What was the most disappointing game of the last generation?

Cyberpunk 2077. No question about it for me. Even ignoring the public hype, you've got a developer coming off of the Witcher 3 providing a new rpg in a genre that isn't that oversaturated. And what we ended up with is...yeah.

Yikes, so many people disapponted with FFXV. For what it's worth I enjoyed it, warts and all. It's honestly amazing it turned out as well as it did considering what a mess the development was.

I don't really have any picks for disappointments since I generally enjoy the games I end up playing enough to not think of them as 'disappointing'.

If I have to pick one I would have to choose Red Dead Redemption 2. I could not stand it. Just so immediately tedious to play and watch. Boring and uncreative missions, a chore to control, so much riding from point A to B. All that is wrong with open world games in one neat little package. I put it away after a few hours and haven't returned to it.

Now it might be strange to read that in the same post that days 'I enjoyed FFXV', but I guess something clicked with me. At least I didn't have to drive from A to B by myself, but could just relax and listen to the radio. And the fights, while messy, were more enjoyable.

@tumes: This! Thanks for reminding me. The first one was so good, too...

hmm... probably Anthem or Andromeda- if only because heading into this gen Bioware might have been my fav developer...and now i'm deeply skeptical of any output coming from them.

and then a distant 2nd or 3rd would be Red Dead 2- after hearing brad, alex and abby talk about the personal emotional resonance of that story, i thought i'd be right there with them. but ultimately the only character i really enjoyed spending time with was sadie (arthur was enjoyable, but by token of being an avatar and the open world jank, i never fully felt like i embodied him).

I wonder if the chance for disappointment was much higher last generation compared to other generations? A rise in gaming, difficulties perhaps in making open world games compelling, or in higher resolution gaming causing technical problems? I don't know if this is true or bullshit, just fun to speculate.

From responses in the public, No Man's Sky (at launch) and Cyberpunk 2077 seem most culpable. But Destiny and Anthem also have a claim, and each of these are open world games that feel empty.

I could not finish Doom Eternal. I played Doom as a child and Doom 2016 and those games feel very much a part of my life. I agreed with Ben at the last GOTY discussion that Doom Eternal took a step in the wrong direction is so many mechanics that the sweet spot for action was lost on me.

I agree with Sekiro. I still have not finished it. After finishing the first major boss fight, having turned a corner to face some magical bull miniboss immediately after was to me a complete rejection of the much better pacing of the previous Dark Souls games with bonfires and bosses.

For me absolutely Breath of the Wild, I'm probably as a big a Zelda fan as Dan Rykert and that game was the opposite of what I want from a Zelda game. I didn't really enjoy the Shrine puzzles, the often open-ended nature of their solutions just made them feel janky to me more than anything else and all of the dungeons were just out and out terrible and confusing to navigate rather than fun, plus the dungeon textures being based on the metal look of the Devine Beasts made them boring to look at/be in. People often talk about having hundreds of little "wowww" moments but I only had a handful of those. I never really figured out if/how you were supposed to take on the bigger Guardians and gave up on my attempt to enter the castle because I guess I was missing something so maybe that's on me but still, the only Zelda game I haven't beaten to date.

MGSV wasn't quite as disappointing and I managed to gel with it a bit and complete the "main" game but still not at all what I wanted.

Also from the above thread; I was hugely let down by The Outer WORLDS after hearing so much hype about it, loving puzzle games and being a time travel/loop nerd I had high expectations and I just don't understand the game I guess? I've played about 6 hours across 4 different attempts and never made any meaningful progress or had anything really click.

Objectively ME: Andromeda, Death Stranding and Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk 2077 is just disappointing in so many ways.

A more personal pick: New Gundam Breaker - first steam/pc release, first official release in the west, and it's just worse than 3 in so many ways. I believe Austin talks about how disappointing it was on Waypoint Radio as well.

I think Cyberpunk is fair on a broad level, even though on a personal level I wasn't disappointed in it much at all.

But it's hard to think of something that deflated so many people more than it did.

Uncharted 4: It starts out well, and yes, it has great production values, but the story drags on way too long.

I see Mass Effect: Andromeda on some people lists, and I can understand why. However, for me it was not that disappointing. After the incredible games that were ME's 1-3, I never had high hopes that ME: A was going to top those.

