Games that wasted a perfectly good premise/plot

[immortalfrieza]

FEAR 3 (I refuse to call it F3AR) was a clusterfuck of "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" design. I will say that exploring Alma's daddy issues was not a bad concept, but The Creep was executed so terribly that it destroyed any sort of investment I might've had in the idea.

The only level in the game I remember with any clarity was the mall. Everything else just blurs together in my mind.

Not to mention killing off the protagonist of the second game in an incredibly cheap way. The badass that was the Point Man's equal, if he had to die, should've been in some heroic last stand. Instead

Spoiler

he died while trapped in a cage when Point Man's psycho brother possesses him.

 

[wings012]

It's a pity what happened to the franchise. I think the whole Vivendi thing threw it off course, so FEAR2 came out having lost a lot of its momentum. It didn't help that FEAR2 just felt incredibly inferior gameplay-wise. I think they should've just picked the story back up with the Point Man than going with a weird soft reboot with Beckett.

I wonder if FEAR2 would've turned out different if they didn't have issues with the IP rights with Vivendi.

FEAR3 may have shat the bed in terms of story, but I had a lot of fun with it. It just plays a lot better than FEAR2, and playing as Fettel is just so damn fun and satisfying. The Phase troops make no bloody sense whatsoever, but possessing a Phase Commander led to a good time.

It's a pity that you can't play as him in Single Player until after beating the game once, so I wonder how many people got to experience him. I would love another FPS where you could play as a Fettel type character with a core possession mechanic. For those who never tried playing as Fettel, I recommend it. It's a completely different game, body hopping and going balls to the wall action rather than having to hide behind cover and play conservatively.

Maybe it's because my expectations were non-existent with FEAR3, but I liked it a lot more than FEAR2. But with FEAR2, I was pretty excited and hyped only to get what I considered a worse FEAR1. Though I still think FEAR3 has more of an identity than FEAR2, with its varied enemy types and playing as Fettel. It also seemed to have a fairly creative suite of multiplayer modes, but sadly I don't think I'll ever find people to play it with.

 

[BrawlMan]

But with FEAR2, I was pretty excited and hyped only to get what I considered a worse FEAR1.

Then they turned FEAR 3 in low budget, straight to DVD, Call of Duty. A major sticking point being duck behind cover to heal, and a two weapon limit. I know you can upgrade your health to take more damage, but that does not solve the issue. They fixed something that was not broken in the first place, and needed no removal.

Though I still think FEAR3 has more of an identity than FEAR2, with its varied enemy types and playing as Fettel.

Kinda, but not much. Both suffer from the same problem of trying to attract the COD Cinematic Shooter crowd and do the worst kind of streamlining. FEAR 3 does have better weapon variety and enemies. Also, the guns sound so much better than 2. They brought back dual wielding for sub-machines guns, but not the pistol (Booooo).

It also seemed to have a fairly creative suite of multiplayer modes, but sadly I don't think I'll ever find people to play it with.

Not any more. The best you're going to get is bots.

 

[laggyteabag]

I will always be grumpy about Halo 5.

The marketting campaign was so good.

The Master Chief and his squad from the books have gone AWOL, and whichever planet they seem to visit ends up being destroyed. The military ends up sending another group of newer generation super-soldiers to go and hunt him down, all the while, the space version of the CIA is up to some creepy bullshit, and is working hard to discredit the Chief, labelling him as a traitor - and they even go as far as to publicly (fakely) announce his death. The whole theme is "nothing is as it seems", going with conflicting perspectives.

Then the game starts, and all of the intrigue is gone. The reason why the chief goes AWOL is dumb. The hunt for the Chief is barely there. The main villain is the Chief's supposedly dead AI friend, who is evil now for some reason. All of the new characters are boring. Its just such a waste.

Ugh.

I posted the above back in 2020, and now I am going to moan that Halo Infinite did not follow up on the plot threads that Halo 5 setup.

Halo 5 ends with Cortana turning evil, and using her army of rogue AI and robots to take over the galaxy.

Halo Infinite takes place 2 years later, and by the time of the game, Cortana is dead (again), and her galactic takeover is seemingly resolved.

I know Halo 5's story wasn't very well liked, but I would argue that was because it was poorly executed, more so than it being inherently bad. There was potential there, provided it was written well.

