Shit Games / Wasted Potential Thread

Why was this game so disappointingly bad?

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It tried to be Derek Padula the game.

There's also the Wii U and the 3DS in terms of consoles being wasted potential. I wish I stopped being optimistic for devs not shitting the bed

I wanted to like this, but it suffers from a lot of issues, namely that it's extremely clear the devs (or original Korean publisher?) intended to have a direct sequel follow it up. If it had wrapped itself up fine, then I wouldn't mind, but it doesn't. The final act leaves so many unanswered questions and ends on a sour note that it poisons the whole experience with the game in my opinion. Also, this game was a sequel in its own right to a really badly translated game (Astonishia Story), and apparently a few of the answers to "what the fuck is going on" in the finale of CGS actually have roots in its predecessor. But at least those have an answer. Not everything is that lucky.

Atlus seemed to do a good job with the script, and the English voicing wasn't bad, but in the end I'm just not sure why they opted to pick this up anyhow, and I honestly kind of want the hours I put into it back. It's not bad, just that after three reasonably good acts it flies straight into disappointment and frodo moments, and is wasted potential by way of "surely it'll be a hit enough that we can wrap it up with a direct sequel."

I think its time for a Spore 2.

We have the tech for it.

If No Man's Buy can have 60 gorillion planets we can have a creature creator that doesn't look like retarded claymation

Because it was made into a children's game.

Tried to be too much of everything. They never had a clear idea of how anything other than cell, creature and space stage would work and the lack of a clear hard vision allowed faggots on the team to chip away at it until it was reduced to what we got.

the one way i could still tolerate a zombie game in this day and age and they managed to make a complete bollocks out of it

Feels good being right.

You think that game was bad?
Nothing will ever top the dissapointment called ArcheAge.

silent hill HD collection

You know Homefront the Revolution is shit but I honestly don't know what I would change to make it genuinely better
I mean I can think of a few things that would make it slightly less shit but not enough to really qualify as better.
Not having the full TS2 game was pure wasted potential though

I guess if it didn't have a terrible development cycle it might help, I'm just trying to think though on how it can be improved. I guess it'd be better if it were more linear like Metro and taking inspiration from mechanics there like the cracking gasmask or something like bullets or food as currency considering most of the people in that world are near homeless. Maybe sidequests that give it character instead of the diarylogs?
Forget not having the full TS2 game, not releasing a Timesplitters HD collection either this or last gen is pure wasted potential

The game itself was not THAT bad but whatever enjoyment you could have was clouded by all the stuff that was supposed to be there but didn't make the cut. It was probably way ahead of it's time, at least in paper. Maxis selling out was a mistake.

Probably, but you would have to expect someone other than The Sims Studios doing it.

hmm, i wonder…

I just wanted it to be creature stage forever

I LIKE SHANTAES BOOBIES

Spore is a decent game for younger kids.

Also featuring:

It promised a lot of freedom but delivered hamfisted linearity.

Everyone was picturing themselves evolving their species over time but instead, you fill up a fucking meter until you can just jump to another stage. The first place I would point to for a problem is the time each stage takes:
5 to 10 minutes, maybe 15 if you want to collect all upgrades but after you get the achievement the first time there's no point once you have what you want
Pretty much the same, maybe a bit longer but I wouldn't estimate any longer than 20 minutes
depends how you play it. War takes the longest in my experience at up to 30 minutes, but if you do diplomacy you can knock it out in like 5.
like tribe basically. religion is the fastest i think with like 10 minutes tops and war will take no longer than 30.
so after like 2 hours of everything else, the rest of the game is spent in space. You have the most freedom here to do basically whatever you want and can easily spend a week or so on it before you decide to reach the galactic center and realize it's not even remotely as hard as you were anticipating.
I haven't played in years but i think this is pretty accurate Spore is basically a space exploration game marketed as an evolution game.

How I would want to fix it is to scrap the stages. Make it so there's no really clear dividing line between the cell stage and the creature stage etc. basically turn the flow into this:
With no cuts in between. You don't "win" any part of it. every stage is just a natural result of the traits you acquired.

Though this would quite obviously be a much larger project than Spore was.

TL;DR:
Spore is basically a space exploration game. The part of the game everyone wanted to play essentially turned out to be a 2 hour character creation system with the caveat that you earn the stuff you give your player.

Let me spin you a yarn about Dark Souls 2.

Those who played Dark Souls 1 will remember that almost every weapon had a unique moveset. Weapons within a class near-universally shared the same r1 attacks, but almost each one had their own special r2 attack. This was due to the data format used in 1, and subsequently used in 3. A weapon had a base moveset byte, such as straightsword or spear, and a strong attack byte.

2 did not do this. Each individual attack that a weapon had was a 4-byte value. This is how they created movesets like Santier's Spear's, or the Bewitched Alonne Sword's, and had things that were both spell tools and something else. This system allows for insane variety for movesets. Weapons were not limited to sharing all their r1-based attacks, you could have two weapons within the same class that had the same r1 but a different followup r1. There was absolutely no reason any weapon should have ever shared a moveset. A small amount of extra effort would have made sure every weapon was unique, and unique in ways no other souls game could attempt to do.

