Sonic the hedgehog reboot on PS3. Sit through a loading screen, watch a two second movie, sit through a loading screen, run, sit through a loading screen, watch ANOTHER F******NG movie, sit through a loading screen finally can see a level entrance and fall to death because light dash is broken. Also there's some weird sexual tension between an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog and a human princess. I didn't stick around to see the ending *shudder*.

League of Laggers > Ranked

The ending to ME3 was fine. Some people just had too high expectations and wanted every choice you made in the first two games to affect the ending, and when it didn't they flipped out. They don't understand that all of ME3 was the ending to the series, and it referenced a great deal of past choices throughout.

Also, Citadel. I don't need to say anymore than that.

World of Warcraft after they launched the Wrath of the Lich King. I had finally gotten my druid to be viable in PvP and then came the death knights and the retribution paladins...and then they overhauled the skill system and a ragequit finally ensued. Talk about balance issues. There was no love for the druids at all. It was a such a great concept for a class, too. I loved it. Anyway, all that crap destroyed any remaining interest I had in that masochistic grind fest. I haven't gone back since.

And the elitism! How can I forget the elitist DPS and guild nazis. It's a game, man. Chill. Sorry I don't have the perfect rotation down. It was like going from playing football at recess with my friends to playing football in high school. All the fun got sucked out of it. It's a game. Just have fun.

CU/NGE

Nothing even comes close.

When I played WoW during TBC, I was a hardcore raider. My main was a hunter. There was a bug - I forget the details now of what triggered it - where, when you killed the currently-targeted mob, your character would choose any adjacent mob at random and fire at it automatically. The only way to stop it was to turn your character around when the first mob died. It was maddening, and was the cause of many wipes due to unplanned breaking of CC. It lasted a long, time - months - before Blizzard finally fixed it.

I think maybe a tie between SWTOR and RIFT with SWG CU patch being close.

Hellgate London... bought two full games and two lifetime subscriptions (one for a friend). Ouch $$$. A few months later the servers were taken offline and it was bought by some Korean company which won't let me log in because I'm not in Korea. I swore I'd never play a subscription game again till I found ESO, but now my friends are quitting in droves.

Maybe I'm the only person who enjoyed Dragon Age 2 (not as much as DAO, but it still had great characters). The repetitious maps were boring, but I still liked the game.

The strangest and most offputting experience I ever had in a game was the beta for Age of Wushu. The quest texts were all in very fractured Chinglish, and I spent quite a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what the quests were actually wanting me to do.

But it got worse when I logged out. During the process, I was informed that my character was being kidnapped and forced into prostitution during my offline time. I tried to give feedback on the forum about how an announcement like that might be disconcerting, and risked unwanted publicity in the English speaking world. Not sure I got through to anybody, though.

I also did not enjoy at all my brief encounter with WoW raiding. It was actually worse than the legendary Onyxia Raid Wipe. WoW was made worse by the extensive customizability of the client: which sounds great until your DPS gets metered and you have to have Deadly Boss Mods to keep track of the choreography. WoW convinced me that any game that sends people to Ventrilo to coordinate team play is too complicated.

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.

Its extremely sad . Had it been finished and had understandable itemization at launch we would have very different dynamic in the mmo industry.

X rebirth. One big pile of gamestopping bugs. Stay away from this

Heraclea wrote: »

The strangest and most offputting experience I ever had in a game was the beta for Age of Wushu. The quest texts were all in very fractured Chinglish, and I spent quite a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what the quests were actually wanting me to do.

But it got worse when I logged out. During the process, I was informed that my character was being kidnapped and forced into prostitution during my offline time. I tried to give feedback on the forum about how an announcement like that might be disconcerting, and risked unwanted publicity in the English speaking world. Not sure I got through to anybody, though.

What?!? That's insane! What on earth were the devs thinking???

Honorable mention goes to EQ2 launch.

They built the game around being played on "next years computers." Except they conceptualized this when it was looking like cpus and gpus were going to continue doing what they had been doing...Getting bigger and faster. But when they got past the point of no return with the core of the game the entire computing world went to multi cores instead. The game, suffice it to say, never really recovered from this, not for a few years at least when single cores on multi core systems could handle the game well enough to turn everything up. Eventually the game was gorgeous but at release you had to turn everything down so far it looked like complete crap on top of performing like crap. This went nicely with the crap gameplay and linear content.

The funniest part was it had some specific problem with the latest nVidia cards. Most of us were just having general performance issues because the game was too heavy for our systems, but people who went out and got the latest nVidia cards were getting extra problems like streaking, ghosting, hitching, etc on top of everything else. Some of these people spent thousands on new systems or over priced alienware systems trying to get "next years computer" without knowing that they were being completely BSed the whole time by SOE.

That's not funny until you consider that the game box had the "Played best on nVidia" logo on it. And when you opened the box longevity CDs and manual was a flyer for nVidia saying the same thing. And when you logged into the game there was a dedicated splash screen "Played best on NVidia" LOL. When asked about this on the game's tech forums a dev replied offhandedly "Oh, that's just marketing fluff."

I was not an nVidia user at the time but I've never come closer to filing a FTC complaint. He we caught red handed a software company boldface doing what software companies routinely do yet deny doing it. It's like it never even occurs to these people that what they put on their game box and in their game and what they tell their customers has to actually be TRUE.

Man, O4 was such a bad bad time for gaming and I'm not sure we've recovered much in the decade since.

Anarchy Online at release.