Most disappointing? I’m not sure about that, but Hotline Miami 2 is up there. The first game admittedly set up my expectations waaaay too high, so the crash down was hard.

Metal Gear: Survive.

I Can't pick just one, because their both linked together. Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem. Mass effect because hello its Freaking mass effect in a new galaxy and they did absolutely nothing interesting with it. Anthem because if you listen to the reports that's why mass effect was given to the b team. So disappointed with what Bioware did with those two titles.

RDR2 for sure. That game was at odds with itself in how it approached its open world and its story. Don't get me wrong the story is fantastic, it's Rockstar so that's not a surprise at all, but that's part of the problem. I think starting with GTA 4 Rockstar started to approach their games with a preference of presentation over game play, and RDR2 is a sign that things need to change.

I was certainly entertained by the game but I don't know if I can say I ever had fun. It's ironic that Rockstar essentially revolutionized how open world games can be made, and their games have become less and less of a sandbox and other developers have surpassed them in the freedom they provide.

Cyberpunk 2077 for well-worn and obvious reasons. Some solid writing, Keanu is great, but no patches are going to fix the banal design and boring direction of that game.

Final Fantasy XV is just plain stupid. The plot drives straight off a cliff halfway through, and half the mechanics seem designed to be inconsequential as you use them. Using Potions: The Game.

Halo 5: Guardians is a mess. Like, visually. It's a pain to actually look at. It's too much.

And for my blasphemy pick: Control. Some of its writing is embarrassing. People talk about it like it's this subversive action game, but underneath the cool fonts and lighting effects is more left-trigger/right-trigger, more collectibles, more quasi-meaningless upgrade trees, more go-here-shoot-this. It has this vague undercurrent of political commentary ("the red guys in the gov't are bad!"), yet it doesn't get past shooting people with guns without consequence. For a power fantasy, it doesn't even feel all that good to play, so you just wind up throwing chunks of the floor over and over from hour 2 through to the end. You get a magic shape-shifting gun, so magic it can become such crazy things as...a pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher.

There's a lot of good mentions in this thread but a lot of them I managed to dodge since them since the backlash came swiftly enough to temper my expectations. I was sad to hear that Mass Effect Andromeda was poor since I loved the series, so when I fired it up I just tinkered and wasn't shocked when it didn't click with me.

I'm going to upset some folks with this one, but it's Nier: Automata for me.

I really liked the first Nier for what it was, so a sequel by Platinum seemed like a slam dunk. Automata was tedious on every level. The gameplay was more active than the first Nier, to its detriment, but not active or interesting enough. More time wasting quests and running across a big, ugly map that isn't fun to traverse. Actually everything about Nier Automata is ugly, visually. Awful frustrating game design where it would lock you away from the quests while ramping up the level cap or difficulty with no warning (the start of the C play through as the worst offender). Random genre switches done poorly. Garbage checkpoint system. I found myself screaming at my television as I suffered through more and more waves of garbage, poorly communicated, bad game design.

But the story. Oh god the story is just so disappointing. The game gives you no reason or motivation to care about these characters. In fact, the way the story sets them up as disposable right off the bat just leads everything that follows to "oh sure, of course that's what would happen" because everything is so pedestrian. All off the plot twists were so basic and edge lord shit - "wow look how sad we can make these characters" but with nothing to say about its actual themes of purposelessness and existential crises. A lot of unearned moments, like leaving two characters together without ever indicating that they felt anything for each other (in fact one of them is literally programmed to kill the other, also unaddressed in the slightest, just assume she'll fall in love with the boy because that's what happens right, fuck I hate this game). So much wasted potential, caught up in how clever it is.

It's 20 hours of my life that I wasted since I really bought into since literally everyone in the industry but Jeff and a few outliers was saying was totally worth it, and it so, so, so wasn't. I played through every route in the game and by the end I just hated the game, and everything that it stood for, and resented the huge waste of time. What a disappointment after the first Nier.

Artifact.

@swthompson:

After hearing all the buzz about Nier: Automata, I tried it because it is on Game Pass. While I gave up too soon to comment on the story, I agree with everything else you said.

Ssenran Kagura Reflexions.

It's not a disappointment in the sense I played the game and it failed to meet expectations. I'm sure that it meets expectations in that it revolves around the various game's intimacy mode, of which I have honest to god never interacted with and never will because that's a bridge too far for me with this series.

