Worst waste of story telling potential that annoyed you.

[Bigggg BRIM77]

Wow, I'm surprised that we made it to page two and no one mentioned Diablo 3.

"Hey there, Deckard Cain. I see you've been an extremely important part of the entire franchise lore, would be a shame if you got killed off at the start of the second act by one of the lamest bosses in Diablo history."

 

[Sabitsuki]

Guild Wars 2's main campaign.

A game that started off doing a lot to make the player character feel like an actual character and part of the story. Introduces you to various interesting heroes with their own motivations and grievances. With a whole slew of interesting groups of creatures and organizations ranging from Ice Giants, Fire worshipping cultists, technological masterminds, centaurs, lamias, shadowy assassin groups.

About half way through the game it looks at that and brushes it all aside. Instead giving you zombies. No complex or interesting motivations anymore. Just mindless hordes of dead people controlled by a dragon.

To top it off, all the interesting characters you are palled around with are replaced by Trahearne. A character who becomes important quite literally only because he is told so. Characters who are more proven and that have shown actual motivation and willingness to do anything to save the world are all fallen to the wayside for him. He is incredibly boring, he is extremely apathetic for far longer than is needed, unsure of himself in a way that comes off as incredibly asinine when you know dozens of people more fit to do his job than he is. To make things more infuriating, other NPCs cannot stop fawning over how amazing he is, as you yourself end up doing 90% of his work for him.

 

[Metalix Knightmare]

Call of Duty Ghosts. The Ghosts are drummed up as this uber badass guerrilla team. I was expecting to be using hit and run tactics, lots of stealth, misdirection, traps, y'know, all that stuff used in ACTUAL guerrilla warfare! But no. It's just Call of Duty with a dog, and the dog's not even there the whole time.

 

[Britishfan]

Mass Effect 3 and so much has been said about that I won't bother going over it again.

Heroes, which someone has already mentioned.

The Hunger Games. I've never read the books but I have seen the first movie. You've got an interesting world here with instead of exploring it and actually experiencing the growing discontent and looming revolution we piss about with some girl with a stupid name stuck in a forced love triangle.

 

[forgo911]

As much as I don't want to bring this damn thing up again... Mass Effect. The ending, namely. It could have been such a fantastic moment, so many variables coming together to form an amazingly complex, satisfying variety of endings. Nope. Press the button, then the thing happens. Three colors, people.

OK, something that hasn't been a major controversy on the internet and we're all sick of hearing about... Erm... Far Cry 3. It could've so easily turned into something after the spirit of Heart of Darkness: A regular person thrust into a harsh environment, slowly turning insane as the artificial bounds of civilization crumble and he has to become precisely what he originally set out to survive against... Instead, we got an, admittedly pretty good, "gotta go save my friends" type story. Sure, there were a couple arbitrary nods to the whole Heart of Darkness angle, but it really wasn't emphasized at all, and it all just felt token. I just think that what Spec Ops: The Line did could have been done even better, this being an open world scenario where, if you're fighting people, it's mostly your own choice, piling the guilt on you as a player rather than the game designers forcing you into combat and then putting the guilt on you.

Also, I guess Dragon Age 2. "Hey, we're going to introduce a new type of storytelling games haven't really done before: Instead of focusing on an overarching plot, you're going to experience the story of a place, the city of Kirkwall: the different political struggles, how society evolves over time and reacts to changes, and how changes in one sector of city life affect others. We're also going to have you play a character doing rather banal things for most of the time, and chain you down to their uninteresting little story involving them doing fuck all most of the time and occasionally stumbling into tidbits of the city's evolution".
To be fair, it's a bit hard to blame BioWare for it: If you're making an RPG (which they kind of but not really were, but that's beside the point), you need to follow a single character, since you need to keep your stats and loot and all that goodness. This doesn't really mesh well with having the emphasis of your game be the evolution of an entire city. Perhaps it would've been better as an honest-to-God hack'n'slash (which it was approaching anyway), and made you play as different people at different times.

As I pointed out earlier, Dragon Age 2 had a decent story, if you read into it a little. Dragon Age 2 is a story about the mage/templar conflict from the very beginning when you run into a templar on the way out Lothering, when he tries to stop you/your sister. After that, almost every "side" quest you do is about helping the mages or hindering them, depending on your choices. It all builds into the third act when you have to take a stance against the mages or templars and solve their conflict. It is a subtle story that is pretty good when you know what to look for.

