So, I finally get it.

[Catfood220]

This has probably been done before but seeing as we get a thread every time someone discovers Dark Souls, I thought I'd do this.

I want to talk about The Last of Us. Now, if anyone reads my posts on this forum, I have had some pretty bad things to say about this game. I didn't think it was a bad game, just a really meh game. Sure, the story was alright if pretty predictable and the action and stealthing I found to be ok at best. I thought the game was best when it wasn't putting me through rooms full of Clickers that instantly know where I am despite being sneaky. I finished the game and pretty much went "it was ok, nothing special". A game that I was predicting was going to be my game of the year, left me pretty cold and my eventual game of the year went to Puppeteer.

So fast forward to last month and my friend is trying to get the platinum trophy and describes it as "the best game ever. Fact." So I decide to have another look to see if I have been too harsh on the game. And guess what folks, I had.

My expectations for this game were pretty high, unrealistically high coming from Uncharted makers Naughty Dog, I even pre-ordered the Joel Edition such was my faith that this game was going to be good. And I think that's what made me dislike this game, it couldn't possibly live up to my impossibly high expectations and was always going to be a disappointment to me. It didn't help that I was trying to play it like Uncharted, which you can't blame me for, Naughty Dog train me one way and then expect me to play another. I mean it even had Nolan North in it. Shame on you Naughty Dog

So anyway, I played it again and guess what? I ended up loving this game, I got it. Sneaking up on Clickers was good, heart in mouth fun. The bow and arrow ended up being my favourite weapon in the game and bits where I had struggled with on my first play through became easy when I came at it at a different angle. David is one of my favourite boss fights of recent years. Yeah, most of my encounters with humans turned into a gun fight more often than not, but I ended up really loving my time with this game second time around.

Is it perfect, no. The story is incredibly predictable like I said and the most emotional part of the game happens right at the start. The game is incredible to look at, but don't pay too much attention to the water pouring off the buildings, it looks a bit odd. There are also a couple of small bugs that I noticed too, none of which game breaking but it is annoying when Joel's brother gets stuck on some scenery and I have to reload the game. Also, stealthily shooting someone with an arrow, anywhere on the body is an instant kill. I came to the conclusion that everyone is a massive wuss in The Last of Us world, no wonder the fungus won.

So, yeah, sorry about the essay, I didn't mean it to be that long.

So for those of you that skipped right to the end. I think The Last of Us is great now.

Now, my question to everyone is, what game have you been so unrealistically excited for and been let down by because of those expectations? Did you give the game another chance or did you never get over your disappointment?

 

[Zhukov]

Welcome to the light brother!

...

My example?

Umm... having trouble coming up with one. Pretty much every time I've had high expectations of a game, I've ended up enjoying it immensely. Worst case scenario I get "pretty good" when I was expecting "very good". Call me a joyless grump, but I'm pretty hard to disappoint.

...

OHH! OHHHH!

Dragon's Dogma!

I remember seeing a trailer way back 2009-ish and thinking it looked okay. Then a demo came out and I really enjoyed it. I wanted more, so I bought it as soon as the used copies were a available.

Turned out the demo was the most fun I ever had with that game.

Won't go into too much detail since I've already ranted at length elsewhere and got into a few lengthly arguments. Suffice to say, the fast travel was terrible, the monsters kept respawning, most of the classes sucked, the world was bland, the NPCs were incapable of shutting up and the story was woeful.

I did end up going back to it once. Found myself thinking, "I really should resume that save, why did I dislike that game so much anyway?" Lasted about half and hour before saying, "Oh, I remember now!" and shelving it forever.

Come to think of it, I think I ended up trading it in to get like $7 off the price of The Last of Us. Most value I ever got out of it.

 

[Savagezion]

That's cool. This weekend I am giving Demon's Souls another go. When I got it oringially I was working on easier games like Uncharted 3, Arkham City and the like. I like me some hard games and Demon's Souls got a lot of praise in that field. SO I took it home and put it in.I got to the first castle realm and never really got far. It pissed me off that the enemies respawned upon death AND revisiting the nexus. I didn't like that weapons had only a few combinations and I couldn't jump. I hated that I was dying all the time. Now, at the time, I had started growing a backlog that has overwhelmed me a couple times since. It's still just over 60 games. It has been over 80. I didn't hold the difficulty as a con to the game but everything else I did.

