Games that you love solely for what they could've been

[BaileyTW]

Now I already like Daggerfall but like there's so many things implemented in the game that are shallow because of limitations. Like you have all these regions and you have reputations with multiple factions in each place but that reputation ends up meaning very little, just shop prices and whether or not the guards will be lenient with you, but in the main story you see its implementation where some plot threads are elaborated upon if certain groups or people like/hate you. I think if more of the game was like the main quest line then it would have been so great. Of course in bethesda fashion even from the start the game is buggy so like adding complexity everywhere would have made the bugginess come out to a bigger degree. Like for example, the dodge skill, you know what it does? If you guessed make it harder to hit things cause they accidentally added your dodge skill instead of the enemy's to the to-hit formula then you're right. Actually that's not bugginess that's just a huge oversight. Thankfully there's fan patches.

I still do like the game, but there's a lot of potential unrealized there.

[yakfak]

Final Fantasy XII for the way the story falls away at the precise time you want it to ramp up. the characters lose their uniqueness while they're dragged along on a quest, the promised main conflict takes to the skies when you're in a dungeon and plays out in cutscenes. cos the gimmick of the game is that all the battles take place in the field and you write simple rules sets to control your characters, the engine makes it hard to really feel the boss battles (besides some of the optional stuff when you're encouraged to manually use skills/spells like Shear and Decoy, which don't really make sense as part of an AI) and you realize that in the time spent between Giruvegan and the end of the game, NOTHING has happened except that you've done a lot of forced grinding in some very long and confusing dungeons and come out of the other end of them too strong to care about the plot any longer.

 

good points about FFXII: The music, the first half of the game's plot, Fran is a cute bunny

also they made grinding fun, and making the rewards of combat in an RPG is really important to me; you're accruing exp and job points, creating chances for rarer enemies to appear, unlocking fairly well-written passages in the bestiary and getting chances at some fairly long drop, steal and morph lists all at the same time.

but from Giruvegan all the plot points are too high stakes to work as development and since the dialogue is very ponderous and Star Wars-ish it all comes across as ludicrous anyway. I want tales from FFXII where the main four characters do pirate stuff. Basch and the Queen could go live in a castle just off camera, who cares.

[Snark]

Half life 3

 

[Devalaous]

Sims 3, an open world simulation ahead of its time, and crippled by executive interference, such as forcing 32-bit, making the various teams that worked on the game have NO communication with each other, and ending up with a program that can only use 4 GBs of RAM (technically less) that buckled under the weight of 11 expansion packs, a ton of stuff packs, and INSANE amounts of DLC, much of which barely even worked together. It needs just as many bugfix mods as the average Bethesda game, but once you get it stable, its such a neat game with so much potential.

Sims 4 doesn't even come close, as it was an online social game retrofitted to be a main game, and its rife with issues. Plus, it was turned into a safespace simulator in time..

[almostmatt1]

I feel like The Outer Worlds has all the bones of what could be a really good game, but ends up just feeling really bland. I've tried getting through it a few times and each time I do I underestimate how hard the game tries to hammer in the "lol corporations bad" joke, which is most of the personality the game tries to have, and it gets not only old but a bit annoying quite fast. Similarly to The Witcher 2 it has a lot of good elements of an RPG in which you could develop a character satisfyingly, but the game itself seems a bit too short and lacking diverse content to actually feel like you can effectively do so. I didn't get wrapped up in the excitement because it was an Obsidian game and I don't really like how it gets compared to Fallout so much so I didn't get let down by it because I was expecting something revolutionary and life changing, it's just disappointing because I really think it could have been great but just fell short.

 

Edit: Also, shout-out to Dwarf Fortress. I play it fairly often and quite enjoy it now but for a while found the game impenetrable because of the UI and graphics before I just gritted my teeth and got used to it. But yeah, for a while I thought that the game sounded like the coolest thing ever made but was just unplayable for me, so that would have been my answer if I saw this thread about 18 months ago.

[Rudolph]

9 hours ago, hybridial said:

Nah, how about this, System Shock 2 was great, but it does have very big problems at the end, clearly where it was rushed. One can imagine what could have been with some more time. Maybe Nightdive's enhanced edition will answer that question. 

To be fair, after playing System Shock 1, I do not find System Shock 2's rushed ending all that bad. It is not good, but the bar was not set high to begin with and I do not think the game had earned the right to give SHODAN a proper boss fight, given how she spends most of the game being so weak she has to rely on you to do her bidding.