But here we are, and that entire plot is just gone. Halo 5 will never be redeemed, and now it is pointless, as well as being bad. Im sure this conflict will be explored in the books, but as far as the game's story goes, that is in the past, and now we are focusing on something entirely different and unrelated.

I just never feel like the reactionary "sweep it under the rug and go in a different direction" solution ever really works. I feel the same way about The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, where the former made some controversial choices, and then the latter just tried so hard to "correct" the "mistakes" in the most cowardly and ham-fisted way.

 

[wings012]

I posted the above back in 2020, and now I am going to moan that Halo Infinite did not follow up on the plot threads that Halo 5 setup.

Halo 5 ends with Cortana turning evil, and using her army of rogue AI and robots to take over the galaxy.

Halo Infinite takes place 2 years later, and by the time of the game, Cortana is dead (again), and her galactic takeover is seemingly resolved.

I know Halo 5's story wasn't very well liked, but I would argue that was because it was poorly executed, more so than it being inherently bad. There was potential there, provided it was written well.

Halo 5 itself seems somewhat guilty of what Halo Infinite did. They kinda just swept the Didact under the rug after Halo 4. Maybe you could've just taken it as him being killed in the game, but apparently he survived and then was killed again in some side comic that hardly anybody read....

Halo 4 itself wasn't popular for a lot of reasons, but 343's reaction to any sort of negative reception is seemingly to spin around in circles and run away in a completely random direction. When they really should've stuck to their guns and improved their execution.

There was also a lot of interesting looking unused concept art that got released, with a fair few showing Cortana in her role as the queen ***** of the universe. Makes me wonder what could've been.

As much as I enjoyed Halo Infinite.... the story was very non-existent. Like quite literally nothing really happened.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I posted the above back in 2020, and now I am going to moan that Halo Infinite did not follow up on the plot threads that Halo 5 setup.

Halo 5 ends with Cortana turning evil, and using her army of rogue AI and robots to take over the galaxy.

Halo Infinite takes place 2 years later, and by the time of the game, Cortana is dead (again), and her galactic takeover is seemingly resolved.

I know Halo 5's story wasn't very well liked, but I would argue that was because it was poorly executed, more so than it being inherently bad. There was potential there, provided it was written well.

But here we are, and that entire plot is just gone. Halo 5 will never be redeemed, and now it is pointless, as well as being bad. Im sure this conflict will be explored in the books, but as far as the game's story goes, that is in the past, and now we are focusing on something entirely different and unrelated.

I just never feel like the reactionary "sweep it under the rug and go in a different direction" solution ever really works. I feel the same way about The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, where the former made some controversial choices, and then the latter just tried so hard to "correct" the "mistakes" in the most cowardly and ham-fisted way.

DMC and Metroid were fortunate enough to realize that they could acknowledge particular past entries and keep moving forward, perhaps Halo can too someday.

 

[laggyteabag]

Halo 5 itself seems somewhat guilty of what Halo Infinite did. They kinda just swept the Didact under the rug after Halo 4. Maybe you could've just taken it as him being killed in the game, but apparently he survived and then was killed again in some side comic that hardly anybody read....

Well, the Didact did fall into his big glowy laser beam, so I would say that most people probably assumed that he had died.

I was actually surprised to hear that he wasn't dead in one of the spin-off comics, but then obviously they killed him off again, so the whole ordeal was ultimately pointless.

On the point of the Didact, though, I am surprised that 343 utilised him in the way that they did. He is a very important character in the grand scheme of things, and 343 even commissioned a trilogy of books where the Didact was a major character, on the run up to (and shortly after the release of) Halo 4. Then he shows up in the game, barely makes a physical appearance, and then dies as a one-off villain who is barely even mentioned again.

The dude had the legs to last a few games, IMO.

Halo 4 itself wasn't popular for a lot of reasons, but 343's reaction to any sort of negative reception is seemingly to spin around in circles and run away in a completely random direction. When they really should've stuck to their guns and improved their execution.

Yeah, I don't think 343 are very good at taking criticism. Their community team can sometimes be quite aggressive or condescending when it comes to addressing feedback/criticisms, and you are right that they do tend to get the wrong ideas in their heads as to what the community is actually asking for.

