(Worst) Game of the Year

[ub3rman123]

So, it's the end of another exciting year in the video game industry. We've seen some real gems come out, such as Borderlands 2, Legend of Grimrock, and Faster Than Light. But that's not what this thread is for. This thread is dedicated to the worst game you've played this year. Played, not released. I'm just saying that so I can shoehorn in my nomination even though it actually came out last year. I pick up on these things a bit slowly, is what I'm saying.

 

Without further ado, my nomination is... Dead Island. Why? After finally deciding I couldn't take it any more, I closed out the game and wrote up a list of my grievances, at present 45 entries long. Let's start from the top.

 

The first immediately obvious thing is the painful UI system. It's obviously optimized for consoles, as it requires tedious double-clicking and there are no hotkeys for any actions. Additionally, almost everything comes with a pointless "Are you sure" screen you have to click through as well. The best part about this is that since the game is in permanent multiplayer mode, you have to weave through the complex UI while having your ankles munched off.

 

Another irksome thing is the mouse sensitivity. Usually, I play at a fairly high sensitivity to keep from moving the mouse too much while playing, so I set it as such when the game began. Lo and behold, the menu sensitivity is tied to the in-game sensitivity. If you set the in-game sensitivity to anything slower than having it so a millimetre moves the mouse in a 360 degree circle, the menu pointer will move as though it were being carried by ants. Dead ants. (Zombie ants?) Luckily, there is a fix available for that: Dead Island helper, which also allows you to fix a few other annoyances such as black screen flickers. Doesn't fix all of them, though. I'm not sure that's possible.

 

Something slightly related to that is the spawn system for both enemies and players. It hates you. The spawn system wants you to be dead and it makes no bones about it. While you're in a menu, zombies will literally spawn inside you character and start clawing away. While they do this, the game gives you no indication that it's happening until you're dead and pulled from your wade through the inventory. Once you're dead, the game will then respawn you (with a fat wad of cash now missing from your wallet). What would be a logical place to place you? Somewhere away from the action, yet not too far that it becomes tedious to go back, right? Nope. The game picks out the furthest possible location from where you died, and on top of that ensures that you'll be surrounded by a crowd of the undead to greet you. Get ready to die and do it all again..

 

Have you ever been playing a game and suddenly had to stop? What do you usually do? Save, right? Well in this game you can't. Now, I've played a lot of games that don't have the ability to manually save. I played Borderlands 2 recently, and I never lost a second of progress because of that. Not so in Dead Island! The game saves for you extremely rarely. When it does, the only indication of it happening is a very faint 'Checkpoint' text in the bottom right that flashes for a split second and disappears. Thus, when quitting time rolls around, you may notice that there's no menu button to save. You may also notice that quitting doesn't save automatically. The only way to save, as I've found, is to complete missions. Not really a great thing when it's supposed to be an open world free roamer. So, when you close your game out, it's almost always a gamble to find out how much progress you're going to lose. My first attempt at this game I lost ten levels' worth of progress because of it and didn't play Dead Island again for six months.

 

Next grievance: The weaponry. The vast majority of what you'll find is useless trash that breaks after swinging it twice and hitting nothing but air (By the way, weapons take durability hits even from just hitting a wall, not even zombies). After a long few hours in the game, you get to the guns. This was when I finally felt some elation. I thought the game might at last redeem itself and give me the zombie-blasting fun I had been looking for. Nope! The guns do hardly any damage, even on a headshot. By the way, good luck finding bullets. Until you get to the much later sections with their scant few human enemies that do wield guns, you'll have at most a dozen bullets to fire off before having to pull out that Spiteful Stick (Actual weapon name). After you have found the enemies who have ammo, you'll find your next harassment: You can only carry some six dozen bullets at a time, forcing you to leave many clips behind.

 

How about driving? Sometimes cruising about in a car with three of your buddies riding shotgun is the best part of the journey. Again,

! As far as I got (16 hours), the only drivable car is a boring pickup truck that handles, as someone else has stated, "like a boat through peanut butter". It's not an exaggeration. Actually, there is another car you can drive, an armoured car kitted out with spikes and shielded windows. While that sounds like a pretty good deal, it's worse than the truck in every way. Your pals can't shoot out of the windows, you can't see out of the windows, and if the pickup is like a boat in peanut butter, this is a dead elephant that's been buried in soft peat for how it accelerates. You'll probably get to most of the pointless fetch quest locations more quickly by walking. No, not sprinting. All of the PCs can run about ten feet before having to slow down and wheeze back to breath.

