Half Assed Good Games

There are some games I quite like that, with a little more effort from the developers, could've no doubt been amazing games. However, as they stand, the games just make me say, "wtf, f-ing assholes, lazy, just lazy!!". I'm talking about games like Ninja Gaiden 2 with its intermittent lock ups and wildly unbalanced/chesse-able AIs and Devil May Cry 4 with its insulting "we only made half a game" backtracking.

Do you guys have games like these? Ones that you like but make you go, "this shit is half assed" cause of the potential they just pissed away?

EDIT: this thread is not about developers. please don't read what i wrote up top seriously, it's me being over the top. GERALTITUDE nailed the idea of this topic: "the idea of this thread (games that have hidden potential/were almost great/games you like but are driven crazy by unreached goals, etc)"

Games from Ninja Theory. I like everything about them, they just needed more polishing on the gamplay side of things. DmC was good in that regard though so here's to hoping that Hellblade will be awesome.

No. Because calling developers lazy is 9.9/10 times an ignorant, inaccurate statement based entirely on wild misunderstanding and lack of any actual experience making games or software or any similar product.

Very few games are half-assed.

But yeah. Many games don't live up to their potential and I do have a long list of games I wish were better or more complete. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a great recent example for me. I like it a lot. But there are just so many things and nagging issues and weird design decisions I just don't agree with. I think of the game it could be, and wow. I could say this for nearly every game I play though. But yeah, DA is a big one.

@geraltitude: sorry, i didn't mean to come off ignorant but maybe you're taking it a bit personally? i'm in film production and of course everyone works hard to make it all happen but at the end of the day, everyone is judged by the final product. if the film is bad, on hindsight, we go this could've been better, that could've been better, why didn't we do this?, wtf were we thinking? not we tried hard and they don't know anything about how the sausage is made.

What you describe as "lazy" is probably just a lack of budget or not enough budget being allocated to bug fixes and QA.

While I agree with @geraltitude's comment - most likely these games didn't live up to their potential due to budget, deadline or other constraints, rather than the developers idling their thumbs - two games instantly come to mind for me as games that have a whole lot of promise, but which fall short due to issues that could possibly have been fixed had the developers had more time to finish the games. These games are Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds (the PC game, not the PS1 one) from 1998, and 7th Legion from 1997.

The War of the Worlds is essentially a prototype of the Total War model - the turn based RISK style world map with territories to conquer or defend, and a real time large scale battle mode to decide who wins the skirmishes in these territories. It's all presented with remixes of Jeff Wayne's fantastic 70's rock musical and an art style based on the booklet paintings from the album. The premise is just fantastic (based on H.G. Wells' 1898 novel of course), with 19th century humans attempting to defend against an Martian invasion, using the technology of the day (while attempting to capture and reverse engineer the alien technology). Sadly the game's multiplayer mode was disabled on launch, supposedly to be patched in later, which never happened, and was riddled with bugs, making several unit types unusable and some maps pretty much unwinnable.

7th Legion was a RTS/CCG hybrid, something we've started seeing a number of in recent years, but to my knowledge hadn't previously been done in 1997. In many ways it looked like C&C, with a pretty obvious aesthetic inspiration from Warhammer 40000, you had C&C style MCV's to establish your base, and WH40K style space marines, mechs and tanks to fight each other with, and of course the five cards that were handed out to each player at the start of the match, which could do anything from giving you a money boost, make a unit temporarily invulnerable or destroy every single building on the map (including your own). The game also didn't use the by that point standardized resource gathering mechanic, instead you were given a set amount of money every minute, and got bonuses for every enemy you killed.

So, yeah, the cards weren't balanced super well, but the game's biggest shortcoming - especially when you consider what genre the game belonged to - was that the game didn't handle the actual mouse recognition particularly well. Selection boxes could only be drawn from left to right, from the top to the bottom. If you tried from right to left, the units wouldn't be selected. Moving units around wasn't too great either, the game was pretty particular about exactly where on an enemy unit you should click to order an attack, it also had a contextual menu that was supposed to appear if you held down the button for a second, but which most of the time appeared instantly and thus cancelled the orders you tried to assign. The pathfinding could've been better too.