Example: Halo 5's campaign was criticised for not featuring enough of the Chief, for Cortana being evil coming basically out of nowhere, for the marketing having nothing to do with what story Halo 5 was actually telling, and for relying far too much on external media for a number of characters' backstories, among a slew of other things, and according to the head of the studio, one of the big takeaways from Halo 5 going into (what would become) Halo Infinite, was that Halo 5 told too much story, and they needed to tell more simple stories going forward.

Uh, no. But okay.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Halo 5 ends with Cortana turning evil, and using her army of rogue AI and robots to take over the galaxy.

The thing is that this seemed to be a payoff from a single line spoken from Halsey around (I want to say) Halo 3: “If people would just share things with me, I could solve all the world's problems.” Since Cortana was generated from a clone of Halsey's brain, it made some sense that she'd inherit the woman's control tendencies, and once given seemingly endless power, try to force everyone to "play nice" to protect her Spartan. It's just that 343 Industries can't seem to write its way out of a wet paper bag.

 

[BrawlMan]

DMC and Metroid were fortunate enough to realize that they could acknowledge particular past entries and keep moving forward, perhaps Halo can too someday.

Given it's 343, I doubt it. I appreciate the enthusiasm. The other difference being is that Capcom & Nintendo respectively, got off their asses and decided to stop doing games that are prequels or take place in the past. Dread actually takes place after Fusion. Capcom did some timeline altering so everything is properly in place now. DMC4 now takes place after 2. And whatever elements they took from the reboot, fit better in the original continuity.

 

[BrawlMan]

Oneechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad - The ending points out that Saki, the second sister and younger protagonist, may go berserk and insane and that comes with her bloodline madness. The Baneful Blood Curse. The closest follow up to this is in the sequel on the Wii, Bikini Zombie Slayers. In Aya's scenario, Saki goes berserk briefly, and you only fight her for that one boss fight and she's back to normal. A similar occurrence happens in Saki's scenario, except you fight Aya.

By the time of the Z: Kagura & Z2: Chaos, that dangling plot thread is dropped and forgotten about. Given how well Saki is doing with her powers by this point, and she and Aya got a new power up that's they're in full control of in Chaos. I don't have a problem with it. She was already a villain in the first game, and they probably didn't want the risk of repeating that again. Honestly, dropping that plot point was for the better option.

 

[CriticalGaming]

FEAR 3 (I refuse to call it F3AR

Call is "Fa-Three-ar" like Yathzee did.

 

[Dalisclock]

Call is "Fa-Three-ar" like Yathzee did.

Anyone who tries to put a number in the place of a letter like that(and not as a joke) deserves all the mockery they get and then some. Whoever came up with that title should have been fired and been legally barred from every holding a job in marketing or writing ever again.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Anyone who tries to put a number in the place of a letter like that(and not as a joke) deserves all the mockery they get and then some. Whoever came up with that title should have been fired and been legally barred from every holding a job in marketing or writing ever again.

H3y! 1 r353nt th4t r3m4rk.

 

[BrawlMan]

(I refuse to call it F3AR)

Anyone who tries to put a number in the place of a letter like that(and not as a joke) deserves all the mockery they get and then some. Whoever came up with that title should have been fired and been legally barred from every holding a job in marketing or writing ever again.

H3y! 1 r353nt th4t r3m4rk.

​

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Soma

The first quarter of the game has an amazing set up for a horror game with it's setting and the encounter with the bot on the assembly line. "Did I just kill someone? Is this strange growth somehow sucking the mind and soul of people and putting them into robots or some other horrible otherworldly thing?"

No. The game is just a bullshit philosophy lecture for atheists that were too stupid to realize what that actually means before playing this game.

What a fucking waste of a creepy set up. Once you meet Catherine, all the atmosphere and fun gets sucked out and the mysteries solved and it just becomes a boring slog of getting to what you know is going to happen while the writer plays dues ex machina by making Simon an idiot and a dozen other forced shit just so they can keep the plot together for their lecture.

What. A. Waste.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I posted the above back in 2020, and now I am going to moan that Halo Infinite did not follow up on the plot threads that Halo 5 setup.

