Gaming

Just wanted to say I also hated persona 5 tacticia. I really wanted it to be good.

FFXVI for me. It wasn't terrible, but it was just pretty mediocre and I feel like mediocrity is unacceptable for the most popular jrpg series in the world.

Yea starfield sucked. It just never captured me

Payday 3, forspoken, red fall, fire emblem

Tactica bored the hell out of me too.

Wow Gollum was so bad that it doesn't even live in people heads

I'll cheat and list one from December of 2022:

Dragon Quest Treasures

Major disappointment. Repetitive, unfun, just not the game I was hoping for.

Gotta be starfield right? Redfall was a massive L as well

Starfield for sure.

To be fair, when I saw how much Xbox had riding on it to be their “breakthrough” game this generation, I knew the hype would never match expectations.

I don’t normally quit games but I quit Starfield after less than 10 hours. It became chore based and boring.

Tears of the Kingdom. I don’t know whether that’s a hot take, a cold take or a room temperature take at this point, but it just didn’t do anything for me. Then again, I’m a Wind Waker/Link to the Past Zelda fan, not really a BotW Zelda fan, so I was going in with a bit of a handicap already. It’s not that I hate BotW, it just felt like the kind of game you need to really sink a lot of hours into, and I’m old enough to where that’s not always a luxury I can have. It took me two months to beat the Dead Space remake if that gives you any idea. So when TotK came out and it was more of the same, just with extra crafting and some new mechanics and areas, I ended up dropping it partway through. I don’t have the time, creativity or effort to dedicate to this game, which was ultimately disappointing considering I can only buy 5-6 games a year.

For me it was Starfield. The game just seems so far behind the times of what everyone else is doing these days. And all those loading screens really bugged

Starfield has less personality than a Tinder fuckboy.

"My favorite show is The Expanse and I like long walks on the moon."

Star field.

Everyone who didn’t answer Diablo 4, didn’t play it.

Gollum. Enough said.

Starfield definitely. Redfall is for sure a way worse game but I wasn't hyped up for it like a new Bethesda rpg. They had a blank slate to make anything they wanted to and they made bland boring human goes to bland space where nothing interesting, mysterious or fun ever happens.

It Actually made me lose all hope for ES 6 and that's my favourite series ever. Unless they get a totally new engine and overhaul many things it's going to make me sad.

Starfield

Starfield. I couldn’t believe how bland it is.

Engage's story was just too flat. Loved the actual gameplay though!

It's about to be the day before...I can foreshadow right?

Destiny 2.

FFXVI

It's gotta be that golem game, right?

Starfield

I don’t think any have disappointed me but tbh the only game I can remember even playing this year is BG3. The times before BG3 seem so long ago and blurry.

Oh I got NHL24 for like $20 for Black Friday and quit playing after a few hours because it was too buggy. So I guess that would be my biggest disappointment but it’s not like I expected much from it to begin with.

Starfield, no question. If it was made by a smaller dev everyone would have cut it a lot more slack, but being from Bethesda made it so, so much worse.

Starfail! Full stop...

Unfortunately starfield for me. I still played it for 15+ days of play time. I'd be lying if I didn't say I enjoyed my time. However due to so many bugs and shallow mechanics I haven't played it in almost a month if not more.

I enjoyed ship building and basically everything else that I did was secondary, just to afford it. Ship combat felt shallow and so building was really my only focus. The exploration, crafting, outpost building and in some ways even ship building all felt half cooked. Crafting and outpost building are the worst offenders and are easily compared to fallout 4, both have essentially the exact same system, but fallout 4 has so many more options in both regards(why do melee weapons have no mods or upgrades in starfield?). Weapons and armor in starfield are also severely limited in number compared to other bsg titles and even the uniques are just reskins of anything else that's available.

I did somewhat enjoy exploring planets and the random points of interest initially, but seeing the same military outpost 5 times on the same planet was annoying. Or having to go through the same exact cryolab 10+ times for story related missions felt like a chore along with the temples. While there were a variety of different poi, a military outpost, research station or civilian outpost on one planet, was mostly of not exactly the same on multiple other planets.

I really wanted starfield to be the next bsg title I could sink countless hours into, but it feels lacking in so many areas its difficult to want to keep going back to it over other more engaging games. I know mods for the game will help make it better over time, but Bethesda needs to stop leaving it up to the community to make their games better. Skyrim and Fallout 4 both hold up to this day without mods, but starfield doesn't feel the same way at all only two months after its release.

Madden 24 on pc is unplayable so I’ll go with that

Baldo

Cities skylines 2.

Game truly needed another 2 or 3 years in development.

Apart from the starfield cliche , company of heroes. It just felt like the previous CoH with no improvements.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

i have a full AMD system, havent encountered any "game breaking" bugs in my 170 hours of casual game-play.

I like how this popped up over an ad for Tactica 🤣🤣

Ff16

Final Fantasy 16.

Loved the Demo for the most part but the actual game was made up of the small bits I didn't like about the demo.

While I still want FF games to be RPGs going forward I was open to the DMC style action. However the action was just passable, the rpg elements were shallow, and the story started off derivative of dark fantasy stories then became derivative of old JRPGs including past FF games. Fell asleep during cutscenes.

Somewhat reductive Story Spoilers: >!Your ultimate goal is to kill god like for the umpteenth time in a Jrpg to rebel from destiny/authoritah. Oh and the Eikons aren't important characters to the history of the world, but elemental flesh mechs like Titans in AoT. With the exception of Iffrit... sorta. !<

Overall the game was just boring.

