2012 Gaming Disappointments and Superappointments

Oh, is that not the opposite of disappointment? Let's go with pleasant surprises then.

Disappointments
Really not much for me. Managed to avoid most of the real bombs. I thought The Walking Dead might overcome my dislike of zombies and apathy towards adventure games, but it did not. Still liking it okay, but not as much as most people seem to.

Pleasant Surprises
Tokyo Jungle - Yeah it gets repetitive, but definitely unique and a lot of fun.
Diablo 3 - Hated the demo and read the first month of mostly negative reactions around here. Then I tried the full game and after getting through normal found that it was a lot of fun.

Pleasantly surprised that for the most part Guild Wars 2 lived up to the hype. Extremely disappointed they still have no in-game looking for group / dungeon system.

Disappointments
The end of Mass Effect 3. Now that that's out of the way...

Pleasant Surprises
Everything else about Mass Effect 3, especially the multiplayer mode.
Tokyo Jungle actually getting a US release, and at a US acceptable price.
FTL: Faster Than Light was one of the first Kickstarter games out that I know of, and it came out as a brilliant roguelike. Yay!
Far Cry 3 has no right to be as great as it is. I've had somewhere between "HAAAAAAATE" and "It's alright" for all the Far Cry games (and the Crysis offshoots) until now, but this, oh man, THIS. So good.
Dead or Alive 5 marks the transition into genuine respectable fighter territory after four "fun but cheap" games. I hope 6 actually has the reduced boobiness that was clearly in mind, because it's clear where they took chests down and where they kept them up due to fanboy demand (Kasumi girl what is going on with those?). The new art style looks best with the ones that got reductions 90% of the time, and it's really weird that Tina's below the average size now. But hot damn, the game is really fun, the new art style owns, and the new graphical effects are great (dirt and sweat build in fights, clinging to models and even showing on clothes, water even adds transparancy/cling to some clothes).

Disappointments
Diablo 3. It feels a bit churlish to call D3 a disappointment, given how much time I spent playing it, and given all the good times I had playing it, both with folks from BrokenForum, as well as folks I knew from WoW, not to mention time spent playing with my wife, which was super cool. And yet, in the end, I felt that it didn't deliver. I definitely got my money's worth, no argument there. But it wasn't a game I'm likely to ever go back to, unlike D2, which I kept going back to over & over & over. There were too many design decisions that just didn't gel for me, not least of which was the endgame, which bore too many resemblances to raiding in an MMO: you ran the same content over & over for marginal upgrades so that you could eventually run slighltly more advanced content over & over to accomplish the same. And in the end, you never finished the game, which is kinda frustrating. ("Finished" being defined as "killing the final boss on the hardest difficulty level")

Pleasant Surprises
Dark Souls. Holy crap I've spent an inordinate amount of time on this game, and I've only *just* gotten tired of it. It's truly fantastic. And the community here & out on the wider Internet are both fabulous. If you haven't tried this game yet, you really should. It's *awesome*.
Civ 5: Gods & Kings Expansion. When I first played Civ 5, I was only lukewarm about the experience, and I'm still only so-so about many of the changes they made. But I keep coming back to it, and this expansion really really helped it out. Many of the DLC civs were also pretty well thought out, and super fun to play.

Disappointments

Diablo 3 : I spent a lot of time with this game, hoping I was just at the point where it would start getting good - after 100 hours, it never came and eventually, i just stopped trying or caring. It's not a hard formula really - banging on the loot pineta is supposed to get you showered in candy. However, time and time again, i got showered in shit with the message that if I wanted candy, i should take the shit the game gave me, sell it, and then go over to the store and buy candy

XCom: It does some things right, but....oh it was supposed to be so good. In the end, it was pretty mediocre and 20 hours in, i really have no compelling desire to finish it.

Pleasant Surprises:

DayZ: Wow, big giant world. No rules. Zombies. OMG. I need to find food and a gun before the sun sets! WHERE THE HELL AM I?!? Is that a bicycle? OMG I'm riding a bicycle, in the dark, in a foreign country, with a shotgun, during a zombie apocalypse and looking for water before i die of thirst! THIS ROCKS!

World of Tanks: It's still bringing me in - day after day. I shouldve been done with this a year ago, but physics, new tanks, new countries, new modes, all just keep pushing the right buttons...and after 5000 battles, i still remember those golden moments - the time I killed 2/3s of the other team, the time i raced back and forth 3 times from the flags to win the game, the time i killed the last 5 remaining enemy tanks when i was the last one standing.