I'm disappointed that it exists.

MGSV. Single handedly putting one of my favorite series in a shallow grave earns it the top spot.

The fantastic engine and gameplay were wasted on hollow, repetitive mission design and a mute, drunken Kiefer Sutherland mumbling out his 3 contractually obligated lines made me wish it hadn't even been released at all.

Fallout 4 would have been my pick, but disappointment implies I had any faith in Todd to deliver a functioning, well designed product.

Undertale , super hyped up and still hyped by people today, this game isn't that great as everyone said it is, I did a review on this, but perfect example where the fans overhype a game and doesn't live up to the expectations.

Last of Us 2

FFXV

Death Stranding

The Outer Worlds (not Wilds)

I understand the disappointment in FFXV. Overall, I ended up liking it, but barely. One of the main things that disappointed me was how they treated Luna in the story. After building her up for so long, even during the movie, Kingsglaive, which was surprising pretty good, she gets killed off halfway through the game before she reunites with Noctis. I know this was supposed to be some sort of surprise plottwist, but that is the problem with plot twist, they can either come off as amazing like Keyser Soze in Usual Suspects, or be ridicules and borderline insulting like what happened in this game. Not to mention the fact she was originally supposed to be the main villain of the game anyway, but the writers chickened out because of fears of sexist claims. Adryn's role was supposed to be Luna's. But with that said, the combat was fun, they music amazing, the interaction between the party while traveling was endearing enough for me to like it, even though I didn't like the whole Jpop boy band concept.

yeah i'd (at least partially) back you on that one. it isn't my most disappointing- but after hearing this website opine about its diamond-in-the-rough quality, i thought for sure it would resonate. it really didn't click with me though (despite my stubborn need to get all of the 'main' endings).

I have tried and failed to even finish this game so many times. This basically completely meshes with my sentiment of the game...and yet, I just downloaded it again to give it another go? Maybe it will click this time? But as of now, it definitely at least somewhat tracks as disappointing for me.

For me, Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the selection I would have to make. I wasn't overly hyped for it like many that had their world's nearly shattered by it, but I did expect extremely high quality from the studio that made The Witcher 3, and what came out was pretty mediocre at best, IMO.

For Gran Turismo Sport, I remembered this game received a lot of complaints about not including GT League at launch until the Gran Turismo franchise's 20th anniversary on December 23rd, 2017.

The same goes how Forza Motorsport 7 received a lot of complaints as well.

Not to mention that this game didn't include some other characters such as Ikaruga, Katsuragi, etc.

Animal Crossing: As much as Nintendo likes to innovate and then carbonite their innovations animals crossing is the most phone it in franchise. Though I never played the current version the delay out of September and then the final release reviews kept me from buying a Switch. All of my apprehension about buying a Switch would have been assuaged with a solid Animal Crossing. If you like this game it’s your first Animal Crossing and not your 4th.

Cuphead: Way too hard a game in a genre that I havent completed, a side scrolling game, in nearly 20 years. Just realized that while typing this. Dumb it down. Maybe there’s an easy mode but I’ll feel bad about myself if I play it like that.

Black Ops 4: I used to buy all the CODs with all the dlc and enjoy the hype cycle for each of the content packs in the days before their release. Knowing I had a single player campaign to go back to meant that one day I’d go back play the single player and make sense out of the dozens of hours I put into multiplayer with no context or why maps are chosen and how everything ties in together. This game was a PUBG rip off to the point that they canceled the single player experience. I feel bad for all of the developers and writers that had written a masterpiece and then had all of that pitched into the garbage.

Wolfenstein Youngblood: This series with female protagonists? Sign me up. Broken forced co-op and chatty protagonists. I finished the previous 3 Wolfensteins but wouldn’t recommend this for even $5.

SWBF1: Multiplayer only? They rectified that with SWBF2 but the multiplayer was so fun and I wanted a campaign. This was the age of doing your research saving me. I’d be pissed if I got the special edition ps4 or actually didn’t play this through games with gold.

Persona 5: The dungeons and combat interrupted the excellent life sim. Give me a game that auto battles all of that.

