Other potential titles…
Video Games are Dead – True but too dramatic
Gamers are Dead - Too 2014
Fuck Video Games – Hmm…
LOL VIDEO GAMES – So close

Video games in 2015 felt like a huge bag of mediocrity and disappointment, at least in my quiet opinion. Games that tacked on another entry in some of my favorite franchises under delivered on multiple fronts, while many new franchises just became instantly forgettable. In fact, I would be willing to go so far as to say that the promises and reveals made in 2015 were far more amazing than the actual game releases themselves were.

What we have below are the biggest disappointments of 2015. Note that it doesn't say that these are the worst games of 2015. There is a fairly big and distinct difference there between the two. These are the games that disappointed me on some level for some reason, most of which are probably stated in the paragraphs following the game or the game industry event that I listed. Oh yes, and I should also mention that I do not own an Xbox One, nor a Wii U, nor any of the modern handheld consoles. Does this mean this list should exclude the games, ideas, and concepts from (or about) those platforms? Of course not, don’t be silly!

The following is really in no particular order. In fact, I’m just kind of winging it here. There will probably be a thing or two that I forgot to rant about and will have to hurry on back to edit it in before anybody noticed.


Timed Delays on PC
We’ve all been there before. A new game is coming out that you are excited to play. You hurry over to Steam, load up the page, and … you then discover that the game won’t be out for two weeks later than you were told. That’s right, I’m talking about the garbage practice of delaying just the PC release of a multi-platform title.

Those who play on PC are used to the song and dance by now. “We’re delaying the game to add some extra polish to the PC version!” Bullshit. Alright, maybe it’s not complete BS in some cases but your gut reaction sure is to call it that. It is an even bigger slap across the face when those extra weeks spent “polishing” the game still result in a ton of bugs and performance issues common across most users.

And we already know what games these are. Ubisoft seems to be the biggest offender when it comes to these sorts of delays. We saw them do it with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, which came out on October 23 for consoles but not until November 19 on Windows. We’re already seeing them do that with Far Cry Primal in 2016. The consoles will get Primal on February 23, 2016 while Windows users will have to wait until March 1. Even the Jack the Ripper DLC for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate game is delayed on PC! It came out December 15 for consoles but won’t be out until December 22 on PC.

Why? At least with Syndicate, most fans were fed the line of them needing a near full month to work on “stability and optimizing” for the game. Jack the Ripper’s delay and Far Cry Primal’s week long delay make zero sense as far as that excuse is concerned, so why delay it at all?

I know we’re all thinking it, so let’s just say it: Piracy. These companies seem to have this perpetual fear that if they release for every platform at the same time, they will lose out on sales across the board because people will quickly crack and pirate the PC release. What they don’t really figure is that the people who pirate were going to do that in the first place anyway. A delay really doesn’t prevent that. You aren’t really gaining sales back by delaying a PC release, merely lowering the number of potential pirates on day one. “Oh, the PC release is delayed? Well shucks, let me just give up my plans to pirate this game and instead go buy it for the PlayStation 4!” That’s not how it works. That’s never how it worked.

Then there are the Metal Gear Onlines of the world. The competitive online multiplayer component for Metal Gear Solid V came out on October 6, 2015 for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. In this time, Konami fired Hideo Kojima, gotten rid of Kojima Productions, and gave enough time for Kojima to open up a new studio with many of his old co-workers and MGO still isn’t out yet on the PC. It won’t be out until January 2016. That places Metal Gear Online for the consoles at a solid month delay from the core game’s initial release, and roughly four full months of delay on the PC side of things. I just can’t even wrap my mind around this one.

Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe an extra week or two really is spent on putting that third layer of wax on the PC release of a game. I merely play games and write about them from time to time. I am not one of these companies. I know not the true reasons for the decisions they make, I can merely assume and we all know what happens when people assume. But maybe, just maybe we are finally working towards a world where games run flawlessly right out of the gate across all combinations of hardware! The era of not needing a day 1 patch is finally near! Oh what a glorious time it shall be!


Post-Release Patches
Remember when games released and that was it? There were no patches. There was no sitting around to play on release day because some day one patch fixes a hundred different things that the developer couldn’t fix ahead of time so that they could make a publisher’s “set in stone” release date. Sure, there were still bugs from time to time but actual game breaking bugs were few and far between. They were certainly nowhere near the current level of prevalence that they are now. I remember those times. That was when companies actually used to put effort into their testing and quality assurance practices! Now, they can happily skimp on these procedures because “we’ll just patch it after release” is now a thing.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that post-release patches and delays on PC releases aren’t really exclusive to 2015. You would be right in thinking that! However, just because it’s not exclusive to a year doesn’t mean it should get a free pass here. There are plenty of issues like this in the gaming industry that happen time and time again in this and every year. That is precisely why it’s safe to say that this practice won’t be going away any time soon on any platform, especially on the PC even with those “for polishing reasons” delays. Sorry if I got your hopes up at the end of that last section.