 

Ah, did I mention the quests? Why, I did! What a coincidence. Have you ever played an MMORPG where you stroll into town and see a half-dozen exclamation marks cluttering up your map? It's exactly like that, except that somehow the developers have made the quests even more uninteresting and pointless. It may well be a zombie apocalypse, but I will be more than happy to find your teddy bear, secure you some vodka, and even put up posters nobody will ever see. Just because it's an RPG, or at least an insulting facsimile of one. Oh yeah, you can't track multiples of these fetch quests at a time, so you trek back and forth across the map because your only option is to scroll through the painful quest log to find which quests are nearest at the time.

 

How about the characters you play as or meet? Sorry to say it, but they're terrible. The voice acting is halting, and I swear I can hear the rustling of the note cards they're intoning their lines from. I think the mark of a great game is that you believe that the characters are what they are. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I never thought for a second of any of the characters as some fellow in a sound booth. Dead Island proved to be quite the opposite.

 

The characters themselves aren't exactly winning personalities. They all seem to be built entirely from stereotypes. Left for Dead's protagonists had just as little introduction as the ones of Dead Island, yet they were so much more connected. You could feel them in every level, sense their reactions. Dead Island had none of that. I don't even remember the name of the fellow I was playing as, nor what his voice sounded like. The NPCs aren't better. At what feels like about the 1/3 point of the game, a character names Jin is promptly shoehorned into the game. She's louder than Ashley and even more insufferable somehow. She sports the trademark of an escort target, suicidal tendencies, and never waits up for the players to do anything, such as wheeze themselves back to full stamina. I kind of cheered every time she got eaten by zombies while shuffling her around the island, which seems to be the opposite of the visceral emotional reaction the developers except you to have throughout this game.

 

Okay, let's move on to the biggest problem: The storyline. I've always held the idea that story is the most important part of a game. If the storyline is bad, no amount of good gameplay can keep me going. Well, guess where Dead Island sits on that particular spectrum. The beginning is predictable. The middle is predictable. And after all that tedium, surprise surprise, the ending is predictable as well. The worst part about it is that the storyline doesn't seem to be built with the ideal of having an interesting narrative. Instead, it's made to put the player in the path of as many fetch quests as humanly possible. There are no epic moments in this game, only another bland cutscene that leads into the oft-repeated line "I need you to go out and find ten batteries." And just when you think it's about to change and the story will finally take command, it just doesn't Bitter disappointment, that.

 

In short, this game is my (Worst) Game of the Year because of the phrase I prefer to describe it with: Aggressively bad. It feels as though the developers chose all the worst attributes of great games and mashed them together in a mushy broth. Escort quests. Quick time events. Always online. Dumb mechanics. The only redeeming thing Dead Island really has going for it is the grand idea nestled deep in its core: The joy you feel at putting a crowbar through the frontal plate of a member of the undead. Sadly, it's been buried under hundreds of annoying, painful design choices.

 

 

 

 

So, thanks for reading my long winded rant about this game that's been disguised as a discussion topic. What do you think deserves to be the (Worst) Game of the Year?

[hoofhearted4]

hmm i honestly wish i knew. there are two things that stop me from having a worst game of the year. First is i dont remember what i played in the beginning of the year. and if it was bad, all the more reason i forgot about it or why i didnt like it. the second reason, is i usually do some research on the game before i buy it. hence ill know if id like it or not.

 

if i HAD to make a nomination off the top of my head it would probably be SWTOR. to me the game wasnt horrible, it just shouldnt have been subbed base nor then made into a pseudo F2P game. had they just done the GW2 model, they probably would have been fine. i had fun when i played it for my free month. granted i got it several months after it came out, and didnt really have many people to play the low level quests with, but had i had that (like i do in GW2) it woulda even more fun. i only stopped because i didnt wanna pay for another month. though because it wasnt good enough to continue passed its one month, i do regret paying the full $60 (or $50 idr) for it. so funny how it stayed so expensive for so long, then dropped like crazy right after i bought it lol.

