D4, Starfield, Cities Skylines 2, and Mortal Combat 1. D4 and Starfield are self explanatory. CS2 is my biggest disappointment in years. Paradox killed whatever good will it had left by forcing the demise of CO. Under no circumstances should CS2 released this year. There’s no mods. It doesn’t function in any meaningful way. It’s a performance nightmare. CS1 danced on the grave of SimCity and committed all the same sins a decade later. Don’t listen to anybody that says the game has potential. They’re sitting on 2000+ assets they can’t release because they can’t import buildings into their own city building game post release. That’s how bad it is. Cities Skylines 2 was dead on arrival and it took the community 4 months to realize it.
MC1 isn’t worthy of the K. It’s just a slog. I don’t know how much they fixed it but that doesn’t break the fact that cameos are a major turnoff. Or that it has the worse progression system of recent MK games. Or that it’s sitting on potentially one of the biggest rosters MK ever had but culled itself in half by reserving half the characters for cameos. Tekken 8 and SF6 have lapped MK hard this generation. Hell even Strive and DBFZ have taken steps to stay more relevant than MK1.
And you know what the kicker is? I bought all these games at the same time. I’ve been playing the clip of Totalbicsuit singing we don’t pre-order games a lot lately.
For CS2 I get the buyer’s remorse, but it not having potential? Are you ok?
Paradox almost always follows the pattern of launching a meh game that eventually gets good after DLC and free updates. CS1 was similar in that regard, and I have no doubt that CS2 will follow that same path. Yes, zoning tiles are wack. Yes, there is content missing from CS1. Yes, the simulation needs work. Yes, there were bugs at launch and there are still bugs even if there are fewer. Why does that mean that the game will be completely dead in a year? After playing both games over the past few months, I genuinely had more fun with CS2 and its missing content than CS1 with all of its content. The only things I really miss from CS1 are the music packs, the scenarios, the more devastating natural disasters, and the overall financial difficulty.
Have you been paying attention to the drama surrounding the game and behind the scenes at CO? I’m not gonna recap it in full but it paints a dire picture for the game’s future. CO admits the game is in a broken state then flip flops on how they’re gonna fix it. They’ve entered crisis PR mode and have gone through the rigamarole of blaming the fan base for being toxic, saying the simulation is working as intended, moving goal posts in their roadmap, to abandoning it all together, to nearly ceasing all communication with the community, to openly admitting that Paradox called them to keep up the weekly dev talks against their will. This is a panicked dev studio.
In the actual game, we’ve figured out that almost none of the simulation is working as intended. It’s so bad we’re at the point where one of the code modders came out and shamed/corrected CO with actual math errors he found in the code on the CS2 forums. We know they’re sitting on 2000+ assets and can’t put them in the game because their own asset importer is somehow broken. Modding is months away and the longer it takes the more this game will exit the zeitgeist. People are already leaving in droves. Just check the Steam charts.
Does this game have the potential to turn around. Yes. Do I trust Collosal Order to keep this ship from sinking. No, not anymore. Whatever good will they had, they burned through it in a matter of weeks with these last few Word of the Weeks. We’ve been around the block with botched game launches a lot recently. Especially this year. This is one of the rare ones where the fundamentals of the game are so broken it might not be salvageable. The lack of meaningful communication and action from CO has eroded all trust. The communication we have gotten from them has shot themselves in the foot more than quell any animosity stirring in the community. After only a handful of patches they’ve already dumped the road map and tied bug fixes to DLC. WHICH NOBODY SHOULD BUY after the way they’ve handled this game. I don’t care how much potential the base game has. It all comes down to modding support. And if all signals from CO are we’re struggling with our own code to the point where features that were days to weeks away are pushed back to almost a year, this game isn’t gonna survive. This isn’t just some half in the bag stripped down sequel that Paradox developed to be a DLC cow. This is a fundamentally broken game. By CO’s own word this game is a mess. They shit on the grave of SimCity with CS1 only to tempt the fate of Maxis with CS2.
I was aware of a lot of the stuff you mentioned and it’s all valid, but literally, what other choice do they have than to fix the game? Start a new game from scratch? If their YouTube video is accurate then they’ve been developing this game for several years already. They can’t fall back to CS1 because its player count completely tanked as well. Their options seem to be: 1. Completely die, or 2. Finish CS2 and then add content like they did with CS1.