 

If anything, they should have (literally) merged the Rickenbacker with the Body of the Many, essentially making the Gravity Shafts at the end of the Command Deck the point of no return. I doubt the game would have been substantially better had the Rickenbacker been given large, semi-open-ended levels as the ones before it.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Rudolph

[Denim Destroyer]

ATOM RPG: A very blatant clone of Fallout 2 with a Soviet setting. Instead of improving upon the faults of Fallout 2 the ATOM developers simply doubled down even unintentionally. ATOM like Fallout 2 has too many pop-culture references, a rushed story with an unsatisfying conclusion, lack of direct companion control in combat, bugs, and probably the most offensive an over reliance on agility. Agility directly influences how many times you can shoot and move in combat making it the single most important stat. Sure you can survive the easier encounters with a lower agility but the late game encounters will be unreasonably brutal due to having less actions per turn. Ideally companions could make up for it but there is no way for sure of knowing what they will do in combat thus making them more of a liability. For these reasons I cannot name any other game I have more of a love-hate relationship with.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

On 8/1/2021 at 7:55 PM, MattFright said:

Turns out, the developers would often give talks telling other developers about how they intentionally tried gating off player progression, intentionally pissing off players so they could laugh at streamers, and generally had zero care whatsoever about player fun aside from the bare minimum (which would be what they'd brag about...obviously), and even ended up making promises for post-release content and major updates that they never delivered on.

Just read this thread today - is that really so? I always thought the game was designed to be as fair as possible. It's a shame that Vlambeer (the game's developer) has decided to close its doors.

On 8/1/2021 at 7:55 PM, MattFright said:

After abandoning that game i wondered what it could've been like if it were developed by different people

I suppose the closest thing to this would be Nuclear Throne Together mods, the most ambitious of which is Territorial Expansion.

 

To get on topic; Dying Light. Its gameplay is excellent (very much so, Techland is good at mastering the undead; it helps that there are basically no other open world parkour games out there), though the main story falls flat and doesn't make sense at some points. I hope the sequel can somewhat fix this, though I'm a bit worried with all the alleged internal affairs going on.

[DSC]

Mega Man X6. The game was rushed by Capcom and, no joke, seriously could've ended even better than X4 with what they had there.

[omx32x]

2 minutes ago, DSC said:

Mega Man X6. The game was rushed by Capcom and, no joke, seriously could've ended even better than X4 with what they had there.

i like x6 more then x4 but i agree that it is garbage

 

i dunno x4 is kinda generic its the one i replay the least of all of the ps1 games

[TheNoob_Gamer]

3 minutes ago, DSC said:

Mega Man

A bit unrelated, but at one point I had interest in this franchise after observing the stark discrepancy between US and Japanese box arts.

Then I developed a love-hate relationship with the classic series, specifically the first 6 games: They have guns (lots of guns), is challenging, but the controls were a bit too jank for my tastes.

[hybridial]

2 hours ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

but the controls were a bit too jank for my tastes.

 

I feel like I might have had more time for that series had Mega Man ever learned to shoot up.

[omx32x]

41 minutes ago, hybridial said:

 

I feel like I might have had more time for that series had Mega Man ever learned to shoot up.

then you are in luck go play megaman zx or zx advent every power up on these games give you a completely different gameplay style then before and one of the power ups gives you the ability to control where your shots go

[Artman2004]

Doom 3. The game has a wonderful setting and aesthetic, but the gameplay is lackluster and basic, and the levels are repetitive and way too focused on darkness. 

 

The weapons are overly simple and pretty unsatisfying to use, weak sound effects and ugly designs don't help. There aren't any advanced mechanics or tricks you can learn with the weapons, they don't even have alt-fires! The strategy for most weapons is shoot and reload, that's it. No rocket jumping, ricochet shots, or placing traps.

 

The monster variety is also pretty shallow. They have all these cool monster designs, but it's as if someone at ID decided, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have like 78 melee monsters that behave exactly like the Pinky from the OG Doom, except with some gimmick to make them slightly unique?"

The enemies don't have to be outsmarted or need smart play to fight, just shoot the funny monster. The most brain that needs applying is the hitscan enemies, because they are actually dangerous. Most, if not all, only have 1-2 attacks they use, which can be easily dodged or avoided unless they get placed in a cheap area like a corner where you won't see them the first time.

 

Most of the levels are just metal bases, with very little color outside of grey and black (because darkness). The ones with color (the Mars surface levels, the toxic sludge areas, and Hell) really stuck out because they broke off from the usual color scheme. The level structure is pretty linear, with a puzzle sometimes.

 

Overall, it feels like wasted potential, like they focused too much on the technology rather than the game being fun.

