Submitted 2 weeks ago by Soulinyx@piefed.world to games@lemmy.world
Fallout 4. Fallout was finished. We did it. Nv was a doctoral thesis on everything ‘fallout’ was or had to say. Even the dlc path literally ended with either ‘you can’t take the gold with you’ and walking away from this beautiful fucked up hauntological horror ruin made out of misguided obsessive love or just nuking shit again and starting from nothing.
My issues with 4 stemmed from the base crafting and defense systems. It felt like trend chasing at a time when every game had to have crafting. I’d be out exploring some cool area of the wasteland when suddenly my radio is blowing up asking me to come home and fend off raiders. Nah, I’m good.
I can see value in a Fallout 4 set a couple hundred years after Fallout 3. Fallout 4’s civilization is still too broken. Add a few hundred years, and you could get an established civilization out of it, like the NCR of NV.
Funnily enough, that was one of the major complaints fans made about Fallout 3. For some unfathomable reason Bethesda decided to set it generations after the first two games, yet the Wasteland hasn’t changed at all despite it now being centuries since the bombs fell.
Come to think of it, they did the exact same thing with Skyrim.
Why keep making ‘fallout’. Its done.
Max Payne 3 was really disappointing compared to 1&2.
Phantasy Star Online 2 never hit me like PSO, maybe it’s the pace of the game
I was a a huge PSO fan and would religiously check for news on a PSO2 release. Sega then went quiet for several years and by the time it came to the West, I had already moved on. Did try it out though and was overwhelmed by the monetisation stuff and ditched it. It felt like a successor in name only.
Phantasy Star Universe was honestly a better successor. It had a pretty fun single player story too.
It has been many, many years since I played it, but I seem to recall Max Payne 3 was fine but cutscene heavy. More of a movie than a game haha.
Steam say 85% positive reviews, and the negative ones are split 50/50 between saying too many cutscenes and saying fuck you Rockstar for your shitty unnecessary launcher.
Assassin’s Creed III never clicked for me, and I remember buying the Collector’s Edition day 1 - after enjoying the hell out of AC1, 2, Brotherhood and Revelations.
I ended up enjoying both AC4 and Rogue afterwards, so 🤷🏻♂️
AssCreed3 suffered from the setting. There aren’t enough big cities and beautiful buildings in revolutionary war America. You spend too much time in trees.
Black Flag would’ve had a similar problem except you spend lots of time on the ship, so running around the cities doesn’t matter as much.
I think you hit the nail on the head, right there.
Black Flag still felt more vertical than AC3, plus when it comes to my memory - AC3 felt very cold and grey, while AC4 was bright and warm.
Hard to top AC 2, anyway.
Overwatch 2
Should have just called it Overwatch Minus One.
The community called it Overwatch 1.5. Now they renamed the game back to Overwatch (1). You can’t make this up.
Might get shot for this, but Quake 2 never really did the thing for me compared to Quake 1. Weapons and enemies all just felt a bit sluggish, and level design was a bit confusing at times.
I agree. I was never a fan of them removing the fantasy elements either - it made the game feel so much more generic than the first (though this might be hindsight since I first played Quake 2 many years after it came out).
Q2 was great but I 100% agree that shifting from the tone and style from Q1 was a miss. I really hope that one day the series returns to those roots.
I quite enjoyed quake 2 but I agree that the thematic shift was super jarring. There’s a community mod that helps bridge the themes of 1 and 2 very well named Call of the Void, which may make it more palatable in some way?
Quake 2 was the start of id games just being demos for the idtech engine.
We sat on the Id software ftp waiting for q2test to drop at around one in the morning, then waited around 1.5 hours for it to dl on modem While chatting on icq. Played it and the full game - wasn’t really a fan of the game.
Quake 4 was an improvement.
This is me pulling from my youth, but at the time it released I really disliked Jak 2 (sequel to Jak & Daxter). The first one was a wonderful open world action platformer, and while there was a bit of that in the sequel, a ton of it was this weird GTA-esque city map complete with a crime star system. I remember really hating those parts and they just went on and on.
It’s a very big tonal and gameplay shift, but my biggest issue with Jak 2 is the sudden spike in difficulty. Missions are long, often lack checkpoints, and enemies kill you so easily. Those racing missions still haunt me to this day.
