Games with the most wasted potential starting 2022

A lot of games get announced, and we say wow that looks great really cool idea this could really be something good, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way today on game ranks some games with the most wasted potential starting off with number 10 it’s Red Dead online rdr2 was and still is one of the biggest and most important open world games of all time but if you looked into how Rock star has treated that online mode you’d think it was a failure it wasn’t though uh as of November 2022 it had sold 46 million copies one of the best-selling games of all time, so you’d think it’d have a pretty thriving online community but missteps from Rock star combined with overall neglect means that the online portion of the game is more like a ghost town which is a real shame because Red Dead online is pretty great, and it could have been a lot more like so much more but instead of trying to Foster the community and add features to drawing more players Rock star basically gave up on the mode and dedicated all their time and the insane money to their machine that already makes tons of money which is Grand Theft Auto online the sad truth is that Red Dead online was never going to be as popular or make the kind of money the GTA online did like a slow Cowboy game can’t sell you stuff in the way an over-the-top crime game can, but that doesn’t mean they had to give up on it the story of Rock star’s mismanagement of Red Dead online is a really long one even for people who still play it and really like it’s hard to get over the fact that the whole thing could have been so much better if they just put the time and resources into it but they didn’t

At number nine is Anthem yep Anthem I almost feel like I have to remind people what Anthem even is like it’s a game that came and went so fast it’s super easy to forget about like it’s a third-person shooter you fly around in an Iron Man suit a BioWare yes that BioWare made it uh it was loaded with live service crap, and they gave up on it in less than a year it failed hard, but it’s not like it was destined to suck it was a new IP set in a potentially interesting world and the mix of flying and combat really could have been a lot of fun but like a lot of BioWare games this game suffered a really rough development cycle like sometimes their games come together real good after a rough development cycle like Dragon Age Inquisition and Anthem is an example of when they don’t have the thing about Anthem is nothing really fits together the loot system’s super basic you can’t really customize the character builds were barely a thing story was linear and dull the worst of all the flying which was like one of the main selling points of the game felt tacked done you basically used it to go from point A to point B and that’s about it, but I don’t think BioWare really knew what they were trying to do I mean management literally told people never to mention Destiny while designing the game they didn’t want to copy it but in the end they made a lot of the same mistakes Destiny made and had fixed by that point um and as a result their game really never got a chance ,and it’s mostly just forgotten about

at number eight is watchdog’s Legion originally I was gonna put the original watchdogs on here but uh honestly it’s the third one that had the most wasted potential like the first one never managed to reach its visual or narrative potential but in terms of gameplay was pretty good sequel fantastic it’s one of the best open world action games ever and while the third isn’t terrible it could have been a lot more I’m talking primarily about the very vaunted Legion system where there’s no quote unquote main character instead you just play as anyone which is a cool idea, but the implementation was really weak at the end of the day you were basically just using a character creator that only let you hit the random button like that’s really what this ended up being instead of playing as a defined character with motives a personality and a unique model you played as an ugly NPC with a limited selection of abilities that didn’t make the game more interesting just made it, so you had to swap between a few characters every once in a while apparently the system was a lot more in-depth and interesting at first, but they play tested it into Oblivion and took out basically everything that would have made it unique and that ended up making it into just another Ubisoft open world game but with a barely talking protagonist protagonists I guess not exactly the Revolutionary experience they made it seem like it was gonna be.

At number seven is Mass Effect Andromeda and I don’t want to pick on BioWare here like but seriously so uh new Mass Effect game set an entirely new universe slate wiped clean more about exploration rather than an increasingly narrow scope of focus on action should have been awesome uh wasn’t what was supposed to be an entire new Galaxy got condensed down to a few planets and while that  could have worked it was mostly just painfully dull paint by numbers open world crap Vehicles were back and that was cool but uh you barely got to use them for anything other than driving through these really painfully dull planets doing busy work outside the open world there are some positives the combat is a lot more vertical and dynamic and wow is it ever good, but again this game was supposed to focus on exploration rather than narrowing down on action so the thing that they improved upon wasn’t the focus and as you know Mass Effect has a real complicated story where things that you do have big effects but instead of using the Clean Slate they had apparently given themselves it kind of just transported all the same grudges from the last galaxy to the new Galaxy on top of that companions are pretty forgettable uh the two new aliens really aren’t that interesting and the whole premise of colonizing a new Galaxy basically gets thrown out in the first few minutes there was so much potential here like it could have been an amazing new Trilogy instead of a single mediocre game, and they’ve announced Mass Effect four so uh that’s what we got a single mediocre game in the Andromeda Galaxy.

At number six is Castlevania Lord of Shadows 2 uh the Castlevania games were awesome The Originals on the Nintendo are all-time classics Castlevania Symphony of the Night was one of the best games ever and the Game Boy Advance in DS games continued the Legacy positively they were all um 2D though this series just never quite got to that same standard when they went to 3D probably the best it ever got was the first Castlevania Lord of Shadows it was a reboot that was a pretty good starting place but didn’t  have a lot of the classic monsters and the music ah not quite there’s really good music in the Castlevania series and not in Lord of Shadows the sequel could have been amazing if it took everything good about the first game and works in stuff from the classic games but what we got was a bizarrely bad sequel that kind of just doubled down in the worst parts of the first game combat is somehow clunkier uh there is a bizarre focus on stealth and if anything the world is even more disconnected from the classic game’s story is a mess which is a shame because it had a pretty intriguing promise that it mostly squanders Dracula in the modern day would be awesome and I admit there’s some pretty cool visuals in the modern day Parts at times, but it doesn’t work these days the best 3D Castlevania games are just Souls likes they don’t really play anything like Castlevania but the souls games kind of have that right spooky atmosphere and challenging gameplay all they really need is a Wicked soundtrack uh someday we will get a good 3D Castlevania game but it seems like it’s gonna be a while because this game bombed bad.

