Biggest disappointment this year?

[Hensler]

I'm going to have to stand up for syndicate here.

If you erase all knowledge of it's namesakes then it's a decent fps thats worth a blast through once.

I only paid £6 but I came away satisfied with what I'd paid for the game.

Fun weapons, reasonable AI, cool bossfights, hacking mechanics, the best lighting in a game since mirrors edge....

It doesn't deserve the hate.

I really liked Syndicate too, and am surprised to see it mentioned in this thread so much. The only really disappointing thing I see about it was that it wasn't an HD remake of the original, but people knew that long before it was released, so I wasn't really disappointed that it was an FPS. And it turned out to be one of the better FPS games in recent times, with some cool moments in the campaign and some great new weapons and gameplay ideas. Plus the 4-player co-op multiplayer is an absolute blast to play with friends, much better than the single player. I would have loved to see peoples reactions to it if it had been a new Starbreeze IP, instead of using the Syndicate name - I think it would have gotten a lot more fans.

[thegooseking]

Biggest disappointment? Binary Domain. Might not be the worst game of the year, and might not have had an awful lot of anticipation to fail to live up to, but it certainly had a lot more potential than it ultimately delivered. And that's before even getting into how bad the port is.

[Patrick Swayze]

Biggest disappointment? Binary Domain. Might not be the worst game of the year, and might not have had an awful lot of anticipation to fail to live up to, but it certainly had a lot more potential than it ultimately delivered. And that's before even getting into how bad the port is.

Port runs fine? Smooth as a baby bottom.

[thegooseking]

Port runs fine? Smooth as a baby bottom.

It runs fine, but the graphics options and even the control options are relegated to an external utility and can't be changed in-game and as a result getting the FOV and mouse sensitivity right is a pain (it does earn points for letting you change the FOV, but loses them by making you quit the game to do so then relaunch it to see the changes). The mouse support on the menus is weird (there is no cursor; moving the mouse just switches between the options like an analogue stick would) and if you use keys instead, you're told to use Space for confirm and F for cancel, which is a little odd. While it does have keyboard prompts for the controls, they're sometimes hard to make sense of.

[Smashbox]

Another vote for Diablo 3. Shoulda known better.

[Casimir Effect]

Somebody go exhume Akira Kurosawa so we can inform him, then.

Fucking brofist!
I loved ME2, favourite one in the series. Gameplay was better in ME3 but a savegame editor gets rid of the whole Planet Scanning bullshit and the plot/writing is superior in ME2.
I can't understand how people say the combat in ME1 is superior. For half the game your Shepard can't hit for shit and weapons overheat; then suddenly there's point where you can run around with an assault rifle firing continuously with little-to-no bullet spread. And the tech/biotic powers aren't worth much in ME1, which is what sets i apart from just being a Gears of War/Vegas game.

OT: I don't really have a disappointment for 2012 yet. I enjoyed ME3 and I think that's the only 2012 game I've played. I tend to surf the sales and stay a year or so behind everyone else.

[Shooop]

Battlefield 3 and Max Payne 3. I love shooters and now Battlefield has turned into CoD with vehicles and Max Payne is 95% cutscenes.

I will give Rockstar credit for a good story and great voice acting, but I'd like to actually play a game instead of watch it. It's even worse when I can't skip through movies when replaying levels that last 5 minutes or more. There's probably less than 6 hours of actual gameplay in MP3.

Battlefield however has no excuse for being so totally devoid of any personality other than 64 players per map - so it's trying to reach the standard of Battlefield 1941. I guess that's what EA considers progress. And EA's new plan to alternate MoH and BF releases each year means they're aping Activision's business model as well as their games.

[soldant]

It made it worse by gearing it more towards the cover based shooting and less towards the statistical character development. The powers and class choices mattered less because they were all going to end up just doing the same thing. Bang bang, duck, blast bang bang.

ME3 brings back some of the statistics but it keeps ME2's gunplay, which is vastly superior to ME1. ME1 was just as much a cover shooter as ME2... and really I don't see what the problem is, people generally take cover when shooting at other people. The stats-based character development for weapons was ridiculous, and ultimately you could cheat the system by simply timing your shots or using shorter bursts. It was pointless.

Equipment, though not handled particularly well in ME1, still gave me a small sense of progression and they stripped that out for 2 as well.

ME3 brings back a bit of equipment stuff in the form of lots of weapons and mods for weapons. ME1's inventory was ridiculous - you always picked the gun with the highest damage, which was the Spectre gear, and stuck with it. Then you ended up with like a million Lancer rifles cluttering up your inventory which you were never going to use, and didn't need to sell for money or omni-gel.

[Patrick Swayze]

It runs fine, but the graphics options and even the control options are relegated to an external utility and can't be changed in-game and as a result getting the FOV and mouse sensitivity right is a pain (it does earn points for letting you change the FOV, but loses them by making you quit the game to do so then relaunch it to see the changes). The mouse support on the menus is weird (there is no cursor; moving the mouse just switches between the options like an analogue stick would) and if you use keys instead, you're told to use Space for confirm and F for cancel, which is a little odd. While it does have keyboard prompts for the controls, they're sometimes hard to make sense of.