On the other hand, Jak 3 is my favorite one in the franchise. It’s still closer to the 2nd but it’s such a fun ride with a bigger focus on exploration and platforming again rather than combat. Love that game to death.
Funnily enough this was my first thought as well. I paid Jak & Daxter about 10 years ago on PS3 and quite enjoyed it. Certainly not one of my all time favourites but it was good. I jumped straight into Jak II after 100%ing the first and just absolutely hated the change of direction so dropped the franchise there and then.
Yeah it was a really weird tonal shift. I’m sure it had to do with GTA being big that year or something.
Command and Conquer 4. The game that killed the franchise.
Picture things after C&C3. Two factions, GDI (America, basically) and Nod (evil religious dudes) were busy fighting a bunch. The Scrin (aliens) show up and start blowing things up. It is discovered that the aliens are making special structures of unknown purpose. GDI gets to work with blowing them up, but Nod helps the aliens save one of the structures. It is rendered impervious to harm when the game ends.
Then, there’s the C&C3 expansion. The fancy alien device under GDI’s control is stolen back by Nod, on the orders of their leader, Kane.
Quite a setup for C&C4, right? There was a first person shooter sequel (called Tiberium) on the pipeline, but it was cancelled. Wait some more time, and C&C4 is announced and released.
What did we get?
Ridiculous. I’m still upset about it to this day.
Such a pity, C&C3 was so good
Dragon Age 2. Origins was so good. Then… Bleh.
Every single game after origins can take a hike, honestly.
Fallout76. Thankfully never paid for it. Huge fallout fan. Lack of NPCs was a big part for me. Than there was hackers deleting your progress.
I don’t think Fallout76 can be counted as a sequel. It’s a standalone game in a franchise, like Super Mario 64 is a different game then Mario Kart 64.
Fallout 76 doesn’t count as a sequel to Fallout 4 in the same way that Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t count as a sequel to Skyrim. MMOs just aren’t the same kind of game as a single-player RPG.
wtf you talking bout willis?
Fallouts lore/world is continuous from FO1, FO2, FO3, FO4, and FO76.
Super Mario World and Mario Kart? Seriously?? I don’t think you know what sequels are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t played any of the games you just mentioned based on the ludicrous assertions youre making about them.
well now it has story and npcs.
Oh really? I guess I’ll have to give it a 2nd chance.
I got it for free through PSplus while back. Gave it an hour of my time but didn’t invest cuz of the whole hackers find you and perma deleting your items debacle.
This isn’t from personal experience because its reputation is so bad I avoided it entirely, but apparently Mass Effect 3. The fan backlash was so strong they apparently had to retcon the ending, LOL!
en.wikipedia.org/…/Mass_Effect_3_ending_controver…
(You know it’s bad when it’s infamous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.)
That’s a shame. If you liked the first two or just want a really awesome SciFi rpg, you should give it a go. The reaction to the ending was really overblown imho. And it wasn’t retconned per se, it was expanded and more options were added.
I beat the game before any changes were made to the ending and I didn’t feel nearly at visceral as some people did. The changes they made also helped fill in any real qualms I had. Not to mention, even if it’s as bad as they say, the ending is like 1% of a trilogy spanning SciFi epic. It’s an incredible rpg series, one of the best ever.
At this point, I’d need to re-play Mass Effect 1 and 2 first. And also wait for it to go on a good sale.
The ending was dumb but the game itself was p solid
I remember not liking 3 when it came to the Xbox at the time, but I played over 150 hours of the Legendary Edition with some mods that improve 3 and actually incorporate a lot of the choices from the first 2 games and 3 that made the ending hit even more for me!
I might be wrong as I just quickly looked this up, but it might be this mod?
Borderlands
1: Decent 2: Best in the series Pre-Sequel: Playable Clap-Trap is the only redeeming factor. 3: Solid gameplay, shit narrative 4 Shit.
I liked the moon gravity stuff in pre sequel, and the shield lady’s abilities. But did not care at all for the story or humour in that one.
I’ve bought and played them all. Presequel and BL4 are wasted money in my eyes.