Halo 5 ends with Cortana turning evil, and using her army of rogue AI and robots to take over the galaxy.

Halo Infinite takes place 2 years later, and by the time of the game, Cortana is dead (again), and her galactic takeover is seemingly resolved.

I know Halo 5's story wasn't very well liked, but I would argue that was because it was poorly executed, more so than it being inherently bad. There was potential there, provided it was written well.

But here we are, and that entire plot is just gone. Halo 5 will never be redeemed, and now it is pointless, as well as being bad. Im sure this conflict will be explored in the books, but as far as the game's story goes, that is in the past, and now we are focusing on something entirely different and unrelated.

I just never feel like the reactionary "sweep it under the rug and go in a different direction" solution ever really works. I feel the same way about The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, where the former made some controversial choices, and then the latter just tried so hard to "correct" the "mistakes" in the most cowardly and ham-fisted way.

It depends on how many installments were made purely as cash-in attempts. Like especially with horror franchise reboots, I highly doubt anyone really cares if the vast majority of slasher flick sequels are ignored.

 

[BrawlMan]

Another example of FEAR is Perseus Mandate. This timeline was considered non-canon anyway, but it sucks that it never got a follow-up, nor integrated into the later games. The whole, the corrupt senator has Paxton's DNA subplot. Also, the Nightcrawlers are actually awesome and it's a shame they never come back. These guys are actually fun to fight and are different from the Replica.

 

[Hawki]

Okay this one is gonna be a bit of a different take on this thread's idea, but hear me out.

Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2, both waste great story, great setting, great characters, because the gameplay is absolute dogshit and it's miserable to play. Does that count as wasting a perfectly good plot? The plot is good, the characters are good, but since the game stinks it goes to waste because it's unplayable trash.

Boo! Boo!

Oh yeah, that definitely counts. A great story is marred far too often by terrible gameplay. If you have to struggle with the bad gameplay just to get to the great story, well, the story isn't that great either.

Disagree. Gameplay can hinder the deployment of story, that doesn't affect the quality of the plot.

Or, to be clear, "storytelling" and "plot" are different things.

Like KOTOR, FF12, and many other games, Xenoblade Chronicles is the case of a game that tries to LOOK like an action RPG and would have been infinitely better as one, but takes the lazy way out and instead plays as a turn based RPG and makes the rest of the game far far worse as a result. All of these games, with the exception of FF12 because the story is terrible, live entirely off of their great stories rather than their gameplay. That's the reason I really really hope the KOTOR remake goes full action RPG like it should have been in the first place.

Unlike a true turned based RPG Xenoblade doesn't even have the ability to control the entire party's actions with every turn, meaning that we got idiotic A.I. which could've actually been decently smart if they put any effort into it but they didn't. Basically the whole strategy of every fight in Xenoblade 1 was just using the Monado abilities to protect your party members from their own idiocy.
[/QUOTE]

Halo 5 itself seems somewhat guilty of what Halo Infinite did. They kinda just swept the Didact under the rug after Halo 4. Maybe you could've just taken it as him being killed in the game, but apparently he survived and then was killed again in some side comic that hardly anybody read....

I don't really agree. There's nothing in H4 to suggest that the Didact is coming back. Maybe if you interpret the ending monologue in a certain way, but that's about it. And also, speaking personally, the Didact is a terrible villain in H4. That's not to say he's a bad character (when you factor in the H3 terminals and EU material), but in H4 by itself? I'm sorry, why do people want this twat back? Yes, he's killed in the comics, but I'm left to wonder why anyone wanted him back in the first place.

Also, H5 ends on a cliffhanger with a clear course, H4 doesn't, so Infinite ignoring H5 isn't equivalent to H5 'ignoring' H4.

As much as I enjoyed Halo Infinite.... the story was very non-existent. Like quite literally nothing really happened.

If "story = plot" here, then I kind of agree, but if we're talking about "story" as an overall concept, I disagree. Even as someone who liked H5, but had resigned myself to the fact that the fanbase loathed it, I think Infinite makes the best of the hand it's given. While the plot is thin, it's got some of the best character writing in the series, and is pretty strong thematically (I detailed this elsewhere, but a core theme of Infinite is "legacy," and we see how this impacts a no. of characters and plot points).