Meanwhile, Xcom was a very pleasant surprise for me. I expected it to just not work out, and damn, it was great great great for me.

Pleasant Surprises

Diablo 3: I don't exactly love this game and I know it's probably going to be on most peoples' lists of disappointments, but I didn't expect to like it at all since I wasn't a fan of the first two Diablos. And I did like it, for what it was: a serviceable ARPG that's worth playing for a little while and then putting away.

Dark Souls: I got this for Christmas but didn't actually have it in hand until January 1, so it qualifies. I expected this game to be pretty good since I'd heard good things about it, but I didn't know if it would click for me. I expected that if I did like it, I'd probably play it most of the way through and maybe even finish it if the end game were especially compelling, which is not something I do with every game or even every game I like. But I never expected it to be as good as it is. I didn't expect it to become my favorite game of all times, and I sure never would have guessed that almost a year later I'd still be playing it over and over again.

Disappointments

Mark of the Ninja: This game sounded so cool! And everyone said it was so good! Too bad I couldn't see one damned thing. This is in all likelihood a problem with my eyes rather than the game, but not being able to actually play this was a let-down.

My biggest disappointment this year were in gamers themselves. The ugly sexism at the core of our beloved hobby is a problem that seems to be too easily handwaived away by white male voices of privilege. And that pisses me off, because games should be inclusive and not exclusive. Everybody should be able to enjoy games because games are awesome, and women should be comfortable to both make and enjoy games because more people involved means more chances of making awesome games. We, as a subculture, really need to grow the fuck up.

I can sign on to this. Looking back it's hard to believe all the stuff that came to light in this regard just this past year: Stardock, Tomb Raider, the fight games thing, etc. On the other hand, maybe that means that we're on the verge of a turning point. I doubt the world of gaming has gotten any more sexist this year, so it may be that this is actually the year that the gaming community started to at least question that sexism instead of accepting it without a second thought. So it might end up being a pleasant surprise after all, but we'll see.

Also, if we're going to name things that are "gaming" but not actual games, I have one more pleasant surprise: Broken Forum! I didn't think it would last at first, but it's grown into a really great community.

Whoah, what? You couldn't turn up your brightness? I have shitty eyesight and I was able to see the game just fine, without jacking up my TV settings. (This was on Xbox, though. Were you on PC or console?)

Disappointments

Lead with the negative. In this case, it was Assassin's Creed III. For me, the heart of Assassin's Creed is running along rooftops boffing archers in the back of the head, climbing tall things to see what is there, and interacting with an open and vertical world. Much of AC3 got this right -- I loved the Frontier setup, I loved running through the trees, and the climbing in the cities itself was very fun. But the rest of the game seemed intent on ruining it for me, with incredibly poorly designed missions (mixed in with some absolutely brilliantly-designed missions), an unlikable main character, more bugs than should be in a game with a massive day one patch, controls that drove me nuts in small ways (remapping counter, unable to use Eagle Vision unless I'm not moving thanks to it being L3, killing on the move only working if I come in at a particular angle). I expected to love this game, and it didn't even make my personal top ten.

Surprises

Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom should have been a stupid dating game that I would mock in an LP after loving Angie Gallant's writings on the pigeon stuff. Instead, it became a fascinating look at the changing culture of Japan during the rise of Western influence and the decline of the samurai culture that gave Japan its identity for so long. It also became a great example in branching story paths, multiple lead characters, well-handled character death, the strengths and weaknesses of the visual novel, and games not being afraid to let you fail (and in my opinion, saving the most satisfying ending for that failure).

Asura's Wrath was supposed to be Quick Time Event the Game, and supposed to be awful. Instead, it became my game of the year. And no one was more surprised about this than me. BURST

And what madkevin said. I've been both disgusted and heartened by the overall gaming community this year.

XBox. I used the recommended brightness at first and it looked almost entirely black to me, so I turned it up another notch or two (which I have to do with most games anyway) and I could sort of see things but everything looked really dark and small and far away and I couldn't really make much sense of what was going on. I did try turning the brightness up even more and it just made everything look really dark and small and far away and washed out. Like I said, this is not a problem with the game, and I may be literally the only person to have experienced it this way, but there you go.

Yeah, I know, but I want you to be able to play it, because it really is that good. Maybe try fiddling with your contrast settings in addition to brightness? Don't give up or I'll be sad for you. T____T

Disappointment:

Diablo 3: A mild one, I definitely got good times out of it, and enjoyed co-op sessions with friends when play times coincided. But there's just not any inner nudge to ever play again.

