2012 Gaming Disappointments and Superappointments

If the improvements were merely "trivial" I would agree. They are not - it's easily the difference between "totally unplayable" and "awesome" for me. I am certainly not a graphics person either. Something about the un DSfixed game just didn't work at all for me to the extent I didn't feel I could play it. I think perhaps the lack of sharpness, the game just felt badly out of focus. Probably some sort of scaler error between the unfixed game and my monitor resolution (1680 x 1050)

Disappointments

Diablo 3 - I bought it and it is fun , but it isn't diablo to me.
Swtor- I loved the initial story and chose to ignore the gameplay issues I was having. When I finally finished one storyline I looked around and realized this was not what I wanted at all.
GW2- To be fair I didn't want this, but since so many of everyone were screaming GET THIS GAME. I got it. Being a one time payout (on the surface) also decided me to risk buying it. I played it for maybe a month tops before I left in disgust.

City of Heroes closure- This has hurt. Far more than I thought it would. I had more invested in it emotionally being there when I wanted to go play than I realized. I understand how my Loon feels having lost SWG long ago.

I already knew what asshats gamers could be. Playing quake 2 as a stay at home mom back in 2000 teaches you things quickly.

Surprises

The secret world. - I had vaguely kept up with it was not terribly interested. Friends of mine were horribly disappointed but I found I enjoyed it far more than I should have. I just wish I could get over my creepy fears to play it more.

Mist of Pandara - I didn't expect to like this. I didn't even want to look at wow again. With most the MMo's I played/tried not giving me what I wanted I was back to the old wow crack. The pets are addictive, the gameplay is still what it always has been (good and bad). It is comfort and stability in the market at the moment. This isn't a bad thing.


Habits changed
This was the year I stopped playing The Sims in any incarnation. I don't know why or if it was related to the rest of my life difficulties this year but I have no patience to raise other virtual twits, even as an experiment. With this I lost the desire for citybuilders to a great degree and I have no joy in RTS at all now. I did find my old love of sandbox/GTA theme with Saints but that doesn't make up for what I have put away.
I figure since this is a reflection to some extent of our gaming year, this also fit.

Have you found TSW scary in general, or just particular things? I haven't found much that's out-and-out uncomfortable except the Black House -- that's the "show this bit to your friends to get them hooked" quest for me -- but I have a friend who has a crippling fear of zombies, so different strokes and all that.

Is it weird that I can't really think of any strong disappointments this year? I'm disappointed in some aspects of games I enjoyed (Borderlands 2 for example), and I'm presuming based on feedback from others that I'll be disappointed in some aspects of games that I haven't played yet (Torchlight 2, AC3) but overall I can't think of any game that I've bought and played that was a complete letdown.

Not-Quite-Disappointments But Still
- Dishonored: I can't pinpoint one particular aspect of this game that is off-putting for me, but for some reason I just haven't felt the need to play it through to completion. "Failure to thrive," in a way. It's the kind of game I love, but after the first four or five missions it just wasn't very engaging. I feel bad even writing that.

Pleasant Surprises
- Mark of the Ninja: Just a fantastic game all around. Great art style, tight controls, very polished and refined for an XBLA title. Surprising because it's from the makers of Shank, which I didn't enjoy at all.

- Sleeping Dogs: While it shares much of its DNA with Saints Row, GTA, and other open-world crime action games, it really sits apart in terms of the setting and style. The emphasis on melee combat over explosions and madness makes it feel like a more realistic game rather than an over-the-top playground of violence and 'uge kabooms.

- Dragon's Dogma: Fun times in a more action-oriented open-world RPG, battling massive beasts and exploring a cool new world. If Elder Scrolls games had combat like this, they'd be far more enjoyable.

Disapointments
-Sine Mora: I love shmups, though it's more of a casual thing, I'm definitely not super hard core about them. Vertical or horizontal doesn't matter. When I first saw previews of Sine Mora I thought it looked awesome. An old school horizontal shooter with modern graphics, reminding me of Thunderforce, Gaiares, Gradius, R-Type etc. But then I got the game, and it's just riddled with design decisions I don't agree with. In the end I could
never get into the zone while playing it which just kills it.