I put 70 plus hours into it, so yes I thought it was great, and yet I'd still say MGS5 probably. I saw someone else say it and I'd have to agree. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. MGS always had cool settings: Shadow Moses, Big Shell, the Jungles in MGS3, and even the world-hopping environments in MGS4 and Peace Walker I enjoyed it, but in MGSV it was underwhelming.

While I'd say the previous MGS games took control away from the player to give the story, I still preferred that to the comparatively weaker story V had. The gameplay was good, but I didn't get out of it as much as other people seemed to with the 'if you think you can do it, you can do it' kind of gameplay. I wish the game had more music options too with the walkman. The choice of 80s music wasn't great, and the lack of many original MGS1 - 4 or other Kojima game songs was disappointing.

Oh! Shoot, actually, my choices would probably be Quantum Break and Control. For me, bother paled in comparison to Alan Wake. Their stories, environments, and sound designs were all a step back to me.

This would be a difficult question if cyberpunk 2077 wasn't a thing

@gtxforza: Hard for me to take anyone complaining about GT Sport and it's lack of singe player content seriously when they so heavily marketed it as an online multiplayer racer.

Also, can we just put an entire company here? Cause Nintendo was super depressing this generation. All the excitement of the switch and Nintendo finally changing things up with their main franchises (Zelda and to a lesser extent Mario) had me super excited for their future. Then Zelda ended up being so-so and they put out a few other interesting games in the first year before spending the next 4 years sitting back on their asses putting out overpriced remasters, wii-u ports, and same-old same-old add +1 to the number sequels. Not to even mention the complete joke of forcing a subscription service for online play and still not being able to figure out how to do online (friend codes?! Still?!).

Yeah, it is true that GT Sport is marketed as a simcade racer but the reason it had to remain as simcade just like Forza Motorsport? because to make it accessible for any motorsport fans to pick up and play, if it was a proper sim racer match to iRacing, rFactor, or Assetto Corsa in terms of the driving model then most players would say it's too hard or something plus I can see the Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport series are both more popular than Assetto Corsa.

I prefer the Assetto Corsa series more than every other racing game at this moment.

From what you've said on Nintendo, it's your entire opinion and not facts, but if you don't like Nintendo, please don't bother to trash talk on that otherwise you will give PC, PlayStation, and Xbox fans a bad name.

For me, Nintendo is a legendary company that inspired several gaming companies on how to create good games so I personally choose to respect them.

I'm personally okay with paying for console multiplayer subscription services such as PSN, Xbox Live, and Nintendo Switch Online.

Easy answer. Destiny. Sad that a game that played so well was so goddamn boring, hollow and repetitive. Got the season pass and never even bothered with it. what a dissapointing shit show of a game.

Halo 5 mostly because of how misleading the the marketing around the campaign was. "The greatest hunt in video game history." I understand they ending up having to make drastic changes because of the original backlash to H4s campaign, but I wish they would have been upfront

@gtxforza: I mean if you wanna talk facts you can check out this website to view what they've put out since 2018. And lets see...

Started off 2018 with a rerelease of Bayonetta 1-2 for switch, then released a new kirby and labo; followed by 2 more re-releases with hyrule warriors and donkey kong. Then they released sushi striker, (another) mario tennis game, (another) mario party, re-released pokemon yellow (let's go eevee/pikachu), (another) smash bros, and ended 2018 with fitness boxing.

For 2019 they start off strong with a re-release of new super mario bros U, followed by yoshi's crafted world and a labo DLC. Then we got Mario maker 2 (basically a re-release of mario maker 1), (another) fire emblem, and a zelda remake (awakening). They ended the year with ring fit (something actually new and interesting), (another) luigi's mansion, (another) pokemon, and a brain training game.

Then we come to 2020. We got pokemon mystery dungeon, (another) animal crossing (with a completely broken multiplayer), a re-release of xenoblade 1, a new paper mario, re-released pikmin 3, mario kart live, (another) fitness boxing, (another) hyrule warriors, and capped the year by stopping the sale of the steaming pile of super mario 3d all stars.

So of that list 9/29 were straight up remake/remasters/re-releases and 11 more of those were basic formulaic "make the same game but increase the number at the end by +1" releases; all of which I might add were released at full price and Nintendo is the worst of all the publishers about giving any sort of discount or even long term price decrease for any of their games.