Assassin's Creed III: Mild again--I expect to still finish it. There are parts that are very much why I've been a fan of the series. While the AC series has always suffered from some pretty uneven mission design, there are a few in this entry that are just such godawful experiences it's downright worrisome.

Pleasant Surprise:

Far Cry 3: Caveat: I'm still very much in early honeymoon period, so I reserve the right to shamefacedly eat crow on the subject later on. But Far Cry 2 never grabbed me, and pretty early on in FC3 I liberated an enemy outpost using a tiger. Even if the game goes to crap suddenly, victory-by-tiger was the very definition of a pleasant surprise. (Well, for me. Not so much for the enemies.)

I might try again sometime. I have not-great night vision though too, especially when it comes to picking out smallish details, so I'm not that hopeful about it.

Disappointments:
Assassin's Creed 3: I haven't really liked them since AC1, which had both the combat and the laser-like focus on the things that the game does well that I enjoy in a truly magnificent (architecturally, at least) setting. But I thought this was going to have an interesting enough historical what-if context for the often silly story to make up for the "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to game design they've adopted, and that they'd have enough fundamentals down that I could ignore the stuff I wasn't interested in. I was wrong.

Mass Effect 3: Specifically, the beginning in terms of invalidating the end and most interesting parts of ME2 and then how they streamlined some major decisions from the past. It's a shame because mechanically I liked a lot of the game and I still really valued the storylines that they did some really cool things with in the overall arc of the series, mainly the Geth-Quarian and the Salarian-Krogan angles.

Pleasant Surprises:
Mark of the Ninja: nuff said.
Diablo 3:I got a lot more out of it than I thought I would, and it was mainly because of the always online stuff that I'd initially regarded as pure DRM in action. Great community.
ME3 Multiplayer:Some really great times in the definitive version of horde mode, and again, a great community. I really like it when a game clicks with my wife as well and we can play it together.

Would you say that you're a superseer? It just sounds like there's something wrong with your TV's black levels. I've played it on both PC and xbox and I can't imagine it being harder to make things out than, for instance, Dark Souls. It reminds me of when someone had mentioned in passing their ancient TV and then commented that the DS forest was a really blah and muddy area.

Oh, I'd totally forgotten about SWTOR. There was so much potential there, but it just got buried under playing-it-"safe" MMO tropes. That got even more apparent after the breath of fresh air that was Guild Wars 2. Therefore, mission creep for my personal list:

Disappointments:

Assassin's Creed 3
Diablo 3
SWTOR

City of Heroes - I was sad to see it go. All things end, and it was absolutely showing its creaking age, but the recent team earlier this year was actively adding more to it of consistently high-quality stuff. It deserved a more respectful shutdown and send-off than NCSoft gave it.

Pleasant Surprises

Far Cry 3
Guild Wars 2 - any future MMO that doesn't enthusiastically steal big chunks of its DNA better have a real good reason not to.

:/

Well I obviously don't have a problem with Dark Souls. I haven't had this issue with anything else I've put on my TV, game or otherwise.

Disappointments

Diablo 3. This was the first Blizzard title I bought since WarCraft 2 back in '96.I expected an amazing, amazing cutscenes, and amazing gameplay. I got overwrought cutscenes, and only a few of them at that, a god awful story that wouldn't make the cut at SyFy, and average gameplay. The lack of loot and AH really conspired to removed something special from the game.

Need For Speed:Most Wanted. Everything in the marketing about this game screams Burnout, but with licensed car and cops. Trouble is that it's not actually Burnout. I suspect that for people that want NFS it's too much Burnout. They tried to appease both fans and came up short. I hope that there will be a right proper new Burnout soon enough, it's going on 5 years and counting.

Torchlight 2. I expected this to be a Diablo 3 antidote but it didn't grab me. I played it to Act 2 meaning to come back, but haven't. That was months ago.

Mass Effect 3. I got this in April for $30 on a CRAZY Amazon sale. It still sits mostly unplayed.

Pleasant Surprises

Fez. I hate platformers, and I generally don't take to indie games so I did not expect much when I downloaded this demo that a bunch of people were talking about. Holy hell did it suck me in right away. Delightful music, interesting game play and not too much reliance on twitch reflexes sold me on it. I was hooked. This game is the very definition of pleasant surprise to me.