Evolve
I am willing to be that you forgot about Evolve. I may even go so far as to double down and say that you not only forgot about Evolve but upon reading the name here, you thought that it came out in 2014 and not February 10, 2015.

Evolve, the 4v1 game that wow’ed trade show visitors time and time again came and went like a fart in the wind. The game seemed to receive some fairly decent reviews from most publications as it sits at roughly 74% on Metacritic for the PC version. So, just what went wrong? Well, the gameplay isn’t really something that can be enjoyed for more than a round or two. It’s great in short bursts and even moreso when playing with and against friends. However, it just got repetitive in a hurry. Players just did not want to keep playing a game where most of their time was literally spent running around in circles in maps that were so incredibly similar to one another. It got real boring, real fast. Most of my friends managed to get their fill of the game in the pre-release beta periods and never picked up the final release of the game as a result. It was hard to justify spending $60 on a game where a short beta period was enough, and this was a game we were all super excited to play when it was first announced.

The DLC nonsense didn’t help that game much out either. There were special bonuses for pre-ordering the game, there was a Season Pass, there is now a second Season Pass, and there were multiple SKUs for the game that featured various levels of included game content. Prior to release, Turtle Rock and 2K faced extreme backlash from the gaming public for their initial DLC plans. I believe the public figured it would cost a person $120 if they wanted to buy the game and all of the day one DLC for Evolve. $120! Can you imagine? People were furious. They firmly believed that they were being ripped off by that practice and sales of the game suffered as a result.

At least one analyst said that Evolve sold just 300,000 units in its first month of release. For those not sure what to make of that figure, that isn’t a very good number for a AAA game release. 2K and Turtle Rock are still sticking to their guns though. They keep creating content for the game and keep trying to turn it into the next big eSports phenomenon. As of the time of this article, Evolve doesn’t even crack the top 99 list for games played on Steam in the past 24 hours.


Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
At one point, I started writing up a big blog entry on everything I disliked about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It got to the point where I just could not adequately convey my extreme disappointment for the final entry in what is arguably my all-time favorite franchise. MGSV managed to do what no other Metal Gear game before it has done: It is the first Metal Gear title I have no desire to replay.

Don’t get me wrong, the gameplay in The Phantom Pain is easily the best in the entire franchise. Everything about it just felt so damn good but stellar gameplay simply could not overcome what is easily the weakest story in the franchise, an unnecessarily sexualized character, a disjointed second act, and entire portions of the game that were obviously cut from the final release including the data mined third act.

Hell, most of what was shown in the pre-release trailers either A) Was shown completely out of context or B) Wasn’t even in the final release of the game! The first chapter of the game had a tremendous flow to the story. It was great, it was engaging, and it was both fun and exciting. Then we get to the second chapter and suddenly the pace comes to a near complete standstill. Players are forced to either replay more difficult rehashes of old missions or a number of “Side-Ops” in order to force the ball to start rolling again on the main story quests. It was a boring, unnecessary slog of filler and tedium.

Once the actual ending of the game was achieved at the end of the second chapter, most people were kind of left scratching their heads. Really? That’s how the game ends? It comes not with a bang but a whimper, made even more infuriating by the fact that data miners managed to find a completely abandoned third chapter to the game complete with half-finished cutscenes and a more “final” boss fight. Even with that discovered content, the ending would have felt unsatisfying for most fans of the series, but it would have still been better than the one we were given as it came about out of the blue. Where were the codec calls? Where were the cutscenes? Outside of a handful of cutscenes, all we were given were tape recordings, hours of tape recordings. I know Metal Gear Solid IV was mostly a huge cutscene, but the balance shifted so far in the other direction with V that the product suffered tremendously as a result.