You should also consider Paradox’s recent history. They planned to release 3 broken games in the 2nd half of 2023. 1 released and was immediately written off, the 2nd was delayed, and the 3rd was Cities: Skylines II, which sold at least 1 mil. It’s pretty clear that Paradox greenlit CS2 because it’s a successful series that would offset their other losses, and there is no way they’ll let it die.
Funnily enough CS1 has seen an uptick in players recently. It surpassed CS2’s daily player count. The 24 hour peak is almost 4000 more than CS2 yesterday. 10k to 6k rounding up.
Let me be clear, I don’t wish for this game to die. CS1 is my most played game of the last decade. I really wanted CS2 to be that going forward. Before Cities Skylines, the game I’ve put the most time into in my life was SimCity 4. When Sim City 2013 came along I thought just like you that there’s no way that one of the most beloved video games series of all time crumble like this.
Reality is CS2 has just as much a chance to be abandoned as SC13. It really hinges on what they do next. If it’s not a bug fix or mod support they’re doomed. If they really start pushing DLC and tie bug fixes to that, the message is clear. They don’t care about the quality of the game and it’s just another cash cow. And let’s be crystal clear. Since Paradox went public this game lasting will be more dependent on what sales look like going forward. We’ve already seen cracks in that when Paradox released their investor call and showed disappointment in CS2’s post launch performance. That will kill this game.
Ultimately this game can die not because they decided to stop working on it or Paradox breaks from CO. It will die because nobody will want to support it. It will die because modders will abandon it and move on. Investors can pressure them to leave it behind. The community that supports it will leave. A game like this thrives with a community behind it. If that community decides to abandon it, then this game will fade away despite CO/Paradox’s efforts to keep it afloat.
Everybody is looking at this game like it’s the next No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. That blind hope is great if you like the game, but to everybody else this has the same chance to be Cities XL, or worse Sim City 2013.
“Mario is Missing” for the SNES.
I remember opening the Sears catalog and seeing what must be the sequel to Super Mario World. I shovelled driveways and busted open my piggy bank - it was a full price Nintendo game and I had to have it.
I started my subscription to Nintendo Power after that…
Oh I feel your pain.
I was in a video rental store, saw “Mario is Missing”, and like you assumed it was a sequel to “Super Mario World”.
Got home to play it and was just flabbergasted. I don’t think I played for more than an hour before complaining to my parents. Luckily they’re nice people and they had more errands to run that day. So back out we go, back to the video store we end up, time for me to pick a new game to rent.
Oh, “Mario’s Time Machine”, now that’s a Mario sequel guaranteed to be fun.
Mario and I were not on good terms for a long while after that.
(For those not in the know, “Mario is Missing” in an educational Mario game about geography, think Carmen Sandeigo but not fun. “Mario’s Time Machine” is basically the same game, but time.)
My god that game was terrible.
Vermintide 2 Just not my kind of gameplay.
That weird followup to breath of the wild. Game was just annoying playing as the other characters. I think I maybe put 15 minutes into before I cut my losses.
… Hyule Warriors?
That’s a Zelda reskin of another game. It’s not really in the Zelda canon, kind of like Link’s appearance in soul caliber. It was just meant to wring an extra buck from Zelda fans.
Palworld
I was expecting factorio but with union busting knock-off Pokemon . I got a really generic open-world survival craft with normal knock-off Pokemon.
Same here.
When starting out without having seen all that much of the game beforehand, I saw a great potential for just that expectation you and I shared. The game keeps you jumping from one task to another, managing your initially growing base(s) to produce new necessities, catch new/more pals, explore the map and …well, that’s basically it, so far.
The gameplay loop so far is pretty barebones and the countless bugs, especially regarding basebuilding and -managing, grew all the more frustrating as I was forced to realize that there simply is no goal or endgame besides catching all the pals, exploring the whole empty map and maybe spend countless hours optimizing it all by breeding the best attributes in your pals, i.e. holding F and waiting.
A lot of that is hopefully simply a symptom of it being early-access though, I expect to have a better time in a few months when the hype died down and the game has matured a bit more.
Modding hopefully will be a feature in the future. I’d love to have factorio with Pokémon slaves
I think it’s a fun game. But it certainly is overhyped as fuck.