-Torchlight 2: Maybe it came a little too soon after Diablo 3, but I got bored pretty quickly with it to the point I haven't even finished it yet.

Surprises
Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer: This was way better than I was expecting, and possibly some of the most fun co-op of the year.

I haven't played Dragon's Dogma but from what I've read here and what you're saying I'm curious if you've tried Dark Souls?

I think Dragon's Dogma and Dark Souls are doing different things with their combat. DD is much more fast paced/combo oriented while DS is much more deliberate. Both are far better than the Elder Scrolls games.

It's been largely a year of disappointments for me

Disappointments:

MechWarrior Online: I don't remember the last time I put so much effort into trying to like something, but this has disappointed me at pretty much every turn. It's pretty enough, but the gameplay is mediocre at best.

PlanetSide 2: The infantry combat just feels off. In general the game feels only half like a Planetside game so it hasn't been able to hook me at all.

Diablo 3: I just found this incredibly boring. Some people have ripped me for not playing it long enough for it to get fun, but I still reject that as a valid argument.
XCom: Good, but nowhere near as good as I was hoping. The three star game I wanted to be a five star game, held back by bugs, quirks, and areas that need more depth.

Resident Evil 6: Had a blast with 5. This was... abysmal.


Surprises:

Smite: Expected a crappy 3rd person DOTA clone. Actually got a pretty fun game out of it. Needs some work but there's more there than I expected.

World of Tanks: Developers have surprised me by improving this game more and more through physics and diverse tank lines.

Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai: Simply amazing. They took an amazing game and made it even better mechanically in pretty much every way. Vastly increased unit variety, better agents, more decisions to make. My Steam shows me having played over 1k hours of Shogun. More than half of that is FotS. My personal game of the year, if an expansion can count as GOTY.


Notable Mention - Mass Effect 3 - I hated the ending, but loved everything up until that point. The ending redux is marginally better but still crappy. The game would have been better if it faded to black when you went up into the station at the end. Anything would have been better. The ending from Evangelion would have been better. MP was not at all what I wanted - I wanted true co-op story missions to play with family and friends - but still managed to be fun and challenging. It basically goes on both lists for me.

No, I haven't, but all the talk about it here and elsewhere has me curious. At first, all I heard about Dark Souls was that it was mercilessly difficult and that you'd die constantly, and I don't tend to be patient enough to enjoy games that are quite that hardcore. I've been reconsidering, though; it's obviously a pretty great game.

Disappointing: Surprisingly few, actually. Umm, I guess if I had to pick something I'd say X-Com... While I really loved it for the first while (go read my posts in the thread if you don't believe me), ultimately it just got somewhat boring. I'm not sure why; probably because I was playing on normal and a fairly conservative play style is basically an I-win button. That being said, my disappointment here is minimal and tempered by the fact that I spent a ton of time enjoying this game.

Surprising: FTL, Torchlight 2, and Dishonored. None of these were on my radar until they were released, and I enjoyed them all a lot. And I've barely scratched the surface in Torchlight 2. Dishonored gave me a player-empowering stealth experience like nothing else I've played.

Both: Mass Effect 3. At its best this game was a masterpiece of video game storytelling; at its worst it was random space ninjas who escape an ass-whupping via cutscene and oh there was that disastrous ending. MP was fun, though I hardly played it.

Good point re: ME3 being uneven; I didn't hate the ending with the burning fury of a thousand suns or anything, but it was a letdown and some of the preceding sections were less than stellar, like the space-ninja ridiculousness.

I think it was Lizard_King who mentioned the ME3 multiplayer (specifically) as a pleasant surprise, and I meant to echo that point in my post. It was completely out-of-the-blue awesome. In the run-up to ME3's release, I knew I'd be getting the game to play SP, and I figured MP was a stapled-on afterthought that I wasn't going to be interested in playing. And I was completely wrong; it ended up being really well-designed feature that I spent far more time playing than I expected.