 

[forgo911]

Mass Effect 3 and so much has been said about that I won't bother going over it again.

Heroes, which someone has already mentioned.

The Hunger Games. I've never read the books but I have seen the first movie. You've got an interesting world here with instead of exploring it and actually experiencing the growing discontent and looming revolution we piss about with some girl with a stupid name stuck in a forced love triangle.

Yep and everything thing becomes good when the third book shows up. Before it thou, it is an interesting idea that is wasted on teen drama.

 

[C117]

Tomb Raider, the reboot.

This game sets up an interesting premise (you are trapped on an island, do what you can to survive), gives you a few missions where you just kill wildlife and learn the basics, and it all shows Lara Croft as a very vulnerable person, not used to the harshness of the wild. Then the human enemies appear and you gun them all down without so much as batting an eye.

What.

At first your goal seems simple enough: get of the island. But that is complicated because of a storm in the area. A storm which is caused by a goddess. And even though that sounds like something a crazy person would say, the rest of the group just goes "okay" and goes with it when Lara tells them about it. Oh, and Whitman is apparently evil because... I honestly can't remember. But apparently he was evil enough so that when he died, Lara's words right after the fact can best be summed up as "Whitman you c*cks*cking son of a *****".

What?

And in the end when you confront the leader over all these other people on the island, these people who are desperate and just want to go home, the people that you by this point have been mowing down in the hundreds, rightfully calls you out on this, and states that he, like you, is just doing what he needs to in order to survive. Whereafter you cap his ass.

WHAT!?

 

[exobook]

For me - literally all Warhammer books. With a seting as potent as 40k or WFB writing of such a crappy stories is unforgivable. Especially offensive for me is the dominace of pro-Abnett clique. Abnett actually CAN write. But he doesn't want to. 3rd parts of both Eisenhorn and Ravenor are insane in a bad sense. Both inquisitors act like brainless imbeciles, by simply allowing events to happen instead of, hey, INVESTIGATING or something alike. Relations of Eisenhorn and Pontius are beyond sane.

The only 40k writer I can give a positive mark is Mitchell. For obvious reasons - his books are the closest to actually having the right to be called "literature".

I general I feel the problem with Warhammer is that a lot of the writers fall too much into writing a novelisation of an action war movie and as such focus on the action rather than creating an interesting story. Abnett dips into this sometimes but at least writing something entertaining. This perhaps runs into the problem of the franchise being overly focused on the war side of it setting, after all have warhammer ever focused on a detective/crime drama or a board room power struggle between traders?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I just saw Captain America 2 and I gotta say it... while it's nowhere near the WORST waste of potential, I hate that they never really explore Cap's disconnect with the XXIst century. They address it a couple of times, make jokes about it, and that's it. Suited The Avengers I guess since it wasn't his show but come on, this is HIS movie, and you can't be bothered to delve just a little deep into the issue? I think that should be the most interesting part of being Captain America in the present day.

In retrospect I suppose I had a similar issue with Thor. Get an alien character on Earth, throw a mug to the ground, make a couple of jokes about it, forget it for the rest of ever.

 

[in4ser]

Gungrave. The supernatural elements ruin the series.

 

[The World Famous]

I'm going with Kingdom Hearts. It could have been an amazing story about all the Disney and Square characters banding together to defeat the worst villains both sides have to offer - imagine Maleficent and Kefka teaming up to destroy the universe - but instead it became a bunch of Sephiroth clones with some Disney fanservice sprinkled in. What a waste.

 

[Yeager942]

Attack on Titan.

Great premise. Horrible, horrible writing.

 

[ckam]

Attack on Titan. I mean, I didn't really like it when I first saw it, but then ? I saw this:

Spoiler

 

[Rariow]

As I pointed out earlier, Dragon Age 2 had a decent story, if you read into it a little. Dragon Age 2 is a story about the mage/templar conflict from the very beginning when you run into a templar on the way out Lothering, when he tries to stop you/your sister. After that, almost every "side" quest you do is about helping the mages or hindering them, depending on your choices. It all builds into the third act when you have to take a stance against the mages or templars and solve their conflict. It is a subtle story that is pretty good when you know what to look for.

