Continuing the cadence of new year posts, I though this morning I would talk about some of the gaming related things that disappointed me the most last year. Some of these I am sure will be remedied in the near future, given that a handful of them are just games that have seemingly dropped off the radar. Others were just games that released and weren’t nearly as enjoyable as I would have hoped. Even other things on the list are just situations that were frustrating to deal with. Regardless here is my list of the things I was the most disappointed with during 2020.
Console Launches
I remember some frustrating launch years for many products, but I feel like this year is going to go down in history as maybe one of the worst? First off you had the scarcity of the Nintendo Switch due to the high demand of Animal Crossing combined with stay at home orders that put everyone in the mood to play some sort of video game. Then there were the delays caused by the absence of e3 in getting the word out of exactly when and for what price both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X would be launching at. Finally you have a situation that was brought on by the artificial scarcity of the Sneaker drops industry… leading bot builders to decide there could be a significant profit in grabbing these new consoles and trying to flip them aftermarket. The end result is that very few people ended up getting that shiny new console under their Christmas tree. Among the AggroChat crew I think we all wanted one… but only two of us so far managed to snag one.
Graphics Card Launches
Possibly even worse than the Console Launches is the roll out of new graphics cards by Nvidia and AMD. This situation is made worse by the fact that the 2000 series was not exactly a stellar leap ahead of the 1000 series, and folks like me have been holding onto our aging hardware in the hopes of upgrading during the 3000 series which is is sizable step forward. On the AMD side you have the fact that they have not had a single graphics card that could compete at the high end for the last several generations, making those team Red loyalists extremely hungry for product. The same bots that impacted the console sales also snagged all of the available video card stock… which is only made worse by the fact that crypto currency had been booming again. Hopefully the two day plunge over the weekend will shake those folks out of the market, and as we get into 2021 enough stock will be released so that maybe just maybe I can snag a 3070 or 3080.
Metroid Prime 4
Far as I am aware we received zero information about this game during the entire 2020 calendar year. It was announced in 2017 with this static image, and then since January 2019 we have heard nothing. We know the game ran into development issues, but I had hoped to hear something… ANYTHING… during 2020. Truth be told… what I want probably more than anything is a re-release of Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch, which I figured would happen in the run up to the fourth game releasing. I just want Nintendo to remember the Metroid exists and is a really cool franchise. The life of a Metroid fan however is filled with constant sorrow.
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines II
This is a game that was supposed to release back in March and then was delayed with an undetermined 2020 release date… and now has seemingly disappeared completely with a new undetermined 2021 release date. I am sure this game is another side effect of the pandemic along with unrealistic schedules that did not take into account just how much was left to do in order to bring the game to market. I am still looking forward to it, just disappointed that we didn’t get to play it last year and at the current rate is is uncertain if we will be playing it this year either. Hopefully we get some updates about the game soon.
Dying Light 2
The first game was great and I was super looking forward to the sequel. This was originally slotted to be a spring of 2020 release date, but similar to Bloodlines seems to have completely disappeared. Tweets from the Dying Light twitter account would indicate that it is going to release in 2021, but the steam page still just says “Coming Soon”. The lack of any tangible information about the game in quite a long while makes me wonder if this is just stuck in development hell. As always the case I hope it takes as long as is needed to make it the best game possible, but I am more disappointed in the lack of information coming out than anything else.
Warcraft 3 Reforged
So confession time. I have never finished Warcraft III in any form. It released at a time when I just did not care about RTS after burning out on Dune 2, Command and Conquer and Warcraft II. However there is a lot of lore that takes place in this game that ultimately shaped World of Warcraft, and I have long thought I should probably play through the campaigns to see it for myself. When a trailer of gameplay was released during 2018 BlizzCon I was super stoked that maybe just maybe I would get to experience it in a prettier format. It had really cool cinematics which made me super excited to play it… but the final version that released didn’t seem to include any of that stuff. This video does a good job of showing the difference between the demo that was shown and the final version. Maybe someday I will sit down and actually play through it, but it was a bit of a punch in the gut when it finally released in January.
