You fell in love with a game and it’s characters, sunk hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. It became a comforting, immensely satisfying part of your daily life. Then you heard a sequel was coming and got really hyped but when it came out it was utter rubbish…
Which game(s) was that for you?
A future prediction as I won’t be buying it - Subnautica 2.
Mass Effect Andromeda. I feel like I’m the only person on the internet who liked the ending of ME3 but holy shit Andromeda was fucking awful.
Mass effect had this weird metamorphosis across the series where the character writing and gameplay improved noticeably between each game in the series while the story and mechanics took big steps back. Andromeda had some of the best movement/power sets in the series, not to mention your own build-a-gun workshop, while absolutely failing at everything else it tried to do. “My face is tired” indeed random not-the-citadel lady.
My first experience with this was Last of Us. I wasn’t expecting good things for part 2 after hearing things about hostile takeovers but killing off the main guy just ruined it for me.
Dragon age 2, Mass effect 3
ME3 is particularly bad cause most of the game is exactly as it should have been, and then the ending is pure unadulterated trash.
I was a Siren main in Borderlands.
Every new game in the franchise made me hate Lilith more. I think I may have cheered at the end of BL3.
Why? Lilith was the best siren gameplay in the series. Yeah, ol Randy fucked her up real good with their dogshit writing, but her character never really changed. I’ve never been able to seriously pick up another siren character because nothing compares to phasewalk.
This is going to show my age but Master of Orion 3.
Moo2 was so fucking good.
I’ve tried many many 4x space games, but none have ever matched the joy that one brought.
FF Cotw why in the everliving fuck put that idiot in the game. Sure you can make millions by putting CR7 in the game same as you can make 10 grand by sucking dicks for a 20 in an alleyway. I can’t believe how many shit decisions they make and still have enough money to burn on it.
Loved MK 1 then 2 blew my mind 3 was good 4 blew my mind again. Then until 9 I didn’t touch anything too goofy I haven’t been able to play the single player much (of DA Deception and Armageddon) but didn’t click anyway. MK9 was goated. Then MKX didn’t liked it at all (cant handle a game with such bad animations). Loved 11 and now MK1 is like meh.
Wasn’t a sequel but I used to love League until Yone and the healing meta. Sylas saved it for a while; like I love gimmick chars and a rebel to boost, sign me TF in. But all in all the BS balance the toxicity the lack of respect for my time, it was too much. Switched to WF and couldn’t believe how chill it was.
Destiny. Played the heck out of 1, and 2 is just… Annoying. I still play, but I actively disuade people from picking it up.
It went from a mechanically fun game with garbage storytelling but amazing lore, to mechanically complex and hyper specialzed, still mostly garbage storytelling, and lore that is trying to constantly one up itself or nonexistent. The seasonal model was a mistake and it’s grindy for the sake of money. It really took a terrible turn down sitcom alley of having the seasonal content need stakes, but also not really change anything drastic. So it just feels like tasks for the sake of tasks… Which it is. A neverending treadmill where grinding has only very short lived rewards.
Evil Genius 2. I loved Evil Genius 1 as a kid. It was far from perfect and had a lot of bugs, but it was a blast. I’m fully aware there’s a lot of rose tinted goggles going on for it in my mind. But I thought the new one would fix problems and be more enjoyable. It did improve on the first in a lot of ways, but it was so so grindy.
In EG1 you could send you minions into the world to steal money and complete missions (that gave points or loot, like stealing the Eifel Tower). I’m EG2, they kept this mechanic, but anyone you send to the world map is just gone. They cannot come back. This leads to just an annoying constant flow of recruiting more minions, training them to upgrade, and them being sent to the map forever to never return. It would perhaps be slightly better if you could increase the rate you recruit minions like the first game, but instead they always come at a constant rate and there is a button to recruit more but it’s buried in a menu. So many things in this game are buried in a menu.
Another frustration, they added a feature to automatically tag enemy agents that come to your base (to be killed, captured, distracted, etc) but they’re all under different research tiers. Why require the research at all? Right clicking agents and saying “tag for capture” is just pointless busy work. Even in the original you could hold control when you did it and it would flag the whole group. Not anymore. You can only tag one at a time.