But this isn't even the end of what 2 missed out on with movesets. There is a mostly unused system in the game related to dual wielding. Not to powerstancing, but simply having one weapon in each hand. Using a lefthanded weak attack and then a righthanded weak attack actually calls on a different attack ID value than just using a righthanded weak attack. There is a 99% unused system based around dual wielding that would allow you to access unusual attacks by comboing them out of weapon's attack in the other hand. Lefthand weak attack into right hand strong attack, righthand weak attack into left hand weak attack, etc. There are also unused move values for strong attack shield pokes, and a few others I still haven't identified.

But that's still not even all they missed out on with movesets. There's tons of unused but totally functional attacks, such as the halberd moveset from Dark Souls 1, or THE BLACK KNIGHT SPECIAL STRONG ATTACKS. Yes, that's right, you could have been launching people into the air with the original BKGS moveset in Dark Souls 2, The attack exists, has complete hit data, and is actually about 50% faster than it was in Dark Souls 1, making it way more effective. For whatever insane fucking reason, they chose to cut the memorable and unique movesets from the game and to make the Black Knight weapons share generic movesets with other weapons.

They still have spell aiming in the game, as well. It's just not used.

But there's something even more tragic that they cut.

Spells have entire movesets.

It works similarly to farron flashsword in 3: You get different effects from the spell if it's done from a roll, or while running, or if you follow it up with itself. However, in 2, spells also had r2 attacks, and another set of data for casting the spells twohanded. The data for all 'moves' within a spells moveset is identical, so while you are technically performing a running version of soul arrow if you cast it while running, it references the same data as the standing and rolling versions, so you can't tell anything different is going on.

This is, perhaps, why Straid's twohanded version of Soul Greatsword is an overhead cut. It would have been entirely possible for the player to do that as well, or to even have an entire Soul Greatsword moveset with things like a two-handed running cast knocking people into the air, or the two handed strong cast being a powerful thrust that consumes more stamina but hits harder.

With some CE editing, you can essentially port Farron Flashsword from 3 to 2 without having to add anything.

oh and i guess there's also some unused spellcasting animations but who cares about that

BUT

The most fun I had on this game was griefing public "regions" by bottlenecking traffic at the entrance to my city, causing traffic to back up into theirs, clogging their imports. Fortunately CO stepped in and fixed most of it.

They attempted to make 5 games at once. Just as expected, they all ended up shallow and disappointing.

Ultimately, the failure of Spore could have been that it wasn't Jewish enough. A modern game attempting that would have been split into 5 games, DLC, a season pass, etc. and it would have given them time to make each chunk of the game compelling.

Needed an aquatic level.

It was pretty okay if you knew absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, about it beforehand

It got to the civ part and I checked out hard, I think I was over-saturated with them at the time and cramming it into Spore made me drop it.

EA cut out a ton of content because of retards

Agent-based systems were a mistake.

From a mechanics standpoint:
-Guns being a rarity and a powerful asset for you and rebels.
-Getting guns actually means something significant. Losing them, just as much.
-Punishments and lockdown states from disorderly conduct and rebellions. Say, on losing turf some public executions occur, which shits on morale.
-Actually decent hiding mechanics, as well as being stowed away/hidden by regular citizens so long as morale (willingness to rebel) is high enough.
-Awful punishments for people who hide you if you are found while hiding there. This also takes a dump on morale.
-Better parkour mechanics to assist with the running and hiding.
-That being said, enemies that commit to systematic grid searches for you without giving up after a timer. Level of response is of course dictated by the level of your offense, as well as the Known Rebellious Attitude (KRA) of the area.
-Known Rebellious Attitude is based off of current area morale, compared with recent failures on your or on rebels' part in the current area.

Just a couple mechanics that would actually keep you on your toes at all times, forcing you to be careful in order to keep territory, let alone taking more. Morale has to be managed through success in order to allow more options. Only when morale is very high can you get the people together and actually try to take turf.

Its pretty fun now, that big flaws have been fixed
But get cities of tomorrow, that one is a must.

...

I'll raise you 1.

I prefer to pretend that game never existed, the ending pissed me off even with the context.

Things could have been different.

obvious pic.

But the remaster by Beamdog is not even out yet :^)

The biggest problem with Spore was EA. They took a concept requiring intelligence, and tried to adapt it for casualfags.

I also didn't like the linearity of it all.

For a game that built around creativity, your options are limited. You can't become spacefairing sea creatures or anything like that.
You can't have environmental preferences.
You can't even create your own planet.