After 4, I’ll never buy one again. I am a huge BL3 fan and 4 was just a soulless cash grab.
pre sequel best in the series tbh
You forgot:
Saints row 3.
2 had just the right balance of funny and serious.
3 felt cobbled together as a series of lolsorandom ideas without an actual soul in them, cut out fleshed out characters you grew to love in 2 to make space for terribly acted cardboard cutouts voices by meme-famous people like Hulk Hogan and Sasha grey, neither of whom aged particularly well as a casting choice, and didn’t really have anything seriously above 2 except for the raw gameplay.
The three Spyro the Dragon games on the Playstation were all fantastic. The first Spyro game on the PS2 (notably not made by Insomniac) was terrible.
Also related: The Crash Bandicoot games took a similar nosedive in the PS2 era. Crash of the Titans was alright but the other ones I played were awful.
God of War III. Good gameplay, but what the hell was that story? Kratos kills everyone in an unneccessarily sadistic way, turns the whole world into chaos and ruin and them offs himself with his own sword.
That felt like reading a school shooter fanfiction.
Good gameplay
Massive understatement though. GoW3 is still the best western action game to this day.
I definitely agree with you about the storyline. I actually laughed out loud when Kratos stabbed himself at the end. I feel that they were trying to make sure there wasn’t another sequel based on Greek myths.
The last of us 2.
I liked the first game, the twist at the end was a bit iffy, but it was understandable from a character perspective (Joel was never a good guy, and him deciding to kill a bunch of fireflies to save his psuedo-daughter from an iffy medical procedure makes sense to his character).
The second game was fantastic mechanically, and a train wreck everywhere else.
I understood the story they tried to tell, and they might have even told that story decently.
But it was absolutely not what I signed up for, I went from a coming of age (Ellie) / found family (Both) / redemption (Joel) story, and went right into a gritty “the price of revenge” story that was just so emotionally exhausting. Half the story was spent on a character I didnt care about, the timeline was confusing, and most of all, I didnt want to play a game about Ellie (and Joel’s brother) descending into emotionally driven monsters who sacrifice everything for revenge.
Its hard to say the game was “bad,” since mechanically it was good, and the story had depth. The confusing timeline wasnt great, but was survivable if the game was otherwise good. It was just such a tonal whiplash, and was such a slog to get through that it killed the whole series for me.
Out of all the hate I’ve read about TLOU2, I’ve never seen anyone say the timeline is confusing. I also can’t see the tonal whiplash, personally. Both games are incredibly dark.
I loved it. Blew the first game out of the water. Found absolutely nothing about the narrative to be confusing and I’m not even sure how that would be possible.
Everyone was just pissed at the events of the beginning of the game (trying to avoid spoilers), but I honestly thought it was brilliant and an amazing way to keep the (far superior now) story going.
Joel was a piece of shit who deserved to die, it really doesn’t matter that you played as him for 40 hours or whatever. In fact, that makes it even better imo.
Found absolutely nothing about the narrative to be confusing and I’m not even sure how that would be possible.
I mean, they did have two story lines that take place in parallel with one another, and affect one another. So it’s not like a standard linear timeline, I could see how someone spreading their play sessions out over many weeks or months could lose track of things. But I thought it worked well.
Joel was a piece of shit who deserved to die, it’s that simple
I don’t think that was the intended takeaway, nor would I ever dare to say “it’s that simple” about any character’s motives in this story. The entire point of a trolley problem is that it’s an ethical dilemma without a clear “right” answer.
At the beginning of TLOU2, Ellie clearly also felt like Joel was a piece of shit liar/murderer…but then learns she’s capable of being the exact same person under the right circumstances. If anything, I see the moral of the story as “it’s never simple once it’s you”.
Banjo-Tooie. You have every ability from the first game off rip. Sounds good on paper, makes more sense than losing everything for some reason. But, it also makes the move set feel bloated, makes the devs reuse old gimmicks to keep the old abilities relevant, and makes the new abilities feel less interesting and very situational. Overall, it makes the game hard to play because the rewards for doing so just aren’t that interesting.
Probably a bit niche of a game series, but Dungeon Defenders. It’s an Action RPG / Tower Defense hybrid that I loved as a kid. And all the sequels kinda sucked for one reason or another. I’ve played all of them a little bit too much, so I’m going to go into way too much detail here lol.