There are just so many little things like this that made the game so annoying to play. I wanted to like it. But I just couldn’t enjoy it. The new art style is worse, too. It keeps the spy fi aesthetic but it’s much more cartoonish. The game is more diverse which is nice, the original was like all men. I also liked what they did with John Steele, the main antagonist more or less. Canonically you beat him and killed him but they pass on his mantle to new agents and train them to be like him. And they’re relatively weak, but like a constant threat.
Also surprised this one didn’t come up sooner.
It was one of the few times I really got hyped about a game as an adult.
Castlevania Lord of Shadow 2. Loved the first one and 2 was just bad. I wish they would have kept it as a God of War clone, with stunning visuals, game play and music
Fallout 76?
I played it with coop mates (via game pass IIRC), all EGS fans since Oblivion, well after 76 was released and patched up, and it was just… boring. And grindy. Yet kept trying to upsell us stuff. I kinda get how some like the game with those BGS environments, but that was still a shock to me.
Starfield did nothing either. I watched YT story videos/tried the intro out of a friend’s Steam library instead of buying and felt like I was looking at a AI slop Skyrim mod, both technically and in terms of writing. Again, I’m a hardcore fan going way back, warts, glitches and all.
It’s remarkable the studio has fallen so far, without basically changing anything, yet still has such a loyal following. How is that even possible?
Think you could take it back a step there.
- Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
- Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
- Fallout 3 - “Oblivion with guns”, but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what’s available in the world.
- Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for ‘proper’ RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I’m going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
- Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. “Talking” interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the “final decision” point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda’s worst habits, given free rein.
Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of ‘hyped’ is for it.
I think the rose tinted glasses effect is strong. Fallout 4 wasn’t that bad and had some neat characters and sidequests. I played heavily modded NV too, and while great, has plenty of missed beats and slow quests.
Also, making a (mostly) top down, tight text game is very different than producing a voice acted, sprawling 3D world. It’s like trying to compare the writing quality of a novel vs a 2 part blockbuster movie.
Not that I disagree with the decline, but I think that’s putting it too strong and ignoring huge differences.
For me the technical and artistic of aspects are factors too. Starfield would’ve been unreal if it came out in 2012… but look at its contemporaries. CP2077? KCD2? Even ME Andromeda utterly trounces it in artistic creativity, animation quality, graphics, scripting, performance, HDR quality, combat, even some voice acting; I could go on and on. And it’s basically the same premise.
Yet Starfield feels like modded Skyrim, looks only superficially better, and runs at like a tenth the speed.
One thing that really threw me off FO4 was the voiced main character. They had to simplify the dialogue options significantly, and I just don’t need my character to have a voice, my imagination can sort that out just fine. That way I can make up my own mind about how my character sounds in my head, have more detailed dialogue options (like FO:NV), and not have a locked in boring voice with boring dialogue options. Lots of cool additions in FO4, but it just seemed so shallow, I stopped playing quite early.
I wouldn’t go as far as ruined but Halo
4/5/Infinite all suck.Everything after 3 is poorly written fan fiction to me. It still is one of my favorite franchises of all time, but it’s never going to be the same again. Halo Wars 2 was all right though.
Reach and ODST rule imo
CE, Reach, and ODST are my top 3 games in the franchise. I think i have a special appreciation for the self-contained stories.
Actually, I had REALLY hoped Infinite would use ODST as a template for their open world. Because IMO, Infinite implemented it terribly in just about every way they could.
Half of Halo 4 was the best story they ever put in a Halo game. The other half was embarrassingly formulaic sci-fi.
It’s okay but Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless and fighting the promethean enemies in 4 is horrible. All of them are bullet sponges and there isn’t enough ammo to kill them.
I don’t think 5 ruined 4. By the end of 5 it’s established that this Cortana is not the same Cortana. For all intents and purposes, the old Cortana is gone.
Infinite however, gave her a sympathetic send-off which undid that.
Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless
It really did.
4 and 5 didn’t ruin anything for me. There’s stuff I genuinely like about them that got me excited for the next game. Plenty I didn’t like about them too.
Then there’s Infinite… it feels like the DLC or post-game content to a game we never got. And the multiplayer was unplayable last I saw. It made me no longer excited for the next game.
I still do Halo game nights a couple times a year though.
4/5 made so much accumulated story baggage though.