This weekend I was in the mood for 'kill me' gameplay. I was especially in the mood to give my backlog games a second chance and constantly hearing about the Souls games I decided it was time for Demon's Souls to once again appear in front of my one man court. I made a temple knight and have been kicking ass. I am still early in and just killed the tar monster boss Phalanx.
This time around though, I don't mind enemies respawning so much. I still think the game needs more moves per weapon but maybe it compensates later in the game somehow. I really took notice of its awesome visual style this time around too. Overall, I am really enjoying it. It is still going to have to be set back aside occassionally because it will take me a while to beat it, I can see. I like the challenge though. Knowing I have it and 2 more Souls games laying at my feet makes me happy to know that challenge probably isn't going anywhere. It may be 8 months to a year before I get around to beating it provided my progression stays as it is and my breaks away from it are decently short. I have the whole adventrue in front of me still as well.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Welcome to the light brother!OHH! OHHHH!

Dragon's Dogma!

I remember seeing a trailer way back 2009-ish and thinking it looked okay. Then a demo came out and I really enjoyed it. I wanted more, so I bought it as soon as the used copies were a available.

Turned out the demo was the most fun I ever had with that game.

Won't go into too much detail since I've already ranted at length elsewhere and got into a few lengthly arguments. Suffice to say, the fast travel was terrible, the monsters kept respawning, most of the classes sucked, the world was bland, the NPCs were incapable of shutting up and the story was woeful.

I did end up going back to it once. Found myself thinking, "I really should resume that save, why did I dislike that game so much anyway?" Lasted about half and hour before saying, "Oh, I remember now!" and shelving it forever.

Come to think of it, I think I ended up trading it in to get like $7 off the price of The Last of Us. Most value I ever got out of it.

Yeeeaaahhhhh, I can see exactly where you are coming from man. Though, I myself did still enjoy my time with it anyways. The boss fights were a total blast for me~ But yeah, it had a LOT of flaws that I wish Capcom would fix in something like a sequel. Dark Arisen said to fix a few of the problems though, but not all of them. Also, if the Pawns were bothering you, you could always sit em down in that chair and tell them to shut the hell up. Worked alright for me!

 

[BrotherRool]

I've eventually come to like/not dislike Mass Effect 2, but it was a brutal experience that required breaking me over the course of many many playthroughs (I'm not sure why I played a game I didn't like so many times). There was never a moment of click, but after lots of Mass Effect discussions and lots of times playing their games I slowly realised my comments and impressions of Mass Effect 2 were losing their negative tinge and coming towards the light.

I think what it really came down to was this: Being able to choose your backstory is terribly misleading and put me in conflict with the game. Because you really can't roleplay a character in Mass Effect 2 (or 1 or 3), you're watching one of two stories they wrote and there's some very light touches of input you can have. But after choosing a backstory, I thought I could be my own special snowflake and so the game became a constant fight of picking options on the dialogue wheel and having the character say nothing even close to what I wanted them too.

Mass Effect 3 was the game that cured me. I spent ages picking a backstory and fleshing out a character and as soon as it left the character creation screen Shepard opened her mouth and it was absolutely nothing like the person I'd created. So I learned to go with the flow.

I think the best way to play Mass Effect (1,2 or 3) is not to think of it in terms of a character, but instead in terms of what you want to happen. That way you can enjoy the story of what's happening to Bioware's Shepard whilst having the input of seeing Garrus mellowed out and the Krogan's saved w/e. It's when you try to match saving the Krogan's with Shepard's character that it all falls apart. The choices are for the player, who is a different person from the player character.

Once you understand that, Mass Effect 2 is a game with excellent character development and interactions, fun side stories, horrible main-enemy design, a complex ambiguous is he/isn't he antagonist and one of the best climaxes of any game ever (despite the horrible main enemy design)

 

[Fox12]

Does Evangellion count? I hated it the first time. Shinji was annoying, Asuke was a horrible human being, none of the christian "symbolism" actually meant anything, and the entire story falls apart at the end. I watched it years later, after seeing Pacific Rim basically make a crappy reboot, and found that... a lot of my complaints were still pretty valid.

However, the things it did well, it did incredibly well. The characters were subtly developed, and I found myself loving them. Shinji was never supposed to be a hero, he was supposed to be a mouthpiece for the writers mental problems. Asuke was actually pretty intersting, and she quickly became my favorite character in a show where 50% of the cast can't stop moping. She worked well with Rei, who managed to be both creepy and tragic, due to her inability to connect with human beings. I absolutely loved the series the second time around.