Driver: San Francisco. Who expects anything out of a Driver game? Turns out that this was a pretty decent arcade racer. Who knew?

Diablo 3. Disappointment and surprise, yes. I ended up taking a character to level 60, so there were some redeeming qualities about it. Once you strip away the cruft, twinking and what have you I really enjoyed some of the elite mob fights that happened in hell level and beyond. By the time I got there I was a bit down, so I was surprised to see that part click. I had expected the whole game to be like that, but what are you gonna do.

Bulletstorm. Yea, this didn't come out but I got it during the Christmas steam sale last year for $5. It was totally not the dudebro game it sold itself as. On top of that they turned it into an point grabbing action FPS that clicked with me. I don't care for most FPS games and think they suck, but this was different and new enough to make me really enjoy it.

Disappointments

Diablo 3 , all my friends were getting it so I got it, and within 2 months just about everyone I know stopped playing it. The story was ok, but I myself didn't find any pleasure in playing it through 3 times to max out 1 character.

Endless Space , I am going to blame Brian Rubin's space enthusiasm of all things space making me want a space game this summer, so I pre-ordered and was really let down by the utter dullness of the game.

XCOM Enemy Unknown , not sure if I really liked the original , so I figured a 2012 take on it , making it more player friendly would be right up my ally. I have yet to finish my 1st game. I am near the end and will probably wrap it up over the winter, but I don't see myself ever replaying it.

Pleasant Surprises

Dark Souls , I don't think I've actually finished a RPG since Dragon Age 1 , so I wasn't sure I'd get my money out of this game. Turns out I loved it, and the DLC. And the combat was really amazing.

Surprises

Spec Ops: Third Person Shooter Heart of Darkness hahaha no. Except I tried it and it really, really worked for me.

FTL: My second roguelike. Dredmore held my interest for maybe thirty minutes, but this was extremely engaging for a good ten hours. I've no particular desire to replay it as is, but I'd gladly go back to it were there DLC or an expansion or sequel.

Diablo 3: Prior to D3 my most played ARPG was Dungeon Siege III, with a whopping 20 hours (which was also probably equal to the amount of time I'd put into every other ARPG I'd played combined). When I stopped playing D3 I had well over one hundred hours in it...

Disappointments

Diablo 3: ...but I didn't stop playing because I was sated. I stopped because Act II Inferno was a brick fucking wall that I rapidly tired of smashing myself against. I gather that's changed, and fully intend to go back and complete Inferno on at least a couple characters...eventually.

In keeping with the hivemind...:

Disappointments:

Diablo 3: I actually did have a decent amount of fun with it, but it didn't grab me the way I was expecting, like D2 did. I still haven't even gotten a single character to max level yet. Maybe I've just grown less tolerant of repeating the same content over and over though; I haven't exactly played D2 a lot recently either.

WoW Pandaria: Nothing really to do with the game itself in this case, but a combination of friends having already moved on, our guild having fallen apart, and other MMOs already keeping that itch scratched has left this as the first WoW expansion where I just couldn't muster much enthusiasm.

Pleasant Surprises:

Guild Wars 2: I never got into the original Guild Wars, but word-of-mouth about GW2 was just so pervasively positive that it was hard to ignore. I was a bit wary of the WvW emphasis that often accompanied it, but figured it was worth a try anyway, and it turned out that I enjoyed nearly all aspects of it.

Forza Horizon: The initial fear was that it might just be a quick cash-in TDU-ripoff hanger-on to the main Forza series, but the combination worked out well. It's fun to go tearing through those twisty highways and dirt roads with decent physics and handling behind it (compared to the TDUs), whether you're in a race or not.

Disappointments:

Diablo 3: I was underwhelmed even before the dreaded "Act 2 Inferno Wall". I will doubtless return one day, but I'm in no hurry.

XCom: in some respects it's like a good board game version of xcom (this is not in any way a knock; indeed there's value into having that sort of thing). But some of it's mechanics aren't very interesting or well designed.

Pleasant Surprises:

FTL: it's not without it's flaws, but it's fun and sometimes clever. I've put an absurd number of hours into it.

Dark Souls PC: I got really frustrated with the initial release on the consoles. I was both pleased that the PC port had a mod to help with various issues (I'm fortunate that I only jumped back in recently), and that I was able to work past my frustration. I'm close to beating it on one character and loving the playthroughs of two more.

I haven't had a lot of time for gaming this year on account of having a young child but I did manage a few gaming stints with the help of my long-suffering wife.

