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?
World of Warcraft ruined Warcraft.
Capitalism ruins franchises.
MMOs and live service ruin lore. They’ll twist the existing story into knots so that players can fight or recruit every popular character from the series, even if it makes no sense. Even if they’re dead. Gotta keep those players engaged, even if it comes at the expense of the integrity of the world and writing that drew them in in the first place!
Cataclysm ruined World of Warcraft.
Pssssshhhh wow was ruined after beta was finished 🙄
KSP2.
Surprised this didn’t come up sooner to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, Fable III was a brutal step back. You couldn’t even equip clothing pieces individually anymore, and the whole “you’re king now, better collect enough money in time” sucked too.
Oh gee, I couldn’t think of something to put here. But Fable 3 was definitely a flop
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.
strangely enough, for all the hate Andromeda gets, I have more playtime in that game than the original trilogy combined.
Andromeda is more fun to replay. and to me the combat is hella fun. the characters are good. the loyalty missions are awesome.
the story? ehhhh. it has potential, honestly. and left us wide open for exploration.
its not the most flawless perfect game in existence, but damn its pretty good.
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.
Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless
It really did.
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.
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.
Apex Legends ruined the possibility of getting a Titanfall3
StarCraft and Brood War were amazing, but the writing quality took a nosedive in the sequel. StarCraft 2 felt like poorly written fanfiction that didn’t understand the existing characters or their motivations at all.
Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there’s a suspension of disbelief when you’ve got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.
SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That’s my “Han shot first” of the franchise.
Agreed 100%, how Kerrigan was handled was the worst of StarCraft 2’s many sins against prior characterization. They spent an entire expansion setting her up as an irredeemable monster and the new big bad of the setting alongside Mengsk and whatever Duran was up to, only to undo it all because NuBlizzard wanted their waifu.
And there is no way Jim Raynor as of the end of Brood War would ever ally with Kerrigan again after her betrayal, yet he goes from having sworn to get revenge for Fenix’s death to helping Kerrigan “redeem” herself with little more than a mention of past grievances.
Maybe Jim was just in a really good mood after all his hair spontaneously grew back. /s
Halo 4, kinda suck tbh. This is coming from someone who play the MMC so i basically marathon it and is able to compare it back to back, and it peaked at Reach. The gun play is wonky and no dual wield, Covenant somehow become the bad guy again after the event in 3, and none of the one that help human defeat Gravemind came back as an ally.
But it doesn’t ruin the franchise for me though, to me canonically there’s only 5 Halo game. The rest is fan fic.
4 felt like such a cash grab to me. No deep lore or story telling like with 1 through reach. Exposition was just spoon fed to us rather than a great mystery. Still, I plugged through, hoping maybe it’d turn around.
Then 5 came out and I gave up all hope on the franchise. Spent more time playing as Locke than we did Chief, story was more compelling than 4 but the storytelling and pacing were clunky, and it was completely disconnected from 4.
Infinite just got worse. “We lost, chief” (but we have no frame of reference, we have no idea what that means , we don’t know how the rest of the world has been affected, and then we’re put against some no name character when we really just want to know what the hell is happening off world)
The only good thing about Infinite was its return to the classic art style. After whatever the art team was doing in 4 and 5, I am glad at least the art team finally got a clue.
Agreed. It could have been such an interesting concept if it was literally any other place. Zeta halo could have been so cool, but it felt so detached from the universe
Puyo Puyo Tetris. I put out a lengthy video essay about how this game is directly responsible for everything wrong with the series today, and a followup.
TL;DR: Outsold every main series game, and by an order of magnitude. Succeeded in spite of Puyo Puyo rather than because of it, did a terrible job making new players actually want to play Puyo Puyo and just led them to bounce off it and play the other game instead. But even in spite of how much I initially disliked it as a game, I thought its success could lead to bigger and better things for the series, perhaps we could finally get a main series game localized next. Never happened, instead Sega rehashed this crossover four times. Main series is dead, never coming back.
I have never seen such strong opinion about Puyo puyo WTH?
I’m passionate about my favorite game. I’m sure you have games you’re passionate about, right?
Fair and valid point Sir tho you have to admit Puyo Puyo hardcore fans are a rarity.
Well, we’ll remain rare as long as Sega does such a terrible job marketing this series…
I’m going to say The Last of Us 2. I loved the first one so much, and then 2 was not what I wanted or was expecting, which completely killed any love I had for it and any desire for a larger franchise.
I was hoping for an anthology series where each game focused on a different group of people in the same universe. I loved Joel and Ellie, but I wanted their story to be over and to get a look at how other people had dealt with things.
