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?
Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel are two of my favorite games which I’m almost always down to replay.
Borderlands 3 has solid enough gameplay, but absolutely shit all over the storyline and characters.
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.
Don’t play many sequel games, so it’s hard to say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Oblivion.
Daggerfall was awesome and Morrowind blew me away. Going into Oblivion I had the highest hopes. Bought the Collectors Edition, took the day off…and biggest disappointment from a game ever. Granted I like Skyrim. Not as much as Daggerfall or Morrowind, but far more than Oblivion. So I guess it didn’t kill the franchise for me.
Bonus popular game that actually killed the franchise for me: GTA4. I loved the Trilogy, but I could not stand IV. All the main characters annoyed the piss out of me, the driving and gun play weren’t nearly as fun…I tried to play it but got burned out around 1/3rd of the way in. Tried to play GTA5 a few years ago and I felt burned out after 40 minutes.
Man, GTA IV is my favorite, and GTA V is my least favorite, and largely for the same reason: the main characters.
In IV, I really liked Niko and wanted him to succeed. I really didn’t like Roman, but I could relate since everyone has that annoying cousin. I just really wanted Niko to succeed at having a second chance in LC.
In V, I hated Michael, Trevor felt shallow (more backstory could’ve helped), and Franklin was a disappointment (what happened to his dream of owning a business?). Maybe they’re fleshed out more in GTA Online, but I never played it. Honestly, I was fine with them all dying since they all seemed like a waste of space, yet I had to play as them. Franklin was the least disappointing, but I really wanted him to have some interesting side content instead of an attempt of a story w/ his friend that ultimately went nowhere.
GTA SA is mu favorite because CJ’s arc is just so good.
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.
Why? I loved moo3. Not as good as moo2. But still good.
Either way, Master of Magic was the GOAT!
I think you are alone. Most people were disappointed. There were too many thing that were set to automatic. It was kind of hard to even play the game. More like just watching.
There is a remake of MoM that plays quite nice :-)
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.
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.
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.