Despite all of this, I actually like Spore.
While the game was flawed in many ways, at least it was original, unlike the garbage produced nowadays.

the original game is terrible too

Spore turning out how it did had nothing to do with EA, there's like 3 different artbooks and a ton of interviews with fromer devs that all point to internal disagreement at maxis being the culprit.

designer-notes.com/?p=654

Here's a 13 page blog post from a maxis employee with like 10 other maxis employees in the comments all talking about what they felt went wrong. Not a single one of them mentions executive meddling, but rather they point to biting off more then they can chew and the aformentioned disagreement over if it should be science themed or stylized and if it should be more of a toy toolbox or a proper game.

The thing I hated most about Spore was it just BOTHERED you so fucking much. You were constantly being railroaded around to accomplish varying goals AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE, or else you'd get pretty handily fucked.

I had a lot of enjoyment in the Creature stage. Just wandering around the world, looking up into the sky, checking out the wacky terrain and foliage and other creatures. You could do everything at your own pace; there was no rush and no significant AI breathing down your neck. Nobody would ever show up at your nest and murder everyone while you were gone. It was a really damn nice example of how a proper Sandbox game should be made. Just fuck around for hours and hours occasionally altering your creature whenever you want.

But in every other stage, you can't do that anymore. There is no time to relax and play in the sandbox. You have to GO! GO! GO! or you'll lose.

In the tribal stage you have to gather food relatively quickly and build up your numbers and get weapon upgrades or you'll get steamrolled the first time another tribe decides to come over and smack you. Every upgrade precipitates a new conquest or allying quest, and there's a definite pace to the stage that you have to stick to, so it's more or less a non-stop rush to the finish.

In the civilization stage, you have to immediately do a motherfucking Zerg Rush on all nearby spice geysers. God help you if your first city is landlocked and you can get any ocean geysers. If you don't claim enough quickly, you'll get fucked over by all the other civs and never be able to make enough money to do anything, so unlike every other stage, it's VERY possible to get stuck in an absolute No-Win Scenario early on, and lose the entire game if you don't have an earlier save to revert to. After that, it's pretty much a non-stop rush to the end.

In the space stage, it's almost exactly like the beginning of Civ. with having to rush out and grab as many decent T3 planets as you can, because the AIs are all cheating fuckers and expand so goddamn fast there will be no unclaimed systems left within thousands of light years if you aren't on your toes. While this doesn't result in an automatic unwinnable condition (because your home planet produces spice), it turns the early game from a painful lengthy slog into an unbearable hours-long slog. By the time you get to the midgame, and you have some ability to terraform planets and get lots more spice, you're constantly being inundated with meaningless "quests" and issues with pirates and shit that distract you from any attempts at sandboxing. When you get to the endgame and you're got tons of power to bend the galaxy to your will, that's when the Grox show up and start kicking your shit in, and there's no way to avoid this; you can ally with them to prevent them from being annoying, but then literally everyone else starts being annoying. There is NO TIME IN THE ENTIRE STAGE where you can just be left the fuck alone to do things at your own pace, just casually going around having fun. There is NO FUN. You have to rush and rush and fight and fight nonstop.

The entire game past the creature stage is essentially just one big annoyance. I never spent much time being creative in later stages (making buildings, vehicles, etc.) because all my energy was being sapped by being sucked into the pace of the game. They made a sandbox game, and then threw in a shitload of losing conditions because "muh difficulty" is the only thing kiddies think define how good a game is.

Because 99% of the game is in the Fly around in ship mode and ultimately that's very fucking boring. Shit the B team that made the DS game knew that and had you play the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME as the creatures, and after realizing how badly they fucked up released a half assed content update to let you "play more stages" as a creature, when in reality the adventure stages aren't anywhere near as interesting as the original creature stage was.
Don't believe me?
Go back and play it and you'll find the creature stage is really fucking short (Not the shortest mind you, that still belongs to the tribal and civilization stages) but it's arguably the most enjoyable part in the game with the most work in it.

And what a rich and varied gameplay that was.
Run around collecting random shit, play simon says or spam attack.

Look, when everything else is worse than that you have a serious problem.

I'm not denying that.

The gameplay was not important. Spore was supposed to be a sandbox toy, not a "game". It was trying to transform it into a game that was the genesis of all its problems, because there were already better games for every single stage.

Few suggestions

Except it was. Definitely in the creature stage. You can only paste extra crap on your creature for so long until you get bored of it. And that's all there was.
If they added some actual complexity to the combat and interactions with the enviroment, and the dynamics of the way your creature worked compared to how you pasted extra crap on it, now that would make it golden.

I do agree with you about the game bothering you too much in later stages. I wish you were allowed to take a more slow paced strategic approach. (except for the tribal stage, I can't see a single redeeming factor about that).
However, I believe the reason they bother you is because the devs were trying to distract you from the fact that the game is actually really shallow and stale. If they'd put some more strategic elements into the gameplay, and you'd be able to develop at your own pace, there could've been more room to enjoy the sandbox aspect.

Perfect example of half assing a concept. How hard is this.

Simcity 2013