What Game Had the Most Wasted Potential

[64bitgamer]

I have a hard time measuring wasted potential. If we want to talk lost potential energy, then really Nintendo is the first company that comes to mind. They have a huge user base of rabid fans, desperate to have more games, but they squander their significant cushion of cash and loyalty releasing the same games with minor changes to them. I mean, they're still really good games. The new Wii U mario games are fantastic, but Nintendo for all its talent power released two mario games in the span of as many years. However, that feels like a company wasting potential, and not a game.

How about Sim City 5 as the winner? Sim games are still amazing and are great for hours of fun. Sim City 5 could have brought the system into fully rendered 3D glory, and really used the zoning system to allow a sense of running a city that's growing organically. However it turned into a huge mess, ridden with balance issues, bugs, and no one being able to play for the first couple of days.

 

[lacktheknack]

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness had so much going for it.

The animation was way ahead of its time (stair-climbing that actually matches the stairs? Ladders with the hands in the right places? MADNESS!), it had a risky but awesome plot hook (did she kill Von Croy or not?), the locations were quite well designed, and some of the situations Lara got into were cool and not seen before (the police chase, breaking into the Louvre, interacting with people in the Parisian slums...).

But no. We got glitchy controls river-dancing us through an increasingly insane plot (it acquires Indigo Prophecy Syndrome less than halfway into the game) and badly designed fights through increasingly ridiculous locations (Biodome of man-eating flytraps and shark-plants, anyone?) with awkward design choices and numerous pacing issues... Ugh.

Plus, I think she was a KK cup at this point. If Crystal Dynamics didn't tone her down from Legend and onwards, she'd have knee-knockers at this point.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Alpha Protocol is one of the best examples of good idea, bad execution.

Also Dark Void.

 

[zpm4737]

Mirror's Edge

Probably one of the most prominent when-it-works games, as in, when it works, it's awesome. When it doesn't, it's frustrating. There were shining moments in that game where the running felt great and flowed perfectly and just WORKED. Even the combat had its moments of synergizing with the main mechanics really well a few times, and actually made you feel badass instead of weak. The story could have been great as well. The game feels like it was rush out the door, though. It feels like so much more was planned. I don't see why they would make unique character models to appear in a single cutscene, or why the themes brought up in the opening cutscene are completely dropped once the game starts.

So much potential. The game had its shining moments. Given another year or two in development, the whole game could have felt that good.

 

[Rose and Thorn]

Does The Last Guardian count?

A game that looked to have so much potential, but never got fully developed. To me, that is what potential wasted is, since all we got was some nifty cutscenes.

 

[Brian Tams]

Halo 4.

Here, 343 had a wonderful opportunity to tell a narrative about once enemies banding their forces (which still should've been hurting from the war) to fight off a common foe.
Instead, the Covenant turn bad again for some bullshit contrived reason just so the player could shoot some more grunts.
In a nice twist, though, the humans are the ones who release the super baddie instead of the elites once again blundering into it.

 

[stroopwafel]

Resident Evil 6. This game was crap but there was also such an amount of wasted potential. For starters the controls were great and the Tall Oaks section could easily be on par with the best bits of Resident Evil 2 if the game had a tighter focus and wasn't ruined by such an overwhelming amount of poor design decisions. I almost feel sorry for the developers that they had to produce this garbage considering atleast some of them were quite skilled and knew what Resident Evil was about.

Oh....Capcom. You desperate relic of the past.

 

[Zantos]

I've been playing Two Worlds recently and I can see all the components of what could have been a really good game. Unfortunately due to what I can only assume was budget or time limitations it ended up buggy, unbalanced, bland in the combat and with terrible voice acting. It can certainly still be a fairly enjoyable game, but I think that it could have been so much more.

 

[Hazy]

Recently? Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.

That premise lends itself soooo well to a horror game: crawling around in the guts of a roaring machine, stepping over bodies on a conveyor belt (some of which aren't quite dead yet.)

