Volitions Advocate on 11/11/2015 at 02:08
AvP 2010 lack of modding ability. Mods and Maps are what kept AVP2 alive for so long and the game itself was great, technically and visually.
Portal 2 / (lack of) HL2: Ep3. I was pissed when I learned Chell woke up 200 years later. She was SUPPOSED to wake up on the Borealis just in time to announce Gordon's triumphant return and tie the universe together. Instead we got an incredibly complex ARG that only amounted to "sup dudes! Portal 2 y'all!" WHERE THE FUCK IS GORDON, GABE?
Gears of War became the Unreal 3 we never got but deserved.
All of the really promising concepts and IP's' that ended up being counterstrike clones: NeoTokyo, Brink, Titan Fall, Rainbow Six Seige, Survarium, among others.
EDIT: How could I forget fucking Rage? Started out pretty damn good. Gets into the swing of things. Transports us to a new map. Gives a bunch of new characters. Sends us on a quick little sabotage mission then out of nowhere the credits start rolling. The game didn't have a crappy 2nd act, or a "short campaign"... It was just truncated. Somebody put it on the table and whacked it with a machete and said "There... release THAT"
Nedan on 11/11/2015 at 03:46
My biggest "I wish it had turned out differently" game:
(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxkOKuOFT68)
Half-Life 1. (
link spoiler alert) Yep, I said it & I expect a mob holding torches & pitchforks to be after me shortly ;). I really really
REALLY wanted to like this game but the extremely stupid final boss followed by that retarded encounter with the GMan (I have also never liked the acting of this character by the way, as he felt like a flunky from William Shatner's school of acting) spoiled all that build up to the end for me. It left a sour taste in my mouth ever since with the series. So I wasn't at all surprised about the ending we got left with from HL2:EP2.
My almost perfect game:
Definately... (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW-7uatehx4)
Trespasser. For its time it had great visuals & a really good atmosphere when it worked. But that crappy AI & the wonky as all hell physics killed the mood for me quite often. I don't think a game intended to be scary should be a source of endless amounts hilarity. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoyed playing the game... but for all the wrong reasons. It definitely needed a lot more beta testing.
My underrated gem in the list:
(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWb9_5N91OE)
Forsaken. The game was extremely fun as all hell & brutal. Both multiplayer & singleplayer were a blast. And that is a rare thing for me to find a game that I like playing offline as much as I liked playing it online.
As for the cancelled game I most regret never having played:
The rest of (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6BKVgnVzFs)
SiN Episodes. Was a huge fan of the original game... loved it to death. Was absolutely excited about Episodes. Utterly devastated when the rest was basically cancelled.
As for which development studio could have changed the world:
Looking Glass Studios... considering this forum, this was obvious.
Melan on 11/11/2015 at 06:53
Cleve Blakemore's Grimoire: Still unreleased after all those years! :mad:
N'Al on 11/11/2015 at 06:58
Still no sequel to Limbo of the Lost!
N'Al on 11/11/2015 at 07:00
Actually, I agree with Starker. Also, VA on Episode 3.
nicked on 11/11/2015 at 07:15
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Gears of War became the Unreal 3 we never got but deserved.
Oh yeah - that reminds me of how disappointing Unreal 2 was! How are we going to follow up the beautiful, atmospheric, dreamlike sci-fi feudal world of Unreal 1? Why, with a crappy, forgettable space opera of course!
Sulphur on 11/11/2015 at 07:16
Man, there's so many tragedies. The fall of LGS, the fall of Troika, the fall of Origin, the weird reanimated corpse of Interplay...
But yeah, I'm going to have to say Ultima IX. What the fuck was that thing. Broken on release for the longest time, paid lip service to the philosophy of the series, bad writing, the list goes on. And the worst part is, the original script for it would have made it a pretty amazing send-off for the series. But no, we got it going out with a clank and a sputter instead of a bang. Sigh.
icemann on 11/11/2015 at 07:34
Listing the games that immediately come to mind:
* Command and Conquer 4 - The game that bears this name is an absolute abomination and should not exist. And yet it does.
* Daikitana
* Doom 3 - Whilst what we got was certainly fun and enjoyable, it lacks much of the greatness of the games before it + they went for more a survival horror type vibe compared to the previous 2 games which had been about taking on HUGE hordes of enemies straight from hell.
* Duke Nukem Forever - Lost opportunity big time.
* Plants vs Zombies 2 - The first game just has so much life to it as well as replayability with all the mini games, and the investment = reward style stuff. The sequel which never got a PC version is more about micro transactions and unlockable worlds, with little to no mini games. A lost opportunity for something far greater.
* Ultima 9 - Ultima online was nearly 100% to blame for this games failure imo. All the best developers from Origin were all on that. Such a bad game compared to the others. Watch Spoony's video series on the game if your curious on how bad it is.
* Unreal 2 - This game is such a pale shadow of the first game. Such a shame.
* Wingcommander Prophesy - The Wingcommanders from 3 onwards are some of the rare few games where FMV was used to great effect. Prophesy was just such a disapointment over the other games. Still a good game, just not AS much.
Volitions Advocate on 11/11/2015 at 07:36
Quote Posted by nicked
Oh yeah - that reminds me of how disappointing Unreal 2 was! How are we going to follow up the beautiful, atmospheric, dreamlike sci-fi feudal world of Unreal 1? Why, with a crappy, forgettable space opera of course!
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Gears of War became the Unreal 3 we never got but deserved.
Because: Unreal 2There. Because you're right.
Malf on 11/11/2015 at 09:07
I was a Mac gamer and hence a MASSIVE Bungie fan when Halo was announced. The promised features and ideas they had for the game really excited me, even though I knew my Mac at the time probably wasn't going to be capable of running it.
They were touting it as having persistent online battles over an open world with planned clan play and base management (although my memory may be embellishing it a bit!), and in general, it was a LOT more ambitious than what we ended up getting.
That Bungie then became "The Halo Company" and we saw the death of their other, more interesting franchises always bummed me out.
While I agree that the death of Troika was a tragedy, I would say that the bigger one was the event that led to their creation: The slow, painful death of Interplay.
Interplay published some incredible, ambitious games in their time, and I still struggle to comprehend how they managed to screw up so royally.
Think about it: Earthworm Jim, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Descent, Freespace, MDK, Sacrifice, Carmageddon...
For a period of time, my gaming life WAS Interplay.
Now of course, we have various successors and spiritual successors to many Interplay titles, but I still wonder what we could have seen if they hadn't so criminally lost focus on what made them great in the first place.