He is a very important character in the grand scheme of things, and 343 even commissioned a trilogy of books where the Didact was a major character, on the run up to (and shortly after the release of) Halo 4.

Um, really? Because I've read the Forerunner Saga (read almost all of the Halo novels, but meh). I'm not sure how you can call the Didact (or Ur-Didact, to be specific) a villain in the first two. Third one, sure, but not the first, and I don't think he even appears in the second. Certainly the Didact did some morally shady stuff before the start of the saga, but that's par for the course for the Forerunners and ancient humanity alike.

The thing is that this seemed to be a payoff from a single line spoken from Halsey around (I want to say) Halo 3: “If people would just share things with me, I could solve all the world's problems.” Since Cortana was generated from a clone of Halsey's brain, it made some sense that she'd inherit the woman's control tendencies, and once given seemingly endless power, try to force everyone to "play nice" to protect her Spartan. It's just that 343 Industries can't seem to write its way out of a wet paper bag.

I think that's valid, but...

Okay, I'll say it before, and I'll say it again, I don't have a problem with Cortana being 'evil' in H5 ("evil" isn't even really the best word for it), and I thought the thematic subtext in the game is pretty clear.

Cortana at the end of H4 is in a bad state, but what happens after that? Well, among other things, she ends up passing through the Domain (the sum of all Precursor/Forerunner knowledge), ends up on a world called "Genesis," makes reference to "the waters of life," and deploys constructs called "Guardians" that suspiciously look like angels...

By thematic translation, Cortana has 'fallen,' in part due to 'forbidden knowledge,' and ergo, knows sin, and brings grief to all through hubris. Considering that this series is literally named "Halo," and has never shied away from Abarahamic mythology, I thought the references were pretty clear, yet I seem to be the only one who saw them. And sure, you can argue that all that aside, in terms of plot & character, it's still off, but IMO, I thought it was well done.

Also, evi!Cortana is fun to write, and Infinite gave her as good a sendoff as was possible given the backlash against H5, so there's that I guess.

 

[laggyteabag]

He is a very important character in the grand scheme of things, and 343 even commissioned a trilogy of books where the Didact was a major character, on the run up to (and shortly after the release of) Halo 4.

Um, really? Because I've read the Forerunner Saga (read almost all of the Halo novels, but meh). I'm not sure how you can call the Didact (or Ur-Didact, to be specific) a villain in the first two. Third one, sure, but not the first, and I don't think he even appears in the second. Certainly the Didact did some morally shady stuff before the start of the saga, but that's par for the course for the Forerunners and ancient humanity alike.

You might notice that I didn't even refer to the Didact as being a villain in the books, so im not entirely sure why you may think I did?

To be honest, though, my knowledge of the Forerunner books is a bit hazy. I've read them all twice: once when they first came out, and I was about 15 (I didn't like them), and again on the runup to Halo Infinite, because I thought my maturity would allow me to appreciate them more (it didn't). They're just not for me, so they don't really occupy any space in my brain. To be honest, I have always found the Forerunners to be more interesting as mysterious entities, rather than a fleshed out race with characters, and politics, and whatever else 343 has decided to explore with them.

In any case, my point was that I was surprised that 343 decided to explore the Didact as much as they did, only to have him show up as a villain in Halo 4, barely appear in that game, and then die at the end. Seems like a waste, to me.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

You might notice that I didn't even refer to the Didact as being a villain in the books, so im not entirely sure why you may think I did?

To be honest, though, my knowledge of the Forerunner books is a bit hazy. I've read them all twice: once when they first came out, and I was about 15 (I didn't like them), and again on the runup to Halo Infinite, because I thought my maturity would allow me to appreciate them more (it didn't). They're just not for me, so they don't really occupy any space in my brain. To be honest, I have always found the Forerunners to be more interesting as mysterious entities, rather than a fleshed out race with characters, and politics, and whatever else 343 has decided to explore with them.

In any case, my point was that I was surprised that 343 decided to explore the Didact as much as they did, only to have him show up as a villain in Halo 4, barely appear in that game, and then die at the end. Seems like a waste, to me.

Wasn't there are character just like that in Mass Effect 3? In the books a lot, shows up in the game and is just annoying and seemingly unimportant despite having to fight him a bunch?