Marvel’s Avengers
I had so much hope going into this game. I like the Destiny style of engagement, where you run missions, gear up and then do harder content. I have long felt the absence of Marvel Heroes, which was the diablo-like game that ultimately lost the Marvel license and shuttered. I had hoped that maybe just maybe I was going to get a 3D beat-em-up game that felt similar to that. The end product however… just felt like a confused mess. You had a bunch of problems, the biggest being that combat really wasn’t terribly interesting. Everything was fairly tanky and took a long time to kill, but the process of taking them out also wasn’t that terribly interesting either. Gearing was a bit of a confusing mess as well, because you collect items that don’t really have an impact on your characters appearance in any way and were mostly just “Stat Sticks”. Lastly there was the significant problem of only having around six unique maps in the entire game and everything was just a randomized sequence of objectives. I leveled two characters to the cap… geared one of them to the max… and then it was when I was leveling my third character that I realized I was not enjoying myself at all and logged out never to return.
Godfall
In a similar category, I though this game looked gorgeous and I was super interested in it given that it appeared to be a more melee focused version of Destiny. When I got my hands on it however there was just something lacking. Like it ticked a bunch of boxes but the resulting gameplay and world felt empty and soulless. This is the exact same feeling I had when I attempted to play Battleborn back in the day. Mechanically the game was fine, I just didn’t care about it. I am just realizing as I type this that both of these games are from Gearbox, but I have no clue if it was the same team or if there is any overlap. Both games however felt like they were lacking something to ground me in the gameplay other than just being pretty or in the case of Battleborn having a ridiculous number of interesting looking characters that I was not engaged with.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
I debated putting this on the list or not, but ultimately decided to. I am not saying that Shadowlands is a bad expansions, but I am saying that it has not inspired the level of engagement that I had hoped it would. This might entirely be a me thing. I went into Shadowlands with so much hope, I was changing mains and super focused on trying to get in a group friendly mindset. I had this whole plan to launch a discord community for getting friendly groups, that never really came to fruition because the resulting gameplay left me a little uninspired. I pushed forward nonetheless and when life threw me the curveball that was the lack of available healers to run with as a tank… I just started focusing more on Retribution and spent two weeks grinding my face against dungeons to get to a reasonable gear level. Then on December 10th I logged out and have yet to log back in.
Sure I was distracted by Cyberpunk, but were I really enjoying the gameplay I would have found a way to keep playing the MMORPG or would have returned to it when I finished the storyline several weeks ago. Shadowlands is a series of systems that I don’t really feel like I want to engage with. So much is focused around Torghast and The Maw, and to be honest there isn’t really anything rewarding in either to keep me logging in each day and suffering through it. Sure there are legendary gear that can be forged… but the process of crafting them is so painful and costly that you can’t just really afford to keep crafting spare ones. I didn’t necessarily enjoy the leveling process enough to run up a number of alts either. As a result I have bounced and I really wish I had not. So I am left wondering… is it the expansion or have I just outgrown MMORPGs since I have a similarly hard time attaching to the day to day grind of Final Fantasy XIV.
Other Disappointments
I am sure there were other things that I found disappointing, but given how odd the year was they maybe just fell through the cracks. What were some of your bigger disappointments this year? Drop me a line in the comments because I am curious if anyone felt the same way about some of the ones I listed.
I’ve been a big fan of Destroy All Humans! back in the day and enjoyed the first two games on my Xbox quite a few years ago. So, when the remake of the first game was announced on Steam, I immediately purchased it only to be disappointed as the 30 bucks I paid for the game weren’t worth it at all. Instead of revamping the graphics, they barely touched them, resulting in it basically looking the same. The bugs still were present. There was no content added to the game and after eleven hours I played through it with nothing left to do, so… that was the biggest gaming-related disappointment of 2020, in my opinion. It’s basically a port that was marketed as a remake with no extra content, no quality of life improvements and no bug fixes.
Apart from that, I’ve fallen out of my love for Destiny 2 as every season pass felt grindy at best with no new additions and eventually, when Beyond Light was announced I couldn’t care less about it as they removed planets, vaulted content and introduced some weird expiration date on weapons, resulting in me not grabbing Beyond Light, despite being rather excited about the new Stasis mechanic and the new darkness-inspired classes and stuff.
At last, I hated the amount of hick-ups that Twitch got away with. Banning small streamers during 2020 for being sexually clothed or whatever when they were cosplaying as a more clothed version of Chun-Li while bigger streamers would get away with abusing their pets, showing more skin and using slurs. The amount of inconsistency around bans was a rather big disappointment. Pair that with the site being more than broken over the past couple of weeks and the DMCA chaos that I still have to deal with with no answer from Twitch Support (even though I got permission from the Label and the Artist). Eventually, they cleared up some of the bans and even punished some of the bigger streamers, although a lot of ToS stuff is still rather vague and leads to a lot of speculation.