What is actually the worst gaming experience you've had?

nhisso

Mercenaries 2. There may have been others, but that one stands out in my mind the most. I absolutely loved Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. It's one of my top 10, if not top 5 favorite games. EA came in and pissed on the franchise and Mercs. 2, a game I waited for for years, was just god awful.

There have been numerous MMOs that were utter disappointments, of course. But ESO has been the worst for MMOs. Now, before someone asks why I am here, well, Ill answer that: I am here because I check these forums nearly every day. This is the first time Ive commented since I quit though. Im not here trolling or talking smack about the game, but this topic caught my eye. I check these forums/eso site to see if there is any new news; word on Thieves/DB guilds.

ESO was the most disappointing game I have ever played. Imagine, for so many of us, waiting for over a decade for an ES online game. It's something we've wanted since MMOs got popular. Originally, Bethesda had discussed a Fallout MMO. I believe that was just to cover the fact they were making an ES online, game. No big deal. I actually like the FO franchise a little more than ES, simply because I like the post apocalyptic setting slightly more than the medieval fantasy setting. Regardless, ES online was something, as I said, that I and millions of others have wanted for years upon years... then we get this garbage. Zeni. has no idea what they are doing. I don't know much about the individuals working on this game, but Im guessing many of them worked on Skyrim. Skyrim was a slap to the face to Oblivion and Morrowind. It took many mods, eventually 252 of them (although many of those were for fun and not necessary for my total enjoyment), to make the game "good". Aside from Skyrim-issues, ESO is just meh. Oh so freakin "meh"! I can't believe the potential of this game was just squandered and given to a company like Zeni who has done nothing but *** on this idea for an MMO. Stuff that should be in the game already is not. The ridiculous NON STOP technical issues are abundant and absurd. The classes and limited skill set are ridiculously restrictive. I just can't understand the choices Zeni made. Welp, Ill continue checking back on this game in hopes I see some vast improvements. But all I see is the next Champions Online. Potential greatness being squandered by a company that has no clue what it's doing.

Sallakat

Absolute worst has to be making a character in WoW so my bro-in-law could get a special mount. It happened to be SWTOR downtime so I leveled it a bit, full glorious 7 levels. I ended up having a true grumpy cat moment; hated every minute of it.

Fuzzylumpkins

It was in this game. It was having 3 days off work to play this game with 3 other real life friends. During the very first day we found questing together was only going to be a nightmare and the game would be better off played solo due to quest npcs dropping off and advancing each and everytime someone else completed a quest you were all on. It ended up being a frustrating waste of time for all of us. That was not the worst part. The evening of the first day we had together I encountered a log in error that followed with 3 frustrating days of not being able to get in game at all.

So it went from not being able to play with friends in game in a mmo to not being able to play at all and wishing I had a back up plan for my days off. So in short, paying someone to screw me over losing real life time in the process.

Woolenthreads

nhisso wrote: »

....The classes and limited skill set are ridiculously restrictive. I just can't understand the choices Zeni made.....

Actually, I can understand their choices. I hear everything you're saying and agree but MMO's, far more than singletons, are controlled by the lowest common denominators and squeaky wheels. The LCD of players are consolers, so they're going to make it console compatible.

As far as the IP is concerned, I still consider Morrowind, Bethesda's greatest product. With Oblivion they listened to the Squeakies who whined about "broken" and travelling, With Skyrim they saw the console sales and bought into them. It might displease me but I'll still play. Sometimes, though, I wish they'd consider upgrading their old IP's (Daggerfall, Arena etc) to make them playable on the new systems in 1st person.

"Look at that! You got me monologueing"

ThisOnePosts

I'll tell you something, I wouldn't be lurking nor posting on forums with a game I felt was my worst gaming experience.. or even a meh one. To me that is an utter waste of time and I typically find those people to just be QQers. Yes yes, I can think of many excuses for you no need to, I'm just pointing out that if you truly felt that way, you wouldn't still be lurking the forums --- unless a troll of course in which case needs to be knocked back with a bow then DW'd into a loot chest.

Rev Rielle

Anastasia wrote: »

Woolenthreads wrote: »

The issues which have plagued this game are not the worst I've had. The worst gaming experiences I've had were with Skyrim and Eve Online.

