Singularly Datarific said:
Oni.
Bungie's first big game since Marathon, it was going to be so awesome. Seamless integration of hand to hand combat and guns, big levels, beautiful graphics, all that good stuff.
Then they didn't quite finish it when it came out. They cut all of the multiplayer, which was one of the coolest looking things that they had. Not only that, but it seems like they forgot to populate their levels. Everything is either a corridor, a floor, or a wall. Not one bit of clutter in the whole world, apparently, everything is scrubbed clean to an eerie perfection, with nothing irregular or anything. The levels were designed by professional architects, so while they were realistically-built, they were also realistically-boring.
It was still pretty cool, but it had sooo much more potential.
While I'd agree Oni was flawed, a couple of your points are absolute rubbish.
Unpopulated levels? There was plenty of junk in them, although in keeping with the times most of that junk could be described as a crate of some kind. Well, except for the machinery (vast, vast quantities of machinery). And the trucks. And the motorbikes. And the airplanes. Some levels were, however, better populated than others.
(though remember that at that time, people didn't waste so much processor time on populating levels with junk)
Also, speaking of population, Oni had a decent number of NPCs, most of whom you could have a nice little chat with.
Also, the multiplayer wasn't cut due to time problems, it was cut because no one had a fast enough connection to deal with all the data that had to be sent - even on a LAN it was laggy. So they cut it out, rather than release a lackluster product.
The realistic architecture was, I'll admit, as much of a burden as a boon, because all the levels were about twice as big as they needed to be. That said, that left plenty of room for combat. Can you imagine storming the National Archives being anywhere near as much fun when you keep crashing into the photocopier and the coffee machine? On the plus side, it had some very open levels, something I'm rediscovering in Deus Ex.
The biggest flaw for me was probably the over-concentration on switch-to-switch gameplay (hit a switch, go find the next one, hit that one...), but it did make the other levels stand out. The Rooftops is still by far my favourite, and Dream Diver is quite the trip (did you know that if you kill all those tiny Strikers who are running into the tiny doors, everybody gets huge heads?).
I did have a couple of other disappointments, but I'd have to play it again to tell you what they were. The combat system, at least, was not one of them.
