What was the worst game that you pre-ordered?

[garjian]

That depends what you mean by pre-order.
Not that long ago, you could walk into a store and just pre-order every upcoming game in their book... no deposit or anything. In those days, I'd pre-order everything because why the fuck not? I'd just not buy it if I didn't want it.

If you mean on the internet, well I think I pre-ordered Fable 3, so that...
If you mean in-store deposits... ...I think I've only done that once and that was Soulcalibur V, and I still play that now so...

 

[Aethren]

I'm not dumb enough for the preorder trick.

Although, I have regretted numerous early access purchases, like Towns, Which was never completed and Kinetic Void, which wasn't a game when I bought it. There was also that StarForge thing, again, not a game at the time of purchase. Dunno what any of them are now, but I suspect either of those won't be a game for another 3 years.

Except for Towns. That shit's dead.

StarForge was released back in September dude.

 

[Mezahmay]

Oh dear. The last game I recall preordering and disliking was Call of Duty: World At War on the 360. Disliked vehicle combat in the multiplayer, couldn't for the life of me beat veteran difficulty when the enemy soldiers have x-ray vision, superhuman reflexes, and the magic ability to spawn grenades up your ass every 8 seconds.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Dungeon Lords by a developer called Dreamcatcher. It promised to be everything I could ever want in a RPG. What I got when it finally arrived was a broken mess of a game that didn't even have a third the features it promised. Some stuff was patched in later, but it was still an utterly broken piece of shit. Also the progression was broken too. At one point you're told you have to gather this set of mcguffins, the first of which you get in the dungeon under the first town. Then you find out that this Lord guy's daughter has been kidnapped and she has one of the mcguffins and you should rescue her before getting any of the others. However what I discovered from looking on the Internet is that you can't rescue her until after gathering most of the other mcguffins. So yeah it was after that game I resolved to never ever pre-order another game ever.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've never pre-ordered a game in my life. It's served me well.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Crysis II was my biggest regret. Preordering what I thought would be a better looking, more expansive Crysis, instead I got a console sci-fi shooter and CoD rip off. It was an awful game with none of the joys from the first game to be found. It was later removed from Steam as EA prepared to forgo selling their games on the biggest DDP bar none.

I actually have a screenshot that summarises the entire game in a nutshell. Where Crysis was challenging, required trial, error, skill, planning and supported many play styles, weapon preferences and so on, this image shows the level of game Crysis II was:

Spoiler

 

[Quellist]

Mine was RE5. Hell I even bought the guide book because I thought I was going to be scared out of my mind... it was a poor life choice.

Oddly enough i found 5 the most fun of the whole series, but then my best friend and i bought copies together and played the whole thing online co-op so we didnt have any of the companion issues.

Res 6 is the worst pre-order i ever made and pretty much killed the franchise for me

Honorable mention to Brink...the so called 'seamless single/multiplayer' experience that was anything but

 

[Grendich]

Dark Souls 2 and Guild Wars 2 have been the only games i preordered so far.

And while i rage a lot about guild wars 2 and its lazy developers and have initially been disappointed by dark souls 2 (cause i expected a game better than dark souls 1), i dont regret preordering them

 

[The Raw Shark]

GTA V.

Bought it, waited for it to release, played and did the usual "oh cool, apex of this gen" stuff, and then.........well now fucking what?

After the main story, nothing else was interesting. And even after finishing the extra stranger sidequests there was still nothing. Just a bunch of boring minigames and possible kicks out of jumping around and pressing O at everything in sight so that Michael would tumble at everything.

I even tried dressing Michael up as Agent Smith, Trevor as Max Payne in the Hawaiian shirt and Franklin as Samuel L. Jackson.

Still bored out of my mind, nothing else was worth the 60$

GTA Online was the most boring thing that I had ever played in my entire life, not enough missions with a story. Just meeting random people and doing boring jobs.

Thankfully Saints Row IV was worth the 60$ to me, plenty of content that was actually fun to play even after the main story missions and 100% with the DLCs being added bonuses of hilariously fun, not to mention just free-roaming was fun in general.

 

[Arina Love]

Mass Effect 3, it was awful all around. ME2 did raise warning flags but i couldn't even imagine level of f*ckup Bioware managed with ME3.

 

[Vigormortis]

Borderlands 2

I've yet to even finish it. I lost interest in the game, the writing, the characters, and the series when, while on some 'required' side-quest, I was being instructed to kill random animals while some robo-armed jackass (of whom had me killing the animals so he could think of names for them) called one a "boner fart".

Soon after, I pressed escape, closed the game, and haven't been back since.

And I quite liked the first game. But there's only so much pointless faffing about and overly juvenile humor that I can take from a game before I feel the urge to tell it, and the dev behind it, to fuck off.

 

[AnthrSolidSnake]

A tie between Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, and Watch Dogs.

Actually, I never preordered Far Cry 3, but I did buy it launch day, so I guess that sort of counts.

The thing was, none of them were bad games, they just had shitty optimization. Every single one of them had stuttering issues and horrible texture issues that I had to wait over a month for them to be patched.