Shame it was squandered by a staff who seemed to excel at not knowing what they were doing and nothing else.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

Spore

I followed development since its announcement in Wired magazine in 2005.

What we were promised was a scientific evolution game spanning from cell to galactic empire.

What we got was six disjointed minigames that catered to underage creationists.

For months people kept saying "Spore has such potential!" But that potential was never realized.

Will Wright left Maxis. They squeezed out some DLC and a failed spin-off, Darkspore. Then the Maxis went underground hoping to clear their name before SimCity 2013 was announced.

And I can't count the number of times I've heard "The new SimCity has such potential!"

Any bets if that potential will be realized?

25 Posts until someone mentioned Spore. It's baffling that people would say DA2 or ME3, which many people would say messed some things up.
But Spore has had so much potential if they would've lived up to the promises it's barely fathomable. Completly play through the whole evolution of a species, travel through all of our milky way and terraform every planet you encounter.
That's like dozen games packaged into one.

My own choice - since Spore was already mentioned now - would be: DarkStar One.
I'm a huge gigantic super mega duper Freelancer fan. I was thrilled when i heard someone is going to tackle that genre.
And then: BAM! Singleplayer only! BAM! Horrible Story! BAM! Easy as pie & boring combat.

Bleh i really wished they wouldn't eff-it-up that hard :< 10 Years of no Freelancer-esque space-pewpew.

 

[Padwolf]

I'm gonna jump in and give another to DA2. I love that game, a heck of a lot, but it could have been so much more!

Silent Hill 4: The Room. That game is great in my opinion, really great. However I think if they changed a few of the lines it would be even better. Well, the voice acting. I think a little bit more variety of monsters would have been good, as well as a few more good scares in the apartment. Though those are terrifying enough as is, I just felt the game could have done a bit more.

Sonic Generations. The mini games were a bit annoying to me after a while, especially since you really had to do them to progress. It was a shame. Also, I wanted more of it. A hell of a lot more. It could have been such a great big epic sonic game. I just want more goddamnit :'(

Secret of the Magic Crystal. I just want to take my unicorn on a cross country run. Please give me more to do with them!

 

[LightningFast]

Skyward Sword. At its core there was a fairly interesting story, one of the more interesting iterations of Zelda, beautiful music, graphics that, while perhaps a bit cartoonish, were pleasant to look at, a few side-characters that I actually gave two shits about, and motion controls that I felt worked well most of the time. (Except for the parts with the electric-sword goblin-things: fuck those guys) The boss fights overall were also considerably better. The Koloktos boss fight? Quite possibly the best I've ever had the fortune of experiencing. It even goes so far as to mock the whole "DO THIS SAME THING THREE TIMES" trend we usually see with Zelda bosses.

Unfortunately, it was bogged down by below-par puzzle design, segments which pushed motion controls combined with mechanics that made them inconvenient, obscene amounts of backtracking (I was perfectly okay with returning to the same areas twice to explore them differently; I was NOT okay with traveling across the planet to get a GODDAMNED BUCKET OF WATER) and quite possibly the worst companion character I've ever had the misfortune of being forced to listen to. Skyward Sword is the only game in which a character begins beeping to tell you about the beeping that occurs when your health is low. One of Zelda's strengths is immersion in the world of Hyrule, which was completely lost because it felt the need to tell me what an Amber Relic was every time I started up the game again. It somehow managed to take several steps back from Twilight Princess, a far better game released several years before this one.

I had to quit right after the game forced me to give water to a frog statue... three times. All while explaining to me patronizingly EXACTLY what I needed to do to solve the insultingly obvious puzzle. "Don't forget how to pour water on a thing, Link!" I made up my own ending in which Koloktos comes back and you fight a giant version of Koloktos a la Shadow of the Colossus, and the entirety of the game takes place inside this giant Koloktos. It's not like the dungeons are different parts of the robot, though that'd also be cool; the whole thing's just a four hour version of that one awesome boss fight with twists here and there. There are no poorly designed mooks which take six times as long to defeat because of motion controls and add nothing to the gameplay. Also, Fi is destroyed by a meteor, and instead of mourning her, they spit on her grave and forget immediately about what a goddamned waste of the Legend of Zelda IP and the credibility of motion controls - something I've tried to defend in the past but have ultimately given up on - that this ultimately mediocre game was.