And number five is the order 1886. Speaking of games with great settings and atmosphere the Order 1886 really could have been one of Sony’s big new franchises if it didn’t stumble right out of the gate with a kind of forgettable first entry it’s a game with a cool concept you play as an immortal Warrior taking on Supernatural threats in a visually interesting steampunk world, but the actual gameplay left something to be desired I don’t want to call it a snooze because I like it and also resident the Order 1886 Defender Jake balding really liked it, but it’s also not really that different from your standard first-person shooter the main twist is that sometimes the guns are pretty interesting but uh the environments are small the story’s kind of predictable and the game is very short you’re Immortal it’s steampunk, and they’re Supernatural stuff except there’s not really a lot of Supernatural stuff you fight like two werewolves in the game the moment that the story gets interesting it is basically sequel teases you like that’s the end sorry the princess is in another castle, and you’ll never see that castle because we made this Castle way too short and kind of generic at times and nobody’s gonna buy the next castle like it has all the make setting and if it wasn’t a sixty dollar game if it was like a 20 game I think it would have been remembered differently so at sixty dollars it’s basically a competent Tech demo for PS4 it still looks good now like just to be clear look at this game it looks beautiful that looks like a fairly recent game honestly and that’s from the beginning of the PS4 cycle it’s not terrible it’s not even like there’s any major problems It’s just not enough .

at number four is artifact looking back at it now artifact seems kind of destined to fail but when it first came out it seemed like it could be huge digital card games were at an all-time high valve announced they’re making a new game with Richard Garfield who created Magic the Gathering sounded like a license to print money uh wasn’t at all I like far from it um what makes it so wasted is that the actual game design is pretty cool and interesting it’s a cross between a card game and a MOB Alike it was doing something that was just a little bit too complicated in a real card game and    think the problem was it really wasn’t that fun to play like a lot of the design is clever, but that doesn’t make it fun and then valve was real slow on making some changes to keep players around they take a slow and steady game design that is not cut out for live service games like this like people needed to know what’s going on what they’re doing where it’s going how long it’s going to be and Val just barely talk if they’d been a little more responsive and been a little more flexible about what the game would be also maybe main monetization that wasn’t easy as hell to hate artifact could have been probably a huge name in digital card games, and now it’s kind of more of a punch line.

At number three is hello neighbor a game most people agree has a great premise it’s like combining a home alone with rear window you play as a kid investigating the house of your creepy neighbor the whole goal of it is to sneak in find out what he’s up to but the whole time he’s hunting you like a less threatening xenomorph adapting to what you do in learning and allegedly forces you to find new ways of sneaking around him, it’s clever but anybody who’s ever played it agrees that while it starts off pretty good it slowly gets worse with each new build that they put out the clever AI aspects of the game were downplayed and the more tedious parts became the focus which is bizarre because while it’s relatively popular most reviews from people who’ve actually played it are not great this game could have been a more intense version of alien isolation with its AI programming, but it’s just it never turned out to be that.

At number two is Epic Mickey before Epic Mickey came out this game has some major hype behind it is was a war inspector game set in a weird and dark alternate version of Disney it’s by the creator of days X, and it’s Disney stuff seen stranger and darker than pretty much everything we’ve ever seen from the company it can’t be understated how interesting those first pieces of concept art were and what they hinted at but what we got was not even close to that we were kind of expecting a post-apocalyptic Disney Deus Ex but uh got a less good Okami with all the edges filed off Epic Mickey was just a safe pretty by the Numbers platformer uh there were some ruins there and a few things that kind of looked like the concept art if you squinted a little but by and large it was the Disney we all uh new, and we’re kind of sick of by that point yeah those first Concepts were never gonna be the actual game especially one actually paid for it by Disney, but it’s still a missed opportunity even if realistically what we got was exactly what we should have expected.

And number one is Spore game with Limitless potential and so much of it wasted so so so much this was another game with like astronomical hype I mean we’re talking about a thing that was gonna simulate an entire lifespan of a species not a creature like a race of things he started a cellular level and reached all the way to ruling a Galactic Empire that’s the scale that we were talking about but uh it was a game that was as wide as an ocean but with the depth of a puddle each evolutionary step was basically a small mini-game with almost no depth to it, and it really did not take long for players to get born these days it’s not uncommon for games to come out that are fairly light on content and eventually become great years after um like no man’s sky or sea of Thieves but spore kind of came out in 2008 and while it made a lot of money it wasn’t making the Sims money, so it really never got the chance to grow into something more complex and interesting the technology was there the way you could create creatures and evolve them was pretty great, but it needed more the expansions and updates never materialized either leaving us with a game that’s kind of fun to mess around with but could have been a lot a more quick bonus for you too shenmue 3 uh for years it seemed like the shenmue series was done but in 2015 14 years after shenmue 2 used Suzuki came back to promote a Kickstarter, and it was a huge success finally after all these years fans could see the conclusion to the Epic Saga it took another four years to make the game but in 2019 people got their hands on it and basically nothing happens you don’t fight the bad guy the plot barely moves forward, and pretty much nothing happens this was you Suzuki’s one chance to finally wrap the game up or at least end it in a satisfying way, but it ends on a tease for a sequel where the actual plot will be it was very frustrating was it the worst thing ever no but like yeah it was fun to do some more shenmue stuff but uh it didn’t go anywhere, and it was supposed to be the thing that finished it all off Ah that’s frustrating trading now and that’s all for today leave us a comment let us know what you think if you like this article  .