Most disappointed sequel?

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

How does the original compare, and is it still worth an investment today?

It's still an amazing game. Obviously a lot of gameplay mechanics are outdated and it's 2 generations behind graphically. But it's not ugly or boring. And the story is just incredible. It's set in the prohibition era. To this day I can safely say that I've never experienced a better crime drama in a video game. Even the stories in GTA don't have that level of maturity and character development.

One awesome gameplay mechanic is the way ammo works. If you reload your weapon before you empty the magazine, you'll lose the ammo that remained in that magazine. The game forces you to treat weapons as real things. So they feel more real. And also weapons feel different from each other. Which is exactly how guns in real life work. You can't just pick up any weapon and expect it to feel the same way as the one you just used. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

Now I want to play it again.

 

[Lictor Face]

Far cry 2. Oh it was fun at times and pretty all round. Until you realised that you spent 3/4 of the game driving around and sprinting around. There was no autosave ( For the 360 version anyway )and you could easily lose up to an hour's progress by not finding a save station.

Thank goodness they removed the excessive travelling and put in a quick travel feature for Far Cry 3, which is extremely fun.

 

[Frankster]

Dragon Age 2: When i think of disappointing sequels, this immediately comes to mind.

Dbz Budokai Tenkaichi: Coming after the still to this day awesome Budokai 3, I remember me and others in boarding school being all excited for this game...Then we played it and everyone walked out after 10 mins, we were all so disgusted with this game.

Masters of Orion 3: Spreadsheet space empire simulator. Way to suck the fun out of an awesome premise.

 

[Lictor Face]

Some guy got warned for saying "red alert 3", what in the world?

Oh in the Escapist, you have to give detailed answers or explanations to your points to FACILITATE DISCUSSION. Thus Single sentence answers are punishable it seems. Basically Explain all your things and you'll be fine

 

[ninjaRiv]

I really enjoyed Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and Fable 3... So my opinions here will probably count for shit, but I've seen Destroy All Humans 2 mentioned and I'll have to go with that. The first one was so much fun, I can't even describe the fun. But the second one sucked, especially when it came to the disguises. The comedy wasn't so great, either.

I found Splinter Cell Conviction to be a let down, too. Not just due to gameplay but Ironside's voice wasn't up to scratch, either. I enjoyed the gameplay, up to a point.

 

[Arina Love]

Mass Effect 2,3. I wanted more RPG elements instead i got dude-bro shooter with terrible story and ending.

Fable 3 one of the worst games i played in a LONG time. It has NO redeeming qualities, just boring shitfest with poorly designed characters, world and pacing.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

GTA IV.

Always loved GTA, but IV was just boring. The missions were boring, the world was boring, the cars were boring, the weapons were boring.

Boring boring boring.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Destroy All Humans! 2 wasn't so good... but then again the first game wasn't so good either... I guess I was waiting for the series to take off and it never did. And while we're talking Pandemic Studios, Mercenaries 2 sucked BALLS.

Maaaaaaaan, what was so bad about DAH!2? DAH!1 I can understand not everyone liking due to some wonky physics and the holobob being overpowered, but 2?!? TWO?!? The disclocator NEVER gets old! Best idea for a weapon I've ever seen.

I didn't like that you couldn't kill people anymore with PK. My favorite method was bashing humans against stuff (repeteadly) and that stopped dealing damage. Hell you can't even kill them by dropping stuff on them. They robbed the PK and the game of the stuff I really liked, which was messing around with the Havok engine. The sequel isn't a bad game, just a bit disappointing.

 

[HellbirdIV]

Mass Effect 2
I was so mad at bioware, ruined the trilogy for me.

Most fans consider ME2 the best in the series, so I find this one very odd without any kind of explanation provided.

Myself, I can't say I've been deeply disappointed by game sequels beyond Mass Effect 3's story failiure (it was still fun to play and had enough good character and story beats to make it a 'Recommended' game, in my book) - but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has to be on the list I guess.

Not only was the story terrible, contrast with the excellent stories of CoD4 and MW2, but the gameplay provided nothing new, instead rehashing the best bits of the previous games, with worse level design and weapons. Multiplayer also proved vastly inferior to the sweet simplicity of MW2.

 

[Diablo1099_v1legacy]

As a lover of fighting games, Street Fighter IV is the pinnacle of heartbreak. Fighting games aren't for me anymore. They're for Xbox Live ten-year-olds and their mommies' money, and Street Fighter IV is responsible. What kind of fucking fighting game rewards you for losing. Honestly.

In its defence, before Street Fighter 4, Fighting games were more or less dead.
Arcades were gone, no one thought a AAA Fighting Game could work and it gave the whole genre a huge boost.
It's not it's fault that a lot of the players online were pricks.

As for "Rewarding you for losing", which game is this?

 

[The Jovian]

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. Command & Conquer is, no it was one of my favourite franchises of all time. But this game sucks so many cocks it now requires daily spunk transfusions to stay alive and is worse than a regurgitated deep fried tampon. I'm 100% certain that there's a parallel universe version of Yahtzee that loves RTSes and named it the worst game of 2010. It is the shittiest RTS that has ever existed with Halo Wars in a close second and the greatest contender for the Zero Punctuation's "Cloning Elvis to make him sing Rebecca Black's Friday" Award for biggest waste of potential. This game could've been a great finale to the series if EA actually cared about the franchise anymore. Instead it is a dumbed down, multiplayer focused, strategy-less disaster with an insanely abysmal plot and an insufferably short singleplayer campaign, I've played RTS expansion packs (StarCraft: Brood War, Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, Generals: Zero Hour) with more singleplayer content than this game.

