What Game Had the Most Wasted Potential

[Idsertian]

Wait, really? Nobody? Ok, I'm gonna get jumped on for this I reckon, but here we go.

Syndicate.

Whoa whoa whoa! Hold up before you all bludgeon me to death with whatever comes to hand, I'm serious.

The game has an upgrade system similar to games that passed before it, such as the original Deus Ex. The ability to hack certain objects in the environment to assist you, as well as hacking enemies themselves, was a genius move and makes the otherwise run-of-the-mill combat quite interesting. Slap an execution mechanic in there, and it would be perfect.
But the short length, 7 hours if you're really dragging your heels, utterly hampered that game. Without the space to really explore its abilities, the hacking and upgrading are little more than gimmicks. The plot was ok, but with more time, it could have been amazing and the script itself wasn't even that bad.
Yes, it fell victim to EA. Yes, it wasn't anything like the original games, but that didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It could have been a great shooter, it could have been a rival even to Deus Ex, but sadly, it wasn't to be.

There was potential there, and it was wasted.

Ok, I'm done. Flame-shield, engage!

 

[Cerebrawl]

Fallout 3. Oblivion. Skyrim. Most things coming out of Bethesda really. Thank goodness for modders.

But my real answer is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, it suffered greatly from time pressure and the second half of the game is a rushed linear mess, it could've been so much more. That people still play it and remember it fondly is mostly because the first half is so spectacularly good. I daresay if they'd had the leisure to do it right it would've been one for the ages, remembered as a storytelling rival of Torment, a contender for best RPG of all time. The real cincher is that the potential wasn't wasted for lack of talent, and direction like for example Fable, just finances and time pressure.

 

[Mikejames]

Rule of Rose actually had some really intelligent (albeit disturbing) mindsets behind it in my opinion. It's like Lord of the Flies taking place on a British air ship; going through a mix of nightmares and childish escapism.

But the terrible combat system really bogs it down. If they dropped it for more of a focus on puzzle solving and exploring the narrative it could have accomplished more of what it set out to do.

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.

The Room actually has one of my favorite premises of the series, but the execution can be all over the place. If they gave the protagonist a personality, cut out the level recycling, and toned down the incessantness of the ghosts, then I think it'd have more of a chance to shine.

 

[Padwolf]

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.

The Room actually has one of my favorite premises of the series, but the execution can be all over the place. If they gave the protagonist a personality, cut out the level recycling, and toned down the incessantness of the ghosts, then I think it'd have more of a chance to shine.

Hehe and if they cut out Henry asking "Hey, are you ok?" then it would have been a bit better! It's still one of my favourites too. I'm currently playing them all through again, can't wait to get to 4!

 

[SoranMBane]

Wait, really? Nobody? Ok, I'm gonna get jumped on for this I reckon, but here we go.

Syndicate.

Whoa whoa whoa! Hold up before you all bludgeon me to death with whatever comes to hand, I'm serious.

The game has an upgrade system similar to games that passed before it, such as the original Deus Ex. The ability to hack certain objects in the environment to assist you, as well as hacking enemies themselves, was a genius move and makes the otherwise run-of-the-mill combat quite interesting. Slap an execution mechanic in there, and it would be perfect.
But the short length, 7 hours if you're really dragging your heels, utterly hampered that game. Without the space to really explore its abilities, the hacking and upgrading are little more than gimmicks. The plot was ok, but with more time, it could have been amazing and the script itself wasn't even that bad.
Yes, it fell victim to EA. Yes, it wasn't anything like the original games, but that didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It could have been a great shooter, it could have been a rival even to Deus Ex, but sadly, it wasn't to be.

There was potential there, and it was wasted.

Ok, I'm done. Flame-shield, engage!

No need for the flame shield with me; I agree wholeheartedly, if for slightly different reasons.

The script for this game was written by one Richard K. Morgan, who happens to be one of my personal favourite authors. A cyberpunk action RPG written by that man should have been one of the best things that ever happened, but instead it just ended up being an unfun, tedious, gimmicky slog of a generic modern FPS with some above-average dialog.

Mr. Morgan was also the guy they got to write Crysis 2, which is a game that I actually genuinely liked, but which still severely undersells this writer's talent. I'd really like to see what would happen if he wrote for a game that wasn't published be EA.

 

[Mikeyfell]

There's no contest. It's Mass Effect 3.
the first two games laid a groundwork for epic storytelling with player driven continuity hitherto unheard of in all of gaming.

What did we get? Generic structureless plot-hole-ridden garbage (With a shitty control system and broken AI)

Other games have fucked up or dropped the ball, but no game has squandered as much potential

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Arkham Origins could've been so much better than just a retread of Arkham City...

Rule of Rose actually had some really intelligent (albeit disturbing) mindsets behind it in my opinion. It's like Lord of the Flies taking place on a British air ship; going through a mix of nightmares and childish escapism.

But the terrible combat system really bogs it down. If they dropped it for more of a focus on puzzle solving and exploring the narrative it could have accomplished more of what it set out to do.

