Biggest Disappointment?

[Luthair]

Originally Posted by Trebla

It's interesting that there are actually quite a few people saying WoW was a big disappointment; and they offer up different reasons why it disappoints them. Some are disappointed with PvP, some with the instances, some with the depressingly small raids. And I guess I'll throw another one in.

Personally I found there to be very little to do once you'd hit max level, while it wasn't a 'big disappointment', I didn't find it to be a particularly great game.

Originally Posted by Tunk

SWG. How could they possibly fuck up the strongest sci-fi IP so badly? I remember whn LucasArts disassociated themselves from SWG prerelease, I just wish they could have pulled the star wars license away also.

With video games its pretty much a guarantee that if its based on a book/tv/movie its going to be terrible. There are exceptions but you can usually assume otherwise.


For me, the only really big disappointment I can think of offhand would be Masters of Orion 3.

[Thug]

Everquest: Biggest disappointment was really with the lack of innovation in the technology as the expansions came out. Towards the end of PoP I knew things weren't really going to get much better seeing as how the events were scripted pretty much the same way as they had been early on.

Also, early on I noticed that no matter how much technology I thew at the game it just never ran better and my computer has pretty much always been pretty close to the high end of what was available at the time. I knew that there was not going to be any improvements when I was taking the .wld files and brute force rendering the entire zone faster than what the EQ engine was doing. Cards at the time were capable of rendering millions of polygons per second and it seemed that EQ never took advantage of them.

Even the smallest things like the slow turning speed with the mouse was starting to become annoying (even tho I had it cranked up to max)

Everquest2: I was really hoping that this game would be a true EQ2 and would be Everquest with a new engine and a new world to explore. It was to a degree but about half way through development I heard one of the head guys say that they were "taking EQ2 in a different direction than EQ" and it was at that point I knew the game was going to be less than I hoped.

My biggest problem with EQ2 was that it was going to be instanced, and while I could certainly tolerate a dungeon to be instanced, the whole damn game was instanced, including the overworld! Eventually I got tired of trying to meet up with people and form groups because they were in overworld instance 4 and I was in overworld instance 2 and I would have to head back to town to zone out and then zone back in to the one they were in. The run all the way back out to meet them.

EQ2's engine was definitely a step above EQ's but unfortunately it was to big of a step and the game ended up running like crap and it seems that stencil shadows were hot at the time for whatever reason and the engine made liberal use of them. I've never been a fan of stencil shadows since they more or less just look like shit.

I only made it to level 27 before throwing in the towel.

World of Warcraft: I really enjoyed the look and feel of WoW. It was a change from the brown of EQ, EQ2 and other games that I had saw. The fact that everything was so colorful gave the artists much more freedom to be creative with the art. Moreover the models and animation were really well done and the game actually ran at a decent framerate (40-60+fps) so you could really appreciate the amount of time they spent on the animation. I dont care how much time and effort you put into animating something, If the game runs at 10fps, who cares. You're never going to get to see it.
I played alpha and beta and WoW and while I want hooked! I was definitely interested. It wasn't until I saw my roommate raiding Molten Core did I get the game and start leveling up.

Some things that turn me off about the game is that for the most part it is not very challenging. Mobs of your own level are easy to kill, in my opinion they are too easy. Going 1 on 1 with a mob it is pretty damn hard to die. Even if you do get into trouble (maybe it parried 8 times in a row) you can just run away for about 8 seconds and the mob will leave you alone.

Even if you do die, its just a quick run back to your corpse and you can res up and keep going. I've got no problem with this but I feel the difficulty should be raised on the game to compensate for the easy CR.

The other thing that turns me off about the game is running from one end of the zone to the other is a pretty trivial task, even if you aggro 5 mobs along the way you can just keep running and they'll just drop off and leave you alone. Sticking to the path through the zone tho it's pretty unlikely that you'll even aggro anything as its a pretty safe route. I really dislike the idea that there's a safe path through almost every zone. I think its pretty rediculous that a level 1 can run from Mulgore to Orgrimmar and make it in one piece. If you're a level 1 running through a level 20 zone you should never make it 200 ft into the zone without getting creamed.

I recently started leveling my 15thish character on another server and chose a bloodelf. I havent really explored the area over there so I wanted to check things out and go through the area as a newbie. Well the quests over there finally got to me. I went through like 6 different quests from 6 differnt npcs who wanted me to go kill like 8-10 of 2-3 sets of different mobs.

I was like this is it? This is the "content" of the zone? Blizzard has me running around killing shit just for the sake of killing it. There's no ulterior motive behind it other than the obligation to the quest. I'm not trying to fight my way to the bottom of a dungeon to kill some named mob for an item I really want. I'm not trying to fight my way across a zone so I can get to this new town that has a new spell I sure could use. There's no end goal to what I'm doing other than grinding mob after mob to satisfy this quest, so I can finish it and move on to the next quest thats doing the same thing.