I kind of regret not playing more MP; I always had a lot of fun when I did. For some reason I'm just not capable of playing with random peepz though; I don't have fun just dropping into random groups. As a result, I played far less than I might have otherwise.

surprises

TERA: before it launched i didn't really think their combat system would feel all that different, but in practice the difference is huge and it keeps the game entertaining. Being able to play for free with very little time investment and few if any bugs don't hurt, either.

Hivemind ho!

am disappoint:


Diablo 3: Hey let's remove all sense of consequence when it comes to character choice, neuter loot to a WoW: Cataclysm level of idiot-proof, and add a cash Auction House instead of meaningfully addressing inflation.

Planetside 2: 95% of my time in this game was spent holding shift running from quick action point A to quick action point B, largely because "quick action" on the map meant "a fight that was over five minutes ago" in reality.

Assassin's Creed 3: The boat battles can't make up for the autistic lead character and increasingly absurd and intrusive backstory. And bad combat (it should not be easier for a 14 year old boy to be able to fight and kill 18 soldiers than it is to run away). And bugginess. And absurdly difficult/poorly designed optional objectives.

Tales of Graces: Come on. You made Vesperia. You made Symphonia. Why'd you make a game that was worse than either of them?

Nintendo: Bahahahahahahahahaha @ Wii U. Also your 3DSXL commercials with that cute actress insisting she's not a gamer while playing the new Professor Layton... erm... game. What, girls don't play games? Or is it just that pretty girls don't play games? It's offensive and disgraceful, and Nintendo should be ashamed of themselves.

The Vita: It's such a good piece of hardware! Why couldn't you line up more games, Sony? Maybe this will make a comeback like the PSP did, but I'm not holding my breath.

Guild Wars 2 post-release content: Because despite everything ArenaNet did to advance MMO design, they still succumbed to adding mindless grind instead of meaningful content.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress: Turns out even Derek Paxton couldn't save this from being generic drek.



surprisingly impressed!



Dragon's Dogma: It's like Capcom told them to make a Dark Souls clone, but the team secretly decided halfway through to to make it charming, bizarre, and a creature of its own. It appeared literally out of nowhere. I only discovered it solely by going on Gamestop.com and looking at new releases. It was that random.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning: Another random "where did you come from" game. It wants to be a single player MMORPG, but if you play it like a loot-whoring ARPG and ignore the side quests it's really quite enjoyable. Also it caused the death of 38 Studios and some of the most delicious drama of the year.

Warlock: Master of the Arcane: It tried to be Master of Magic built on Civ5, like the original was built on Civ. It turned out to be more like Civilization 5: Fantastic Worlds. In any case, quite enjoyable for $20. Also another game that came outta nowhere.

Hotline Miami: I'm not really sure what to say about this game. It's all about the atmosphere, and that atmosphere is chilling in a way that games don't often explore.

Miner Wars: A dinky game I dropped $10 on a preorder for years ago turns out to be a worthy Descent successor.

Torchlight 2: I knew it was going to be good, but I didn't realize it'd be as good as it turned out to be. Truer to Diablo than Diablo 3.

Borderlands 2: I knew it was going to be good. I didn't know the characters and story would turn out to be (almost) as good as the gameplay. Handsome Jack is up there as one of the best villains in gaming.

Far Cry 3: Far Cry 2 was an impressive experiment that resulted in a mediocre game. Far Cry 3 fixed Far Cry 2 because it wanted to be a game instead of an experience. That alone is enough for me to give it a seal of approval. What puts it on the surprise list is the fact it's a retelling of the original, C. S. Lewis's Alice in Wonderland (ie, not Disney's) that captures both the storyline and the unsettling absurdity (as opposed to the charming absurdity in the Disneyified). What puts it on the surprisingly impressed list is Vaas Montenegro, aka the bad guy on the box, who is now in the running for best villain in a video game.