 

[lunavixen]

To be honest, I didn't have high expectations for TLoU because it was made by the same people that made Uncharted (and I dislike Uncharted and still do TBH, even though I loved Crash Bandicoot back in the PS1 era) and it didn't exceed my moderate to low expectations for it, it started as a 'meh' game and it finished as a 'meh' game, and I played it twice just to be sure.

The most recent game i've played that went from being harshly seen, to being seen in a better light for me was Final Fantasy XIII, I thought it was alright, but a little disappointing (to the point where I didn't finish it the first time around), but I recently had another go at it and I've found that it's actually not too bad (I mean, it doesn't hold a candle to FFVII, VIII and IX though). I think it's because I'm starting to understand the story a little better with a total replay, the fighting system is making a little more sense to me and learning how to exploit the paradigm system for the best results is actually kind of fun.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Both Fallout 3 and New Vegas made terrible first impressions on me.

It might've been the absolute dire setting, but you'd think I would've gotten familiar with this when New Vegas came along. Yet it was the same exact routine all over again; I played the first hour or so, completely hate it, returned it. Then after letting it sit for a few weeks I decide to take another swing at it, and suddenly I loved it. I still can't explain what clicked.

Yeah, most of my encounters with humans turned into a gun fight more often than not, but I ended up really loving my time with this game second time around.

You need to remember that you can break all enemy attention if you run and hide. Even Bloaters will lose you (except for the very first one) if you simply put a lot of distance between you and him. Most stealth games have conditioned us to think that if we get caught we're fucked. But with TLoU you can actually use stealth to bait enemies away. You know that subway section with all the Clickers where you have to reach the ladder? During my latest playthrough I was near the end of that area, having snuk through it only taking out the Runners, when a Clicker noticed me and suddenly the entire horde was gunning for me. Me not wanting to waste anything, I ran to the otherside of the area with the Clickers on my tail. When I got there they had lost me, so I quietly made my way back to the exit which had become completely clear of enemies.

 

[Zen Bard]

I was incredibly excited to hear about Diablo III.

Until I actually starting hearing about it.

Everything I read just pissed me off: Blizzard's apparent greed, the automatic stat point distribution, the skill runes, the "World of Warcraft" color palette. Everything!

I vowed never to get it for the PC (because fuck that always online shit) and never to play it period.

Well, when it became available for the XBox, my wife gave it to me as a birthday present (bless her heart...she knew how much I adored the first two but wasn't privy to my private loathing of the third).

So, since I had it, I gave it a shot.

At first, it bugged me. But mostly because it wasn't Diablo II. Then after awhile, a strange thing happened. I started to enjoy it and realize that, in its own way, it's a lot of fun.

I've currently played through it twice (a Monk and Witch Doctor) with a third play-through on Nightmare in progress.

 

[Rariow]

This happened to me in a big way with Far Cry 3. I initially started playing it hoping for a tough-as-nails, painful experience where it feels like you're trying to survive in a world that really doesn't like you, the way I felt in Far Cry 2. When, a few months after leaving the game in disgust about 5 hours into it, I watched some videos and realized this was more a straight-up power fantasy shoot'em'up than a videogame, story-based version of Man vs Wild with some gun people thrown in, I came back to play it and loved the hell out of it. I'm still sad that we never quite got a more polished up, updated Far Cry 2, but Far Cry 3 is lots of fun.

Also, Skyrim, because it bugged the hell out in the tutorial about three times. I then went to loving the hell out of it, though to be honest, after about 150 hours of play (way less than I invested into Oblivion or Morrowind), I went back to being disappointed in it for reasons I'm still not sure of.

Oh, and Persona 4, though that was mostly due to the game practically not letting you play for the first two hours. I was about to quit, but I hit the end of that long-ass initial story bit just before my tolerance ended, and I loved every moment of it from then on.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I could perhaps say Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2 did this for me. When I first played them, I loved them both, but it didn't take long for me to see the obvious faults, which were almost the exact same for both games. I even made a thread about it.

But somehow they both roped me back in. I bought DLC for it and watched guides for where to get the best weapons, and now it's my most played game on Steam. When I modded Torchlight, suddenly a lot of the gripes I had with it were gone. The difficulty gap between normal and hard is still grossly unbalanced, but I've been having a lot of fun with it regardless.