On top of it all, we have one of the most perplexing characters in the entire franchise: Quiet. The reasons she’s half nude and mute? Horrible. Oh, she needs to stay in the sunlight otherwise she could die? So, is that why you can unlock outfits for her later on that actually cover her body with no ill side effects? Is that why you can spray paint her gold? Does the gold paint help her to absorb more sunlight so she doesn’t die? Are her actions of stretching her ass towards the player while on the helicopter part of her survival plan? Or maybe she gets more sunlight when she leans forward and ensures that your view is a gratuitous shot of her mostly uncovered chest? Let’s not even expand on just how big of a cringe the scenes were where Snake and Quiet share a moment in the rain or share a shower together. Ugh. There are dozens upon dozens of other ways they could have had a character like Quiet without the need for her to shove her ass into the player’s face at every opportunity. There were also ways in which she could have communicated but those avenues were never explored because it would have ruined the rather flimsy plot. No amount of spin could change that she was in the game simply to be sexually objectified.

The game's competitive multiplayer still isn't even out yet for the PC version of the game. All that we have is the game's FOB (Forward Operating Base) system, which also ended up being a letdown. Cheating is rampant on the PC version of the game, to the point that there isn’t any reason to keep playing it. Nevermind the fact that you cannot even attack a friend’s base unless you get super lucky and see their name on the list of randomly generated results for bases you can attack at that particular point in time. Prior to release my friends and I were so excited to infiltrate each other’s bases. Plans to steal each other’s animals made us giddy with excitement. Of course, once the game came out we realized we were never able to actually do that.

I love Hideo Kojima and I absolutely love the Metal Gear franchise to the point where I will say that it is my all-time favorite franchise above all else. However, Metal Gear Solid V took everything I loved about those previous games and just disregards them for the incomplete nonsense that was The Phantom Pain. I’m not blaming Konami for this. I’m not blaming Kojima for this. I feel as though the blame lies somewhere in the middle of the two. Kojima spent years and tons of resources on the game engine. Once Konami started to put their foot down on a release date, there simply wasn’t enough time to actually finish the game.


Fallout 4
Let’s take everything great from Fallout: New Vegas and throw it into the dumpster. Now, let’s take everything people disliked from Fallout 3 and make it even more linear with an even worse plot. Let’s then add in settlements that can easily be ignored as far as a plot device is concerned. Voila, now you have Fallout 4.

On top of that, let's include a healthy dose of the usual crap from Bethesda’s game engines. This includes random crashes, objects and people falling through the game world (or popping up in some cases), broken quests, floating physics objects that “fall” into place after picking up an item nearby, getting stuck in world geometry, getting stuck accessing terminals, and the list just keeps on going. Let’s also make sure that the UI continues to be a nightmare for PC users, and let’s also make sure that we map buttons to more than one function. I absolutely love accessing a loot container when all I wanted to do was reload my gun because someone thought binding a single key to multiple functions was a good idea.

Heck, while we’re at it, let’s also make sure that the UI in general is just inconsistent. Use ESC to exit one menu but TAB to exit another menu. Why that’s absolutely brilliant! Sure, some or most of this will probably be addressed by the modding community, but modders shouldn’t have to address this in the first place. These are things that should have been addressed ages ago by Bethesda but they keep cropping up in each of their games, no matter what they decide to call the latest iteration of the same game engine they’ve been using for years now.

The story is a mess. Once again the player does one or two quests for a faction and is made their leader. “Hey, you did this super easy thing for us, now lead us!" Ugh. Dialogue options are a HUGE step back from the previous games. You have only four choices in every case. One is typically a sarcastic remark, one is somewhat “mean,” and a third is somewhat “nice.” A fourth option is typically just a “let’s stop talking so that I can start an identical conversation with you at a later time.” In most cases, the three options that continue the dialogue all lead to the same results, it’s only the delivery that is somewhat different. Once I found this out, the more sarcastic reply became my go to option because at least that was somewhat entertaining to listen to. Of course, you never really know what your character is going to say at any given time since each of the four options give you one or two words to base your selection on. It feels as though Bethesda made huge sacrifices to the dialogue options to make sure it played well with controllers and also to have a character that spoke their lines. I’d rather go back to a silent protagonist for future titles if it means we saw the return of branching dialogue options that had actual, meaningful repercussions to the story and game world based on what choices you selected.

Skill checks for dialogue and character actions are gone. There was only one place where I found a skill check option pop up outside of a hackable terminal or lock pick opportunity. The endings were all fairly underwhelming. There were a few endings but the choice of ending came down to roughly two key decisions near the end of the game. Compare that to New Vegas where the endings you could achieve started branching near the start of the game and kept branching throughout. Fallout 4 had, dare I say it, a worse story than Fallout 3’s plot hole ridden nonsense.

The one thing that Fallout 4 has going for it? Shooting. The shooting and general gunplay in Fallout 4 is easily the best in the entire franchise. Without it, I’m not sure I could have sunk 99+ hours into the game since its release. I’m not sure I would have put up with the excessive levels of jank after all that time if the biggest part of the gameplay also sucked.