Yeah it is over-hyped. I enjoy it, but you do have to keep in mind that it is early access. Hopefully it will continue to get better.
Yeah I’ve been telling people I think it’s fun, but if they haven’t jumped on by now due to hype, they might want to wait until the game is less buggy and more complete. I imagine it’s gonna stay in early access for a long time.
I tried it out bc it was so popular but it felt sooooooo boring to play.
I luckily refunded it lol
Last one for me was Batman something something. Arkham something maybe. Don’t really care about batman, didn’t enjoy the mechanics, don’t remember if there was a story, no idea why I bought it.
I’ve since realized that if you just wait a year or two games usually a) work properly and b) cost less. Haven’t had buyers remorse in a long while.
I rarely bought game lately, so it’s gonna be game from 2020 to now.
Grim Dawn: it’s really a subpar diablo clone and it’s boring, enemy either dies immediately or it’s spongy as heck. Played to the point where i have to get to some manor but thus far the gameplay feels bland, and looking at the skill tree it doesn’t offer much new thing. Not enjoying this one
Black Mesa: Not remorse per se, but i got bored of it and turn my attention to something else.
Call of Juarez Gunslinger: again, not remorse, i got bored of it.
Elder Scrolls Online: i have no idea what i expect from it, and i’m disappointed anyway. I thought it will play like the other ES but it’s really just an MMO. Bought it with other game on sales but by the time i play it it’s already off the refund time.
Forza Horizon 4: it’s pretty good actually, but i feels like it just wasn’t a good kb&m game. I can’t turn well in curved road when in high speed while the bot turn just fine. It’s one of those game that’s meant for race wheel. This and asseto corsa have the same issue, and i was led to believe i can play just fine with kb&m but that wasn’t the case at my end.
Space Pirate and Zombie 2: it’s boring.
Incredible that you got bored with this list, it’s literally some of my favorites.
One thing though, you should play horizon with a controller. It’s not good with a wheel. And racing games haven’t been good on m+kb in ages. You may have a chance if you hook up steering to the mouse, but all the Forza games are really meant to be played with controller.
Squad. Looking for a more serious FPS game other than the popular shooters like CoD or Battlefield. Got a rec for it, so why not. Went to buy it and it’s $50. Well, the reviews looked mostly ok, and so did the screenshots… so I bit.
Man, the game plays like it’s 10-15 years old. Slow, clunky and the graphics leave room for improvement. Very dated. I don’t think I’d mind this game for the $15-25 range, but not $50. I returned it. I think probably the second game ever I returned.
If by “more serious” you mean more mechanically complex than “point and click”, I recommend trying arena shooters if you’re willing to get your booty cheeks slapped into the dirt for a bit while learning to play. Quake Champions is free and has the best GFX, but it has hero shooter aspects that a lot of people don’t like. Quake Live is a paid (but cheap) alternative with no bullshit. And I’d recommend the original Quake if it weren’t so dead…still might be fun with friends, though.
I like Half-Life 1’s multiplayer and it recently got a 25th anniversary QoL update, but tbh it’s still a broken and chaotic mess lol. But if you’re into that, I highly recommend it.
I would recommend Counter-Strike as a more straightforward yet still mechanically complex FPS, but they recently removed a LOT of content. Lots of game modes and maps are missing, but if you’re in it for the competitive experience you might still like it.
Speaking of Counter Strike I saw a line saying Arms Race was back but I haven’t had time to reinstall and rejoice. I uninstalled specifically because it got removed so I’ll be giving it another shot this week.
This one might controversial, but Baldur’s Gate 3 for ps5.
- I had plenty of technical issues, like my Karlach questline being glitched out because of some of mission, which was the worst since she was my main companion. I also had to start over earlier as well when I didn’t know that I would get locked out of quests for simply going to a the next area, I didn’t know that was “act 2”.
- I finished divinity os 2 in august and I didn’t really find this game all different other than the crazy production value jump. Which I don’t want to underplay, it’s much much better and ver very good for a crpg.
- the community is very circlejerk-y, when I mentioned in one of the threads about being locked out from doing other act 1 quests because I jumped to act 2 accidentally, they just said that it’s a “skill issue”. Also, the big reason I bought this game was because I kept hearing “I don’t usually like crpgs, but this game is a must play” so I was a victim of hype, that’s on me.