Far Cry 3 did eventually become fully playable for me, AFTER an expensive system upgrade, and AFTER several patches spread out over a month and a half.

Watch Dogs also became playable, but only with settings like Object detail and shadow resolution being turned down, along with several patches.

And I'm still waiting on Far Cry 4. Stutters almost worse than Far Cry 3 did in most cases. I mean, yes, these games are rather pretty, but 16GB of RAM, an overclocked AMD 8350, and a factory overclocked 780ti shouldn't be lagging.

*sigh*...I guess I'll just have to learn my lesson and not preorder or even buy anything Ubisoft is remotely behind. Though The Crew is surprisingly polished so far. No stuttering, decent visuals, and great optimization on my end. Too bad it's a mediocre racing game at best so far.

 

[Kevlar Eater]

XCOM Declassified. For starters, I hated every character that had a line of dialogue, the story was pure bullshit, the skills had needlessly long cooldowns and were more geared for long fights, and the game looked ugly altogether. It was one short, unenjoyable mess. The only upside to that game was that it came with the old X-COM titles, none of which I've even installed.

 

[KenAri]

Oooh, man. Oh man. Let's see.

Star Wars: The Old Republic; Bioware's skidmark of an MMO.

Call of Duty: Ghosts; I never expected them to cock up a formula that never changes, but they managed. Oh boy they managed.

Dragon Age: Inquisition; I must confess I haven't gotten very far. That's because I literally fell asleep while playing it, turned it off and then forgot I even owned it. Man I've never seen a game with such boring combat. Farming on Heaven Island in FF8 was more fun than this.

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword; again with the cocked-up formula. This game would've been okay if not for that support character. Christ I'd take a thousand Navis all at once over that heartrate monitor thing.

Guild Wars 2; that game wasn't much of a game. Got it to play with a now-ex girlfriend, but then we broke up and I left to explore the content of this game alone. Spoiler: There isn't much. You get all your skills by level 3 and then you've basically completed the game. Slide your fingers up and down the keyboard for I don't even remember how many levels, because all the enemies are the same and there is zero character progression.

And not sure if it qualifies, but my PS4 as a whole. Was excited to start smashing some CoD: Ghosts with nice new controls, textures and what-not. Awful game made for a paperweight console. Can't believe it's been a year already. I've got maybe 100 hours out of it total. It can't even play videos from a usb stick for christ sake. The PS3 is literally still a better console in every regard.

Sorry for giving more than one. I'm apparently a very optimistic guy, because I still preorder stuff despite it very often coming back a disappointment.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Mine was RE5. Hell I even bought the guide book because I thought I was going to be scared out of my mind... it was a poor life choice.

Oddly enough i found 5 the most fun of the whole series, but then my best friend and i bought copies together and played the whole thing online co-op so we didnt have any of the companion issues.

Res 6 is the worst pre-order i ever made and pretty much killed the franchise for me

Honorable mention to Brink...the so called 'seamless single/multiplayer' experience that was anything but

You can answer something for me then! I tried RE6 coop with a friend yesterday, and it was a miserable, boring experience. Opening with unskippable cutscenes and 20 minutes of gameplay which consisted almost entirely of following on-screen prompts to push a button or waggle a thumbstick, it was almost an hour before we were able to actually both be playing coop. And when we did, it still meant being forced to walk and unable to shoot until the game let you. And then it was a confusing, dark and dreary run through a college campus with an FoV that let us see about 10 feet in front of us and no more.

What I'm asking is...does the game ever actually get good, or is this first 2 hour experience indicative of what's to follow? Seeing Leon back makes me think I could give it a go, but the first 2 hours was so tortuously bad I'm not sure if it's a worthwhile venture.

For the other, I think RE4 is my favourite. It did so much right and defined a genre. RE5 was very good too, but did have some frustrations. Playing it in coop tho fixes much of it and is a very enjoyable, well paced experience.

 

[Vrach]

Battlefield 4. Yeah, I know, I'm an idiot >.<

But I'm a long time fan and managed to enjoy BF3 even with the bugs. BF4 though was on a massively different level of "unplayably buggy piece of shit"

 

[Pyrian]

I've only pre-ordered one game, but it came with another one. Bioshock:Infinite came with X-Com:Enemy Unknown if you got the Steam pre-order. I took that deal and never finished either game out of boredom, lol.

 

[Colin Bagley]

Destiny.
Just NOT a good game.

An MMO-FPS Hybrid which takes the worst parts of both of them, and smushes them together into a ball of watered down piss, that's also somehow not large enough.


________________________________________________________
Edit-

No, I made a mistake.
Hitman: Absolution.

At least Destiny was technically an MMO-FPS Hybrid. So at least it was partially honest.
Hitman: Absolution wasn't even a Hitman game, by my books.

Should have been- Large open maps, multiple paths and options for assassination, disguises (That work) and Black/ Gallows humor.
What it was- Linear maps that might as well be corridors, mandatory action sequences, hardly any options, and unnecessary marketing controversy.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I've never pre-ordered a game. Why take the risk on something sucking for what usually amounts to character skins or an extra weapon? Seems pointless to me.