God I hate that game.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Mass Effect 3, hands down. Not only squandered the potential to become a gaming phenomenon that no series would match for quite a while (which they could easily have done by having branching unique endings that took all choices into account, even without bothering to have different experiences throughout (which would be the cherry on the cake)), but squandered inherited expectations from 2 other games. And any fucking idiot following the games could have told Bioware what they wanted in the third, and Bioware knew exactly what was wanted in the third, and they didn't do it. We got an ethereal little shit and fireworks instead.

 

[TheSYLOH]

Metro 2033
In my opinion that game was like a Modern Warfare game minus the triple-A polish.
Mechanics and ideas show up, are tutorialized and then disappear without another thought.

For example, take the living shadows. It demonstrates the supernatural nature of the setting, is atmospheric as hell and could have been worked into game play. Instead it insta kills you a couple of times and disappears forever.
The entire game is more or less something like this. Awesome idea no pay off.

This game just begs for a stalker style open world play style, that is sadly waaay out of budget for the developers.
I don't grudge them for their reach exceeding their grasp, but still its disappointing.

 

[Mikeyfell]

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.

Your problem with Halo 4 was the narrative?
4 was the first Halo game that had a well written story. It was also the first one that wasn't fun to play, but that's hardly 343's fault, it's hard to live up to Bungie quality.
To have a problem with Halo 4's writing, out of ALL the Halo games is weird. (no offense}

 

[Sarge034]

Dead Island, Brink, and Rage. Rage felt like 1/3 of a game, Brink was... Brink, and Dead Island needed a bit of polish. If I had to pick one I would have to go with Dead Island. I am still waiting for an open world console zombie game that has RPG elements, co-op, a good story, is in first person, and has fluid controls.

 

[Seracen]

Gonna go with Alpha Protocol on this one. One of Obsidian's first original IP's in years, and an espionage RPG.

Sad this is, I still like the game, for all it's faults, simply b/c I can SEE the missed potential. What was further salt on the wound was how shoddy the game was even after an additional 6 months of dev time.

Had they actually worked out more kinks in the story, and focused on a working gameplay experience, it could have been a great franchise. As it stands, we will never see something like it again, most likely.

Still, I don't know what I was expecting. As amazing as Obsidian is, they have a track record with buggy releases (though this was a worse offender than most).

 

[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.

Your problem with Halo 4 was the narrative?
4 was the first Halo game that had a well written story. It was also the first one that wasn't fun to play, but that's hardly 343's fault, it's hard to live up to Bungie quality.
To have a problem with Halo 4's writing, out of ALL the Halo games is weird. (no offense}

The narrative of Halo 4 relies entirely upon the player having read the books for it to make sense. This is not good writing. A good narrative doesn't expect the player to do some outside homework in order to get invested in what's going on.
I'm sure there's a very good reason why the Elites are suddenly so eager to skin the Chief alive; in fact, several people (including some in this thread) have told me that it has to do with the books. But I'll never know, since 343's writers are too lazy to include even a touch of back story, instead just pointing out a dusty pile of old books.

I mean, sure, some of the characters are well rounded, and Chief showing actual human emotion over the fate of Cortana is really nice. But that's it.

 

[ecoho]

I have to agree with those saying Dragon Age 2.

The idea was solid. I love the concept of a more personalized rpg story with a tighter focus on a singular location and smaller cast of characters, then having the game take place over time so that you can see how your decisions made throughout the game play out. Seeing the characters change over time and the locations be altered, it's brilliant story mechanic and something Bioware should have considered doing age ago considering while their writing isn't always the best their skill at making sympathetic and enjoyable characters is undeniable, so making a character driven adventure seems obvious. Then add in the unreliable narrator trick with various events as you play them being one characters perspective on certain events and it seems like DA2 should have been the most well thought out and most clever Bioware game to date.

Yet somehow they just completely messed it up. The characters, normally Bioware's strong suit, are a wretched inconsistent lot. The story is a jumbled incoherent mess. The visuals are bland and boring, made even moreso by the lack of variety in locations which never really change as you'd think they should. The gameplay was just a tedious mess. And the way the entire story just sort of crumbles is pathetic, especially seeing as the vast majority of your choices as it turns out are absolutely meaningless.

Worse yet is that because of DA2's failure it's unlikely Bioware are going to try any of those clever ideas mentioned in the first paragraph again, already with DA3 we see they're going back to the old 'save the world' trope.

Such wasted potential.

actually some good news for you all reports are (and from my own experience at pax seem to be true) that they are keeping the smaller cast and having it be more personal for your character then it was in origins.

OT: yeah gonna second Too Human, I mean future Vikings gods kicking ass? who would of thought you could actually crew that concept up?

Also going to put Tales of Symphonia dawn of the new world here too. though I suspect that the new one for the PS3 is going to be enjoyable for me when I get to that part, the wii version was just god awful and a waste of my money.

 

[RedDeadFred]

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.