There are a lot of factors that go into a game not reaching its potential. One of the worst games that I've played was DARK, and I reviewed it for a website. It was really hard for me to write about it negatively because I know the developers weren't sitting there saying "let's just half ass through this game and then release it." They were trying to make the best game possible, yet due some factors, the game was rather poor.

Game development is so complex. It is hard to know what exactly goes on when a game doesn't go exactly to what was planned, but I don't think it is developers half-assing through a game.

Don't forget poor management...
Anyway, Mass Effect 1 comes to mind: the inventory system and the explorable planets could have used a lot more work. I still absolutely love the game though

While I would normally agree that budget is what limits the games potential... As far as Ninja Gaiden is concerned, I am convinced that they had the engine there since the Ninja Gaiden Black on the xbox and all they really needed to do was give us more environments and just a couple of more enemies. Somehow they have been making it worse, emphasizing things nobody cares about, the graphics were fine, we don't need cartoony styles, we don't need more stuff on the screen(too many things catching your attention) or quick time events, I have no idea how they screwed it up but the original kind of had a smart camera that rarely bothered me and somehow they turned it into something that's either chronically too far or too close. In fact all these things lead me to believe the highly unlikely case where the engine/team was crap from the beginning but it was through sheer luck that the first release was any good.

The game thrived on controlled actions synergizing well with your dexterity. Seriously, all I wanted was a couple of more environments, like maybe more jungle/snow and maybe some more environmental kills but that's it. I'd say my favorite battles were with bosses who took a very passive role of just slowly walking to your character and evading when you attack and counter attack back, like the first boss fight or the Samurai.

edit: just remembered there's another samurai boss so I will be clear:

Destiny feels half assed. Like Bungie already knew how to make great shooting mechanics. But the story and missions feel half assed.

I agree with Geraltitude's sentiment. I have a bit more respect for people in any creative field than to just nonchalantly write off as fucking assholes who are lazy the way you have OP.

When I think about your question, I just can't think of any game that fits that criteria. As for games that may have missed their potential but wasn't through a lack of trying, Watch Dogs maybe. I still enjoyed it but after 100% it I was done and exhausted.

To me is Fable 3. It is a good game, but, it would have been awesome, if it had the time required to get fully developed. But it didn't. :/

If you're in film production, then imagine this:

One producer walks in and says "How could we have made a better movie if all of you weren't a bunch of lazy assholes?"

Another producer walks in and says "How could we have made a better movie?"

Do I even need to ask who you would respect? Who you would answer? None of us in this thread can even pretend to know the circumstances behind a game, but we are all - like you said - 100% right to criticize the end product. But what we should do is criticize the game and imagine how it could be better. Not describe why we think it's like that (laziness, planning, management).We don't need to know how the sausage is made. But we shouldn't pretend we do, one way or the other.

Anyways no hard feelings duder I think my sentence partially came off harsh due to lack of punctuation and coffee. I did answer your question, since I really like the idea of this thread (games that have hidden potential/were almost great/games you like but are driven crazy by unreached goals, etc), just not how you framed it. Be well.

And those fucking MAKO bits. Definitely a great game but some noticeable issues for sure

@geraltitude: yes, the idea of this thread is exactly that. i was trying to be over the top and a bit comical but most people just assumed i was being insensitive and it became more about feeling for developers...tone is difficult to get across i guess.

@beachthunder: @thepickle: i think mass effect 1 is a great example. love the story, universe is amazingly realized, and dialogue choices are great but combat seems fundamentally broken.

@liquiddragon: lol yeah duder! Welcome to the internet in 2015 :D . Dunno if it was just too many cynical black years in a row or what but we're all bit more sensitive these days, maybe especially so on GB. You could always edit your post/thread title if its driving peeps away.

One game I was just thinking of is XCOM. Such an excellent game...

Except for the terrible scaling which makes the late game way, way too easy and ultimately too boring to even finish most runs. I wonder if it was done on purpose to make you feel powerful or if the few difficulties they have just couldn't be balanced in a way to satisfy more playstyles. The game just devolves from a tactical experience into an overwatch/snipe rinse and repeat system or something similar. Can't imagine that's what the devs wanted.