Pokemon Conquest: Nobunaga's Ambition + Pokemon. This gets a spot on the list solely because it exists. That it's also a good game is just icing on the cake.

Disappointing

Mechwarrior Online: I really wanted to like this. I preordered, and so I was predisposed to like this. But it's simply not a good game, and it doesn't look like it's going to turn into one. The sim stuff is mostly okay, but the actual gameplay is dishwater dull. There aren't enough maps, and the maps that the game does have are small and boring. The game objectives are boring. Most matches boil down to a big deathmatch in the middle of the map.

Diablo III: I actually didn't hate this game or anything, but I was hoping that it would be amazing, and it wasn't. I'd rank it as my least favorite of the Diablos (a bit below Diablo II, and a lot below Diablo I). The heavy-handed, railroad-y story was unwelcome and made the game feel relentlessly linear despite the randomized maps. I doubt that I will replay it. I really wish developers would go back to letting players find their own story in a game, rather than spoon-feeding them cut scenes and quests. In the original Diablo, the entire main story was this: find Diablo. There were quests in the game, but they were rare and Easter egg-y, not the main component of gameplay that they are today. Discovering a quest in D1 was exciting! And there were different quests in each new game! In Diablo III, the quests are omnipresent and forgettable. Diablo I (and old school RPGs in general) felt like adventures in self-guided exploration. Diablo III (and modern RPGs in general) feel more like working through a list of chores.

XCOM: I don't hate XCOM. I actually rather like it. I want to like it more, but a couple of issues get in the way of my continued enjoyment. The big one is difficulty--there simply doesn't seem to be a difficulty setting that delivers an enjoyable game for me. On Normal, it's a cakewalk, and thus very un-XCOM-ish and not a lot of fun. On Classic, though, it's relentlessly (and often arbitrarily) punishing. Often, you end up getting royally screwed through no fault of your own and have to either restart anew or play like a savebaby. Which is also not fun. These are solvable problems, in theory, but for the time being I have set XCOM aside.

Surprising

Planetside 2: I was really worried about this game. It's SOE, for one. And it's free-to-play, which is, in my experience, the gaming equivalent of putting a plague mark on your front door. The original has long been my favorite online shooter of all time, so Planetside 2 has big boots to fill right out of the gate. As it turns out, my fears were baseless. Planetside 2 is fantastic, and easily my game of the year.

Guild Wars 2: I didn't like the first Guild Wars at all, and didn't expect to like the sequel. As it turns out, I like it a lot. Go figure.

Disappointed! -
- Guild Wars 2: for the Mad King Thorn pervasive holiday bullshit. It was enough to drive me completely away from the game for months, logging in to see that effectively the game had been reskinned to look like a badly-decorated 7-11.
- Blizzard in general: For re-releasing Diablo with nothing new but bells and whistles. Seriously when EA innovates more than you do between iterations of Madden, it's shitty. Also for the temerity of charging $100 plus subscription fees for a brand new entrant to WoW. I understand that as the 84th largest country on the planet (if you go by their subscriber base) they don't have any obligation to recruit new members, but it's still shitty.
- DLC for Skyrim: Just terrible. Not worth the time it takes to download even if it were free.

Pleasantly Surprised:
- Guild Wars 2: For truly being an MMO where I can utterly ignore and deny the existence of other people. Hallelujah, you have finally led me to the promised land. In my ideal MMO, other people exist to perpetuate the economy and that is all. GW2 has done a great job there.
- Dishonored: I haven't even finished it because I'm having too much fun just running around and backstabbing EVERYONE. It's been a while since a game's made that so viscerally fun.
- Silent Storm finally available through GOG.com: the greatest squad-based combat game of all time (FUCK YOUR X-COM) finally playable on a modern PC. It is a new golden age.

Disappointed:
Mechwarrior Online, as others have said, it's just awful. Some of it's me, realizing that I no longer care for the classic control scheme of MW2, as I now realize it really should be WASD to take advantage of the fact the mechs have legs and aren't just shitty tanks. But the craptastic UI design in both the shell and in-game, terrible netcode that seems like it came from MW2 and poorly designed maps all help to contribute. The game balance is consistently off as well. Maybe the TBS version will hit the spot, or Hawken or the mostly vaporware at this point Heavy Gear game that got announced.