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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Final Fantasy Remake Part 1
They changed the story and introduced Whispers to the game, something about Fate trying to drive the story the way its supposed to be. Then they made Sephiroth the final boss of what is now known to be a trilogy (bcz money)…
My absolute favorite game got ruined bcz they decided they needed to “shake the game up”. And now part 2 “Rebirth” is some multiverse bullshit.
I hate everything about this corporate BS they turned the remake into. But, I have to live with it bcz its not my game.
Best I could do is buy rebirth used from game stop so Square Enix didnt get any of my money.
Instead, I play the original from time to time, and I have to try to block out the remake changes they have made.
The franchise was so successful, that Square Enix made idiotic spinoffs and added characters to iconic scenes who weren’t there. They’ve just completely ruined the original game with how much they’ve milked the franchise. Its tragic to me, and not many people care that much.
I really wanted a remake that made the changes that were necessary to play to a modern audience, clear up the confusing story points more fleshed out so they were direct, and maybe changed up a boss or two. Basically I wanted the same thing they did with Resident Evil 4 remake, but instead we got a garbage trilogy.
imagine having never played the original (me, unfortunately, at the time). Then, what are the whispers all about?
I mean, its not a terrible game. I just really wish they would have stuck to the original story. If you havent played the original, thats probably a good thing when playing the remake bcz then you don’t have a comparison.
Funny, I said the same thing on Reddit around the time it was released and was fucking crucified for it, lol. I called it a shallow button-masher with FFVII aesthetics and bad fanfiction for a story. I didn’t get any coherent rebuttal besides people malding over turn-based combat and how rewriting iconic scenes and plot points is good because reasons.
Yeah, depending on where you say this people will absolutely rail you for it. I dont understand why people are accepting of this crap.
Any Splinter Cell after Chaos Theory
Also,
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
followed by Assassin’s Creed: Unity
followed by Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate
I liked Double Agent for trying something different, but Conviction and everything after was utter trash.
I really liked blacklist, it’s a shame the pc port is completely fucked into oblivion…I lost my PS3 disk in a move a few years ago and never found it again. I really need to get a new copy.
For me Just Cause 4 is the worst one for too many reasons to list. Also, I’m still not sure about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but that could have a lot to do with not being ready to play a middle aged, yolked Henry lol
(Edit: Oh and Sniper Elite 6 seems like a contender too. Although SE5 was very poorly received at the beginning until they fixed the issues and then it turned into one of the most awesome games ever so who knows…)
4 was janky, and jumped the shark too many times in the story.
But damn did I have a fun time playing it. The weather guns are stupid, but they’re fun. Just like the jetpack and weather guns from the DLC for 3. We’re not playing these games for realism; at least I’m not. I wanna glide around over a base and bomb the shit out of it and watch everything explode.
100% agree which also leads to one of the biggest disappointments in JC4 for me; re-spawning enemies… It was so satisfying to conquer bases in JC3 and you knew that was it then. That base belonged to the rebellion for good. Also they changed Rico’s ethnicity and bodyshape. Here’s the hero you love except he’s South American now and his muscles are gone. He’s meant to be an ironic cliche “Thees could be traaable”. That was the whole point. It was fun. I think the thing that ticked me off the most though was that all they had to do was make a graphically updated clone of JC3 with another land to fight over and they could have spawned an endless amount of sequels. I’ve played through JC3 so many times and the second that Firestarter soundtrack comes on it’s just so. damn. perfect 😎🍷
Came in here looking for just cause
I got 2 on my Xbox 360 as a hand me down from a family friend in maybe early 2010s cus I also got oblivion from them and remember looking up guides and Skyrim stuff popping up left and right for
Anyways I have 240 in jc3 and find it just fun. And then I have 130 hours in 4
Ngl give me a small graphic upgrade, give me the ammo economy and wingsuit of 3 as well as a new map and I’d be happy
I followed this game like crazy even pre ordering (lesson learned) some upgrade edition that was later released as dlc so yeah I was excited for this
Don’t get wrong definitely disappointed (bought into the hype so that didn’t help) but I occasionally jump back into the game and have some fun
My complaint is the story just wasn’t good. Like no one’s playing just cause for the story but something about it my casual ass didn’t like it
Diablo 4
Prototype 2. I loved the main character of the first one and the idea that even a monster was not as evil as human corporations. The jump to him being a main villain in 2 was too abrupt, there needed to be more story reasons to justify the change, or they shouldn’t have made him a villain at all.