I’m sure I’m one of the few, perhaps even the only person out there that isn’t praising The Phantom Pain and Fallout 4 for the “best of 2015.” But damn, there are just so many things wrong with these two games that it is super hard to even consider them to be anywhere near the best games of 2015. I suppose that’s the beauty of opinions and pointless articles like this?



Censorship
People crying about “censorship” in the gaming industry for 2015 has reached all-time extreme levels of stupidity. Nobody is taking away your games that have anime girls with the big boobs and physics enabled asses. No, it’s not “censorship” when the developers decide to put actual clothes onto a character that looks half of what their “actual” age is supposed to be. It feels like someone saw the word “censorship” on their word of the day calendar in January 2015, ignored the definition, and started shouting it from the rooftops like a damned fool. I suppose that’s just how the gaming community is and will continue to be. They act without thinking or they jump onto bandwagons no matter how foolish they are. They don’t care if they’re wrong or if they’re right because in their mind, they’re always right no matter what. It’s either that or they know how stupid they sound and continue on with it anyway just “for the lulz” because they’re still mentally 10 years old or something.


Mad Max
Mad Max is another that seems to be high on many “best of” lists for 2015. I don’t see why. The game itself was repetitive and boring. The environment, while somewhat true to the Mad Max universe, doesn’t really translate well into being a fun and engaging environment for a video game.

I believe I was roughly halfway through the game when I really started to feel like I just couldn't take it any longer. I pushed forward just so I could finish it along with the video series I was working on but damn it was an incredible test of my capacity for putting up with a bad game. Fights were hardly ever varied. The driving was dull and lifeless. Some story segments felt out of place, were left unexplained, or were just poorly spaced out throughout the game.


Star Wars Battlefront
Here we have a game that I don’t even own. Why? Because of how disappointed I and my friends were with the beta. Just from that little slice of game prior to release, we had a feeling it didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. Of course, once the reviews were out, we discovered that we were right. We went from excited and hopeful for a new Battlefront to not even wanting to plunk down the cash to play it.

It might be worth the price of admission at prices that are nearer to the $20 range, but $60 for what felt like a shallow, multiplayer only shooter? No thanks.


Lack of Proper Backwards compatibility on PS4
A handful of PlayStation 2 titles released in high definition, 60fps, and with Trophy support. That is actually quite neat and a unique “extra step” that didn’t have to happen. However, it should be obvious that most fans, including myself, were really hoping to have Sony announce actual backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 4. You know, the kind where you just pop in your old PS1 or PS2 discs and play them on the PS4? Man, that would have been just the best.


Batman: Arkham Knight for the PC
Do I really need to go in depth on this one? The game was actually pulled from Steam because of how broken it was for most everybody. I was fortunate enough that I was able to play and complete the game without too many issues when it was first released. Others? Well, others had horrific stuttering or they couldn’t even get the game to run at all.

So, it was pulled from Steam. Nobody could buy it while WBIE and Rocksteady worked on fixing the issues. Weeks and months passed and finally the game was deemed worthy enough to go back on sale! Oh, but it was still badly broken. WBIE decided to offer refunds to anybody that wanted them. Some kept holding on to the hope that the issues would get fixed, especially the one where SLI support was non-existent. Problem was, the studios finally admitted that they were just giving up on trying to get SLI working along with fixing other outstanding issues.

I suppose it’s not a total loss though. At least these issues prevented people from having to play through what ended up being a very mediocre game.


Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Back in the day, I used to love the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games. They were the de facto skating game either because they were the only skating games on the market or because they were simply the best and most refined skating experience available at the time. Sure, there were some missteps in the franchise, namely the entirety of the Tony Hawk Ride games, but those didn’t really take away from the greatness that were the original games. Fast-forward a few years and on to 2015 with the release of the long awaited Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 and man, what a stinker this ended up being.

It was hoped that Tony Hawk 5 would be a return to form for the game that occupied much of our time on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Boy were we ever wrong. Dated visuals, a lack of innovation, levels that lacked the flow and inspired design found in past games, and a plethora of bugs really nailed home the feeling that Activision wanted to pump one more quick dollar out of the franchise they will lose the rights to at the end of 2015. Well, it’s either that or they wanted to sabotage the future of the IP for whichever company ends up picking it up after them. Of course, that’s just speculation from fans and is not something that was ever explicitly stated by the company.