[Syn]

Spore from 2008 fills this role for me. I love it to death as is, don't get me wrong, but there is so much that could have still been done, especially in 2008.

[omx32x]

1 hour ago, SynDoom said:

Spore from 2008 fills this role for me. I love it to death as is, don't get me wrong, but there is so much that could have still been done, especially in 2008.

i think spore was pretty cool and unique for a game about evolution but the space stuff sucks

[Hitscanning_scumbag]

oh, all the b games. But especially isle of the dead. Love the potential in that one. 

honorable mentions:

Corridor 7

witchaven

Hidden object games with a story

there are more but i cant really think right now im working on something

[Syn]

46 minutes ago, omalefico32x said:

i think spore was pretty cool and unique for a game about evolution but the space stuff sucks

The Space Stage is super underwhelming yeah. It's fun for like, 30 minutes and then you've done everything cool

[OniriA]

Cyberpunk 2077

[7Mahonin]

Maybe a controversial opinion here, but for me it would be any of the Elder Scrolls. I love the character building, the world the games take place in, the armor, etc. but every single time I’ve tried to play any of these games, I just can’t get into them whatsoever.
 

I have more fun watching my best friend, who is a die hard fan of these games, play than I do playing them for myself. What I think it is, is I just don’t enjoy hardcore RPG style gameplay where you have to worry about so many stats for so long before your character feels and acts the way you want them to. Every one of these games you basically start off as a nobody who by game plot logic is now the chosen one for a quest. Why can’t I start off as a fearless warrior or a corrupt conqueror? Why do I have to be a noob to the game world who has no cool outfits until later and who’s decisions only change certain things, but only the choices they want (ex. Killing certain characters basically “ends” the story, which ruins playing as an asshole if you can’t “win”)? Look at Dishonored for example, you can kill practically everyone in sight or nobody at all, and still get to the conclusion of the game’s plot. I get it with side quest losing the chance for making wrong decision but for the overall story you’d think they’d work it out to where the player can do more than what they basically want you to do.

 

I guess that’s why I prefer other games that have RPG like elements, but don’t take it so far that it slows down the combat and gameplay, or takes away from the fantasy immersion. I enjoyed the dark souls and bloodbourne games because to me, they had a lot of stuff you had to do to get better and increase skills, but you at least could look cool from the start, had a choice in weapons, and weren’t necessarily some noob in the game lore. 

[Albertoni]

Phantasy Star 3.

 

I'm not too privy to the development details but I know it was incredibly rushed.

However, imagine this: An RPG that at the end of the first chapter, you can pick between two women to marry.

Whoever you picks ends up in a completely different story, things that happen and places you go to.

At the end of the second chapter, you have another choice of wives. This leads to four different third chapters, and four different endings.

 

The gameplay isn't such a huge slog as Phantasy Star 2 was, with its insane enemy encounter ratio, but... It's just a different slog. Instead of long dungeons that are easy to get lost in, with an encounter every six steps, you get a huge world with very little references as to where you need to go and what you need to grab. It's not as bad as Castlevania 2's translation, but it's the same feeling. Some of the battle graphics are clearly sketch art that was hastily fixed up, and the music, oof. The series is known for great music but PS3 is just... Yeah nah. The intro theme is amazing but that's it.

 

Also, you can softlock the game during the intro.

 

[Tetzlaff]

 

You Are Empty (2007). What it could have been: Survival Horror FPS set in an alternate version of 1950's Soviet Union.

What it is: a rather buggy FPS with fantastic setting and atmosphere, but lackluster gameplay and monsters that don't really match the style of the game. It feels like the developers had two different games in mind while creating this: The story is interesting and full of mystery, the environments are very eerie and atmospheric, but the monsters have a freaky, absurd design that would fit right into one of the Painkiller games.

[Koko Ricky]

Rage 2 can be incredibly engrossing, but it's also riddled with one-dimensional characters, mostly empty environments, repetitive missions and no clear motivation for anything that you do. 

[Taw Tu'lki]

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold.

It could be a popular game, if DooM was published in 1994, not in 1993. 

[snapshot]

I loved Bioshock Infinite, always fun to go back to every other year, don't use the arrow thing and you'll be surprised by how how open levels can be, or maybe I just have low standards for games (wOaH Skyhook, WoAh Elizabeth, woAH luteces, woAh alternate dimensions) Columbia is gorgeous as heck and seeing a destroyed nightmare-ish version of it in the end chapters was awesome, I spent countless hours in Clash in the Clouds mode, super addictive.

[DollarStoreChili]

Depth. I always felt it deserved a massive following.