Skyrim's was due to the patch that made the f'ing Dragons fly away from you backwards. My work-around was to create another character because the early game doesn't have much in the way of Dragons.

Eve Online's was a new expansion which, for some of us, meant we couldn't login and when we could log in there were issues across the board. This wasn't recent, by the way, I stopped playing it over 4 years ago. To make it worse I was in zero-sec, in a war that we were losing badly, with skills and gear finishing so I was an extremely angry fellow .

I've certainly had other gaming experiences which were worse than any I've had in ESO. I wanted to say Halo as well, where I had a weird vertigo attack watching a cut scene but I worked out that was an effect of low blood pressure crashing.

While I accept people are unhappy here occasionally, it simply isn't that bad. Anyone else have tales, not about ESO, of terrible electronic gaming experiences?

---

Mostly near heartbreaking based on anticipation? VANGUARD.
Still wish SOE would have put the money into it, instead of funneling it away into SOMETHING ELSE. Could have been so awesome if that they would have been committed and jumped on the launch gameplay issues ... the bugginess and way the game run on every sort of rig made it a nightmare and saddened even those of us who hung in there for the longest. Elements of play in that game were fabulous; and the world was gorgeous in addition. ;o(

TOTALLY, COMPLETELY, ABSOLUTELY, UNDENIABLY THE WORST game at both launch and into its 6th month was without a doubt for me trying the franchise of Final Fantasy when it came out as Final Fantasy XV: A Realm Reborn. Astoundingly bad. Especially the customer service and the 'communication' with players, (NOT), of the development staff.Over the previous summer, two friends I had who have been diehard FF console players like since they were I dunno, six lol, worked on me. One of them had played FFXI for years as well.

So though I thought it would be great to go with a new MMO - in this case a relaunch of what many thought had great play elements and had been being reworked for two years ergo shelf ready with all the old goodies, and the issues fixed.

It was ... maddening. I could take up so much space with the play issues, bugginess, quest funneling, gating, mechanics, gold sellers, bots and chat problems .. I won't, but it made me near crazy and I couldn't even finish out my sub. First time I've ever quit an MMO. Not a bit of regret for stopping my subscription, and wouldn't consider for even 1 second returning. Only thing good I can say about it is the quest lines had good writing, and the characters were beautiful and very customizable - I know as I spent a LOT of time fiddling with character creation making yet another alt to cool off from being pissed off about another aspect ingame ;o).


MOST FUN before TESO? A dark-horse, less-heard-of mmo I tried and was infatuated with, and played even through a fair amount of crashing, glitching, bugs etc?
FALLEN EARTH. It was a gem. Loved the humor, the exploration, the blend of reticle or first person aiming, the crafting, the apoc theme, the mass 'parties' the community would have, especially in the early months the three-faction PvP. There were so many awesome players in the first year of that game, really it was very enjoyable!

Yes, poor Vanguard.

Tabbycat

Worst MMO experience: Tera.

Reason: Disconnects every 5 minutes.

traigusb14_ESO2

Ahh the memories.

SW:G - ahh the horror. SO mcuh potential flushed down the toilet.
Vanguard - Ditto

AO launch - When the version on the test server was split from the production version like 7 months ago (to the point when they really never patched the beta version much)... BAM! Release version is massively different from the beta (and actually quite good).. .but so buggy, laggy and unplayable.

I don't Beta games anymore really, hard to suffer the pain 2x as long lol.

---

What's with all the cartoon art games?

I pretty much would like Wildstar (mechanics) but I just can't look at it. It makes my eyes bleed.

Everquest Next seems to be heading the same way (though free to play, so that is like 17 more strikes).

tordr86b16_ESO

Hmmmm let me see. The Matrix Online, Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa and the newest on my list is Elder Scrolls Online.

anakaki

Speaking strictly mmos, I've never had so many issues as I have had with ESO. And ive played tons. I remember the imbalance in warhammer online but I let it slide because up to date, that was the most fun I've had in a game.

mkorny

Nazon_Katts wrote: »

NGE

^This all the way!!!!!!!!! Ruined one of the best MMO's in history!...


Also... WoW launch, and pre-launch (latest beta stages) i remember the launch so well, where there was more downtime than uptime...

