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

Dovel · June 2014

The launch of Dark & Light. That was awful.

Ulalume · June 2014

Rift and my two hours of Wildstar. Never has questing been more boring.

Ardeni · June 2014

Silkroad online. The game was a huge grind, nothing even comparable to ESO. You needed years of playtime, and even then a bot, to actually get to the max level. Even if you didn't want to use a bot, you couldn't level up due to the armies of bots everywhere which killed all the mobs so you couldn't touch them. Getting 0.01% of exp per kill from mobs while getting credit for killing 1 in 5 of them and losing 5% exp from each death... Infuriating and not nice. You got quests every 3 levels and they gave you 10-20% of exp after you killed 500 mobs or something. The fact that you had to level as slowly as possible so that your skills would level up properly didn't help either. I think I reached level 38/90 when I was playing (and I played for 6 months+). Luckily now, 5 years later, I am wise enough not to touch such grindy games and the concept of grinding has pretty much changed all together.

SwordBlaster · June 2014

Dragon Age 2 without doubt. It started the age of the dumberization of games, sponsored by Electronic Craps.

Mortosk · June 2014

Diablo 3 at launch. Pretty self explanatory.

Arreyanne · June 2014

The last 15 -20 minutes of Mass Effect 3

ThreeEyedCrow · June 2014

Vangaurd at launch hands down worst of all time

NerfEverything · June 2014

I've played a lot of MMOs. Ultima Online, EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Planetside, GW, Dark age of Camelot, Shadowbane, EVE Online, Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, LOTRO, RIFT, Diablo 3, Mass Effect (not an MMO but ending was so painful), GW2, Planetside 2, Everquest Landmark. Pretty much played every one of these from launch.

ESO is by far, hands down, THE WORST MMO experience I have ever had. Zenimax is not capable of running an MMO.

driosketch · June 2014

Plants vs. Zombies 2

The f2p model ruined it as have several tweakings that continued after the game was released. They pretty much wanted you to pay money to not play the game, or two spend money on power up to overcome difficulty that was cheap rather than tactical. Unfortunate because it had potential and I loved the first game.

aleister · June 2014

GreySix wrote: »

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.

Right on. One of my favorite games ever. I'd love to see a modern remake that stayed true to the spirit of the original.

aleister · June 2014

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).

Aside from the look WS is turning out to be pretty solid. I've saw some lag spikes around launch, but haven't been have any lately. Other than that, it's very tight and complete -- abilities work without random variable lag, every third quest isn't bugged and there is a ton of content. But yeah, the style... I hope one day we'll see a "serious" classic fantasy adventure-themed game like ESO that is as polished and complete as WS at launch.

EQ:N also looks like it's going the cartoony route although not as over the top as WS.

andreas.rudroffb16_ESO · June 2014

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

->>> for me, reaching V10 by questing/dungeons/worldbosses/dolmen (about 1 Month ) and then came Craglorn with its 2,25 Million XP/Hour on grinding a stupid Boss / 1,5 Million XP/Hour on Anomalies

i felt betrayed (could have spared out the V1-V10 Content for ALTs) ... would have all classes (at least 3 because i dont like DK) to V12 by now if that was ingame before

->>> 2. worst: as i tried to help a guildmember and couldn´t because of phasing

nightside187b16_ESO · June 2014

Has to be SWG the terrible launch the CU and after the NGE. even then its the bests game i ever played.

coryevans_3b14_ESO · June 2014

Arreyanne wrote: »

The last 15 -20 minutes of Mass Effect 3

LOL right?

Cimos · June 2014

Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. At early access and launch, could not create a character because of server capacity. Literally every server on the list was gone. The only way to play was to wait on the Character Creation screen and hit refresh every 5 seconds for hours until you could get lucky and have a server pop up to create a toon on. It took me approx. 10 hours on the character creation screen to create my first character. Once created, you couldnt play with friends, because they all went through the same process and likely ended up on different servers. There were no server transfers either, so you literally could not play with friends.

Also even if you had a character to play, the servers would often go down.

Arsenic_Touch · June 2014

Arreyanne wrote: »

The last 15 -20 minutes of Mass Effect 3

You just can't handle their artistic integrity man.

GreySix · June 2014

Arreyanne wrote: »

The last 15 -20 minutes of Mass Effect 3

Don't make me bring up the last episode of the re-booted Battlestar Galactica.

Cause I'll do it!

Maverick827 · June 2014

The Witcher 2.

Paid full price for it, couldn't even play for more than a half an hour, mostly due to the bad, unresponsive controls. Secondary was that I knew the Witcher games are poorly written pornography, try too hard to be grimdark, and are terribly voice acted.

Chatoyancy · June 2014

I haven't played a lot of games, nor a lot of MMOs, and I can't think of any in particular where the game itself was so bad that it gave a horrible experience.

However, I think my worst experience in a game would have to be RuneScape -- not because of the game itself, but because I think the average player age is about 16, which was made extremely obvious by the immature random tells and random people following my character telling me how hot she was.