Now that's not to say that just because they are re-releases or "another one of those" games that it makes the games bad; but it does make it pretty disappointing for fans who are tired of the same-old games for the past 3+ generations.

It is either Mass Effect Andromeda or Anthem for me.

Didn't you obey what I've said? please do not rant on Nintendo because you're about to give PC fans, PlayStation fans, and Xbox fans a bad name.

You don't seem to understand why Nintendo's developers decided to re-release and remake the old games? because first of all, not everyone had previous generations of consoles, they missed out plus they really want to play them on the Nintendo Switch, or either those who played them before, they personally wanted to play it again by buying them for their collection.

Similar to how Sony Interactive Entertainment's developers decided to remaster their PS3 and PS Vita's 1st parties for PS4 because not every PS4 owner had a PS3 and PS Vita while they wanted to play their 1st parties.

The reason why Nintendo wanted to release games that utilize Labo (Because to make it more variety, plus having a huge amount of different types of audiences around the world) and they had 2 different models of R/C Karts (Mario and Luigi for Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit) which is made for those who love playing Kart Racing games or playing with R/C vehicles in general.

Edit: All proper mature people shouldn't troll on things that they don't like plus don't be an elitist of PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.

I don't understand this mr Forza. Like to me, this just seems like one dude voicing his opinion. Why does that reflect badly on everyone outside the Nintendo ecosystem? No one elected ev77 as the spokesman for all of us. No one would judge millions of people based on the opinions of one person on the internet. He's allowed to feel this way and voice it. There are plenty of people out there that like or dislike Nintendo and that's totally fine. Just like people are allowed to say that bands like Radiohead, Fleet Foxes and The Killers suck while i enjoy those a lot.

There's nothing elitist or extremist about pointing out that Nintendo generally plays it safe with their established IP and that The Killers keep chasing that Bruce Springsteen dragon too much. I tend to like that, but if you're looking for something new and exciting, it's only natural to be dissapointed when the creator has decided that this is the road that they want to keep on going down. While those that love the status-quo are more than happy to see it continue. Just like there are people that love everything FromSoftware has been doing this decade, while others just wish it blew over and they got back to Armored Core or created something entirely different.

Oh ok, now I've got on what you meant Onemanarmyy.

I'm with you, I don't know if it's most disappointing for me but it's definitely up there. I enjoyed the story for the most part, but the combat... To say it was a slog is an understatement. It alternated from boring to frustrating endlessly, and I'm pretty sure I let out an audible 'Oh, fuck this' when I backtracked and had a room of enemies respawn on me. Not that it was difficult to clear the room. I just didn't want to.

Nioh 2 was the game that I wanted Sekiro to be.

I can't tell if you're either missing my point, trolling, or just saw "Ssenran Kagura" and immediately went to Rule 34.

The idea of "generation" has become a little flurry, but if it includes Cyberpunk, then it is the obvious answer.

Runners up (but on a personal level): Arkham Knight and Fallout 4. I could include Andromeda or Anthem there, but I never expected much from B-Tier Bioware at that point.

I just missed your point, my bad.

Two games that have been stated before in this thread for me and honestly its a hard one to pick between.

Persona 5, as the follow up to Persona 4 from a gameplay standpoint absolutely knocks it out of the park. However from a narrative standpoint it's the weakest of the new age persona games by far and that is enough to drag it down for me. I'm still (and I could totally be wrong) under the impression the game went though multiple rewrites, and it really shows to me with some characters just being forgotten about and the overall theme's the game tries to portray. The climax and end are hot trash too.

Spelunky 2, a bunch of physics stuff works differently and the game tries to actively kill you on accident and its impossible to account for everything happening to you or will happen to you in the level. The great thing about Spelunky was as long as you take into account all the hazards around you actively you have the advantage. Spelunky 2 something incredibly off screen will just decide to show back up and kill you. I want to try getting back into it and give it another look at though, initial 15 hours of play though... it feels like the game was designed for you to play it with someone else this time to be honest.

I loved the environment and story in Control. From the perspective of everything other than actual gameplay, it was one of my favourite games of the last few years.

I turned on assists for the combat to make it trivial after playing for a few hours. The combat was too repetitive and everything was too spongy. The combat killed the pacing of the game. I wanted to see cool shit, not fight the same identical enemies over and over again.