Tons of pc games used to have external menus for setting details and the like. I guess to me it doesn't feel uncommon as it might someone younger. And to be fair most reload the game or make you do it from the main menu while not in gameplay so I don't see why it's such a big deal going one step further back.

Couldn't vouch for the controls as I played with my pad plugged in as I like force feed back.

[Mohorovicic]

Tons of pc games used to have external menus for setting details and the like.

Not really.

[rsherhod]

Not really.

Yes, really.

[NathanH]

Tons of PC games used to make me configure graphics and sound manually during installation. I wouldn't find that acceptable today.

[soldant]

Tons of PC games used to make me configure graphics and sound manually during installation. I wouldn't find that acceptable today.

This is how I remember the days of DOS gaming as well:
- Set up sound card (and hope your card is supported or you're stuck with PC Speaker)
- Reverse stereo?
- Testing audio, good luck! If it crashes, you did something wrong LOOOOOL
- CGA? EGA? VGA? The choice is yours! (Maybe)
- Do you have a mouse? Yes? Oh well the driver isn't working because your bootdisk is shit, sorry no support
- Speech support? Wait, you're short 1KB of memory? Sorry, back to EMM386 and your bootdisk techpriest, you clearly don't know your incantations well enough. Return once you have correctly inscribed the correct EMS/XMS runes onto the altar of CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT and then come back.
- Do you have a joystick? Yes? Please wait while I proceed to make it totally useless and force you to calibrate it like 50 times.

Yeah, I don't miss DOS gaming these days.

[NathanH]

Sometimes playing the Quest for Expanded Memory was more complicated than the game that needed it. And let's not forget "Oh, what's that? Your CPU is faster than I expected, eh? AHAHAHAHAHAH!"

[Mohorovicic]

This is how I remember the days of DOS gaming

Picking CGA/EGA/VGA or SoundBlaster during first time setup is not the same as quitting the game just to adjust the mouse sensitivity.

[Eric]

I haven't bought a whole lot of games released this year. I suppose, based on previous time spend in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, that Dawnguard has been a disappointment to the degree that I haven't bothered picking it up. Of the games that I have played, Mass Effect 3 shoots right to the top. I'll grant that the combat was more enjoyable than in Mass Effect 2, but the game has so many issues that makes it hard to believe it was in development for two years. This isn't he place to rehash them in detail, the ME3 threads are easy to find.

The best thing about Dawnguard is the vampire mods is has spawned on the Nexus.

[rsherhod]

Picking CGA/EGA/VGA or SoundBlaster during first time setup is not the same as quitting the game just to adjust the mouse sensitivity.

Control options? No, that is unusual and would certainly be a pain in the arse.
Being able to adjust graphics settings outside of the game (other than .ini tweaking) can actually be pretty handy though. Particularly if it's combined with a decent system profiling tool. First time playing a game and having to start it at least twice because it defaults to 1024*768 seems to be part of the PC gaming experience.

Sigh... I really wish I had a PC that I could just set a new game to max and know that it'll run fine.

[Brit89]

I'm gonna say Syndicate too. I never even touched the original series so I didn't have any attachments to how the game was before they jumped on the FPS genre, but it just played horrible. The controls just felt whack, clunky at times.. the cover and aim system was off. It was just an awful FPS experience.

[Nalano]

This is how I remember the days of DOS gaming as well:
- Set up sound card (and hope your card is supported or you're stuck with PC Speaker)
- Reverse stereo?
- Testing audio, good luck! If it crashes, you did something wrong LOOOOOL
- CGA? EGA? VGA? The choice is yours! (Maybe)
- Do you have a mouse? Yes? Oh well the driver isn't working because your bootdisk is shit, sorry no support
- Speech support? Wait, you're short 1KB of memory? Sorry, back to EMM386 and your bootdisk techpriest, you clearly don't know your incantations well enough. Return once you have correctly inscribed the correct EMS/XMS runes onto the altar of CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT and then come back.
- Do you have a joystick? Yes? Please wait while I proceed to make it totally useless and force you to calibrate it like 50 times.

Yeah, I don't miss DOS gaming these days.

I remember having to fiddle with config.sys/autoexec.bat. I remember trying to squeeze out every last bit for this racing game - I think an Epic Megagames title, maybe Highway Hunter - and forgetting to invoke the display drivers. It was fun trying to rectify my problems while booting blind.

[Kadayi]

Somebody go exhume Akira Kurosawa so we can inform him, then.

TBF assembling the team is really the first act of seven samurai, the second act is meeting the villagers and training them as well as establishing the principal characters (and the risky attack on the bandits stronghold) and then the third act is the climatic battle.

Enjoyed ME2, but I must admit I was surprised that going through the Omega Relay lead straight into the final battle. I was kind of expecting some further missions/investigation beyond that point tbh.