I'm sorry but giving people kill quest after kill quest as motivation to get out there and grind kill mobs for exp and to progress their character isnt the way to do it. You could get rid of 90% of the quests in WoW and have no less "content" than you did before.

I mean seriously, THIS is the game that should have the title Everquest.

As much as I enjoy WoW at the high end if the next expansion is more of this quest quest quest BS when leveling up. I think I'm gonna call it quits.


Vanguard: Well when I heard that Brad McQuaid, the guy that had a big part in the creation of EQ was doing another game, I was giddy. I thought this is gonna be awesome, old EQ stuff with new graphics, a new world, new content, Yay! Finally something to get me off this fisher price my first mmo game called WoW.

The game was a year and half off but boy was I stoked. Until things about the game started getting released to the public. Screenshots started comming out and I was in awe at what I saw. I saw nothing but just miles and miles of landscape. Utterly boring, uninteresting, empty, flat, landscape. I was like oh god, this does not bode well. Theres no way you can possibly fill that up with decent interesting content.

Then I heard that they were making it so that you could practically go anywhere. "If you can see it, you can go there". Mix that with the flat boundless terrain and you've got a cluster fuck waiting to happen. There's going to be no direction to the content, no guidance through the game in where the player should go next. It's like taking a book, ripping out all the pages, putting them on the ground in some random order, with random sides facing up, and telling somebody enjoy the book!

And there wasnt any direction to the game. When beta came out I leveled to level 6 and pretty much set off in one direction running. I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran some more. I ran across water, I ran up hills, over mountains, down the other side, and just kept running. I saw a few mobs here and there along the way but eventually I came to a castle like thing that had level 40+ mobs outside of it! I was like wtf. I think I had only covered like 1/20th of the continent, if not less. Yeah it turned out just like I figured it would when I saw the screenshots.

Next we have the engine. Wow, can we say over engineered? I mean how many features can you cram into an engine before the damn thing becomes unplayable? I don't know but it looks like they were sure trying to find out. I again had a pretty high end computer and i was getting like 10fps?! Even toned down on the graphics I think I topped out at 15-18fps. Uhhh no thanks. I didnt spend $2,000+ on my system so that I can play at 15fps.

Not only that, but the graphics were fucking ugly as hell, but we've got bump mapped/normal mapped terrain textures to thank for that I spose.

The funny part is, people on the forums here kept saying, yeah well it still in beta, its still in beta, it'll be optimized. Yeah well even if, and this is a big fucking IF, you manged to somehow double the fps to 30, its still pretty fucking crappy FPS. The last time I heard of somebody optimizing an engine for a major speed increase was John Carmack back in the days of Quake1 when he implemented using a PVS with a sorted edge rasterizer over some of the other ideas he had previously tried and to be honest, that wasnt really an optimization as much as it was a retooling of how the engine worked.

Either way, with the lack of content, the piss poor graphics and the stuffed to the gills, feature packed engine that ran like dog shit, I knew VG was never going to make it.

Yah I have to agree with another poster, I dont know how you fuck that up with 4+ years of development and 30+million dollars, but then again I've never been in that position, so who am I to say. Perhaps one day.


In the end I would have to rank VG as my biggest disappointment to date, but since I always assume the worst, the size of the disappointment wasn't all that much.

[Seig]

Warhammer Online is the biggest disappointment I've ever come across when it comes to MMo's. Sure a couple of games and expansions disappointed me, but I wasn't really hyped for any EQ expansions or the few Korean games I tried out.

I fell for the WAR hype... the podcasts about sieges, pvp that mattered, and the zone control made it sound amazing. But almost all of those features aren't implemented very well and the game feels like it's still a year + from being released unless it wants to have an epic fail launch like Vanguard.

[Lejina Bloodbath]

Vanguard wasn't a disapointment to me at all. I played a SK for 4 years. When I heard that Brad was there with The Vision, I had no desire to touch that game with a 10 ft pole. I never understood the hype.

Boy, did I try to like EQ2 though. I played vanilla and two more expansions in a top raiding guild. Just like EQ1, the folks I was playing with made the game, but eventually the reality of the game catch up to you and I barely played the Faydwer expansion. Then Kunark came over and that dev made that retarded post that was essentially "healers can all use leather, I wont design different armor sets for all classes!" I knew it was hopeless and didn't touch that game ever since.

[AladainAF]

Oh, to mention CoH, actually I never found it boring. I always had fun.

Until they did the burn nerf on fire tanks. Then, it just became lame.