1. This is RuneScape. RuneScape 2, no less. How could you even tell whether or not my character was hot?
2. I am not my character. I am not complimented. I was amused the first or second time it happened, but when I had a random follower 10% of the time flirting with me in pathetic pre-teen fashion, it got old quickly.

I was really pleased when I started playing Lotro and didn't have that problem once. Here in ESO, I did get flirted with once, but it was in perfect Khajiit RP-speak, so I thought it was hilarious.

srfrogg23 · June 2014

I think for me it was playing the first Diablo online. All the characters for that game were stored on the hard drive instead of stored server side like D2 & 3. Because of that the game was just infested with Hackers, Town Killers, PKers, and virus toting gold spammers. It was so bad for the longest time that I actually stopped playing online. Blizzard tried to fix it through patches, but it was a problem that never went away. Shame, really...

Moiskormoimi · June 2014

Aion was pretty bad, imo. Rift was another one I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy.

Lynnessa · June 2014

The Sims. I could never get my character to work on time... I could never figure out what was wrong with her... she ended up wetting herself, starting a fire on the stove, and dying as her house burned down... terrible.

jamie.goddenrwb17_ESO · June 2014

Tannakaobi wrote: »

I've downloaded a ton of F2P mmo's that have been really bad so take your pick.

I probably say though that A Realm Reborn is the biggest pile of horse dung ever created. But, I should have known better than to bother. I haven't played a decent FF game since what 9, 10 maybe... nah, 10 was rubbish. It just looked really good but... meh! I don't know why FF moved away from there turn based style combat. Can you imagine the 1v1 PVP of something like FF8. Epic....

but, to be fair. I got my money back, which is more than I can say about most dud games, so my vote goes to Dragons Prophet although that was free.

swtor should also get a mention. It was a good game, but it was the biggest disappointment. They should have named it WoW in space.

Ha! WoW in space is exactly the words I used to describe SWTOR to anyone who asked! Although I think I might have said "It's a 4 year old WoW in space..."

Sendarya · June 2014

Preachan wrote: »

That guild leader makes me sad and angry.
Dr. Klein is indeed hard, and I was always happy to have supportive team mates, who are willing to teach stuff and be patient, even if stuff doesn't work right from the beginning. The game is meant to be not easy on NM, so if it doesn't work at a time, so be it. No need to be such a *** towards teammembers.
(And people who are mean to the healer are the worst to me)

Sorry he spoiled the group content for you

Well, to be perfectly honest, it wasn't spoiled forever.
When issue #7 came out, I came back, bought issue #6 as well. I found a new Cabal, they were working on NY raid and ran 18's regularly.
I told them my Ankh story, and they took me in and promised it would not be horrible.
Indeed, we got past Klein on the first try. Damn. And yes, progression wise, their dungeons really out of order.
Anyway, I ran all the NM's with that Cabal. I think my favorite is HE, the 3rd hell instance. I liked the different mechanics in running the dogs, and kiting the first boss, and the final boss has my favorite stay out of the red dance. Well, aside from machine tyrant, who I swear I cheered out loud every time we beat him.

I even did what they called NY training raids, twice. We did not down the boss, but at least I got to see it without a lot of stress. So yes, a good cabal/guild/group can make all the difference.
I still quit again, due to the grindiness of endgame, but will always come back for their new content. They just released Tokyo, and I think later this summer I'll buy it just to see the rest of the story is about, but I really am done with hardcore server first raiding, lol.

@pele also thank you. TSW is an awesome game, it doesn't deserve my ragequit, that was just circumstantial. Truth is, it was immersive, with real play the way you want skill mechanics, and hard but fun content. It is, and probably always be, one of my top 3 favorite MMO's.

Rylana · June 2014

SWG NGE

Schallen · June 2014

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?

This game is getting there for me. It isnt the worst. I just think they need to do a better job of class balancing, and have customer service that doesnt hang up on you.

aleister · June 2014

Maverick827 wrote: »

The Witcher 2.

Paid full price for it, couldn't even play for more than a half an hour, mostly due to the bad, unresponsive controls. Secondary was that I knew the Witcher games are poorly written pornography, try too hard to be grimdark, and are terribly voice acted.

Oh god. That's one I had forgotten about (or suppressed). That voice acting was just intolerably bad.

Leesha · June 2014

My worst was WoW. There was so much downtime from launch day that they credited accounts with close to 2 months of free game time, 1-3 days at a time.

I don't care how broken you guys want to claim ESO is, it is nowhere near the rock bottom that Blizzard hit with WoW's launch.

drogon1 · June 2014

Easy for me. Mass Effect 3 ending. Worst ending to an otherwise stellar epic trilogy in pc gaming history imho.

drogon1 · June 2014

VampiricOmen wrote: »

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.

Brings back memories. When I first played ME3, I was like wtf? multiplayer? why? It's an ME title no?

Then I learned that the actual endings were effected by the multiplayer (after I had finished the game), and thought that having the multiplayer was even more stupid that I had originally thought.

Then I actually played the multiplayer and had an absolute blast. I still go back and play it from time to time as folks still play it even today.

And now, I oddly feel that the doggone ME3 multiplayer was the best thing about it...lol.