Shit games that could have been good

[Slav Power]

Liberty city in GTAIV included new jersey so it could've had the pine barrens area, but what did GTAV did with all that wilderness besides the hunting minigames?

That's the thing, nothing. You had tons of wilderness but it had nothing interesting, the most interesting thing you could do in that game was to make a loop around the map and that's about it. GTA V was artificially big.

 

[cybertoaster]

That's the thing, nothing. You had tons of wilderness but it had nothing interesting, the most interesting thing you could do in that game was to make a loop around the map and that's about it. GTA V was artificially big.

Oh I know, glad I'm not the only one who was disappointed by that. Take for example the whole desert area between los santos and the trailer park town where Trevor lives: you got huge areas like the wind power field where not only no mission happens in the game but you're never made to go thru there at all, why go thru the trouble of modeling that place when there are no missions at all? I think there was one, one single mission in GTAO that made use of that area, and that's all. The prison barely got one random encounter in the main game and two missions in GTAO. The huge military base got one rampage mission and one GTAO mission.

You can tell the game was half-baked in that among other things we were told all buildings would have interiors we could walk in yet in reality there are less buildings with interiors than in GTAIV, probably SA too. There's a mod for that but the fact modders had to step in for a $100 million game its lame. Guess R* cared more about graphics and cinematics than the actual 'game' part of GTAV.

Kane and Lynch as characters are interesting

Eh, it feels like mid-2000 "grit for grit's sake" characters, like one-dimensional but on purpose, you know what I mean?

Still I'm surprised it got a sequel, don't know anyone who bought the original, specially after the paid review controversy.

the game looks pretty damn good - especially for a game from 2007

Not really, you had GoW just the previous year which while basically a tech demo it looked way better.

If they bothered to polish the game and up the story, characters, fix bugs and get the mechanics straightened out, this could have been a gem.

So basically made a new game then. Jokes aside I feel most of the posts here fall into "it wouldnt be bad if it wasn't halfway done".

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Tell me about it, I knew those guys from back when they were making Lugaru which had the same cringy too-realistic furry style, but the gameplay concept was great, I remember a friend saying it played like 3D sonic games should, and maybe he had a point.

But between the cringy art style and DNF-level of dev fuckery its never gonna be done.

Really? not surprising just never heard of that, and furries rarely STFU about their "achievements"

No they don't, its the same generic anime girl with big tits and insane clothes over and over, can't even tell them apart because the artists don't even have a style for each game so it could be from kancole or that korean one with the guns, or the one where all you see is ass all the time, and you can't tell them apart because they all look the same.

It wasn't even good enough to run properly in the hardware of that time, I recently got my old X360 out of the garage and fired up GTAIV. I did remember the game wasn't super smooth but dude the framerate is shit! and lets not even talk about the abomination that was the PC version, modders should get a nobel prize for getting that hunk of crap to run at 60fps.

Liberty city in GTAIV included new jersey so it could've had the pine barrens area, but what did GTAV did with all that wilderness besides the hunting minigames?

GTA Vs map was piss. Tons of empty wasted space and locations the game never uses. I get that the typical way to play a GTA is to just rampage, but I think a well designed open world should create reasons to show off each set piece location even if it doesn’t have to resort to a checklist of 100%ing places. Red Dead did a better job, in both games, of drawing attention to its environments; so did GTA SA.

 

[Kharash]

One game I thought had a really cool concept but fell flat on its ass was Greedfall. The premise is colonial expansion of the Americas but with magic and bullshit.

It was a good enough RPG that kind of reminded me of Dragon Age with its combat. The problem is, when it came to combat, you could set basic party behavior and it would work for almost every encounter. The only time I died was through negligence when the game would toss the very occasional curveball encounter.

The quests killed that game. 95% of the quests were go here and talk to this person. OK that's fine. It encourages exploring in this brave new world. Nope half these assholes are too lazy to walk 50 yards in the same settlement. There's so much more I could go on about with poor design and missed opportunities.

Tldr; Greedfall was a really cool concept but turned out boring and tedious.

It was developed by supreme turbojank devs Spiders. It was never going to be good.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

I feel like there could have been a good version of Hunt Down The Freeman.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Imagine making money hand over fist with that and not use it to finish a game you been working on for what, almost 2 decades now?