Ah Two Worlds. The worst game I've ever thoroughly enjoyed. I loved the freedom in that game. For whatever reason, I one day decided to massacre the one southern city. After, I realized that several important NPCs had been killed in my wake of destruction (green death beams from the sky were my weapon of choice). Since NPC deaths are permanent in this game, I ended up having to learn and master a whole new school of magic so that I could resurrect everyone in the city.

I also liked the huge variety of landscapes there were. This game got compared to Oblivion a lot and if there's one thing this game did a lot better, it's have a varied world. Desserts, forests, plains, dead forests, bamboo forests, mountains, crazy black rock evil area.

Now if only the game had had a decent story, competent writing and voice acting (oh my were some of those lines terrible in their actual content and in their delivery), was finished (there's an entire Dwarven city that you can't go to since the devs never finished that part of the game), and had a combat system that didn't require you to simply run in circles away from enemies in the early game due to everything being able to murder you easily. Only game I've ever played where you start off so weak that it takes about fifty hits to kill a bear and yet you can become so godly that you can one-shot the final boss and be pretty much impervious to all damage.

It really could have been an amazing game.

 

[Mikeyfell]

The narrative of Halo 4 relies entirely upon the player having read the books for it to make sense. This is not good writing. A good narrative doesn't expect the player to do some outside homework in order to get invested in what's going on.
I'm sure there's a very good reason why the Elites are suddenly so eager to skin the Chief alive; in fact, several people (including some in this thread) have told me that it has to do with the books. But I'll never know, since 343's writers are too lazy to include even a touch of back story, instead just pointing out a dusty pile of old books.

Well I never read the books... so there.

I did see Forward Unto Dawn, which did help me get invested in what was going on. But the actor who played Lasky did such a good job I doubt knowing his backstory was 100% necessary to enjoy the story.

and Chief showing actual human emotion over the fate of Cortana is really nice. But that's it.

Yeah it was amusing to see Steve Downs pretend he was a human. My favorite part of the writing was the amount of long stoic silences they gave Master Chief while Cortana had both sides of the conversation. They did try to give him a line which is probably the worst line reading in recorded history. If it weren't for the great music and Jen Taylor's excellent performance that scene would have been hilarious. (Despite the acting the scene was well written)

To me the real meat of the story wasn't so much the stuff going on with the Didact or the Covenant but Cortana's breakdown and her coping with her mortality. The Machine programed to behave like a human and the human programed to behave like a machine dichotomy was explored and realized extremely well (which is something that Bungie never had the balls to tackle)

My problem with the first 3 Halo games is that they relied completely on the lore to keep you invested.
The actual games were about some boring guy and generic military types trying to stop a universe wide disaster.
So the only possible connection you can make to any of the characters or events is "OMFG I live in a universe!" in 4 there's a personal story about grief and accepting loss. So it's really easy to get emotionally invested and actually care about what happens next.

 

[SweetWarmIce]

I'm going to say Too Human. It's painful to think how awesome it could have been.

Edit: RAGE and BRINK are runners up.

 

[Nazulu]

I reckon SSB Brawl would have been one of the greatest games ever if they sharpened the mechanics like the guy focused so much on in Melee. I really just want to expand on Melee with more characters, levels and everything else. Gah!! It drives me nuts.

 

[FPLOON]

Virtua Quest

Building you own custom fighter based on moves done by actual Virtual Fighter characters? What could go wrong, right??

Too bad Soul Calibur 4 and 5 did that concept "slightly" better years later...

Other than that, it could of had more sequels to this spin-off of the Virtual Fighter series... (I think that's what the game's story was trying to do...)

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Remember Remember Me (heh.)? I thought the memory control thing could have been really cool if it was an actual gameplay mechanic intead of just a story-based interactive cutscene. Yahtzee had an Extra Punctuation on his ideas once.

Yeah, that was the first one I thought of. It had the potential to make it into a great open-world (or even semi-open) game in the vein of the first Assassin's Creed. Through the entire game, I desperately wished for a more open section, to explore neo-Paris a bit more, but NOPE! Every two steps the door would close behind me to keep me progressing through an extremely narrow corridor, sometimes with the most obnoxious kind of invisible wall (i.e. an actually invisible one, without even an effort to paint a handrail in there). All the memory thingies could have been something like the "plan your assassination" minigames in AC1.

But instead we got a short game which wanted to be Oni, marred by terrible dialogue and an occasional plot-hole.

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.

Hah, I almost forgot about that one. I think the weirdest thing was that it seemed like they poured all their resources into the first area of the game (with dialogue interactions and the shop which I ended up using once and never again), and then had to make the rest on a few pinecones and a piece of string. I particularly remember that the second playable character wasn't able to do something like climb ladders or jump (it's been a while), and that was really annoying. Plus, the game crashed constantly (although eventually the patches improved it to the point of playability).

So yeah, could have been a great revival of the TR series, instead it sent Core down the drain and eventually led to the Crystal Dynamics games, which I enjoyed, but felt more like "people like Prince of Persia, let's make something like that! Oh oh, and now that we're done with the trilogy, let's do an Uncharted!" instead of a new vision for the series.