Disappointments:

SWTOR: I was really looking forward to this. It was BIOWARE making a STAR WARS game! Sounded like a recipe for fun. My main problem was that, due to having a teeny tiny baby at home, most of my free gaming time was after she went to sleep for the evening. Just a couple weeks after release the game was coming down for hours every night for an entire week. They'd post a message expecting down time of a couple hours... I'd come back in a couple hours and the message would then say 8 hours. So I canceled my sub and stopped playing a MMO that I was otherwise enjoying three or four weeks after release. When I buy a new gaming laptop next year I still intend to play through a couple of the class story lines, leveraging the free-to-play as much as possible.

Diablo III: I loved the original and D2 and fully expected to enjoy D3 in similar fashion. However, as a casual player who plays a lot of alts I was forever stuck in Normal mode where you could faceroll the keyboard to win every fight except maybe Belial. Also, the loot system felt rigged to require use of the AH, presumably to boost the profitability of the RMAH. A lot of this is now fixed and I'm dabbling in it a little, but it was such a disappointment at release that I'm not sure if D3 will re-enter my gaming rotation the way the first two did.


Pleasant Surprise:

Gods & Kings: They did a lot of good things for Civ V in G&K, but I was pleasantly surprised at what a great job they did with religion. It adds a whole new dimension to the game if you want it, but if you're uninterested you can pretty much ignore it and keep playing the way you like. They not only added a missing element back into the game but blew the doors off the Civ IV implementation.

Disappointments:

Guild Wars 2: "It will be something different to the WoW model!" No, no it wasn't.

Torchlight 2: Too little changed from TL1.

Oh, I forgot to mention the "romance" element. I like the romances in Bioware's single player games, but in a MMO it's just kind of icky. If I'm playing with friends online I don't want to hear "Hold on, I need to travel to x location to hook up with this soldier chick..." If I'm playing it with family there's a good chance that underage children are either participating in the game directly or watching. It just seems like a poor feature to put ina Star Wars MMO.

Surprises:
Dark Souls - The combat engine alone is a fascinating piece of technology.

XCom - For the lovely Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart pullovers if nothing else.

GW2 - The first proper post-subscription MMO.

Disappointments:

Elite 4 Kickstarter - The ideal project for KS, but so shoddy that it almost seems like a joke

SWTOR - Comparing it with Guild Wars it feels at least one generation behind.

Far Cry 3 - The story had so much potential but squanders it so badly.

Disappointments
I have absolutely no doubt these three games are five star delights for many, many people -- which is why I'm feeling a bit disappointed about my own experiences with them.

Scribblenauts Unlimited
I read the reviews, watched the gameplay videos, talked with people, and everything pointed towards this being an awesome game. Unfortunately, what I seemed to miss in all my research (and what every ad for the game fails to mention) was that the game is so incredibly simplistic that it will provide no challenge whatsoever to anybody with more than a third grade education. I expected puzzles and action that could only be won with my tireless imagination, instead what I got were idiotic quest objectives like "Paint this House a Different Color", only to have the game choke and die every time I tried to anything more than simply selecting the house and manually assigning it a new color.

Admittedly, there's a whole sandbox/toolbox side to this game which allows players to create and program custom objects, creatures, and people of their choosing. However, since the game is missing a level editor, you're essentially creating all this crap in a vacuum. Most of the puzzles in the game are so overly direct, simplistic, and limited by what you can actually do to solve them that I find it hard to imagine any adult having fun with the actual puzzle solving aspect.

This is a child’s game. It might not be marketed as such, but unlike other titles which do a wonderful job of appealing to gamers of all ages, this one is very strictly a young child’s game -- with the added benefit of a item/character creator. If the game had shipped with a level editor, and players were able to create and share their own (much more difficult & thought provoking) challenges, then I could see myself getting great use out of the item creator, even if the base game was so blatantly balanced around little kids.

I have no doubt this would have been one of my favorite games in the world when I was about ten years old.

Dishonored
I’ve already talked about this one here and there. It all mainly boils down to the game not being for me. I’m disappointed that I derive no pleasure from it (as I did with the Thief games and the like), because it showed great promise before release.

Legend of Grimrock
I loved the puzzles, the environment, the ambience -- almost everything about this game. But, then the developers just had to go and situate all my favorite parts of this game around an extremely tedious and repetitive combat system. The combat in this game was enough to drive me away after only half a dozen hours played. I almost can’t think of a game that could have been so much better suited to turn based combat instead of the real-time stuff they shoehorned in, except perhaps for Sword of the Stars.