Infinite would have been better if 4/5 and whatever requisite novels didn’t exist.
How much baggage do you have to address? Evil Cortana, Guardians, and Prometheans. The rest can be managed around.
If Infinite didn’t have to wrap up the previous games, it wouldn’t have that stink on it. But then it would have had even less substance. And the shitty open world wouldn’t have been any better.
It would have been better if they just used Cortana and the Guardians to wrap up the Promethean saga. But then they’d still have to write a decent story, which apparently they are incapable of.
It’s more that they wrote themselves into a corner with Cortana’s state/loss, all the forerunner lore being out in the open now, the weird Guardians stuff…
Infinite could have been a much more subtle expansion on the forerunners, keeping them enigmatic like the trilogy, and kept Cortana. That’s much more straightforward and “Halo”
The open world stuff wasn’t awful. I loved the marine encounters. But yeah, it felt half baked.
I think mass effect is a clear contender, the ending to mass effect 2 was a bit meh, and then it really hit the fan with mass effect 3 and for those who didn’t get message, they also made mass effect andromeda.
Hear me out.
I liked Andromeda’s concept. I liked some of the side quests and characters, with the SAM & Ryder relationship being particularly interesting to me. FemRyder’s VA was good.
The gunplay was the best of the franchise, even better than the excellent ME3MP which I dumped tons of hours into. It looked fantastic and ran well.
…But yeah, the story felt like a first draft, part 1. Which is, reportedly, exactly what it was.
The concept makes a lot of sense and was really really cool.
I saw a playthrough and I had 3-4 problems:
- everyone seems to be better at colonizing on their own, separate from the home base, whose literal only purpose is to colonize.
- (mechanically the whole colonization thing is trivialized by mary sue story progression and deus ex machina devices)
- all the new aliens are once again roughly 2m tall humanoids
- the ending felt… very “we need setpieces” and “absolutely make it a parade of every minor character we talked to”
ME1 even had Rachni, as non-humanoid npcs, could have something like that…
(And obviously most parts of the art departments did their job well. Hilarious but not game breaking bugs were the exception to the rule. It’s 99% a direction and writing problem.)
I’d say part of the problem for Andromeda was that everyone else got there first in terms of colonization; the player isn’t exploring a new location, untouched by colonists, they’re going to an established settlement and exploring around that instead.
Yeah! There was a twist with the Kett to kinda justify 2 meter humanoid aliens, but still.
And obviously most parts of the art departments did their job well. Hilarious but not game breaking bugs were the exception to the rule.
It was released like a month too early; I don’t remember any bugs or art oddities in my playthrough. In fact, I thought the movement animations in particular were the best of any game I’ve played, and might still be.
Ugh, that game needs a redo, even though I know that would never happen.
OMG - Mass Effect 3, yes.
I’d add Fable III. I got it in a “Buy 2, get 1 for $5” sale and I STILL felt ripped off.
Honestly everything after fable 1 (yes, that includes “the lost chapters”) was kinda meh.
Fable was great, good storytelling with some twists and fun side quests. Loved the comat and the spell system and how much choice you had. End boss really felt like an end boss.
Honesty, all of this? The same for “lost chapters”.
The last boss fight was absolutely dogshit though, what a letdown. You have this huge fucking dragon and it was just such a disappointment compared to the OG jack of blades. It’s difficulty and movesets just didn’t feel right for a endboss level enemy.
Personally never played 2, although I have watched some letsplays and meh. So far as I can tell they gutted the magic system, had a decent story and some quality of life changes.
3 I did play and it would have been a decent game, if it wasn’t sold as a Fable game. Didn’t like the timer for the Big Bad, magic was boring.
Fable 2 largely was just as good as one with one added bonus… for me at least.
The cutscenes were all done in engine, with all the same rules that the game has.
So running into the final boss fight, I had run out of healing items, so I ate ALL my food and drank ALL my beer and wine before starting the final fight.
Cut scene starts. Villain starts his villiain monologue as villains do. My character proceeds to puke all over his shoes.
I actually loved Fable 3, along with the rest of the series. It wasn’t as good as the other 2, but I still thought it was great.
I wasn’t part of the zeitgeist at the time. But I was surprised to find out much later that so many people hated it.