 

[PBMcNair]

Mass Effect 1 for me.

I first played it on my housemate's Xbox, in between hot-seat RTS battles. I was an infiltrator on his suggestion, and I hadn't played an RPG with exploration/sidequests in years. I ended up doing almost no side quests outside hub areas, I played Shep like myself rather that strict Paragon/Renegade, therefore I couldn't save Wrex. It wasn't the worst gaming experience of my life, but I didn't really enjoy it.

I went back to it after playing (and loving) Dragon Age, playing in my own time on my then new laptop. I had a much better time of it, even if I still wasn't sold on the Mako. Ended up replaying it a few times to try new stuff. Then Mass Effect 2 happened, but for the sake of the thread let's not go there.

 

[Karthek]

Fable 3.
After Fable 2 and Fable Heroes(which was fucking awful), I had given up on the series in general. When Fable 3 was free on Xbox 360, I decided to give it a try. I grew to despise the game, its story in particular, but my problems with it always stemmed from one thought: This is NOT like the first game.

Then I tried something crazy: I mentally separated Fable 3 from the first two. And when I played it without comparing it to its predecessors, I actually began to like it! Then I got to Aurora, and downright fell in love with that area.
Overall, it comes nowhere close to being as fun as either of the first two, but taken as an experience in and of itself, its pretty fun.

 

[Rolaoi]

Spore was the biggest let down I've ever played. I try to go back and play it sometimes, but I'll never get the magic from that Alpha. All that cut content wrapped up in an outrageous DRM. It was the only time I ever wrote a letter of complaint to a company. I still haven't bought anything from EA since.

 

[The_Scrivener]

Backlash culture is a plague. I find it loathesome that hype or even isolated individual expectation has an effect on someone's ability to evaluate something. I get that people are human and some bias is involved sometimes, but I don't see why the fanatical nature of HXC GAMER extreme opinion has to always color our ability to see a game as it is.

 

[Hero of Lime]

When it comes to the Last of Us, I enjoyed it a lot when I first beat it. As time went on I started to look back on it and dislike the game more and more. Maybe if I tried it again somewhere down the road I might enjoy it more, but I have no interest to do so anytime soon.

OT: I remember loving Skyward Sword the first two times I played the game. Then I played it a third time a while later and had a real bad impression for some reason. Then I went back to liking it on my subsequent playthroughs.

I also really didn't care much for Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, at least compared to the first two. Now I have a much better appreciation for the game.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

See, the funny thing about the bow and arrow in the Last of Us for me was that I assumed only a headshot was a one-shot kill and played 90% of the game not knowing that when unaware, any hit did the trick. So it was more difficult than it needed to be for me, and probably about right too. I thoroughly enjoyed the game, once.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Dark Souls. My friend at work would not shut up about the game when it first came out. Nor would half the internet for that matter. And when I heard you could talk to people (leave messages), I finally caved and gave the game a shot. I figured I'd help people out, leave detailed messages on what to do or where to go. Stuff like that.

Ha ha! Boy was I wrong. I was the one that ended up needing help and no one would give it to me. I grew to hate the game with a burning passion that was rivaled only by Street Fighter 4. I eventually sold the game to GameStop and spent the next several years rolling my eyes and hating it.
But as time went on, I began to look back on it and remember that I was impressed with the world and the exploring. But I kept telling myself to never try it again because it was just a trap.
Then Dark Souls II was announced, and they said it would be more user friendly. I thought that was a step in the right direction and gave the game a shot. I had a blast and got the platinum super quick. Having mastered the game and understanding how it worked, I recently bought Dark Souls again. I am enjoying it this time around and am tearing through it without any problems. Much more fun this time.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

i had a similar experience with Tales of Symphonia. the first time i had played the game i didn't really like it. but the second time i enjoyed the game immensely, especially since my second attempt happened 4 years later and was much more experienced with video games.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

When I first played Mount and Blade: Warband, I was dismayed. I thought it was ugly as sin, and possibly the clunkiest and least intuitive game I'd ever touched. I immediately regretted even the pittance I'd spent on it in a Steam Sale. Then, for reasons I cannot recall, I booted it up again a few days later, and something clicked. Ended up playing 200 hours. Loved it to death.