[Rennn]

No offense, but games that are actually functional probably shouldn't make the list.

 

For me, it was The War Z. It shoots from 13-90 fps seemingly at random, there's about four seconds of lag at all times, hackers comprise roughly 80% of the community, and it only has one small map. Also, if you walk down hills you will sometimes randomly die if the game decides it doesn't like the angle of the slope.

I'm glad Steam gave me a refund.

Edited January 1, 2013 by Rennn

[hoofhearted4]

No offense, but games that are actually functional probably shouldn't make the list.

 

well its games that youve played. so like i said, for me, i dont play very many games, if any, that i didnt like. at least not any i could remember, and not any from this year anyways. and usually if i dont like a game, its not because the game is bad (like Killzone 2 for example for PS3) its just because it wasnt enjoyable to me or not my cup of tea.

[Thor.]

Worst optimized for console game would be mass effect 3, played it for a bit the demo and i was turned off from the obvious lack of optimization and really bad draw distance.

 

Don't get me started with the pc version, tied with origin which i refuse to go anywhere near it, and the really bad ending.. It shouldn't of been on the game of the year list at all.

Edited January 1, 2013 by Thor.

[JimboUK]

F1 2012, it was Codemasters third chance at getting it right and they still screwed it up. It still feels like a GRID mod, the tyre wear was wrong, the AI was once again awful, the penalty system was broken and it was riddled with bugs.

[Deleted472477User]

I didn't play many new games, but I wasn't impressed by what little I've seen of Tera for reasons I won't get into here. I didn't really want to go near Diablo 3 (forced online play and a real money auction house killed it for me) but that doesn't mean they were bad, just not for me.

 

The only really bad game I can think of is The War Z. People accuse Todd Howard of fibbing, but his is mere truth-stretching compared to the outright lies told by that game's devs. How can you lie about a game having a skill set when it really doesn't? I didn't play it, but man, did I hear about the brouhaha.

[Vindekarr]

Halo 4 and Guild Wars 2, I hate them so very much. Every time I've got a bunch of spare time to play, the laws of time physics require me to play ONE not both, but which?! I want to play them both, but I can't. :wallbash:

 

Star Wars, Kinect(yes, I played it)

 

Oh dear lord where do I start. The force was not strong with this one. A disconnected and hackneyed series of minigames, Star Wars kinect trades on using motion controls to wield force powers, now, this SHOULD by any definition be awesome, and yet, somehow, like the prequals, all this new addition brings to the franchise is disgrace. The controls are so vague you barely have any control at all, you just have to wave your arms around and pray, and that rarely works. The minigame design is the stuff of nightmares, being both repetitive and boring. Yet the worst thing is it's shear disrespect for the franchise. An Emperor Palpatine dance minigame? maybe as a novelty mode in one of the good dance games, that would actually be very funny, but this is so shockingly bad and uncontrollable that it's not funny, it's just sickening.

 

Tera: A very average MMORPG, Tera is highly divisive due to it's hyper-oversexualised portayal of female characters, namely those portraid as children. Some would accept it, others would not, for my part, I think it's unnacceptable and that the developers should be punished. Some would say it's a cultural thing, I'm hot-blooded enough to say that a little girl in a skirt so short it doesn't cover her underwear, waving her ass in front of the camera with a deliberately upskirt shot, is so outsandingly disgusting it should be criminal.

 

Diablo 3. Not only was it a repetitive, uninspiring game that still couldn't beat it's ragamuffin rival Torchlight, but the entire game felt like a cynical marketing excercise built around it's auction house. With the devlopers able to change mob drops in real time, and good gear being so rare that it was common to be 20-30 levels undergeared without using the RMAH, Diablo 3 was an example of capitalism taken too far.

[Thor.]

I wouldn't say f1 2012 is the worst racer out there, especially when you have mods to fix stuff like that.

 

AND Yikes now that's a mod.http://forums.nexusmods.com/public/style_emoticons/dark/woot.gif

 

http://www.racedepartment.com/forum/threads/f1-2012-insane-image-quality-most-closes-to-real-life.60069/

[brokenergy]

Assassin's Creed 3, so many bugs!