Pleasant Surprises
FTL: Faster than Light
Wow, talk about a game that got everything right (except for the final boss battle, what the fuck is up with that?). If I were forced to dream up one complaint (aside from the final boss), it’s that I simply wanted more. More equipment types, more ships, more species, more of everything. It could be argued that in the case of FTL, less is more, and I could agree with that, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t gobble up any future content provided for the game.

I was initially put off by the seemingly simplistic look of the game, after having been burned by so many indie space and self-proclaimed roguelike games before it. But I was genuinely surprised when I started reading all the widespread good reviews for the thing. It got to the point where I just had to try it for myself, because it was clear that my first impressions were perhaps wrong, if not definitely worth questioning. I’m glad I did.

Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter
After the unadulterated trainwreck of it’s initial 2011 release, I wasn’t at all surprised when the developers promised to keep working on it. But, I was certainly surprised that they not only kept their word and kept on plinking away at it, but that they actually delivered on those promises. Unlike Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, which I gave many-a-fair-shots to after it dropped its beta tag, SotSII actually appeals to me, and is very much in line with the game I thought I was buying when I first pre-ordered it last year.

It’s still not a game for everyone, and is certainly an acquired taste for many, but this is a pleasantly surprised thread and not a GotY thread. This one genuinely leaves me pleasantly surprised.

Darksiders II
I played the original, and although I had no major praise or complaints either way about that title, I did find my interest waning before I completed the game and never finished it. I do feel that I got my five bucks worth though, and being that I’m a fan of Zelda-type games in general I went ahead and picked up the sequel, Darksiders II.

Turns out Darksiders II is working for me in ways that the first never quite did. Although the first was competent, I never found it especially compelling. So, I can say that I am pleasantly surprised with II.

The only thing keeping this game from being a GotY contender for me, rather than just a pleasant surprise, is the penchant for the dungeon designers to cram in huge numbers of braindead-easy puzzles. I’d have preferred it if many of the puzzles didn’t feel like so much mere leg-work, puzzles whose only existence seemed to be the validation & justification of whatever skill or tool the designers felt compelled to include.

I also found some of the combat to boil down to mere button mashing. Now, DSII isn’t as blatantly button-mashy as Arkham Asylum or Assassin’s Creed (two games where you can pretty much complete either game by just closing your eyes and flailing around randomly until the generic clumps of enemies fall down, save for boss fights), but some of the combat is still mindless & effortless enough that certain monsters felt more like obstacles than challenges, and seemed wasted in a game with such a (seemingly) robust combat system.

Heh, you realize that Legend of Grimrock is basically a 1:1 remake of Dungeon Master, so there was no shoe-horning. That said, I agree that the combat mechanics, and the monsters that you fought, lent the game to being played with a much heavier action bent than I would've liked, that I don't recall being there in the original.

Try getting three stars on the combat challenge rooms before dismissing Arkham Asylum as button-mashy. You can get pretty far in story mode with just button mashing, but only by playing terribly. The challenge rooms are where the combat system shines, since they force you to step up and really understand how the combat system works.

I don't play for stars (or cheeovos, or any of that other nonsense), I play for progress -- and utilize available assigned difficulty levels to provide appropriate challenges along the way.

Disappointments

• Guild Wars 2 - Glad to see I'm not the only one who didn't care for it, which might make it a little harder for everyone to pin the BobJustBob contrarian label on me as they did last year. It had a lot going on, but had three big problems I couldn't get past:
  
  • Lots going on, sometimes, but no reason to care about any of it. I didn't see a whatever-the-fuck I was escorting, I saw a walking progress bar.
    
  • Dynamic system works great! Except when it doesn't. And if it didn't work and there wasn't enough to do, which happened to some characters but not to others, the fanboy assholes who masturbate to this game decide that you must be doing something wrong, because their precious Guild Wars 2 couldn't possibly be imperfect. The level of undeserved vitriol I took over this is astonishing.
    
  • The weapon/ability system was interesting but ultimately didn't click for me.
• Diablo III - I initially decided this would be shit, but made the mistake of listening to my friends and was convinced to buy it. My complaints are pretty much everyone's complaints: the story is dumb and repetitive, the mechanics and loot don't sustain my interest, and the super-simplified, respec-anywhere ability system is uninspired.