Armored Core 6. It’s just not for me. The customization is way too intimidating and it bores me. Glad others like it though. This is personal.

Starfield for me

I was disappointed in the latest NBA2k, more of the same pay to play!

Payday 3

Payday 3 easily. What the fuck happened there.

My biggest disappointment gaming wise this year was buying an Xbox.

Like, I’m not a major fanboy for PlayStation but god damn Microsoft is failing to deliver. All of the exclusives I’ve tried have ranged from average (Starfield) to mediocre (Redfall), I’m honestly considering just selling it for credit to put towards the new Like a Dragon and FF7: Rebirth on PS5.

To anyone considering a first current gen console. Do NOT buy an Xbox, it delivers nothing worthwhile and despite them claiming the console is more powerful than the PS5 it can’t achieve a stable framerate in any of the games I’ve played on it, games routinely look ugly and chug along.

I’ve played the same games on PS5 and they’re consistently at 60fps and it’s night and day.

Even GamePass isn’t that impressive honestly, there’s barely any decent games on there

Starfield.

I love the space/NASA aesthetic. They got that down. Lots of good in this game. But it was a dissapointment in its poor exploration choices. If this game released in 2015, some of the criticism could be forgiven. But this is 2023 and with the history of Skyrim and Fallout 4 under their belt, this shouldve been so much more.

I haven't posted my steam review yet, but I'm thinking a tentative 7/10.

Zelda TOTK. Bored real quick with it

Mortal kombat 1. I loved mkx and this game looked like it was going to go back to the fast pace action. It kind of did but it feels clunky, I'm not too crazy about the kameos, and overall, the game is just lacking.

Diablo 4.

When Diablo 2 came out, I couldn't wait to get on every day. Cow levels, MF farming, SOJs, etc.

With Diablo 3, I leveled up every class but didn't really participate in the season events.

With Diablo 4.... I picked sorcerer first. I stayed away from the forums as long as I could, but around level 30 I just had to see what other people were feeling. I had no idea sorcerer would be so under powered and easy to kill. I beat the game with him, and I tried to get into the game again with necromancer but I just couldn't stomach the grind.

Amazing voice artists, the story gets really good after act 3 and the gameplay is cool too, but I just can't muster the willpower to log in again. What a Waste of $90.

AEW Figh Forever

My vote is Redfall I’ve never disliked a game experience that bad on a production that wasn’t a tiny one man dev team. I’ve even heard they’ve improved it but I can’t bring myself to give it a second go.

starfield does my favorite game of the year by far. My answer is by far Forespoken... it's not even close.

This is more of a personal one but weirdly enough I gotta go with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Fantastic game objectively, it's like BotW but just with way more content, but even right when it came out, for some reason I just couldn't shake that feeling in the back of my mind that I was just a bit disappointed.

It's totally my fault for following the game's development and the Zelda theory community for so many years after BotW, expecting a really good story structure and so much more with the sky additions, but I couldn't help but feel let down by how little there was to do in the sky and just how absolutely empty the Depths felt. I don't think anything will ever compare to the excitement of my first BotW playthrough, everything was so new and exciting and ready to be explored (hell I'm STILL learning new stuff about that game), but TotK is the first Zelda game I've ever played that I just put down after like a month and never finished.

The Depths were SO cool the first time you find a way down, that music cue that plays is honestly perfect and just so chilling and haunting and it made me so excited. But man, once you see one area, you've seen em all, and that applies to the sky islands too. I also wish it felt more connected to BotW; some pretty important characters just straight up act like they've never met Link and it makes no sense with how heavily this was marketed as a direct sequel. It almost feels to me like this is just a remixed version of BotW as opposed to a direct sequel, because it kinda just acts like BotW doesn't really matter. I can appreciate making a game as accessible as possible to people who didn't play the first one, but cmon man, there's stuff in TotK that doesn't make a ton of sense unless you played BotW, so I don't see why so many NPCs act like the first game didn't happen. It was one of the biggest Nintendo games like, ever, why go only 10% of the way in connecting the games? Just felt weird to me.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily "glorified DLC" like everyone was worried about, but honestly they weren't insanely far off in my opinion. I just felt like most of the new powers were underutilized and the game was almost TOO easy to break, and didn't encourage much creativity with Ultrahand. Once you find a cheap and simple vehicle that works, you kinda just stick with it because it'll disappear as soon as you get distracted by another task. And the memory system worked super well in BotW because we already knew the ending to that story, it was about finding the puzzle pieces, but TotK's memories are very clearly written in an intentionally linear way, and for me, it just doesn't fit with the "discover-in-any-order" method of seeing the memories. I just wish the player got to experience and be a part of the story rather than see it all in a disjointed order taking place in the past (and it's also super easy to spoil the story if you happen to find the wrong memory before seeing the rest).

To say something positive, the physics system is INSANE and I can't believe they got it working as smoothly as they did. And the game runs great, it's so massive and yet honestly it struggled less than BotW did sometimes on my WiiU and original-model Switch! It looks beautiful and the music is great. I just didn't feel that same excitement I get from every other Zelda game.

So yeah for me, TotK was probably the most disappointing of the year despite the fact that I do still think it's a pretty great game overall, and absolutely a huge feat in Nintendo's catalog. Just not what I hoped for from a Zelda game, especially after how game-changing (pun not intended) BotW was, and I know a lot of fans (especially us who are really into the story and lore) feel the same.