Pleasantly Surprised:
World of Tanks, with it's physics update, and constant additions, manages to continue to be fun, even when I've been playing the same tanks for months.


Realization:
I really should pick up more games, some of the ones listed here sound fun.

Disappointments

Guid Wars 2: I liked the beta and fully intended to play this a lot, but after it actually launched I found myself getting bored about 10 minutes into any given play session. The biggest problem for me is that the combat never really clicked for me completely, creating a barrier to enjoying everything else the game has to offer. I've made several stabs at playing more, all to no avail, but maybe at some point in the future I'll get into it, and it remains installed for the time being.

X-Com: Certainly not bad, and to some extent the victim of high expectations. I throughly enjoyed playing through it, but after I finished it I had no desire to go back for more, which is about the most damming thing I can say about it given its heritage. I felt like that one play through left me with nothing else to see in the game.

Xenoblade Chronicles: I managed to get in about 20 hours of this, and there were a lot of things I really, really liked about it, but eventually I got tired of the interface tedium and having to hunt around for quest mobs and items. I think I would have sunk way more time into this if just quest objectives had shown up on the map. Another one I could potentially put more time into in the future.

Pleasant Surprises

Diablo 3: I never cared for Diablos 1 and 2, and wasn't planning on getting this, but I finally caved to peer pressure from my WoW group. To my surprise, they had all petered out after a couple weeks, while I've sunk something like 150 hours into it so far. It fixed most of the things I disliked about the previous games in the series, such as frustrating stat allocation that could only be done correctly or incorrectly, permanent skill choices, and frustrating random levels (the fact that the levels in it are more predictable is a plus for me). It also paid for itself via the RMAH, albeit in Blizzard bucks. I did burn out on it eventually, but its easily the best in the series in my mind, and I'll continue to play it off and on I'm sure.

Mists of Pandaria: This wasn't terribly surprising, I guess, but after the shit show that was Cataclysm, I was happy to have some high quality WoW content to enjoy. The zones and questing in Pandaria are among the best they've produced, and monk class and pandaran race are creative and fun. I don't have a schedule that allows for raiding these days, and the daily quest grind eventually got pretty tedious, so I only lasted 4 or 5 weeks into it, but that was plenty for me.

A couple others: Sleeping Dogs (not brilliant, but loved the setting), Hotline Miami (great style, brilliant soundtrack).

Not Sure if Disappointing or Pleasantly Surprising

Darksiders II: I didn't finish the first Darksiders, but I liked what I played of it. This one I had to play in small chunks because, as someone else mentioned, the legwork involved in the dungeon puzzles could get pretty tedious, and I also found the Diablo-style loot system totally superfluous and pointless and irritating. I loved the character and world art and design, though, and the combat, while simplistic, was fairly satisfying. Death is a completely awesome character, as well. I sort of liked it in spite of itself, but I did like it quite a bit.

Dissapointments

Mechwarrior Online - I wanted to like this. I really did. I still really enjoy reading about the game and hearing others talk about it like on the BF podcast, but the actual game play and interface leave me cold. Just didn't have any fun playing the game. Not as much as I wanted to at least.



Happy Things

Xenoblade Chronicles - My personal game of the year. I put well over 100 hours into this, and completed most everything but the final "super" bosses by the time I finished. I loved the world, the way it managed to do something amazing on the crappy Wii hardware, and the gameplay. Great combat system, with most of the characters each playing differently in combat to allow you to find someone who fit your playing style best. I really enjoyed the quest system, the story line and most of the characters (I could always do with a little less "Reyn-time" or Rikki).

Disappointing

Mass Effect 3's ending: The game had its flaws, but I don't expect perfection. The ending however was simply abominable, made worse by the fact that it was actually hitting all the right notes, right up until that elevator...