Her Story
Think about your favorite mystery style movie. Maybe it's Seven, or Shutter Island, or even The Prestige. Got it? It was pretty great, right? It had an air of mystery around the story that you couldn't quite place your finger on until the very end. Some people probably figured out the twist, but most people never saw it coming. Most viewers were none the wiser while it was playing out before their very eyes and the payoff at the end was amazing because of the very clever deception and writing.

Take all of those good things and then smash them on the ground and stomp on them for a bit. Then maybe set the remains on fire for a minute or two. Then put all of that mangled mess of what could have been a good idea and try to present it as if it were something that really happened. Sprinkle in a bit of terrible, stiff acting to go with Sam Barlow's ham-fisted writing and you have the recipe for one of my most despised games of 2015, Her Story.

You sit through a number of video clip interviews with Viva Seifert's character(s). Her husband died, but did she murder him? Oh no! I guess you'll have to try to find that out on your own! Your "clues" are in the form of a number of video interviews with Seifert's character(s) that show up based on a keyword you type into an in-game computer terminal. That is the extent of this game's interaction. You're playing YouTube The Game here, only the video results are all terrible. So you slog through and you piece things together on your own, if you really want to, and at the end? Well, the end payoff is the ability to say "Yes" or "No" to a question that basically asks if you understand what happened. That's it. There's no further explanation actually offered up.

The game managed to fail as an intriguing, engaging, or even an exciting crime thriller. It could have been amazing. Hell, it could have been a lot of things. What it ultimately ended up being was a poorly written, poorly acted, boring waste of time that I feel deserves nowhere near the amount of praise some in the industry are just slathering all over it.


Overkill and Payday 2
In the middle of their annual “Crimefest” event for Payday 2 developer Overkill decided that they would release a “Black Market” update. This Black Market included safes that contained weapon skins that included mods and stat boosts. The kicker is that the contents of the safe were only made available to you after you spent $2.49 (USD). In a sense, the game did indeed become pay to win. The skins went beyond simply being cosmetic and actually included stats that would modify how the game was played.

Similar unlock methods for cosmetic items is not uncommon in current games. We see this in games like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. All of these feature purchasable cosmetic items that only alter the appearance of weapons or in-game items. They do not alter stats.

For me, the “disappointment” from Overkill comes not from them again offering paid DLC. To be brutally honest with you, I was disgusted with their steady drip of paid DLC for quite some time now. That practice ruined a game that I rather enjoyed playing with friends. Instead, the disappointment comes from how Overkill seems to just not give a damn about how angry this made their fans. In a Reddit AMA held after the peak of outrage, the developer doubled down on their plans.
"We thought — and still think — that this is a great addition to the game. We have a system that everyone can participate in, where players can earn actual money while playing Payday 2. If you don't want to purchase anything, that's completely fine, as you can just sell what you get and continue focusing on the core experience of Payday 2. Meanwhile, the added funds allow us to continue making the game better and better all the time."

Perhaps Overkill believes this will all just blow over for them. Perhaps they are making far more off of the players with deep pockets to the point that whatever outrage there was is completely negated by how much money they were pulling in. There is no doubt that consumers will remember this when it comes time for Overkill’s next offering, even if most people completely forgot once that time comes. Of course, maybe they’re just one of those companies that doesn’t really care what anybody thinks of them…

Konami
#FucKonami


Final Thoughts
So there it is, some of my biggest video game disappointments for 2015. I have no doubt missed a number of things that I’ve ranted about on my Twitter account from time to time throughout the year. I mean, we still have a bunch of jerkoffs harassing people, groups, and outlets in the name of gaming, but to dedicate a special section for them would be a rehash of what was already said in 2014 (Part 2). They are but a one trick pony, even if that one trick is terrorizing people. People still argue over which platform or console is “better” for whatever arbitrary reason. Which means that we also still have the “PC Master Race” crowd out there, fueled by blowhard cynics with egos the size of the United Kingdom. Sometimes the lines between all of these small but vocal groups is a little too blurred, and that is perhaps the most troubling thought of all.

This year also saw the release of Battlefield Hardline, a disappointment for most fans of the franchise and something that felt more like a cash grab than anything else. I’m sure I’m forgetting a number of other terrible games. I’d go so far as to say that most of what is released on Steam on a day to day basis could fill up this article a hundred times over. Steam seems to be a dumping ground for all manner of garbage that people somehow manage to pass Steam Greenlight. Just off the top of my head is Gabe Newell Simulator and things like Snow Horse which pander to obvious markets and are prime bait for terrible YouTube videos from people that like to relentlessly scream at everything.

Maybe video games really were a bad idea.