Seriously, I had 7 other friends in a group, and 7 of us were firetanks, and one empathy healer. Being able to go into a zone, and pull 300 mobs in one pull, and 7 fire tanks drop a burn patch at once was the most fun I had in any MMO, and it never got old.

Its a damn shame you can't do that anymore

[OpFor]

Can I say Duke Nukem 4, because it simply cannot live up to the hype even as faded as it is now.

[Cybsled]

You're making the assumption it will actually come out

[Andric d'Regor]

World of Warcraft.
I was seriously pumped about it, really excited and then I played it. The screenshots looked great and so did the game, the gameplay was well designed and worked. Nothing was majorly bad about it apart from the loot lag but I HATED it. I hated the fisher-price colours, I hated how the trees were done, I loathed the clever little bits that were there to show how clever the designers were, I hated that the quests were so lined up and obvious and led you through THE way to level - much of my view is obviously against what most others thought but I just loathed the game and felt massivley disappointed with it.

EQ2 i expected to be total shite and it was but I enjoyed it quite a lot and had some good folks to play with luckily, tided me through till it got decent. Tried WoW a few tiems since - still cant enjoy it.

[Utnayan]

Back to the future on the NES.

I saved up my allowance as a kid to get that thing, and it was the worst money ever spent.

[Malice]

Vanguard was definitely the biggest let-down.

[Scaffa]

Everquest: Biggest disappointment was really with the lack of innovation in the technology as the expansions came out. Towards the end of PoP I knew things weren't really going to get much better seeing as how the events were scripted pretty much the same way as they had been early on.

Hrm. Can't say I remember anything in Kunark or Velious that was scripted the same as Rallos, Vallon, Tallon, Mud Event, Rathe Council, Corinav, Bertoxx and pretty much every other serious boss. Also raid scripting only got more adventerous in GoD (but bugged to hell and nigh impossible).

I agree with everything else you said but I don't think it'd be fair to say PoP was just same old EQ.

[Thug]

Pretty much with everything you listed there one function/method was used: Mob::OnDeath(spawn new mobs);

All of the mobs abilities were pretty dry, it was either direct damage, or an AoE damage spell.

There was no interactivity on part of the players, it was pretty much always just tank and spank.

Compare stuff like that with Thaddius from Naxxramus where players had to move and group up based on what kind of debuff they had.

Or Heigan where players had to dodge waves of floor eruptions while zig zagging across the room. Plus some players got ported away from the rest of the group and had to dodge/kill eye stalks to make it back to the raid.

Then there's CThun, Magtheridon, and prolly a few more I'm forgetting.

Also, although not a boss, check out the little in ground Simon games in O'grila.

[Cowbell]

I didnt read the thread but, Phantom Menace.

[kudos]

Originally Posted by Scaffa

Hrm. Can't say I remember anything in Kunark or Velious that was scripted the same as Rallos, Vallon, Tallon, Mud Event, Rathe Council, Corinav, Bertoxx and pretty much every other serious boss. Also raid scripting only got more adventerous in GoD (but bugged to hell and nigh impossible).

I agree with everything else you said but I don't think it'd be fair to say PoP was just same old EQ.

He also forgot that EQ was the very first game to require a 3d accelerated graphics card. The technology part he's spouting off doesn't hold any water.

He's also using examples from a game that came out 7 years later or something to say why he's disappointed in EQ . Makes no sense.

[TwiNCannoN]

Originally Posted by Andric d'Regor

World of Warcraft.
I was seriously pumped about it, really excited and then I played it. The screenshots looked great and so did the game, the gameplay was well designed and worked. Nothing was majorly bad about it apart from the loot lag but I HATED it. I hated the fisher-price colours, I hated how the trees were done, I loathed the clever little bits that were there to show how clever the designers were, I hated that the quests were so lined up and obvious and led you through THE way to level - much of my view is obviously against what most others thought but I just loathed the game and felt massivley disappointed with it.

EQ2 i expected to be total shite and it was but I enjoyed it quite a lot and had some good folks to play with luckily, tided me through till it got decent. Tried WoW a few tiems since - still cant enjoy it.

Pretty much the perfect example of how hyping a game up for yourself can ruin it I think (and vice versa). When you hype it up and it's even the least bit disappointing it just snowball effects to where even looking at the icon on the desktop disgusts you. Even worse to do with MMO's since there are so many things you "have to" forgive them for, just for being an MMO.

Strangely I don't think I've ever over-hyped myself on an MMO. Patches and expansions for pre-existing ones, sure - "this patch is gonna fix everything I can't wait" and such; but I do it all the time with FPS games (mainly since it boggles my mind that a professional developer can't balance something as simple as an FPS). "Oh man painkiller is gonna be the best thing ever it's made by quake 1 players and the CPL is gonna endorse it". Rinse, repeat with doom3. Rinse, repeat with quake4... and now the CPL is dead lol.