So desired but very disappointing game that you have ever played?

[Fragony]

Whatever the sequel to Deus Ex was called, loved the first game to pieces...

Actually liked it.

Also agree with everybody who hates the fast pace of battles post MTW releases, MTW remains my favorite and I still play it.

[LittleGrizzly]

Wasn't necessarily a terrible game by itself... with it being the sequel to probably my favourite ever SP game I was left very disappointed though. Probably much like the 2nd and 3rd Matrix films, they are actually entertaining but after the first one I was disappointed.

[The Stranger]

I agree. However, I recently got M2TW and played it for the first time. I was pleasantly surprised at how long combat lasted. You could actually maneuver after the fighting started. So unlike RTW.

i generally remember RTW as RTW:EB so that may be why i remember RTW1 more fondly. But even in the original RTW i dont remember fights being over that fast, and i know i had fights where i had to manoeuver and hold my ground and even fought off 20k troops in multiple clashes with 1 stack. that was so epic :P

[Fragony]

Wasn't necessarily a terrible game by itself... with it being the sequel to probably my favourite ever SP game I was left very disappointed though. Probably much like the 2nd and 3rd Matrix films, they are actually entertaining but after the first one I was disappointed.

Didn't like it at first either, but it's hilarious to break the game and see what happens. You can have a lot of fun with doing stupid things. But the storytelling is of course not as good as in the first, Maggie Chows appartment was tense as ' one of the many wtf moments in genuine storytelling

[Beskar]

What I didn't like about the tactical battles is that half the time the units have a mind of their own. You would say "Attack the 3rd column!" then they do a 90 degree turn and attack the first, whilst the 3rd flanks them in the rear and you are sat there thinking "Why-o-why are you doing this to me.."

[Sp4]

Most of the serious bugs were ironed out after patch 3 or 4 I would say. The rest of them were minor bug fixes and balancing. Patch 14 finally brought the siege AI up to par, but it was "playable" way before that.

You mean it took them a year to add a working siege AI? ^^

[rickinator9]

• Bioshock: Infinite. I loved the original as well as the sequel. A utopean world that went down into ruin and you are supposed to make something of that. Early demo's showed us Columbia would be similar, but somewhere along the way the developers decided to make it into a overreligious, patriotic place that was basically living in the past. The story didn't make it any better.
• Rome II. I was really looking forward to this one. CA stated the game would be very historically accurate(or something along those lines anyway), but I didn't see anything of that. The AI barely did anything in my short playthroughs, there was little variety in units in my opinion, battles were over too quick and I just couldn't make sense of them. The family system seemed to have no purpose at all. This may be due to me playing less popular factions(Macedonia, Pontus), but it was no fun for me.
• Company of Heroes 2. I love CoH1. It's mechanics allows players who had been dealt huge blows in the early game to bounce back if they managed to play flawlessly from then on. CoH2? Not so much. The designers decided to remove all the little elements that made the game so fun in the first place.
• Brink. This game I had been looking forward to from 2009 on. It was supposed to be a objective-based FPS with lots of customisation: you could and can still customize your character and weapons. The major mechanic that made it stand out was free-running. However, the released game had lots of bugs, bad multiplayer networking and free-running didn't work well.

[easytarget]

Interesting choice on Bioshock Infinite, this is the only one in the series I found interesting. I found the others tiresome, over rated and the philosophical under pinning of Ayn Rand sophomoric (but then you can't really rise above the source material, and Rand is a moron).

I think you may have missed a great deal of what was going on in the story of Infinite. The gameplay is just meh (true of all of them), but the story and ideas embedded are quite possibly some of the deepest "take the red pill" ideas in any game I've ever played.

[The Stranger]

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/37

[easytarget]

Bravo Stranger.

[Greyblades]

Speaking of Mass Effect 3, Kasey "Red Green or blue equals diverse" Hudson has left bioware.

I wish this made me as happy as I feel I should be to see the back of him.

Still, it increases my hopes for Dragon Age 3.

[easytarget]

Hate to break it to you, but bioware stopped being bioware a long time ago, even before the dear ole Docs sold out to EA.

I don't know what exactly to call ME or DAO, but I do know what not to call them, RPGs.

[Hooahguy]

Speaking of Mass Effect 3, Kasey "Red Green or blue equals diverse" Hudson has left bioware.

I wish this made me as happy as I feel I should be to see the back of him.

Still, it increases my hopes for Dragon Age 3.

It also raises my hope for the new Mass Effect game that we still know almost nothing about.

[Greyblades]

I'd say NWN was the last real effort by the true Bioware. It was only a cult hit at best though, and NWN2 was a hugely expensive and forgotten flop. That's what forced them to sell out, I think.

...I really liked NWN2...

[Gregoshi]

...I really liked NWN2...

As did I, but the game play experience was horrible - the UI, camera control/angles really sucked the fun out of it. I nearly stopped playing it after a few sessions due to frustration.

[easytarget]

DAO was an RPG by any standard.

Maybe I suppose, but to me it's the definition of brain dead on a rail. Being lead around by the nose.

If that's RPG, it's the short bus version imho.

[easytarget]

...I really liked NWN2...

Same here, I enjoyed it a lot, in fact a great deal more than everything coming out at the time, and certainly more than anything that has come out since that is so dumbed down it makes my head hurt. Which naturally is why I've enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin so much.