The first game was one of my all-time favorites on the xbox 360 as a kid (which is kinda funny because it has like 100x the content on PC). The game was riddled with cheaters and hacked items, but damn did I have fun anyway. My friends were practically begging me to play anything else when they came over to hang out.
Then they made Dungeon Defenders II and charged $20 for it in early access. I bought the game in a heartbeat because I loved the first one so much. But it just turned into an always-online, live-service game without any actual story, that forces you to buy multiple microtransactions for necessary QoL features in order to play the game in the way it’s intended. Eventually the game went free-to-play and pushed that model even harder. Its a shame, because underneath all the bullshit it looks like a fun enough sequel.
Then Dungeon Defenders: Awakened came out. Half sequel, half remake of the original (time travel shenanigans), it had a lot of potential and it’s one of only two games I’ve ever backed on Kickstarter. The game is basically a modernized Dungeon Defenders, with some new content and a boat load of QoL additions. They even release all future content for free instead of as DLC like the original, so its a one-time purchase (and very strange coming from the same studio that runs DD2). Unfortunately, it was too damn similar to the original and didn’t do enough on its own. DD1 had a community dev team adding new maps and content for over 10 years, so why the hell would you buy the new game who’s original content amounts to like 6 new maps? The game did eventually get more content, and is honestly not a bad purchase at this point imo, but it could never catch up to the original.
Funny enough, the original DD1 started getting new DLC again a few years ago, so all three of these games are being developed simultaneously by different teams despite being sequels to the last.
Guilty Gear Strive.
Plus R is my favorite fighting game. Xrd I hated because they fucked with my character (Zato/Eddie) but I could tell it’s a fun game…
Strive just fucking sucks. The irony is I did vibe a little more with Zato in Strive than I did in Xrd, but WTF was everything else in this damn game… they just kinda ripped away anything that made characters unique in favor standardized systemic depth and breadth.
Less unique moves, less unique combos, even animations feel too samey compared to Plus R or Xrd… I hate it. Everything just feels needlessly homogeneous.
Even the game’s ideas suck. Like, WTF is Zabubu…
Every time I give it a shot all I’m thinking of is: why the fuck am I not playing Plus R instead?
Metal Gear Solid 5.
How can you just ditch your main character’s voice actor? As a Metal Gear completionist, how do I even play this traditionally linear game now that it’s open world and packed with repetitive side missions? Why am I building a strut base and hiring staff that I magically airlift to a chopper out on the battlefield? Overall a disappointment, not because of bad graphics or bad controls or bad gameplay, just a hodgepodge of content that was too much of a departure from the format of the first 4 linear games. I never finished it and probably never will. I know Konami threw multiple wrenches in Kojima’s gears during development but I feel the overall direction was still flawed from the onset. Open World was just so popular at that time and maybe they forced it on Kojima, who knows. I know he didn’t want to make a 5th game anyway so I’m gonna just pretend it never happened and be happy with the first 4 and the PSP titles.
Dungeon Siege 3 sucks and could be one of the worst titles from Obsidian. It doesn’t even feel like Dungeon Siege.
Tales of Zestiria: No idea how did they managed the make the game so boring.
Final Fantasy XIII Lightning Returns: XIII was already a bad FF game but it was fine on its own. With LR they stripped down almost everything that makes FF FF.
Far Cry 6: It’s not worth even write a bad review.
Stronghold 3: There is no Stronghold 3.
Mafia 3: It’s not a Mafia game.
Life is Strange Double Exposure. Why did Max’s powers change wtf?!
Gauntlet (2014) if you count it as a sequel to Legends and Dark Legacy, is a big disappointment. I think simple games can be fine but this is just too simple. Legends just barely had enough depth to be good, and then they go and make something simpler.
Deus Ex Human Revolution might be the best game that I hate lol
It’s just not close to as good as the original and it still gets so much praise. They dropped so much of the strategy and depth of Deus Ex. It doesn’t hold up nearly as well on repeat playthroughs.
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. After 4 great fantasy RPGs they dropped that post-apocalyptic groundhog day turd, and the series essentially died.
Possibly a bit obscure, but I absolutely loved the racing game “pod”. “pod 2” released on the Dreamcast and I bought it without hesitation. It sucked.