VampiricOmen

The worst experience I've ever had was when I returned to RuneScape after a six month hiatus. I came back to a bank with only quest items and worthless gear. I have no idea how the person who stole them got my password (it was a complex password that I had never shared), but whatever they did it for, I decided then and there to stop playing it altogether. I spent years accumulating the items and gold they stole, and put hours of effort into raising my skills, doing quests and finishing achievement diaries.

I had never been hacked on a game prior to then, but I'll tell you something, it's not a good feeling. Sure, they didn't keep my account nor did they get it banned... but everything I worked for, all of the hours I spent crafting runes and smelting bars, they took. Nothing was fun in that game any more, I didn't see a point in spending countless hours more to regain what was lost, so I moved to a different game.

On a less woe is me scale of worst experiences: Coming back to Mass Effect 3 multiplayer on the Xbox 360, without first brushing up my terrible aim with Single Player. It was both my worst fail experience, and the funniest that I can recall. N7 rank never really showed skill level, but a person with 600+ N7 should know what they're doing, right? Not always the case, especially if that person hadn't played an Xbox game in months, let alone a shooter. To put it bluntly, I was getting steamrolled on Bronze. Bronze. You so much as glare at an enemy and they drop dead, and I was being thrown around like a ragdoll, getting downed every round like a FNG. I don't recall the enemy, probably Cerberus or the Reapers, whichever it was I bet they had a good laugh, even if they were NPCs.

I suppose it was a good thing that I had five medi-gels unlocked so nobody had to continually revive me. For once nobody had microphones, so at least I didn't have to listen to the irritation of my team-mates. Yes, I sent them messages of apology for being exceptionally terrible, but that was a pretty bad (and shameful) experience for me in regards to Xbox games. It's hilarious now that I look back on it, I don't think I've ever failed that bad at a shooter game, and I'm a fairly terrible player to begin with.

TetsuMaru

X rebirth. Been a big fan of previous x games....then this garbage happened.

Aoifesan

Hatred871 wrote: »

Age of Conan launch.

The game and servers were horribly unstable for weeks, it was one of the first DX10 MMOs(but didn't ship with it) and caused blue screens, crashes, and had terrible performance even on high end rigs.

The game is a perfect example of a bad launch reputation ruining a game forever. It was a decent game excluding the technical issues, and after years of patches it is an amazing game. But it is dead because of their launch reputation.

With the death of the Combo system I sincerely doubt that the game is better than it was at a launch.

Arsenic_Touch

Defiance was my most recent horrible gaming experience.

From developers that posted things that didn't add up (they actually had developer's that sometimes posted but when they did, they often posted inaccurate information which left you wondering if they were actually developers)

Though you were often left wondering if they had any developers left....

Their CS was working with inaccurate information, to the point that you wondered if they even knew the game they were providing support for. The mixing of CS between Rift and Defiance was even worse.

Their forum staff was working with inaccurate information, to the point that some of them were even replaced and their replacements weren't really that much better.

There were out right lies made, lip service made to placate people, the false advertisements, the gestapo moderation.

There was an extreme disconnect between what the players were experiencing and what the developers and forum representatives were saying.

The console versions of the game were even worse and I personally didn't experience them but had witnessed them.

The complete 180 in design choices and disregard for feedback when things were broken. The complete disregard for testing feedback as well.

Patches that broke the game. Ninja nerfs galore and when they were called out for changes, they either lied about them or ignored them and when backed into a corner they said we misinterpreted them.

The bugs, oh man the bugs. Items disappearing, rollbacks, crashes, texture issues, lag, yay.

Their livestreams where we got to ask questions and get some answers were so terrible, they avoided the tough questions and would waste time on repeat questions and frilly questions and the people on the streams acted like they didn't even care about their game. Acted like it was a chore to even play it.

Defiance was like the red headed step child of Trion, and it's a shame because the show wasn't that bad. We always thought the show was going to fail before the game. Well, here we are and they took a buy to play game and turned it free to play. The price drops were so ridiculously fast that they were giving away so many copies within the first few months because no one wanted them. What's funny, they screwed up the free to play patch and it's not even ready for consoles.

CORE actually ended up with about 50 or so free copies of the game, 20 or so free deluxe editions of the game that we actually deleted the emails or forgot all about them. Couldn't even give that stuff away x.x

Woolenthreads

TetsuMaru wrote: »

X rebirth. Been a big fan of previous x games....then this garbage happened.