 

[Glongpre]

Mass Effect 2
I was so mad at bioware, ruined the trilogy for me.

Most fans consider ME2 the best in the series, so I find this one very odd without any kind of explanation provided.

I played the crap out of Mass Effect 1. I was expecting them to fine tune the experience but instead they rip out all the interesting things, all the things that haven't been done before, and create a mediocre third person shooter. Everyone always says that "well, the mako sucked", or "the elevators are too long". But that doesn't mean you ditch it, cause they sure weren't broken.

 

[Manoose47]

Any call of duty title after united offensive... What happened? it's not that all the following CoD games sucked.. but they really didn't rate as sequels. after that we have every fantasy game that's considered itself a successor to baldurs gate 2s throne, NwN, ToEE, DA, go home, you're not even close.

finally for a more contemporary response: hitman absolution, way to damage the franchise guys!hitman was never about action and gunplay it was about pulling off the perfect hit undetected, whether that meant using poison, explosives, piano wire or pianos the hitman series always struck a fine balance between serious and down right loony, absolution however was just one michael bay approved set piece after another.

...sigh

good sequels are often great for adding interesting new features, but when devs change the core mechanics of a series they shouldn't be surprised if it ruffles a few feathers.Honorary mention to Might and Magic: Heroes VI changing the levelling system? WHY?

 

[Zetona]

LittleBigPlanet 2.

All Media Molecule did was add new features, and yet the game had none of the original's charm, whimsy, and magic.

 

[Feylynn]

You are right that the combat needs quite a bit of tactic (right skills on your chars, using CCC's etc.) and at times even seems slightly harder that Origins, but its just so ridiculously unbalanced (Assassin's, damage beats everything, Arishok duel) that I can't call it good.
Out of curiosity whats the "Aveline exploit"? And how do you exploit Healers? I found all the Healing spells utterly useless with their insanely long cooldowns compared to how fast damage is dealt in that game.

You are right about Assassin for sure, especially with Shadow perma crits.
Avaline could get body guard and battle synergy in order to take ~75% of the damage off your Assassin and then use Immovable to become a damage sponge statue that blocked all of it. I personally didn't use the healers because I didn't really have any use for them but I heard no end of others saying they couldn't fight without one at some point and gave them the benefit of the doubt I guess.

Back on the Avaline note, after circumstances removed Fenris from my party the game became far to easy, I could just face tank encounters with Hawke.

 

[Olas]

Honestly it's hard to think of many.

If you can call them "sequels" Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks were disappointments compared to Windwaker, not necessarily terrible mind you, but they both felt way more restricted and linear to me, none of this is helped by weird fully touch controls.

Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2. The first was an addictively fun RTS with visuals that closely resembled the movies and a huge campaign that followed the main story and all it's iconic moments.
The sequel was a bloated Warcraft clone.

 

[Chris Tian]

You are right that the combat needs quite a bit of tactic (right skills on your chars, using CCC's etc.) and at times even seems slightly harder that Origins, but its just so ridiculously unbalanced (Assassin's, damage beats everything, Arishok duel) that I can't call it good.
Out of curiosity whats the "Aveline exploit"? And how do you exploit Healers? I found all the Healing spells utterly useless with their insanely long cooldowns compared to how fast damage is dealt in that game.

You are right about Assassin for sure, especially with Shadow perma crits.
Avaline could get body guard and battle synergy in order to take ~75% of the damage off your Assassin and then use Immovable to become a damage sponge statue that blocked all of it. I personally didn't use the healers because I didn't really have any use for them but I heard no end of others saying they couldn't fight without one at some point and gave them the benefit of the doubt I guess.

Back on the Avaline note, after circumstances removed Fenris from my party the game became far to easy, I could just face tank encounters with Hawke.

So its not really a Aveline exploit just Aveline. I have to say I always felt tanking is kind of useless, since the mobs just drop out of nowhere and all over the place it was much more of a hassle to grab all their aggro, than to just kill them. Especially since taunt only affects mobs that are not further than arms reach and only for a few seconds untill your damage dealers made up the threat it causes through damage.

On the "Healers", they dont really deserve that name since the one Heal-Spell they can use, what feels like, every three years never made any difference for me. It was again easier to kill the enemy instead of trying to absorb the damage.

 

[neppakyo]

The xbone! haha haha!

But Dragon Effect 2: Medieval Time Shepard, Mass Effect 2 and 3 are pretty horrid sequels. Right up in the top 10.

 

[Ieyke]

The Xbone, obviously. XD

Can't believe it took 21 posts to get there.
So obvious.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Have no doubt it's already been mentioned, but Diablo III.

I don't think I've ever seen a game where the developers so thoroughly removed almost everything that made the previous game great.

Oh, and Resident Evil 6, though admittedly I thought 5 was a huge disappointment too so this wasn't really an enormous shocker.