Halo 4. Never was big on Halo and hadn’t really played past Halo 1 until recently getting the MCC, and then I binged on all of them. The main series story was ok, despite feeling slightly more incoherent with each game. Even the spin-offs were ok games. Pushed thrpugh a and finished Halo 3 and thought it was a fairly satisfying ending to the plot, only to find that they’re reviving the chief. Again. With Cortana. Again. And guess what, she’s going rogue. Again. I just couldn’t do it, stopped then and there.
Parasite Eve 3, or should I say 3rd Birthday.
The first 2 games were sequels to a sci fi horror novel. The title doesn’t actually have “parasite Eve” in it because the rumour is they lost the rights to the book and any references to ideas from the book. So they couldn’t mention the titular Eve or mitochondria.
Instead they made a story about time travel and mysterious unrelated monsters.
No idea why they bothered making it.
I love Puyo Puyo.
I hate Puyo Puyo Tetris. It's a big step back from previous games, and it's the worst online experience I've ever dealt with in my life. And I honestly think it gives beginners a bad first impression of the series, because by juxtaposing it next to a more popular game I regularly see players get confused when it doesn't click in the first five minutes and decide they'd rather just play Tetris instead.
I utterly loathe and despise Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It's everything I hated about the first game but buggier. And it's all ctrl-c ctrl-v, the only 'new' content is a butchered adaptation of Chronicle's Skill Battle, minus the full JRPG story mode that Skill Battle was built around. It has serious problems competitively, but by splitting the playerbase, it killed Puyo Puyo Champions, the more functional game I kept trying to run tournaments for but could not get players to show up.
The true depth of my hatred really just stems from Sega's decision to rehash a second crossover. It has been ten years since the last proper main series game, Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and that game was Japan-only - the last game to get localized was Fever, 26 years ago.
There was a time when, despite not liking the first game, I had high hopes that this game succeeding in the west would lead to bigger and better things for the series. Surely Sega willl follow it up with a main series game along the lines of the ones I liked, and surely they'll localize it. But that didn't happen, and the tragedy is that I understand exactlly why it didn't. PPT outsold everything else Sega ever tried to do with the franchise by an order of magnitude, and it did so by selling to an audience that only cares about the other game. So Sega realized the most profitable course of action is to keep riding the coattails of a more popular game because that's all anyone cares about. I just want Puyo Puyo to be its own game, but why would Sega ever go back to that when they know that even the most low-effort ctrl-c ctrl-v rehash will sell far more copies as long as it has the more popular game attached to it?
Ohhh, this will probably be a controversial take, but I am going to frame if to “most disappointing” instead of least favourite.
Batman Arkham City.
Firstly, it is still a great game. I am not stupid enough to say it’s bad. And it is better than Origins and Knight.
But, Asylum is such a beautiful and intricate game with some of the best level design. It is an almost perfect Metroidvania. And then they jumped to the open world for the rest of the games.
That jump, doesn’t particularly add anything, and while Gotham looks great, it is mostly empty and skipped over as you glide and hook to the next indoor section. Outside of some challenges and riddler trophies, it actually is just terrible padding of low level mobs for the most part.
The reason I chose City over knight is precedent, that first jump to open world for me really reduced how much I was invested in the world/areas of the game.
I still love it, and the improvement to combat and gadgets are great, but Asylum will always be king of the Batman games(City is a close but disappointing 2nd)
vikingtons@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
fear 2 and 3 could never really live up to the original. 2 sort of watered things down, 3 was kind of bizarre plot wise.
I almost feel obliged to bring up halo 4 and the rest of the 343 fever dream of games.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I thought 2 was ok (albeit not very original) but then 3 just casually killed off the protagonist of 2 and that was really lame. Was there drama involving different studios making the games, or something? Because it felt like the guys making 3 were saying “LOL, 2 didn’t matter.”
vikingtons@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
yeah I think monolith were taken off the series even during the like… expansions? I’m not sure what you’d refer to the DLC to fear 1 as?
2 was a serviceable game for sure, it just felt like it was on rails a little bit. I find it hard to articulate exactly why that is from memory but I don’t feel like downloading it again 😅.
3 went completely off the rails, however.