Really? I didn't mind it too much though I haven't played since January. That being said I couldn't work out why they just dumped so many of the systems that worked so well in the earlier games .... yeah, all right, point taken, Garbage.

Shaun98ca2

traigusb14_ESO2 wrote: »

Ahh the memories.

SW:G - ahh the horror. SO mcuh potential flushed down the toilet.
Vanguard - Ditto

AO launch - When the version on the test server was split from the production version like 7 months ago (to the point when they really never patched the beta version much)... BAM! Release version is massively different from the beta (and actually quite good).. .but so buggy, laggy and unplayable.

I don't Beta games anymore really, hard to suffer the pain 2x as long lol.

---

What's with all the cartoon art games?

I pretty much would like Wildstar (mechanics) but I just can't look at it. It makes my eyes bleed.

Everquest Next seems to be heading the same way (though free to play, so that is like 17 more strikes).

Everquest Next sems tolerable in graphics for what their trying to do. I also hope in the development time they adopt a combat system VERY similar to TESO's and even reduce their 8 button system to 5.

For a Free 2 Play game cant wait to see what they are going to do.

Falmer

Wow... after 35+ years of gaming... I am sure there have been many that I have simply forgotten. That happens at 40 btw... just so you all are prepared.

The recent ones that stick out are X:Rebirth. Talk about a completely broken and unplayable game at launch. Also Dark Souls. I waited until it was on a super sale and I still feel like I wasted the $7. They could have at least stated that they made NO attempt to port it to be playable on the PC.

Woolenthreads

Falmer wrote: »

Wow... after 35+ years of gaming... I am sure there have been many that I have simply forgotten. That happens at 40 btw... just so you all are prepared.

Hah! 50- . I think I'm lucky to have dodged a lot of bullets with games usually because I'm occupied with another game and then I hear the horror stories . I was going to give ESO a miss because, as a friend of mine says, "Other players ruin my game". I'm glad I didn't, I'm enjoying it for the most part, 'cept spam and bots

ArRashid

1) Skyrim
- more bugs than an Imperial Star Destroyer, crashing every 2 minutes, etc. After more than 2 years and two dozen patches, it's STILL crashing.. if that was a car, bethesda would get sued off their underwear.. Also gameplay sucks without having 100 mods made by players..

2) Tiberian Twilight
- even as a huge fan of the C&C series, that game was just pure *** (not that buggy, but the gameplay, controls and everything else was worse than in '99)

GreySix

ArRashid wrote: »

1) Skyrim
- more bugs than an Imperial Star Destroyer...

lol

What I really liked about Skyrim was our ability to mod the heck out of it.

Makkir

Star Wars Galaxies' New Game Enhancement made me rage quit and beat the crap out of my wife. Then I realized I wasn't married. Who the hell did I beat?

GreySix

Sorry, but none of those comes even close to Master of Orion III, in regard to pathetic gaming experience.

Not even close.

anakaki

GreySix wrote: »

Sorry, but none of those comes even close to Master of Orion III, in regard to pathetic gaming experience.

Not even close.

God, did I have high hopes for that game...

Snowballer23

Here in eso with cyrodiil lag+freeze+"unknown error".........

hk11

From an MMO standpoint, probably Shadowbane. I adored the game concept and wanted the game to be great, but the technical issues were the worst I had ever seen.

GreySix

A bit off-topic, but the best game I've ever played was Star Wars: TIE Fighter.

Really dug the immersion of restoring order to the the Empire by blowing filthy rebels into space debris.

MrBeatDown

D3 and now ESO is attempting to Do the Jay Wilson Game Destruction Strategy So it will be next if they cant figure it out.

kieso

My worst MMO launch experience was an MMO published by Ubisoft called Shadowbane, there were login issues, sever crashes, dupe bugs, rollbacks exploits galore.

the odd thing is years later that MMO became a great niche game for pure PVP and was very enjoyable.

Non MMO i'd say my worst technical experience was Dark Souls 1, man that was an absolute garbage port to PC.

jkbennettb14a_ESO

Borizons (Horizons) or Shadowbane, both were awful.

Horizons was so bad I didn't bother to purchase after beta ended.

Shadowbane I played the crap of until they started merging servers and wiped out my town.