Shit games that could have been good

[Tren Shapiro]

Final Fantasy XV could've been great if after 40 years of development they released a finished fucking game.

 

[Smug]

It's too obvious but I'll say it anyway:
Warcraft 3: Reforged

All they had to do was take WC3:TFT, upscale the graphics and add in a handful of extra cinematic cutscenes. That's it. The programming for gameplay etc. could have effectively been a copy-paste job. It would have still sold like hotcakes and all they had to do for it was put their art team to work on it for a few months.

I don't know if there's a better example of finding a loss out of what should have been a slam-dunk easy win.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Given some time to think, I'll come up with a ton.

Off the top of my head, Sunless Sea (that i've mentioned before) has a god-tier high concept of exploring a sort of Victorian Gothic world in a pitch-black cavern at the center of the Earth with a steamboat where the islands rearrange themselves. This, unfortunately, was chained to a glorified visual novel with clumsy writing-by-thesaurus that couldn't pick whether it wanted to be goofy kid's fare (island of talking guinea pigs) or babby's first eldritch horror, and a brutal but pointless roguelike (permadeath and mild island rearrangement) system.

Bounty Train has a badass concept of being like Sid Meier's Pirates but with Civil War era trains, you train, you have train races (chases) and shootouts, and the Union and Confederacy fight over cities. Unfortunately, the shootouts are ridiculously unbalanced, the trading mechanics are boring, I feel like if it had been explicitly made to rip-off Pirates it would have gone better, particularly in having the world be reactive (you ship in certain kinds of supplies, a place develops more in a certain way with an impact on the war).

 

[Becomemysoulreaver12]

Sonic 06, if the original planned 2007 release had stayed I am moro than sure that the game could have been something special, the game as it stands now has a lot of interesting and even great level design, but the broken nature of it and the controls being in an obvious unfinished state make it a truly sad thing to see imo.
You can even see how much better it is by just making the controls better with a couple of mods, and it becomes much much better with the inproved physics and slight modifications from project 06.

 

[Sniperwoof]

There's a stealth action game called Red Ninja the end of honor for the PS2. It's a Tenchu/Metal Gear ripoff set in feudal Japan where you play as a female ninja who dresses like an absolute whore.

The interesting thing is that this actually has gameplay implications. If guards see you they will assume you are a prostitute and you can beckon for them to follow you into cover for a blowie and then stealth kill them.

It's a very bad game but that's actually pretty fucking cool. I can't think of another game that lets you do this.

 

[HeyYou]

Half of these games aren't shit, they're just disappointing.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a buggy, bland, repetitive, dumbed down sequel to Morrowind. You can find 12 hour video essays on this for more details.

This is a good example. Yeah Oblivion was disappointing to a lot of people and it has a lot of issues but I don't think most people would consider it shit (although leaving the level scaling unmodded might make you want to tear your hair out). Superman 64 would be my choice. There's an entire open world that's completely relegated to flying through shitty rings and some of the levels that barely anyone played because you have to get past the rings aren't completely terrible. Superman Returns is what 64 would have been if it wasn't insanely rushed.

 

[习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想]

Edge of Eternity comes to mind. Granted, I'm not sure how an indie studio could successfully pull off something of that scale anyway.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

There's a stealth action game called Red Ninja the end of honor for the PS2. It's a Tenchu/Metal Gear ripoff set in feudal Japan where you play as a female ninja who dresses like an absolute whore.

The interesting thing is that this actually has gameplay implications. If guards see you they will assume you are a prostitute and you can beckon for them to follow you into cover for a blowie and then stealth kill them.

It's a very bad game but that's actually pretty fucking cool. I can't think of another game that lets you do this.

You don't get to play as one, but the Italian Assassin's Creed games and AC4 Black Flag let you hire prostitutes/courtesans to go distract guards.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Streets of SimCity. Horribly rushed, buggy piece of shit that coincided with the death of Maxis as an independent studio. But it was still fun when it worked and had a nice soundtrack.

SimCopter was also in the same situation as Streets, as it was also buggy and prone to crashing, but the gameplay was hella fun when the game works, with the novelty of being able to fly around in your SimCity 2000 cities, and the soundtrack was great. I do wonder how future Maxis games would have gone, had they kept on using the cross-game compatibility deal with their much later games.