Valve syndrome.

 

[cybertoaster]

Valve syndrome.

Its different, we never even got to see HL3, while both lugaru and the other one have been in early access hell forever. Its again more like DNF where the devs were constantly adding shit to the game and not having a clear idea of what the end product should be like.

 

[Johannesburglurker]

Stronghold 2. I think it could have been a strong franchise, but they shit the bed with 2 and the series suffered a stunning decline afterwards. They expanded on the core systems in all the wrong ways (gong/rats/crime are fucking miserable), the transition to 3D was jank as fuck, the campaigns sucked ass, the characters had none of the charm of the first two games, and Simon (the lead designer) prefers really small maps because he's a drooling retard (fun fact, Crusader 2 can actually support the largest maps in the franchise, but you wouldn't know that from the skirmish trail).

It's especially frustrating because as far as I know no one has copied the formula. That mix of comfy city building/management and RTS gameplay activates my brain in just the right way.

 

[Sneak 'n' Snore]

I'll go with the most recent one I can think of:
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were the games that made me pick up Pokemon again out of curiosity after I dropped the series with Sun & Moon and its frustrating how improvements like the removal of random encounters, not being as story and dialogue heavy or just the way you can explore the region are held back by the horrible presentation and some still on-going issues with the series like the bad postgame or the difficulty being too easy even for Pokemon. Automatic party share EXP meant I was constantly worried about being over leveled.

Another one I want to mention is LISA: The Joyful.
Without rewriting the story this is hard to fix but but the combat becomes stupidly one-sided after Rando leaves and with no other party members Buddy by herself will just alternate between attacking and mending for the remainder of the game which makes all the encounters feel trivial.

 

[Thiletonomics]

I feel like Sims 3 as it is could've been great, but the issue was that the code of the game was way way worse than even the one in Sims 2. Sims 2 already suffered from world corruption, but Sims 3 took it to another level, with mods that could completely break everything, and even worse, add that broken code to every other mod or anything custom made.

And if that wasn't enough, the "load and simulate the entire map at once" idea led to the performance crippling, especially with every new expansion pack, as EA was adding too much and the code was too shoddy to handle it all. Even today, if you install every single possible mod to get the game running better, it will still run worse than Sims 2 without any perfomance tweaks.

The worst part about how The Sims 3 turned out, is that EA never tried to improve upon the formula with The Sims 4, and instead made TS4 a game that was so shallow and hollow, that it made TS3 seem like a much better game. And TS4 isn't one of those games that could be fixed with just patching, the original development of the game being a multiplayer game meant that the only way to fix it, is to throw it out, and start over to do it correctly.

Also, with the upcoming Sims game (the dev name of it is Project Rene), it looks like that EA will still make the same mistakes that they did with TS4's development.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were the games that made me pick up Pokemon again out of curiosity after I dropped the series with Sun & Moon and its frustrating how improvements like the removal of random encounters, not being as story and dialogue heavy or just the way you can explore the region are held back by the horrible presentation and some still on-going issues with the series like the bad postgame or the difficulty being too easy even for Pokemon. Automatic party share EXP meant I was constantly worried about being over leveled.

The performance issues of the game are even more glaring, to the point that it's frustrating to see people continue to defend the game, while other games have gotten outright hate and disgust (it was deserved though) from their communities for having a terrible launch, i.e. Battlefield 2042.

 

[Asian tech support]

Probably a lukewarm take, but Darktide. If anyone cares, it's a 40k offshoot of the Vermintide games which in turn are L4D clones primarily focused on melee combat over ranged.

Spoiler: Vermintide nonsense

Vermintide 1 was pretty good from launch and fairly well supported. VT2 was a mess at launch and support was sporadic. The game did not improve gradually over time, instead riding some autistic roller coaster of questionable quality for the last five years. The lowest point for the game was right after its 2.0 (Winds of Magic) patch, which changed core mechanics in ways that not only made the game worse, but were also reported as being shit near unanimously by beta testers months and months in advance. As of the last year and a half, the game has been in a good place, but the years of shit support ate into the playerbase hard.