Spec Ops: The Line: Heard so many great things about this, but it's a pretty boring game interspersed with an incredibly passive story. The problem was it didn't feel like it belonged in a game but in a book. I was an outsider peering in because the game rail-roaded me into these things, so I hardly felt involved in events. It was an interesting study where it should have been a haunting and emotional experience.

Hotline Miami: A game of intriguing story possibilities that has no fucking idea what to do with them. It doesn't help that it never really explains the various bonus names either so I'd need to go do research in how to optimise my score, rather than the game just being transparent about it. Unnecessary.

Surprising

Katawa Shoujo: A project for a visual novel dating game about disabled girls that started on 4chan and is now run by random forum folk? Bound to be fucking awful, right? Yet turns out that it's a heart-felt and touching story about coping with a life-changing event and teenage love.

The Walking Dead: I'd stopped following Telltale so I have to give credit to Adree for getting me interested. And thank God he did because, despite having lots of problems it was an awesome experience from start to finish. I was fully invested in the story of these people and their struggles and at the end... so many tears.

Disappointing:

ME3 ending. I expected there to be some level of letdown just because ME2 in particular was such a good game, but I didn't expect the designers to miss the entire point of their game in favor of sci-fi wankery. It made me wonder if they ever really understood why people liked ME in the first place. (Rest of the game is mostly great, though, so despite being on my disappointment list it still makes my GOTY rankings.)

GW2: I hate to pull out the "I feel lied to" card, but I busted my ass to get my 'perfect for WvW' exotic suit finished, runed up, and transmuted to look just how I wanted it to, which cost me a lot of time and gold, and less than a week after I finished it they announced "oh and here's a new gear tier, I know we said we wouldn't do that, lawl." Seriously, ANet, fuck you guys.

TSW: Mostly my own fault, I bought into hype from people about how great the story was and SWTOR had made me love story-based MMOing so much... and then this was just not up to par at all. I liked the investigation missions well enough but this was still really, really disappointing. Badly needs player choice in the narrative and a player *voice* in the narrative.

Borderlands 2: I'm mostly disappointed in myself for buying this after not liking the first - I fell into the forum hype with this one like I did with TSW except this time I really had no excuse. Yay, an action game where it takes 34 bullets to kill one thing. ~fun~ The story stuff can't make up for how tedious the gameplay is. Also fuck the way respawns and fast travel work in this game.

Surprising:

XCom: I expected this to be either dumbed down to the point of awfulness, or neckbearded up to the point where the interface gets in the way of the fun. It was shockingly neither.

ME3 multiplayer. I had no idea it would/could be as good and entertaining as it is.

Dawnguard DLC for Skyrim: I thought it seemed a little pricey and I've never cared for their werewolf/vampire stuff much, but this was actually pretty fun and adds a lot of nice little enhancements to the game.

DIsappointments
Diablo III. Poster child of how to squander a once great franchise. Somewhat redeemed by later patches but by then I lost interest and uninstalled the game.
The Secret World. Intricate story based MMO questing with some excellent NPC characters. Let down by an awful endgame gear grind and gated content.

Pleasant Surprises
The continued rise of indie gaming. FTL, KSP, and project based distribution like Humble Bundle, Steam Greenlight, Kickstarter, and so on.
PlanetSide 2. I've never played the original but this new version is addictive and epic in scope. This is how F2P games should be designed.

Man, if I'd known this thread was coming I wouldn't have bothered with the Game of the Year one. I'll have to make an effort not to repeat myself.

Surprises:

- Mark of the Ninja: Already been discussed, but what a gem out of nowhere in a starved genre.

- Faster Than Light: An excellent entry point into roguelikes, even if it has less staying power than it should.

Also, by far not the least: This forum. I was really happy to see it move on after the whole QT3 fiasco, and then it developed this weird Japan-focused offshoot that spurred me into making my own LP. It's been a great and unexpected experience, and I'm glad to see that the friction between the two groups appears to have been resolved for now.