Oh and one more thing : bad keyboard. Unforgivable!

Of recent memory, Saints Row IV and Wasteland 2.

Or tight deadlines and limited resources

Eh kinda. I love Dragon Age 2 (kinda controversial opinion I know) but feel pretty much all of its issues could've been avoided if they'd spent more time making it. I really think if it'd had another year or so in development it wouldn't see hardly any of the hate it gets.

Reusing the EXACT same layout/map for most of the dungeons and buildings, with the only differences being some corridoors/rooms in dungeons being blocked off by a crappy concrete-looking wall was 'lazy' as was waves of enemies spawning from thin air. As for some NPCs/missions being DLC which were kinda obviously supposed to be in the game all along, that could've been a deliberate cash-grab or could be once again due to time constraints (or both). Its still one of my favourite games, especially now I have all the story/character DLC but damn it could've been so much better.

Pokemon is actually one series where you can call the developer's lazy. Game Freak owns 1/3 of Pokemon and with the series having been such a success, they have virtually unlimited freedom. They've made a massive fortune off of being lazy. I mean they're the developer who will release a full price third game that has content they purposely didn't include in the paired versions. Now one could argue well they're a small studio. True but considering how much money they've made off Pokemon over the years, they could easily expand. Nintendo rarely steps in with the series (though they have on a few occasions).

Binary Domain, Asura's Wrath, Spec Ops the Line

Loved all those games but significant portions of the games feel half assed, lazy, not enough time, not enough money, etc. All of them had fantastic/interesting stories and characters that overcame those parts and I believe all 3 of them were in my top 5 games from that year.

@liquiddragon: We must have wildly different interpretations of what half assed is because both games you just mentioned I think are rather good.

Almost every game I love has glaring flaws.

There are a ton of titles which fit this dubious distinction, but what stands out to me right now is World of Tanks

Half-assed design has basically become institutionalized as "part of the game" at this point, and it's just heart wrenching to see:

• Invisible/disappearing/cloaking tanks?
• Imaginary designs which were neither built nor used?
• Pinpoint artillery which makes no actual sense?
• Hit point systems which only favor heavies or high DPM vehicles?

It's all part of the meta now

Funnily enough I still like the game but being at the top for so long definitely made Wargaming.net complacent of their flaws and increasingly unwilling to address them

I suppose there's two sides to that coin for me. It really comes down to where the flaws are vis-a-vis the underlying concept. If the underlying concept is executed really well, I tend to look past a lot of otherwise glaring flaws. Mass Effect 1 is a great example. Sure, there was pretty terrible graphical pop-in at points, the inventory system could have been better and the Mako controls were awful. However, as far as the underlying concept of a making a grand space-opera game goes, BioWare nailed it. Any flaws that game has are peripheral to the main concept, so they are much easier to look past. In other words, I don't need to go into the inventory system to get enjoy looking at a giant sky box with lens flare or absorbing a ton of pulpy fake sci-fi science.

On the other side of that coin are games like Alpha Protocol. While the underlying concept of a modern espionage RPG game is pretty super-cool, all the game's flaws tend to detract directly from that concept. For example, stealth and combat, two things that are an integral part of the "espionage" concept, are horribly, horribly broken in that game. The player can't engage with the concept without also needing to deal with the flaws. You can see the potential, but it really does feel wasted because you see all the ways it could have been executed better.

I'd say Deadly Premonition but I feel like that game is an alien.

I feel like Sweary sneezed one day and it just....appeared. The game and its existence is beyond our human understanding.

@geraltitude: I disagree with this almost completely. The final product is almost always going to be indicative of the process and effort that went into making it. You don't need to understand the nuances of every developer's process when making a game to have at least a general idea of how much effort went into making it, or at least specific aspects of it, especially when compared to other games of similar ilk. I'll give a couple examples.

If a kid in school half asses a research paper, it's usually pretty obvious, especially if plagiarism is involved. If the kid says to the teacher that he was busy doing other things like playing football outside or playing video games, the teacher isn't going to care. He was clearly being lazy and not using his time wisely, and the research paper itself is indicative of that, even if the teacher didn't know the specifics of what else he was doing.