... Ah... that was cathartic.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

The new Thief?

For all intents and purposes, the source material sounds great, but the new game gets a RESOUNDING... 'meh'.

Final Fantasy 13 onwards, the combat would've been tolerable if the stories and characters were interesting enough, but they've had three damn games and it just gets worse to that point that I played the demo for Lightning Returns and I was already tired of it. So boring. So fast.

 

[Hero of Lime]

Halo 4.

Here, 343 had a wonderful opportunity to tell a narrative about once enemies banding their forces (which still should've been hurting from the war) to fight off a common foe.
Instead, the Covenant turn bad again for some bullshit contrived reason just so the player could shoot some more grunts.
In a nice twist, though, the humans are the ones who release the super baddie instead of the elites once again blundering into it.

Well in all fairness, it is supposed to be only a small radical group of Elites that make up the bad covenant in Halo 4. Though I probably would have preferred if 343 made the Prometheans more interesting and varied rather than giving us the same classic Covenant races to fight.

OT: I guess I was pretty disappointed with Paper Mario Sticker Star. Not a bad game, but I had hoped it would have been a return to the style of the first two games in the series. It just lacked the interesting characters, combat system, humor, and locations that made the first two so fun and interesting.

 

[TWEWYFan]

Going for kind of an old one here but I'd say Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Especially given the recent popularity of other survival games I think you could do a lot with an isolated and atmospheric journey through the lost world of Site B. Instead what was a massively unpolished game that was so buggy that it was basically unplayable; they couldn't even get John William's iconic score! Oh well, at least there's that Let's Play by Research Indicates.

 

[bullet_sandw1ch]

The new Thief?

For all intents and purposes, the source material sounds great, but the new game gets a RESOUNDING... 'meh'.

Final Fantasy 13 onwards, the combat would've been tolerable if the stories and characters were interesting enough, but they've had three damn games and it just gets worse to that point that I played the demo for Lightning Returns and I was already tired of it. So boring. So fast.

the new Thief is a huge case of "do you get what the game is trying to do?". most reviewers seem to not understand that FIGHTING IN THIEF IS PRACTICALLY A SIN. and yet, sites like IGN have the gall to say thief's combat is clunky. of course its clunky! Garrett's a thief not a shaolin monk! reviewers call thief on its tedium, when there can only be so many ways to steal things. The only genuinely objective viewpoint that i am 100% behind is that it is rather poorly written and is rather wooden in it's delivery. it really comes down to who you believe; places like joystiq that enjoyed it despite its flaws (i am in firmly in this camp) or places like... pretty much everywhere else of note? okay, that dosent sound very good, but if you are a fan of the previous "thief" games i would recommend messing with the difficulty settings and giving it a try.

 

[bullet_sandw1ch]

I'd probably have to say Aliens:Colonial Marines. A four player coop game in the same family tree of the iconic, widely-loved film? GOD YES PLEASE. What we got was a hack job that butchered the canon of the series (even though alien's canon isnt exactly stunning), butchered basic fundamental facets of FPS games, did not make the aliens terrifying or intimidating in the slightest, and, possibly worst of all, acted as a wallet for borderlands, and the rest of what was left was thrown to the outsourcing wolves. So Gearbox's greed and incompetence ruined what will probably be the only aliens coop game of its kind, thanks to being a giant beacon of failure. Oh well, at least isolation exists.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

For me personally I'd say Darkest of Days. I don't think anyone expected much from the start but the premise has so much potential for an amazing game. Traveling through time to fight in multiple different wars with period accurate weapons and battlefields? Sounds awesome to me. Too bad it was shit.