Pleasant Surprises and Games That Lived Up To, Or Exceeded, The Hype

• The Secret World - This was closer to my vision for MMOs than GW2 turned out to be. It's Funcom, and it has the consequent warts, but I love the shit out of this game. I was interested in but skeptical of the modern setting, but it's worked out great. Unlike other MMOs, the big draws for this game are the story, the lore, and the attention to detail. Everything is the way it is for a reason. The quests are MMO quests -- I think GW2 demonstrated that avoiding that entirely is, approximately, impossible -- but they made me not care because they gave me reasons to do them that were compelling. I'm not gathering Roc Eggs so Fizzlegig Blastwhistle can have breakfast. I'm putting up cameras to monitor the zombie infestation as part of the ongoing story of the region. The investigations are fantastic -- I spent twenty minutes transcribing morse code, I spent three hours scrawling runes on paper, I did research on the real life Internet. If anyone ever found my notes for this game ("BUT THAT IS NOT HIS TRUE NAME") they'd toss me in an asylum and throw away the key.
  
• Guns of Icarus Online - multiplayer airship crewing. Depending on your tolerance for steampunk settings -- they don't lay it on real thick, but, uh, airships -- this is a blast to play with a crew of your friends.
  
• Borderlands 2 - Not gonna lie, I wish the skill trees were more interesting and the classes more unique. And Gearbox is still a shitbag company with obnoxious business practices (see: Mechromancer pack). But I'm having a fucking blast with this game. The writing appeals directly to a juvenile, dinosaur part of my brain, and that part of my brain loves it dearly.

I have not yet played some major releases, most notably Dishonored, so if your favorite game doesn't appear on this list, that might be why.

Disappointments:

Yep, the end of Mass Effect 3.

The Secret World. I wanted to like this game, I really did. But I have never felt less invested in my own character than I did in TSW, and I learned that counts for a lot for me.

Pleasant Surprise:

Fellow Gamers. Yes, really. Yes, there was a lot of sexist bullshit this year, like all years, but this is the first time I felt like it wasn't being 100% handwaved away. It obviously wasn't perfect, and there is a looooooong way to go, but for the first time, it feels like more gamers are starting to Get It, and that makes me feel optimistic for once.

Both:

Guild Wars 2. Pleasant Surprise because I didn't expect to play it for more than ten minutes. Disappointment because I still didn't didn't feel the need to hit the level cap and I haven't played for weeks and do not miss it at all, especially since they seem to have decided a gear grind for anything other than appearances is a good idea after all.

I actually have a pretty short list -- most of this year's games delivered exactly what I expected. (Disclaimer: I still have three notable titles, Spec Ops, Journey, and Dragon's Dogma, in my backlog.)

Disappointments
Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai - The follow-up to one of my favourite strategy games, I thought this would combine its predecessor's tight, tense campaign with a sense of the change wrenching Japan at the time (see Matt's post at #10). I did get gameplay mechanics that superbly conveyed the transition from old->new... but I also got an AI that utterly failed to grasp that change, a half-baked campaign design, and worst of all, the sense that this could have outshone its predecessor with a few more months of polish. Easily the most disappointing game I've played in years.

Pleasant surprises
Analogue: A Hate Story - I really liked its predecessor, Digital: A Love Story (which I only got around to this year), and I really liked this, too. The surprise was why I liked Analogue. Digital was a light-hearted, fun, funny tribute to the Internet, and to communities like these. Analogue is a dark, powerful tale that left a stronger effect on my emotions than almost any other game I've played recently. It was not the Digital 2.0 (Digital II?) I'd expected, but I don't mind that at all.

Disappointment: X-Com Enemy Unknown

Even though it was one of my favorite games, I was really expecting more from it. I was hoping for something that could be played different ways or at least re-playable enough to be surprised by it. But after finishing it and seeing how predictable it was and easy to optimize I don't have any desire to replay it for awhile.

I could probably list it as a double disappointment for the first DLC released for it. As something like X-Com seems like the perfect fit for DLC and Firaxis has so far dropped the ball on it. Linear mission chains are not what X-Com needs and I'm crossing my fingers that they have learned their lesson by the next DLC.

Disappointments

Assassin's Creed 3: I worked on the game, so anything I say could be misconstrued as Kotaku clickbait, but even so, I wish there was more to do in the game and that Connor was a more likable protagonist. I like a lot of the game; the tree running, the homestead, the creation of 17th century New York and Boston, hunting, The Frontier, but beyond some minor quests, there wasn't really much to do in them.