There was the feature in SimCity 4 where you can import The Sims 1 Sims in your city to be observers, and you can use SimCity 4 to create custom terrains for neighborhoods in The Sims 2. The games after that didn't have the said cross-game compatibility, sadly.

 

[A-Stump]

There's a stealth action game called Red Ninja the end of honor for the PS2. It's a Tenchu/Metal Gear ripoff set in feudal Japan where you play as a female ninja who dresses like an absolute whore.

The interesting thing is that this actually has gameplay implications. If guards see you they will assume you are a prostitute and you can beckon for them to follow you into cover for a blowie and then stealth kill them.

It's a very bad game but that's actually pretty fucking cool. I can't think of another game that lets you do this.

Man I love Tenchu but as a kid a lot of the shit was esoteric and hard to figure out. With cheats enabled it's a stupidly fun glitchy mess.

 

[skykiii]

Time for a deep cut.

There was this Windows 3.1/95 era game called Outpost.

Outpost was a game I recall loving when I was young, and growing up had no idea why people called it a "bad" game. It was, however, also a game I sucked at... one of those cases where I didn't clue in to a bunch of the mechanics until I got older. Unfortunately figuring out how to play properly was also what shed light for me on why the game had a nasty reputation.

Outpost was by Sierra On-Line, a company that at the time was known as "fuck you for making this puzzle so obtuse and making me die for a stupid reason!" In other words, point n' click adventure games. But for some reason they decided to make a city management sim, one which they claimed to have put actual real research into.

The premise was that the Earth is about to be hit by a meteor that will likely cause the end of the world (that seems to have been a stupidly common plot in the 1990s), so a bunch of people are being shuttled off to survive. Fun fact... you get to send probes to different star systems and if you select one with no habitable planets you can actually lose before the game even really begins. But the game will recommend a system if you ask.

Once you get to a planet, half the survivors break off and found their own city elsewhere so that you have competition. There is no combat though... its just "see who builds a better city." These days, I'm usually so good at the game that the rebel colony becomes a ghost town as I'm just that much better.

Outpost has a decent remix of Ride of the Valkyries (a song I to this day associate with this game) and the graphical style really appeals to me, one of those cases where you might be able to name things that are "similar but not exactly the same."

But here's where the problems are:

First, there's a lot of micromanagement. For example you can build luxury-producing factories.. but you have to directly tell them what to produce.

A part of me wants to love it because of one aspect... you can set them to produce Strategy Guides for Laura Bow 2 or Police Quest 4 (in general I always loved how Sierra's games were inter-connected like this). But at the same time.... you really shouldn't need your leader to directly tell you what to make.

Some mechanics aren't explained very well. One issue I had as a kid is I would always mine to the deepest levels on resource spots, which it turns out is a BAD idea... you're supposed to go deeper only when a mine starts drying up.

But the big problem was the bugs. These unfortunately never got fixed, despite the game getting several patches. And one of the worst bugs was one that would cause citizens to keep dying each turn for no reason until everyone was dead. Nobody is sure what triggers it.

Thing is, this game DOES have victory conditions--most notably, building a space program and sending a shuttle back to Earth to see if our motherworld survived. My sister says she did it once, but I never managed before the death bug kicked in.

But thing is, to me, Outpost is a good game that just has really bad bugs. If someone were to fan-patch it or even do a remake, it would probably have its chance to shine.

Instead Sierra tried to do a sequel, Outpost 2, but that one tried to ride the coattails of the then-burgeoning RTS market and to me just wasn't as good... although it also is a game I have a soft spot for.

 

[SnowBall]

Sims 4 has a lot of really good ideas and potential but of course greed and incompetence ruined it. A shame since there are aspects I do like about the game.

 

[Judge Dredd]

My choice is low hanging fruit, but Destiny. Jeff Gerstmann's rant about it is legendary.

But in short, everything was in place for Destiny to be the next big thing. At least as big as Halo if not bigger. Then management fucked it all up when they decided 5 years into a 6 year project that they didn't like the story. They ripped that out and cobbled together a game with the parts that were left. Some of the DLCs were found on the disc, and the game was still using Destiny 1 alpha leftovers as late as Destiny 2.

The shooting is great, and the remnants of what lore and ideas that remain hint at something truly special. All it was lacking was content and story, both of which appear to have been cut in the name of corporate greed.

