as Star Wars fans worldwide were unable to play as their favorite characters.
Watch Dogs
Watch Dogs created an enormous amount of hype when it was first revealed at E3. The games would come out on the new next generation consoles, being the Xbox one and Playstation 4, which only increased the excitement for the games. The hacking gameplay also felt new and innovating and the game looked like it might spawn a new franchise similar to Grand Theft Auto. There was no reason not to love what we were being shown during the E3 press releases. However, upon release it turned to dust very quickly as the games were not as innovating as people thought and the graphics were downgraded from what we were shown in the trailers.
Despite being praised by critics across multiple websites and magazines, the majority of the players definitely expected something better than what the game had to offer. The hacking was not really implemented in an interesting way and was mostly used for menial tasks. Furthermore, most players found the main character to have no appeal at all as he had a personality like a brick wall. Despite not being a bad game in it’s entirety it was a huge disappointment in most player’s eyes, which in turn caused the second Watch Dogs game to have low sales numbers as well, since most gamers didn’t want to give the franchise a second chance.
For Honor
For Honor is another game whose gameplay and art style is just incredible, but was plagued by other issues. Although the combat can be tough to learn at first, it can be very rewarding and has been executed extremely well. Many players tried to game out for themselves and were definitely satisfied when the game works. It’s also one of the most original games that has been released in a while. Who doesn’t love bashing in heads as a medieval knight or slashing through enemies as a samurai. However, the disappointment in this game comes from the extremely poor execution of the online services, since most of the time the game just doesn’t work very well.
Activision made a few really poor decisions regarding matchmaking and connectivity in the game. For some reason they thought that peer-to-peer networking was the way to go instead of creating a dedicated server for the game. This meant that if a single player quit the game, the game would stall and try to reconfigure the session. Games would be paused or slowed down frequently, which in a game that heavily punished mistakes, could often lead deaths of players through no fault of their own, since their timings would be off after pauses. As of right now Activision has created dedicated servers for the game, but the damage has already been done as most people that were hyped for the game have moved on.
Yooka-Laylee
Yooka-Laylee was posed to be the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, and the game that would revive collectathons, a game genre that has been dead for quite a while now. The game was created by some of the people that had also worked on the original Banjo-Kazooie games. Many people with fond childhood memories of Banjo-Kazooie were excited to see a spiritual successor in the works that could bring back those lovely nostalgic feelings. The first gameplay that was shown of Yooka-Laylee looked very promising. Fun gameplay and a colorful lively world were shown which made everyone think that this was indeed the game that would put collectathons back on the menu.
Upon release however, the game was received with mixed to average reviewss and was mostly seen as fun but lacking in content. The game was mediocre at best. The first world was what the developers had shown before and was indeed fantastic. However, it felt like the developers put all their time and money in the first world and none of it in the rest of the game. It starts of with a bang but sizzles out very quickly as all the things that the game does well are already shown in the first few levels. Definitely not the spiritual successor that people were hoping for.
Mass Effect Andromeda
Mass Effect Andromeda had big shoes to fill as it followed up the incredibly successful Mass Effect trilogy, but the game crashed and burned completely. Words can’t even begin to describe what an incredible dumpster fire this game turned out to be. The game offered extremely dull gameplay, was littered with bugs and had some of the worst character designs in any video game ever! To put it simply, this game sucks. Since it’s hard to describe exactly how bad it is, I will attach some screenshots that will provide you with an excellent impression.