I love Fable 3. I love how the weapons will change, I like the “Sanctuary” pause menu, and the world is awesome (if a little small). I do wish they were able to make it bigger with more side quests though.
The thing that killed it for me was the timer. “xx Days Remaining”.
If I remember right, that was there for plot purposes, but had no impact on the game.
No it definitely had an impact on the game. You had to either contribute enough of your personal wealth, or choose all the evil choices as regent, otherwise most of the citizens would die at the end. If you didn’t do it right, it left the world basically devoid of NPCs. For a series that made such a big deal about choice, the end of Fable III only had one right answer.
Yeah. There are ways to absolutely break it though. Like if you just buy all the properties you can, you’ll be swimming in gold from the rent.
And then you can share extra gold between characters, so you can start the next playthrough with a “small loan” kinda thing.
Two of my favourite games of all time are Diablo 2 and Guild Wars.
Both of these games I was insanely hyped for the following games in the series and got them both on their respective releases days. Both were utterly disappointing crap when compared to their previous games and both probably contributed heavily to how I will now no longer get hyped for any game let alone buy one in their first year or two of release.
I was soooooo excited for Diablo 3. I even loved it when it came out, as horrible difficult and grindy as it was. I would have kept loving it if they just expanded on that… but nope, they took out trading and economy, the things that made item drops feel exciting for me. Without any sense of value, loot was just… boring.
I didn’t touch Diablo 4 and it sounds like I made the correct decision.
The remaster of Diablo 2 was excellent.
I didn’t, I remember falling asleep playing it not long after release which didn’t bode well, I wanted to like it but couldn’t. I “enjoyed” it for a while many years later as a co-op experience on a console (I forget which one) whilst getting stoned but it was more scratching an itch for that genre and playing with friends locally that really won it over in that instance rather than the game itself.
Likewise with 4, I didn’t even give it the time of day tbh, I still haven’t really seen much about it.
I’d have liked to play the remaster but I refuse to give those assholes any money and the main draw for me was multiplayer as a kid. I played the SP briefly on a pirate version but it was always about the MP for me.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it’s a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you’re playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it’s a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they’ve kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.
But the question wasn’t give a fair assessment of a sequel to a game you like.
I realise that it isn’t objectively a bad game or anything like that and a lot of people still play it until this day and I for sure appreciate them keeping the servers up for the old game so I can still go back to play it should I choose. But the question was what sequel to a game I loved ruined it for me and anyone who played both can see they are blatantly not the same game at all.
GW2 was a complete departure from how the first game worked to a more generic MMO style, I’m sure it is a great game in its own right but for me personally, when compared to the amazing first game, it just doesnt hold a candle.
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Sticker Star kind of ruined Paper Mario for me. Super Paper Mario had already gone quite weird, but in a good way - the combat was completely different but it still felt like the original and TTYD in terms of the levelling, exploration, and plot.
Sticker Star, Colour Splash, and Origami King are very linear in comparison, their lack of experience makes battles largely pointless, and the obsession with giant household objects and nameless toad NPCs is getting tedious.
The latest three games were all still enjoyable, but they’re really nothing on the first three.
The saddest thing about Sticker Star is that I actually think the game had very interesting ideas with its resource management-based combat, but falls apart because the player is actively disincentivized to spend those resources. There is no reward for combat, so the optimal play is to run from every encounter. And bosses have nothing going on either, just use the correct item and ypu win. So you never actually engage with the mechanics at all!
And the fix would’ve been so simple: EXP. Y’know, the thing RPGs normally give you as a reward for combat?
Absolutely correct. Modern Paper Mario is more about the spectacle of the story, rather than the way it’s mechanically explored. They peaked with TTYD, had a weird one with Super, and the rest have been “use this gimmick in VERY SPECIFIC WAYS to explore OUR story how WE want you to.”
This isn’t to say modern Paper Mario games are bad, just that it’s blatantly obvious they threw out mechanical complexity and deeper narrative tones in favor of “watch this big thing explode, ooh pretty colors :DDD!!!” Sticker Star is definitely the worst of them though.
I really hope we get another Paper Mario game that FEELS like a true Paper Mario RPG. TTYD Remastered is incredible, and I think that by making it, Nintendo acknowledged that fans just… really don’t care for modern Paper Mario as it is.
Bug Fables has that TTYD taste to it