In true 40k fashion, Darktide was billed as being more focused on ranged gameplay than its predecessors. Unfortunately, the gunplay is abysmal; it does this thing where when the firearm recoils, the reticle bounces around the screen instead of the entire screen adjusting itself. It's hard to describe but it feels shit. The melee combat which was the pride of the VT series was lobotomized; most weapons' attacks can't be comboed in elaborate fashion a la its predecessors and only one weapon, the combat knife, felt like a true Vermintide weapon. The melee combat lacks the precision that the older titles have.

Fatshart Fatshark (the studio) also made the impossibly stupid decision to make the game a "live service", which resulted in the game having all of the downsides such as no content, bloated weeklies for basically no reward, an unbelievably stingy (and unreliable) loot system, and none of the upsides. Most of the staple features from both Vermintide games were either cut or incomplete, including fucking weapon crafting augmenting. Cash shop worked like a charm though.

To cap it all off, FS has ignored their own forums, going to media outlets to shit on the forum and other detractors there, rather than have a proper confrontation. I'm bitter.

 

[A Happy Cheerful]

Post GBA Pokemon games could be saved if you could play as Leaf and if the completely shit girls like Lillie and Nemona were deleted from existence.

 

[Book Thief]

Dwarf Fortress. After 200 hours of the Premium release, there are just too many rough edges for me to continue to bother. The "rich history" concept is really just spamming random nonsense. The game remembers all this useless garbage but refuses to tell you much about things that actually matter. There's some fun to be had, but unless your autism profile matches the devs, you're gonna have a bad time.

Speaking as someone who has played the game for years, the problem I have with the Steam version release was the shit UI. I know the original is no saint in that regard, but it is miles better than the turd they squeezed out for that version. Being forced to use the mouse makes the game feel like a chore to play, because navigating the menus exclusively via mouse makes it take ten times longer. I also hate how they tried to make the labor system more "user friendly" by dumbing down the system to a bunch of generic one-size-fits-all deal, and if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of assigning labors, you have to go through the effort of creating a "labor profile," which takes up even more time, resulting in a system that is so thoroughly neutered that it impedes functionality for experienced users.

Also, it's been several months since the Steam version has been released, and half the game is still fucking missing, meaning you've literally paid money for less product compared to a free game.

 

[Bunny Tracks]

Homefront could've easily been a masterpiece if the devs put as much effort into the rest of the game as they did the opening cutscene.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I wouldn't say it's shit yet, but there are two things really bringing down Ancestors: Humankind Odyssey for me.

The first, and this is a common complaint, is that the game isn't hard so much as it doesn't explain anything to you. That's intentional, because it wants you to feel like an ape trying to through trial and error comprehend its environment. The problem is that that's not fun. You get slashed by a puma, you're going to die because you don't know which herb to gather (and even if you did, it is very easy to get lost in a jungle with a "remember" feature that only lasts for a few seconds, useless). Get snakebit, same problem, but you also have to figure out how to get the coconut open by yourself. How to mate and how to evolve efficiently, no, figure it out yourself. Recruit new apes? No, we won't tell you how to. See, I see the idea behind making the player explore their environment and figure out how to play, but if you go too far with it you end up ruining it because when the absolute most basic things to keep the whole gang from dying are hidden, then you HAVE to use guides and research it and then that undercuts the whole exploration angle. A lot of other survival games don't have this problem while still feeling very exploratory.

The other disappointment is that I had the impression the game was about teching up to humans, but it's not, you terminate at austrolopithecus, no fire or clothing or such, and that's a real shame because it would be interesting if the game (much like Atilla Total War) included the concept of a tech tree forcing you to "forget" things (you evolve into a man that's better at using tools and superior intelligence, but you lose a lot of the mobility and raw strength of an ape swinging from limb to limb).

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

In reference to above, Ancestors gets really good if you do look up how to play it. 10/10 is nice foraging with my clan, wish I could be a gorilla

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Some time back I rambled about two games I was playing at the same time (that nobody cares about), Nantucket and Amazing American Circus. I never did finish the last one - got to the last boss fight, couldn't beat it, and didn't give a fuck because it had soured on me by that point - and the other one is like Pirates, you only play it in spurts.