Another, perhaps more relevant example, could be Fallout: New Vegas. Most games upon release are normally functional with intermittent lapses in that functionality in the form of bugs or glitches. Fallout: NV was more akin to one massive bug/glitch with intermittent instances of functionality mixed in. It reminds me of someone who is drunk all the time and has moments of clarity randomly interspersed throughout their drunken stupor. I don't need to understand everything that everybody did while working on this game. It's obvious that they were blatantly lazy in terms of stamping out the bugs, and just shoved it out the door with a "we'll patch it later" attitude that seems to be the go to method for a lot of developers these days. Procrastination is the epitome of laziness and it rings just as true here as anywhere else. Even if this wasn't the case, it would still indicate that they didn't manage their time and budget wisely, and just got lazy with certain aspects of it. In this case, it's especially problematic, because the functionality of the game is the most important thing.

And if you don't want to use the word lazy for either of these two examples, using "half-assed" is probably a better term anyway, which was the whole point of this post.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance rules but comes up short on puzzles. Kain's puzzle areas are pretty simple and not too visually distinct. Then you get to Vorador's Mansion and encounter some amazing puzzle design.

So just comparing it to Soul Reaver 2 and Raziel's sections, Kain's puzzles feel half-assed because they're good but not incredible.

Man, those games are SO GREAT.

Nier comes to mind. The story is decent, and there are some cool gameplay moments here and there, but almost everything else about it comes across as monumentally half-assed. It looks like a PS2 game. 90% of the weapons are utterly useless. The combat is mostly dull and repetitive. The side quests are as generic as they come.

Wasteland 2 didn't even bother to get half of its ass.

@tyrrael: Couldn't have picked a worse example. Bethesda, the publisher not the developer, handled the QA for New Vegas not Obsidian, the developer. I agree with you that people are too quick to absolve devs of guilt but this is not the case in this example. The ball was out of their court.

Maybe not related to whether games are half-assed or not (budget, time constraints etc) but I have find I have real problems getting into games that lack polish. Like Wasteland 2 for instance. Chances are I'd love it and play it for countless hours but after watching the quick look and other videos I just got turned off mainly because the UI and stuff like that looked so unibtentionally unpolished. I dunno.

Meanwhile I loved Alpha Protocol, a game that many would say is half assed. It didn't "look" unpolished and I had no problem accepting all the major issues it otherwise had.

Although I understand the arguments, by making a product that is bought and sold as a commodity, I can call your game or film lazy and dumb no matter the circumstances. I have no vested interest to offer constructive criticism, I don't have to clarify or break down my opinion on a product. That's the developers problem, not mine.

@hayt: I find it a little hard to believe that the developer didn't have any idea how broken this game was before they released it. Regardless, there are a plethora of games that fall into the half-assed category, and I liked how you put it actually. The statement, "...people are too quick to absolve devs of guilt..." essentially sums up my whole point, so at least we can agree on that.

Let me hop into my time machine and go back to 1999 and tell you about a little game called, Nightmare Creatures. It was buggy, ugly, and had a basically incoherent story but I loved it.

The character designs and setting were so awesome that I could forgive glitching through a building occasionally.

Little Big Planet 3 kind of felt like that most recently, it's a pretty good game with some good design but felt very low effort for a 3rd game in the series and on a next gen platform.

I feel like there's a world where that Haven: Call of the King game was fantastic, and spurred a legendary game trilogy. It had a cool world, the plot was pretty compelling, and there were a lot of interesting mechanical ideas thrown in there.

It's a shame it was a shitty game, though.

L.A. Noire for me. It was still enjoyable enough, but that game could have been incredible. They made an awesome recreation of L.A., the face-capture was terrific (and Dan-tastic!), but the rest of it fell pretty flat. Your choices didn't really matter at all, you were fairly hamstrung from actually enjoying the open world, and the story was forgettable. I wouldn't call the game half-assed, because I imagine a great deal of time/effort/expense was devoted to creating the world and face-cap, but it was fairly apparent that everything else was a bit of an afterthought. The flaws were even more glaring since it came shortly after the brilliant Red Dead Redemption. L.A. Noire could have been an all-time classic, but fell short.