highly agree with this, there were SO many cool things about XII, but holy hell the focus...just threw off any momentum you had and there were a few key points where you had to grind to holy hell and back (I think roughly level 28-30ish? to get by that stupid dragon in the forest that would insta-poison/status effect you hardcore, that area was a choreeee to grind in).
Ah yes the Elder Wrym, literally the hardest and most bullshit boss I think I've ever faced in a Final Fantasy game. They fixed it a lot more in the International version because in that version you can also control guest gambits by turning them off or on, or setting them up for new things. They also leveled up with you too. Really wish that other people around the world could have played that version instead of the vanilla one sometimes. (note that XII is still my favorite FF game)
yes!!!! just at that point in time it sucked so bad, certain magic spells weren't strong(enough, or were "ra "raga") and you hadn't opened your licensing skill tree too far, so if I remember right I just grinded until I could brute force myself through that battle.
I think another battle I had slight trouble with early on was that stupid moving wall, it's when your characters are roughly lvl 10-15~ish and I think it was right before the fire esper guy, but that was another one I had trouble with.
yes!!!! just at that point in time it sucked so bad, certain magic spells weren't strong(enough, or were "ra "raga") and you hadn't opened your licensing skill tree too far, so if I remember right I just grinded until I could brute force myself through that battle.
I think another battle I had slight trouble with early on was that stupid moving wall, it's when your characters are roughly lvl 10-15~ish and I think it was right before the fire esper guy, but that was another one I had trouble with.
You mean the second Demon Wall after the first one? Yeah I hated that thing, but then again I never had as much of a problem with it since I'm a really bad grinder. Let's just say I was already level 32 when I got to that area and I actually took out the first Demon Wall as well. XD
One of the things I like about XII though is that when you get a new character then they are the same level that you are when you get them, and thanks to the International version they can now level up. I hate it when the character you get starts off at a low level and it was really bad in Skies of Arcadia when you get Fina and you could be level 20 or something and she will always be level 1...>.>
You mean the second Demon Wall after the first one? Yeah I hated that thing, but then again I never had as much of a problem with it since I'm a really bad grinder. Let's just say I was already level 32 when I got to that area and I actually took out the first Demon Wall as well. XD
One of the things I like about XII though is that when you get a new character then they are the same level that you are when you get them, and thanks to the International version they can now level up. I hate it when the character you get starts off at a low level and it was really bad in Skies of Arcadia when you get Fina and you could be level 20 or something and she will always be level 1...>.>
hah yeah it's been years since I played, so I couldn't remember exactly, but you're right! I was definitely nowhere near as bad as you at grinding...(at least until level like 38-40? it's whatever the minimum was to do that level grinding trick with the gambit system and the infinite spawning monster XD )
and yeah agreed, it's really annoying to have party mechanics where you don't get the character until later on but then they start in scrub mode while your other party members could one hit KO them 5 times over >_>
Remember Me had a pretty cool idea behind it, but it was handled by Capcom. I also loved Hitman Absolution (huge fan of the series) but I don't feel it was a great game. Writing issues were a bit more prevalent than usual for the franchise, AI wasn't challenging, stuff like that.
Resident Evil 6 was another one I loved playing but couldn't look past the issues with gameplay and the absolutely idiotic story (even by RE standards).
FF12 had a great plot going, it was going to be like a Skies of Arcadia thing. The combat was so bad I never went past the sewer part. I hate it! I want it to be good and it isn't! Airships! Either give me real time hack n slash combat, or turn based, not half-n-half. Not some kind of coffee creamer ass fights.
Rogue Galaxy had almost the same problem. Fuckin' Steve Blum usin' all mah health items every ten seconds.
Also every DBZ fighter after Tenkaichi 3. Everything got progressively worse.
Crazy Zaul said:
oh yeh and obviously SWTOR is $200m of wasted potential.
Yeah, if you took out the multiplayer bit, that would be an amazing KotOR III. I actually have no idea what the story was, but the gameplay and lore was great. I would play the crap out of it if I could get by without social interaction. And I could have it on my hard drive.
For me it is a toss up between Knights of the Old Republic 2 (could have been so much more if it were just finished) and Dragon Age 2 (too much reuse of material, 2D characters and severe lack of ambition with the plot and scope).
Alot people have said already but...Brink. The idea and premise was actually pretty interesting and it looked like it could be a nice little innovation to the FPS genre. But man was the execution terrible. Felt as if the ideas were slapped onto it and it ended up as a mess.
A another I can think of would have to be is Amensia: A Machine for Pigs. This game didn't live up to its predecessor because it had stripped out several elements from the first game and I felt it dragged the game's quality down by alot.
The civil war is the same. The initial battle for Whiterun is really cool with catapults shooting at the walls, archers everywhere etc. . The final battle against Solitude? You storm the fortified city with 3 soldiers destroy maybe 3 barricades and kill 5 soldiers or something like that on your way to the enemy leader. Then you kill him and...nothing. No one cares. All NPCs are standing around looking blankly at you until you leave. The whole game feels completely unfinished.