I will concede the point made by Cube that even at this stage for bioware the signs of the wheels coming off were already evident in the game design decisions made between NWN1 and NWN2. It was as if the game development had been handed over to someone who had never played DND live, failed to see what the central point of NWN1 was and then had at it anyway, couple that with the first signs of DLC (which as I recall they may have instead called modules or something) which was the also the antithesis of player made core of the NWN1 and you in hindsight can see what was looming on the not too distant horizon.

[Sp4]

rofl... 14 patches

Well, they released the public beta for Rome 2 in September 2013. Now, in August 2014, they updated the AI to be somewhat competent at sieges, which, despite CA's best efforts to make it not so (according to their own advertising anyways), is the situation in which you load up/have to load up the battle map the most.

It looks to me like Rome 2 was released about 6-8 months ahead of time and all the patching and community service we got in the beginning was just CA finishing off things they already were working on when the 'game' was released.

So yeah, buy the next TW game a year after release. It should be somewhat completed then.

[Gregoshi]

So yeah, buy the next TW game a year after release. It should be somewhat completed then.

Everyone can't do that. Some poor individuals have to step up with their money and take one for the team. If Next Total War flops and goes to the bargain bin a month after release due to horrible sales, CA isn't going to waste their time on multiple patches to fix the game.

[Gregoshi]

No argument there GC. I'd rather a game release be delayed to get it right than rushed out the door broken. But my point is that a game developer isn't going to issue 14 patches for a game that isn't successful.

[easytarget]

I never saw this coming: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014...s/#more-227139

[Seamus Fermanagh]

1776

[Fisherking]

1776

Nah, the ones that disappointed me were usually anything by SPI. No matter the subject matter, when you got the game it just was not fun to play.

[Mongoose]

• Company of Heroes 2. I love CoH1. It's mechanics allows players who had been dealt huge blows in the early game to bounce back if they managed to play flawlessly from then on. CoH2? Not so much. The designers decided to remove all the little elements that made the game so fun in the first place.

Give CoH2 another chance. Mechanically, it's actually the other way around - the way that Coh2 does resource income, upkeep, and pop cap actually means that come backs are far more feasible than in CoH1.

[Veho Nex]

Heres your CoH2 comback. 100 Popcap, you build KT and spam sturmpioneers and laugh as everything dies before you. Any other faction is S.O.L.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Nah, the ones that disappointed me were usually anything by SPI. No matter the subject matter, when you got the game it just was not fun to play.

Their Korea game was pretty good. But in general I agree with you, the SPI stuff always bogged down.

[Gregoshi]

Speaking of SPI, I saw a copy of Strategy & Tactics magazine in a store a couple of weeks ago. My jaw hit the floor as I thought S&T went the way of the dinosaur 2-3 decades ago.

Never played an SPI game, but their rep for making "monster" games intrigued me for years.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Speaking of SPI, I saw a copy of Strategy & Tactics magazine in a store a couple of weeks ago. My jaw hit the floor as I thought S&T went the way of the dinosaur 2-3 decades ago.

Never played an SPI game, but their rep for making "monster" games intrigued me for years.

They had some interesting ideas, but some of their games were so complex in practice that going through basic would've been less of a burden.

The Mag

[Mongoose]

Heres your CoH2 comback. 100 Popcap, you build KT and spam sturmpioneers and laugh as everything dies before you. Any other faction is S.O.L.

Are you talking about 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 and 4v4? On 3v3 and 4v4, you're probably right. They don't bother to balance the game for larger team games - sad, but that's how it is. I wish they'd rethink that.

As for 1v1 and 2v2:

OKW has a strong late game, sure, but a King Tiger costs around 250 fuel, and requires you to fully tech out everything, on a faction with a 2/3 fuel penalty. Sturmpios costs 320 MP. If they have a King Tiger and are spamming sturmpios, you really have not been pressuring them that whole time at all, despite allies having an early-mid game advantage.

Also, even end game, the same amount of fuel and MP invested in Jacksons and riflemen can wreck a KT and sturm pios.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Empire Total War.

I was a bit young to really appreciate STW and MTW, but as a n00b I loved RTW, and as I matured I came to really appreciate what the mods offered. Looking back, RTW wasn't great, but its game engine had the potential to create something truly phenomenal - things like EB which have given me endless gaming joy.

M2TW was a very solid game, and Kingdoms was IMO the best expansion for a TW game to date. Of course it took modding to get it they way I really like it, but the base game was IMO a fair bit better than RTW - battles were longer and thus more tactical, graphics were significantly improved, more variety in terms of agents etc - all in all it felt a bit deeper than its predecesor.

And then came ETW - this title came for me to represent the death of the TW series. Somehow it just didn't feel like TW, it wasn't enjoyable. The game didn't play smoothly with all the different maps. And yet despite having a more global scope, somehow the factions all seemed kind of generic. The game didn't have much of an atmosphere to it. Things like forts didn't work at all. Naval battles were gimmicky and lacked the complexity of land battles. It just wasn't up to much.

I skipped NTW, but I did try S2TW. S2TW for me was OK - it had a good character to it, but battles were over far too quickly and there was no tactical element to them. I would say the campaign and the feel of the game was enjoyable, but battles were a let down.

As for R2TW, I didn't buy it, but played it a little on my brothers PC, and it felt like a mess. My brother said it is rubbish and I should stick to EB. So I did.