Thing is, it really doesn't. It's awkwardly divided into this three act structure where every act is its own disjointed, pointless thing. The only reason the Templar/Mage conflict comes across as most important is because that's the note the game ends on. It could just as easily have seemed to be all about the Qunari if they just switched act 2 and 3 around. As I said in my first post, I really like the way the city evolves: Both the conflict with the Qunari and the Mages is well set up and executed. The problem is that, in between those points, you're playing as Hawke doing something completely unrelated and being thrown through a set of contrivances into those conflicts, which just utterly kills the pace of the story and takes away from the interesting stuff that's happening: The interaction between the different groups in the city. They had a really cool idea for a non-character-centric narrative, but felt the need to shove a boring hero's journey storyline that we've all seen a million times before on top of it.

 

[Hochmeister]

Don't hate me, but Attack on Titan is probably the most recent example IMO. It started off really really good, but

Spoiler

started going downhill when Eren learned how to transform into a titan. Suddenly the hero went from an underdog to on the same level as the other titans. They handled his transformation ability really well at first, but then more and more human/titan's started showing up and derailed the plot from "humanity facing extinction" to "who's a titan" reminiscent of the new Battlestar Galactica. Combined with some excruciatingly drawn out chase sequences, an unmemorable cast of characters, and an ever increasing number of questions with no answers and I got frustrated with the manga and stopped reading.

On another note, A Song of Ice and Fire. George RR Martin really needs to learn that a longer story is not necessarily better.

 

[mistahzig1]

The Matrix trilogy

1st movie was great, but they painted themselves into a corner with the plot of the 2nd one... abnd we all know how that turned out

 

[P912]

God damn fucking useless waste of potential screwed like a ***** by dissonant gameplay mechanics Brink. It had an ambiguous and complex story that actually cleverly humanizes and criticizes both the sides of authority and rebellion, constructing the conflict to stem from frustrated leaders who don't know what else to do and misunderstandings and secrets that are the result of a sudden and dramatic apocalypse. Too bad all that got squashed into some audio logs and pre/post mission briefings that you could barely hear half the time and no singleplayer story focused missions meant there were no actual in-game moments we could appreciate the story. I get that they were trying to do a multiplayer only game a la TF2 but that gameplay was wasted on that story.

 

[spartan231490]

Well, mine's not going to be popular, but I think Song of Ice and Fire. Such a cool fantasy setting, divided lands, world on the break of the undead menace and a brutal winter, let's talk about politics. Better yet, let's make it more boring still by having everyone die in the most brutal(and therefore quickly predictable) way. Also, that cool coming menace thing, let's ignore that. Sure, we'll go back to it a couple times a book, but nothing will actually ever happen, it's just there to convince you this is something other than a bland, depressing political drama.

 

[furai47]

Disclaimer: I haven't played the game yet, so it might pull a fast one on me. I doubt it though.

Watch Dogs. At the beginning it looked promising and I'm wondering how much of an effect the waiting and delays have caused, but I cannot stand how the story developed. Just look at it from the announcement onwards: you have this centralised city computer system that watches and controls everyone's daily lives, whether they know it or not. But hey, what's this, a bloke in a trenchcoat and a baseball cap has a phone that can do that too? So he has the supercomputer on his phone is what you're saying. Cool, the guy must be good with computers. And indeed, he is confirmed to be a skilled hacker not long after that.

Interested.

But it's not over yet, oh no. Turns out this guy is pretty brutal and not very white on the moral scale. And sure enough, shortly after that, it's confirmed by the developers that there are going to be many grey areas when it comes to decisions. This Aiden guy has some potential, there's so many ways in which he could develop.

Cor blimey, I love this stuff.

I just hope a person dear to his heart with which we have no connection doesn't die in the first couple of minutes...
Oh, some guy killed his daughter/sister/someone in his family. And the villain is an old guy with one white eye that hosts secret meetings where he stands above ground on a platform looking at a huge screen (Of course!) with naked women below and men in suits. Where is this guy's cape and bespoke villain hat?
And those hacking skills? Turns out Pierce isn't that good at all, it's just that some exaggerated Ramona Flowers reject (seriously western developers, why?) gave him a phone so he can tap buttons. The other male character (not the suave Wei Shen lookin' ************) only needs to become a comic relief character (he's close, just give the man motherboards) at this point, might as well go the distance.

Dropped, 0/10. Ubisoft, get your shit together. I'll hook you in the gabber if you don't.

 

[ThreeName]

I think there was a lot about the legion was was originally intended but never implemented...from Van Buren as well

Ooh, can anyone say "Fallout: New Vegas Restoration Project"? :3