And the cherry on top, Activision is mostly blameless since they were very generous with contracts and let Bungie do their own thing. It was entirely a Bungie management fuck up.

If the shooting starts, restart.

Further compounding that is you have two loadouts. You either have a pea shooter and a disguise, or you walk in dressed for the North Hollywood shootout. And some story missions force you into combat.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Spore

Man all you had to do was put SimLife, SimCity and SimSpace from one end to the other and it would had been great.

Not sure how you fuck that up. The community was there. The creators were working fine. What happened?

 

[Orkeosaurus]

Bannerlord fucking sucks and is just a glorified mod platform. It's so goddamn barebones it's sad. I honestly can't think of a single thing substantive they've added to the game in two years.

 

[Hepativore]

I had high hopes for Scorn, but it cannot make up its mind on whether or not it wants to be a puzzle game like Myst, or a combat game like an FPS. The game has a lot of very interesting environments, but it feels like the development team spent all of its time on the atmosphere of the game, as it is very short and comes off as unfinished. Plus, from what the concept book implies, 95% of the concepts in it never made it into the game and you would never even know what the story was unless you looked at the concept book.

Scorn could have been great, but it seems rushed and unfinished despite how long it had been in development. The bioweapons were cool, but you only get most of them towards the end of the game and when you get the final weapon, you are forced into using it after one boss battle as you lose your other weapons.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

There's a shit ton if you go back to the NES and SNES. Many just need a tweak here or there, something like an improvement patch to iron out the kinks or decrease the bullshit artificial difficulty.

Ninja Gaiden NES would be an good example. Just fix the respawning nonsense and maybe enemy placement in a few sections, and you have a very playable game.

There is this indie game that pretty much does that.

Oniken: Unstoppable Edition on Steam

When a global war nearly decimated humankind, an evil military organization called Oniken takes advantage of the situation to dominate and oppress the few remaining survivors. Even though any resistance to this organization seemed hopeless, a small rebel movement organizes strikes against Oniken.

store.steampowered.com

A Ninja Gaiden clone without knock back, sprite flickering and enemy respanwn, it is still a hard game since it still uses limited lives and continues, but for what it is, i think it's a good game if you're in the mood for a game that looks and plays like a NES game without it being held back by the system's limitations or bullshit design to make more money out of rentals.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

There is this indie game that pretty much does that.

Oniken: Unstoppable Edition on Steam

When a global war nearly decimated humankind, an evil military organization called Oniken takes advantage of the situation to dominate and oppress the few remaining survivors. Even though any resistance to this organization seemed hopeless, a small rebel movement organizes strikes against Oniken.

store.steampowered.com

A Ninja Gaiden clone without knock back, sprite flickering and enemy respanwn, it is still a hard game since it still uses limited live and continues, but for what it is, i think it's a good game if you're in the mood for a game that looks and plays like a NES game without it being hold back by the system's limitation or bullshit design to make more money out or rentals.

Oh yeah, that game is cool, I didn't get too far but I liked what I played for sure. Same dev made Odallus: The Dark Call, sort of Castlevania-ish, I guess. Really good and a bit easier than Oniken but still not a cakewalk.

I think the dev is a tranny though, which means I'll unfortunately be pirating anything he makes next.

 

[Product Placement]

REmak 3: What there was is good just very little of it, give it an extra year in dev time to add the stuff cut from the OG game plus expand and add new areas on top of that.

Crash The Wrath of Cortex: Fix loading when it first game out, remove powers up like the slow walk on nitro which breaks the pacing of the game, have the boss fights be different Crash villains each time, remove the coco levels and replace with normal levels, cut the stage gimmicks such as riding a truck . There you have removed most the bullshit, making it a far better game,

The Last of Us Part 2: The gameplay in this one is on point, the game in terms of graphics and how it runs is also very good. Issue is the story is bad at best and lazy at worst, but even with a shitty story the game could have been good if the pacing was dogshit with most of the game you just walking and looking around rather than do anything engaging.

Croc: Have it control like a normal 3d platformer rather than the tank controls it has.

Drakengard 3: Have the frame rate not be 10fps most of the time.

 

[Second Sun]

Dawn of War 3. If they'd just remade 1 with shinier graphics it would have sold like hotcakes.