Disappointments:

- Persona 4 Arena: What a localization clusterfuck. A game should fail because it's bad, not because its publisher and developer need to be clued in that people in Europe buy games as well.

- Xenoblade Chronicles: It bugs me to only see this on American lists in 2012, especially considering the way it was only grudgingly brought to NTSC with weird-ass Gamespot exclusivity after desperate fan outcry. What the fuck, Nintendo?

- Assassin's Creed 3: I wanted to like this game. What a buggy mess. I'd buy the polished version next year if that didn't make me a horrible sucker of a consumer.

I have a problem with sound. I think I have stated it in many spots.. but I may not have been clear. The black house is the worst place ever for me.

Trying to explain, I don't have a good way to give the feeling the sounds can evoke in me. I watch say silent hill games on youtube via some other poor sap doing a blind run because I cannot stomach doing it myself. Loon played Ravenholm for me for HL2. There is an atmospheric level that I both adore and run screaming from.

I have never repeated the black house, though I have done most of the island repeatedly. I am loathe to level a rp character who is dragon because I don't want to go through the story transition before going to the desert. (A haunted asylum..excellent but ugh)
I throw money at Funcom cus to make me squeal and cringe means they are doing something right.. but it also means I just find it impossibly hard to log in there.

Yeah , ok fine .. I am crazy. But I have a point!

Wait, what happened with P4A in Europe? Did it not get localized or something?

Haha. Yeah, the Black House and the asylum are legit creepy. I forgot about the asylum.

Get Loon (SO?) to do that part for you.

I think this has been one of the best years in gaming. Not because there's been one tremendous game, but because there's been a bunch of very good ones and some wonderful developments for the game buyer.

Disappointments:
Diablo 3 - Utterly disappointing. A dull, pale imitation of what made the series great. The MP experience was probably ok, but for those of us who wanted to play SP, the experience was awful. And they can still go fuck themselves with that always-on connection DRM.
ME3 Ending - What a bunch of poorly written shit.
Gaming Forums Besides This One - The year started off with Chickenshit throwing a temper tantrum. It ended with the mods of another gaming forum posting bigoted shit with no repercussions. Overall, a bad year in gaming forums.

Surprises:
Gnomoria - Yeah, it's still in alpha, but it sucked a lot of my time already.
Guild Wars 2 - A great MMO without a subscription fee. I've had a bunch of fun in GW2 - more fun than I've had in years in any MMO.
XCOM - While the remake isn't perfect, the game is outstanding.
Crusader Kings II - I'm not normally a fan of Paradox games, but this one was a pretty decent twist to their normal stuff.
Walking Dead - The first adventure game I've truly loved since A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Kingdoms of Amalur - I thought it looked awful generic on release, but it plays pretty well and is better than Risen, Divinity II and others in the genre.
FTL - Indie game of the year? Is there any doubt?
ME3 Everything Else - What a great ride.
Civ V G&K - It hasn't made the game perfect, but it made a good game better.
The Availability of Sales - It used to be that games rarely went on sale. Then the Steam sales made it a twice a year event. Now, you can find awesome deals on great games virtually all year. I think I paid full price for 5 games all year - ME3, D3 (present), GW2, Distant Worlds and XCOM. Everything else has been purchased cheaply and most for under $10. I've gotten games from Amazon, Steam, GameSpy, Origin, Microsoft, GamersGate, GreenManGaming and others. My gaming dollar has never stretched this far.
The Growth of the Indie Market - I haven't been much into indie games for the most part because their production values were low. But they're getting better and better. I spent a butt-ton of time on Terraria earlier this year. FTL, Gnomoria and others have really occupied my time. Now there's a bunch of 'em that are coming out and they look good. For instance, I can't wait to get my hands on Castle Story or Xenonauts. I'm drooling over Masters of a Broken World and Dead State. These games not only sound awesome, but the production values are there too.
Kickstarter - What a great concept. I think I'm in for 4 kickstarters now - Castle Story, Project Eternity and Dead State. Others have come close to getting my dollars. Finally there's a way for the marketplace to get what they want.
BrokenForum - My new #1 spot for gaming discussion.

