Any gamer worth their mettle has learned how to cope with disappointment. For every overhyped shooter that blows us away, there are a thousand Brute Forces or Daikatanas that teach us to never again trust an E3 presentation. But even with our tempered expectations, there are still some releases that leave us wincing and longing for what could have been. Here, then, are the biggest video game letdowns of all time.
Mass Effect 3
In a truly heinous slap in the face of series fans everywhere, BioWare had the gall to write a conclusion to the trilogy that completely countermanded our FemShep/Tali/Legion-love-triangle fanfiction.
Between The World And Me
True gamers couldn’t help but feel stinging disappointment when, halfway through completing this release, they realized Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed tract on being black in America was a book and not a video game.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5
Developers missed the mark with this Tony Hawk entry by opting to replace the franchise’s famously punk soundtrack with Eastern Orthodox Christian hymns.
Halo 3
Though boasting a strong campaign mode and solid core gameplay, fans blasted Halo 3’s multiplayer for Bungie’s decision not to bring back xXDemon0fGanja420Xx, the 26-year-old guitar instructor beloved for playing garbled Pantera albums through his microphone and intermittently shouting “Fuck” between hits off his bong.
Civilization VI
This massive disappointment has only consumed 3,300 hours of our lives over the past year—a far cry from previous iterations in the series.
World of Warcraft
Technically, it was us gamers—out of shape, listless, and stumbling through life—who wound up being the crushing disappointments here, not the game itself, but the pain still remains.
Dark Souls
Too hard.
Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr.
Talk to any gamer alive in 1998 and they’ll tell you how bitterly disappointing it was to discover that all of Ken Griffey Jr.’s nude scenes in this N64 title used a body double instead of the real deal. While the developers set things right a year later in Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest, it only made the absence of truly authentic full frontal in Major League Baseball all the more glaring in retrospect.