Guild Wars 2: I wish I like this more than I do. It's a gorgeous game and I spent a small fortune on it for the collector's edition. The systems are well designed and it has no monthly subscription, so why don't I ever feel compelled to play the game at all. Like Inigima, I find nothing much to care about in the world, characters, story or otherwise. Dynamic events are such a great idea on paper, and work well when there's people around, but when you're alone, desperately trying to kill that Champion MOB and everyone else is just not responding, then yeah, it feels like you're missing content right in front of you. I still miss the skill system of GW1 and find myself settling into a rote pattern with my chars, soon after which I stopped. The game never really evolves after the initial levels, and it's just filling bars and grinding numbers. It's easy grinding, far easier than Asian MMOs, but it's still grinding.

Mass Effect 3: No, not just the ending, but a large chunk of the game disappointed me. The highs were great. Mordin, Legion, Tali, Thane all had fantastic stories to end their careers, but the whole experience of the trilogy and the odd threads of narratives that seemed to hold ME3 together where enough to take it out. The ending is one thing, but super cyber ninja was annoying as hell. I did not like the plot of chasing down Cerebus and the illusive man amidst the war of the galaxy. Galaxy readiness was such an unrealized concept that it wasn't enough of a systemic reward. The sidequests were mostly odd non-entities. As a standalone product, ME3 can be regarded as fantastic, as a capper to its 2 previous games, I had expected more in terms of the world around me.

Pleasant Surprises

FTL: I'm not a roguelike guy, nor do I share nearly a fraction of Rubin's love for spaceships. I wasn't sure I'd like FTL at all, being a roguelike dungeon crawl through space. So I was surprised that it ate up most of my holiday when I installed it on my macbook air for something to do on the plane. It's such a cool distillation of decision to be made if I really was hightailing it through hyperspace and games were short enough that I'd replay them to get the right outcomes. I still don't really like the unlock system though.

Borderlands 2: Definitely in game of the year running for this one. I did not expect the writing to be as funny, the world to be filled with characters both annoying and meaningful, nor the jokes to have come that fast. Much of the game can be derided for its other aspects, the constant backtracking, the loot system, the checkpoint system; but none of that matters because the story was entertaining throughout the 3 times I played through it.

Mark of the Ninja: Like LK says, nuff said.

Firstly - note I have not played any of FTL, Borderlands 2, Farcry 3, ME 3 or even ME 2. Although if I do play and enjoy them (cmon Steam Sales!) I don't think I am going to be able to call them "surprises".

Surprises:

Dark Souls! So glad I took a chance on some weird Japanese console game port that was supposed to be super hard for the sake of it. (HINT: Its not super hard for the sake of it, its plain awesome). I've had a great time with the game albeit, losing some interest after a burst of sustained play (not unusual for me).

X-COM: Honestly didn't expect the modern remake to be this good. Some question over re-playability though, have finished once and have not felt compelled to play again.

Darksiders: Picked it up for sub $10 this year when on sale, obviously they were trying to generate interest for the sequel. Really enjoyed it, especially loved the character of WAR and the whole backstory.

World of Tanks: My first "free to play" and I bought a $30 virtual tank eventually before getting tired of the hamster well. Can't complain though, a had a good few months there of sustained play of a few hours practicality every evening or at least every second evening. Rekindled my interest in MMO's in a way not seen since EQ1 / DAoC. (It's been less biting every cycle - only played WoW to the first xpac, played Lotro a bit, not much since).

Theoretically should be fun to just jump in casually and enjoy the "free" play with the large stable of fairly decent tier 7ish tanks I've got and not worrying about levelling / credits - but I fear being enmeshed in the wheel again!

Greenman Gaming. Wouldn't have purchased any of my surprises if wasn't for them (not including WoT)

Disappointments:

Dark Souls without the DSfix patch: It's a god awful vaseline smeared low res crap textured mess. NO ONE would be raving about this game without the fix. Largely criminal they thought it was acceptable for a PC release.

Darksiders 2: I did enjoy the first bit (~ one third) I played. Its better than Darksiders. The level / environment design is nice and the Death character is bitchin. But then Dark Souls happened. I expect more from my Action RPG now! To be fair, I suspect if I do go back to Darksiders 2 (BACKLOG permitting!!) I'll probably still enjoy it for what it is.

Regional pricing of downloadable games (and other stupid practices like staggered release dates globally) hasn't DIED IN A HUGELY PAINFUL FIRE FOR ALL THOSE THAT PERSIST IN THE PRACTICE.