Also they should have learned more from the world design of Fallout. They did some nice random quests and some of the ruins etc. had some interesting back story. But most of the time you plunder generic cave A oder generic grave B.
There's a mod for that! [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37216/?] (Yeah, that is basically the catch-phrase for every single issue with Skyrim...)
Yeah, apparently the Civil War in Skyrim was originally completely dynamic, with settlements changing hands depending on who you help (or don't help, as the two sides attack each other whether you are there or not) and your side can actually lose the war if you mess around too much with those skinny draugh girls and boys in their damp holes instead of helping the war effort. This particular mod restores most of that.
You could call that wasted potential, I call it realized potential, as we wouldn1t have it even now if Bethesda wasn't swell enough to hand over the dev-kit to the fans as usual.
To be honest making it possible to lose the civil war if you don?t help seems like a pretty terrible idea, it basically means that you can?t do anything but fight battles until the civil war is finished if you want to be certain that your side wins.
The original x com is easily the worst game I ever played in my life but I kind of like the premise, thankfully the new one is awesome.
Like a lot of people I was going to say Dragon Age 2 because it was a definate let down after the first but you're right.
It was so bad I think I blanked it from my memory and it could have been so good. Those damn cut scenes every time you died, none of yourweapons did any damage at all and the fact that the controls were bizarre ruined the game.
More importantly. How does anyone make a game about futuristic Norse Gods beating the crap out of robots with guns and axes bad?
I'm gonna say Dragon's Dogma, yes I know a lot of people liked it as it was but honestly I couldn't finish it. There was so much I loved in that game but the bad AI, a huge interesting world with not enough in it, and lack of story stopped me. It sucks because it could of been perfect... or at least as close to perfect as a game can be.
I agree with this. It could have been a good game if they had put more work into it. I'm thinking the same thing about XCOM Declassified . I liked the stuff they showed before they scrapped everything and made it into the game that they released. Finding tech on the battlefield and researching it, resource management inside and outside of combat missions, tactical combat. It could have been really good. I also don't think most people would flame a shooter spin-off if it was really good. I love the old XCOM titles but I found the idea of making a shooter in that universe quite interesting.
But I guess the game (at least for me) with the largest amount of wasted potential in recent times was Skyrim. The dark brotherhood missions were really well done, but then they suddenly end with you sitting in a cold ugly cave doing randomly generated missions and nothing has changed in the slightest.
You killed the emperor! I mean someone should realize that their emperor is dead, right? But everyone just goes on with their stuff.
The civil war is the same. The initial battle for Whiterun is really cool with catapults shooting at the walls, archers everywhere etc. . The final battle against Solitude? You storm the fortified city with 3 soldiers destroy maybe 3 barricades and kill 5 soldiers or something like that on your way to the enemy leader. Then you kill him and...nothing. No one cares. All NPCs are standing around looking blankly at you until you leave. The whole game feels completely unfinished.
Also they should have learned more from the world design of Fallout. They did some nice random quests and some of the ruins etc. had some interesting back story. But most of the time you plunder generic cave A oder generic grave B.
The whole game WAS unfinished. Check out the Skyrim Nexus site, several modders have dug out code that wasn't finished in the game, much of which refers to the civil war. You were tight to point that out specifically. What the code shows, is that the civil war was meant to be a dynamic battle across the map, continuing throughout the game and changing based on your actions. It was supposed to be affected by your rise as Dragonborn and affect the quests you are able to engage in, creating a game which requires multiple playthroughs to see all the content. Some conetent would be walled by helping the one side or the other, drastically altering what you could achieve in a single playthrough. I believe there was some element of politcal gaming to mitigate this effect found in the code aswell. You were supposedto be able to fight for land and capture any hold for either side.
Sadly, skyrim wasn't finished and the features you called out, were the ones sacrificed to the gods of corporate gaming.
Guild Wars 2. All of the technical aspects of the game are amazing. The combat system is very fluid, the design choices that went into resource/exp sharing, dynamic events, and the general questing from the main game was refreshing and made me really feel like part of a community. It's the first MMO where I didn't view players as an enemy: someone who would steal a resource node, tag my mobs, etc. The class design was interesting and the World vs World pvp was a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately, they've been terribly lackluster in content. Their failure to create more prevalent end-game with their main release has led to this constant mad dash to create new content. Features keep getting added and then forgotten, currencies used for one update and then never seen again, design philosophies completely changing. So while I enjoy everything about the game from a technical standpoint, I don't think their design team is able to create content that lives up to the potential of their own game.