Also BG3 for me. I didn’t experience any bugs, I just realized the combat is absolutely not my thing. And I dislike the combat to the point of avoiding the game, which makes me sad because I really like everything except the combat a lot.
I’m in the same boat, I find the combat both boring and frustrating, the worst possible combination. It’s absolutely loaded with RNG. People said this was the crpg for people who don’t like crpgs, but I can say that is not the case.
As someone who has never played DND, BG3 is like I imagine a lot of it. Constant dice rolling and combining attacks in ways that work. It’s way too tedious for me when I want to play.
It’s for DND lovers.
It’s pretty good for telling you things will be locked off, but very bad at telling you what will be locked off. I nearly didn’t go to the creche at all, because the warnings made me think that was Act 2 through that doorway.
Co-op was an absolute bug-fest. Performance was appalling on PS5, crashes all over the place, and worse, players are likely to miss out on any real links with companions because of how reputation is dished out. It’s an interesting mode to have, but it’s objectively a worse experience than single player.
And yet despite all that, it’s still probably the best game of last year. And last year had a lot of good games.
I learned my lesson. I’m used to some crpg and knowing that I would get locked out of quests if I do certain things, but it makes sense contextually. Here I just didn’t get why Halsin would be dead, but later I learned about “time-sensitive” quests and just to be safe I started doing everything before leaving the acts.
I’ve played through a few times. Before you leave Act I, there is an explicit warning that doing so will close out story-based quests that are incomplete. Having said that, it only closes out the main story quests for the most part; I’ve gone back to do side quests frequently. Act I doesn’t truly lock until you’ve unlocked the end of Act II.
That seems consistent with actual tabletop D&D; ignoring a time sensitive quest may net negative results.
Same. No bugs, but it just didn’t live up to the hype for me. I dropped it just after starting chapter 2.
I got bored, honestly. The combat was a slog and I hated save-scumming to overcome poor design decisions that made gameplay unnecessarily complicated. I just wanted Baldur’s Gate back, instead I got DOS with a D&D wrapper. And I didn’t like DOS at all.
Red Dead Redemption 2 only because I bought it for full price a month ago.
Don’t. Rdr2 is one of the few games I honestly felt like they deserved more for. So much detail, so well done. Of course get a deal where you can, but don’t worry about paying full price.
Oh it’s an amazing game it just never goes on a real sale. The game made me cry during the entire “final” mission. Absolutely worth every cent.
It’s under $20 right now on steam. Is that not a real sale?
Temtem.
Had the potential to be the RPG Pokemon could be if it just entered this generation’s technical level. Instead, it became a shitty grindy money-grab that has been killed by the devs.
I thought about getting it for switch so I could finally check it out only to realize it was online only.
Well, yeah. It’s an MMO lol
Yeah I forgot that. Kept thinking it was just online coop not full mmo
Not just the games, but the whole of the PSVR2.
I really liked the Horizon games, so I bit thinking it’d be more like the others but in VR.
Gameplay is much different. It looks cool, but if the gameplay is balls it doesn’t matter how good it looks.
All the other games I got make me sick to my stomach. VR is a niche and an acquired taste.
My gf got it for me for Christmas and it hurts my soul to have only used it a couple times since, but there’s so few games and I can’t wear it for more that 30 minutes without my face sweating, shoulders aching and the screen is so small, where is the full field of view wtf is the point of a tiny screen strapped to your face?
Starfield.
I sailed the seas on this one. Maybe when it’s got all its DLCs and is on sale for $30.
The DLC’s aren’t going to fix the problems with that game. But in true Bethesda fashion, mods might.
Buying RDR2 to play Red Dead Online with a friend. I got disconnected three different times while trying to complete the first mission, which you have to finish before the game lets you do anything else. Every single time I had to start the mission over from the beginning, including the stupid-ass cutscene.
I gave up after the third time when I got dropped as I was literally about to finish. Fuck that scam.
Humble bundle had a bundle of all the Mega Man games for 20 bucks.
I instantly regretted it once I loaded it up and I thought to myself, I could’ve just got roms for these and a better emulator than the one it came with… The emulator doesn’t even let you fuckin adjust the audio levels.
Something is just fucking wrong with the Mega Man collections. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but they just don’t feel right.