There was something funny about each, though, in that they both had a problem that could have been solved by swapping their concept. Nantucket is one of this interesting little genre of literature adaptations, take an old book and make a game of it. It's basically a retarded Moby Dick sequel, and it had actual quests and shit. Probably not many, I assume, but there is SOME semblance of a narrative. But then they added this DLC that expanded the map to include the whole world, but only for this bullshit "Challenge Mode" where you are in a decades-long competition to be the greatest whaler of all time (the other whalers are real historical figures, but you won't know who the fuck they are unless you read books, some aren't even on Wikipedia). Now, you could say that this is fine, it's another option, but I always have this deep conflict because I DO want to see the stupid whale story, but the gameplay is so shitty without the circular flow of a world map (trade winds and multiple choices of how to navigate around) that I just cannot bring myself to do the story mode.

On the other hand, Amazing American Circus has a narrative about trying to win the big circus tournament (what the fuck) by putting on shows so amazing they'll blow the dicks off your competition and make them drop out and probably kill themselves. It's like a shitty kid's sports movie. And AAC wanted to have quests and such, but you quickly find that they're mostly awful, it's like Scooby Doo in reverse where everything is about ghosts with horrible voice acting and cringey dialogue.

What they should have done was Nantucket should have just had the damn world map in the story mode and Amazing American Circus should have ditched its awful writing and had it be a competition to be the Greatest Show on Earth, which would have fit thematically. It could have framed it around getting the right to exhibit at the Chicago World Fair. Historically, Buffalo Bill was rejected from it and had to exhibit on the outskirts. I could imagine a mini-alt history where if you beat the competition AND cross a minimum threshold by that end date then you win. Other circuses could have moved around the map in competition with you (instead of being weird boss fights) with real-life strategic interactions like sabotaging their caravans. AAC also had this bizarre decision to gate the regions and artificially lengthened itself by having unnecessary choices, is shit. Just make the whole map open for christ's sake.

It's a shame, both games are great proofs of concept but underbaked, but they'll never get fully baked because nobody gives a fuck about circuses and whales, it's a miracle either exists in the first place.

 

[Ser Prize]

Buried deep within this pile of shit is a good game, or at least the potential for one.

The idea of a shooter/hack and slash game where the protagonist can be dismantled and put back together has tons of potential. Get your left arm knocked off? Lose access to your two handed weapons. Lose both arms? Kicking only. Purposefully lose your arm so you can still shoot with it? Hell yeah you can make something with that idea. Make it like Devil May Cry and you could do so fucking much.

Even the characters and storyline aren't unsalvageable. The idea of centuries of loss and strife wearing down a once virtuous knight into a callout, burnt out hobo who just doesn't care anymore is a good place to start, and then you add in the angle of his wife reincarnating and you have the potential for a full ass character arc.

@Asian tech support​

They replaced the distinct and memorable characters in VT with generic created PCs. Which is retarded because the characters and their interactions in VT are some of the game's highlights.

 

[PandaChai]

The first that comes immediately to mind that hasn't been mentioned yet is  Godus. It's a fun opening prologue to an actual game that never progresses beyond the tutorial. But then that's what I get for believing Molyneux's lies. And on Kickstarter to boot.

 

[Fruttasecca]

Stronghold 2. I think it could have been a strong franchise, but they shit the bed with 2 and the series suffered a stunning decline afterwards. They expanded on the core systems in all the wrong ways (gong/rats/crime are fucking miserable), the transition to 3D was jank as fuck, the campaigns sucked ass, the characters had none of the charm of the first two games, and Simon (the lead designer) prefers really small maps because he's a drooling retard (fun fact, Crusader 2 can actually support the largest maps in the franchise, but you wouldn't know that from the skirmish trail).

It's especially frustrating because as far as I know no one has copied the formula. That mix of comfy city building/management and RTS gameplay activates my brain in just the right way.

I liked it but I was also a kid when I played it, cant really remember anything wrong with it.

The worst part about how The Sims 3 turned out, is that EA never tried to improve upon the formula with The Sims 4, and instead made TS4 a game that was so shallow and hollow, that it made TS3 seem like a much better game. And TS4 isn't one of those games that could be fixed with just patching, the original development of the game being a multiplayer game meant that the only way to fix it, is to throw it out, and start over to do it correctly.

I warmed up to it when I saw CallmeKevins Jim Pickens series. Hilarious and he never managed to replicate the chaotic insanity in the the other Sims games.