Guild Wars 2. All of the technical aspects of the game are amazing. The combat system is very fluid, the design choices that went into resource/exp sharing, dynamic events, and the general questing from the main game was refreshing and made me really feel like part of a community. It's the first MMO where I didn't view players as an enemy: someone who would steal a resource node, tag my mobs, etc. The class design was interesting and the World vs World pvp was a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately, they've been terribly lackluster in content. Their failure to create more prevalent end-game with their main release has led to this constant mad dash to create new content. Features keep getting added and then forgotten, currencies used for one update and then never seen again, design philosophies completely changing. So while I enjoy everything about the game from a technical standpoint, I don't think their design team is able to create content that lives up to the potential of their own game.
And much of that could have been forgiven if Scarlet wasn't written to be the ultimate Villain Sue [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainSue]. With that aside, one of the things that pissed me off to the point of quitting the game was the incompetent "balancing" team. They obviously favor the warrior above all else while trying their hardest to sweep the mesmer, engineer and ranger classes under the rug when they *do* any 'major' class updates. On top of that, damn near everything that made this game a success was thrown completely out the window in favor of the cash shop with abysmally low drop rates concerning Black Lion tickets or scraps; I could max out my credit card on Black Lion keys and get nothing of value, but why would I ever do that?
I could write a novella about the problems of this game and it would be a better-told story than almost anything the writers could and have churned out concerning this game. To me, wasted potential is the least of Guild Wars 2's problems.
The first one that comes to mind for me was the most recent Alone in The Dark game. I loved the original trilogy, being among the first first survival horror games, and while The New Nightmare was merely functional in terms of gameplay, story-wise it was pretty entertaining. But everything since then, namely the movie and the remake, have been complete flops. I'd really love to see a sequel in this series that does it right, perhaps returning to the first trilogy's late 20's, early 30's setting and bring back more of the Lovecraftian influence the previous games had (the first one in particular). A game where the story is about a private detective trying to battle against supernatural horrors while uncovering a mystery is one I think would be well-received, and modern gaming mechanics could make it memorable, with good stealth mechanics so you're encouraged to hide from the more powerful monsters and damage and combat mechanics that allow you to fight against -some- enemies but making it tense and challenging.
Like Yahtzee once said about AiTD, "It had a lot of features that with a little more polish could have worked," or something to that effect, and he's right. Item combining to create makeshift weapons, use of light and fire to fight an enemy weak to those things and other such game features could have really done well, but game-breaking bugs and sketchy controls really made the game fall apart. The plot might have been passable if it hadn't been so overtly bombastic compared to the previous games' tendency to creepy atmosphere. The spunky female sidekick could have also been dropped, because she definitely added little if anything beside an annoying plot device.
I'm not one to declare "the most" wasted potential out of all games, but the one that disappointed me the most was NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams.
I love the original NiGHTS so much and was so excited for this title. It had its moments but they sure tried hard to dummy it up and ruin the magic the original had. It should have been so much more.
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.
This.
Before this came out, the first thing I saw of it was this trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxqiFKrkEwM
It's more like a short student horror edit than a game trailer, but hell, this used to give me nightmares about what unholy thing this game was going to be. So very very dark, mysterious, full of disturbing stuff, maybe even a psychologically effective gore fest with disgusting surgery. At least it looked fresh and creepy to me. Hadn't it been for the logo at the end, I wouldn't have known if this had anything to do with Tomb Raider.
Where is all this in the game? You fight your everyday action movie power mongering villain. The horror element hinges on what evil ancient thingamagic the guy is trying to awake, not so much on the delivery.
For me, it was probably Sonic 06. I LOVED the SA games as a kid, and I was hoping this game would take what those games had, improved upon them and make a fantastic game.
Boy was I let down.
It's a shame really, the soundtrack was pretty good, and looking back, I do like the concept of some of the levels.
In general, the game was pushed out the door really early. Sony and Microsoft wanted it out in time for the holiday season, and Sega wanted it out so it could coincide with the series's 15th anniversary. Maybe if the team got a few more months in development, we would have had a much better game.
Well it's not the most wasted potential but it's a wasted effort that I have recently encountered. I've been bringing it up often lately but yet again it's kinda relevant; Xenoblade Chronicles.
Specificaly the Heart-to-Hearts. They were a pretty good idea that was very poorly executed. Optional extra scenes between 2 party members that develop their relationship through conversation and the prompts to engage them can be found all over the map. These conversations could be about the main plot or anything else which is why I liked them - they fleshed out the characters much more. A good idea in theory was to have affinity requirements needed to activate them - this meant you already had to have 2 characters be very close before they could have certain more intimate discussions than "low-level" ones.
What this meant in practice was that you could NOT activate about 90% of the HtH's when you first encounter them! Consequently if you wanted to see these developments, you had to backtrack to do it once affinity had risen! It completely destroyed the illusion of the characters bonding throughout the journey and replaced it with the idea of them needlessly returning to previous locations just to chat.
Tales of Graces managed to do this perfectly well with the skits that had the same idea but had no "requirements" to see them.
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