I remember seeing adverts for that, but at the time I was done with Skyrim in general. I had assumed the DLC would be more of the same. What was the matter with it?

I felt the tone was too much of a departure from the aesthetic of Skyrim, in the way that Bloodmoon was a really bad expansion for Morrowind. I may have had very high hopes due to Bethesda's more recent DLC for Fallout 3/NV, but Dawnguard just didn't add enough for me.

Eww where was that?

Disappointments (unpopular opinions go):

Skyrim - Everyone acted like it was the best game ever so I caved and got it despite never playing a Western RPG before and thought it would be a great first try. It was addicting I'll give it that, but it wasn't any fun at all. The characters were incredibly boring and even fighting dragons got dull really quickly. It didn't even look that great, I mean the graphics were good, but it didn't actually look good, if that makes any sense. Graphics don't make a game and I much prefer Minecraft's look over Skyrim's despite having "worse" graphics. It didn't help that the PS3 version (the one I got) was plagued with glitches and became unplayable due to lag after some time. The only thing I liked was the massive customization in terms of appearance and skills.

Devil Survivor 2 - Characters were bland in comparison to the first game, and the plot was boring and predicable especially in comparison to the first game. I had no interest in beating all the endings like I did with the first one.

Rhythm Thief and the Emperors Treasure - It wasn't a bad game at all and I enjoyed it, but I thought it would be a lot better than it ended up being. It was cute, and I liked the story, but most of the rhythm games weren't very fun.

Pleasant Surprises:

Tales of Graces f - I expected to like this game. I did not expect to LOVE it. But I did. I liked it even more than Tales of the Abyss, one of my all time most favorite games ever (the plot isn't as good, but the sidequests are significantly less tedious, traveling is less tedious, and it doesn't have load times that take forever). Usually games have at least one character I really dislike but not here. There was one I liked less than the others, but I still liked them all. I just really, really love it.

The Denpa Men: They came by wave - It's a cute game from the Nintendo E-shop that I got out of curiosity not thinking much of it but it was actually really fun and well worth the small price.

That's all I can think of right now.

That is a fair call, obviously it was "playable" in the sense you could still move through the world, fight etc, but for me was unpalatable to do so pre DS fix.

It went from "A month or so after the US version" to "We'll get this out in 2012" to "Uh whoops it's gonna be 2013 and we still don't have a clear release date". They've confirmed that they're not translating it into additional languages so it's literally just a matter of making the game display on European TVs and submitting it to the publisher so they can run it through Sony/MS's approval process.

Arc System Works games have always come to Europe months late for no good reason, but the cherry on top of this shit sandwich is Atlus (also known for not giving a damn about PAL regions): They didn't like Japanese costumers importing from America due to the strong yen, so they just went ahead and region locked P4A on the PS3, the first game ever to do so. So yeah, while looking forward to an Atlus game or an ASW game as a European has always been annoying, the specific combination of the two has resulted in new and interesting ways for us to get fucked over.

Add that to the fact that P4A is a competitive fighting game that relies on an active online community and you have the reasons why it's gonna have a hard time when it arrives here. ASW's new game is already out in Japanese arcades. Maybe we'll get P4A by the time it reaches America.

Disappointments:

X-Com: No I haven't played it yet but based on what I'm hearing they just didn't deliver the game that I wanted to play. I'll probably check it out at next year's Holiday Steam Sale or something but I wanted so much to pay full price and wish I could have paid more but it doesn't sound like that's how I would feel about it.

FTL: I enjoyed it but I was also very frustrated with it. I think I have some ground to stand on (as the creator of Selkirk IV!) when I say that in many cases, Roguelikes are basically a form of game design simplification. There are a lot of things you don't have to do when the game can just say "haha u died!" instead of offering a lasting challenge. Plus ten for being incredibly polished and cool, minus six for being so much less than it could have been.

Orcs Must Die 2: Meh. Been there, done that.

Torchlight 2: I have no idea why but this really didn't grab me. I played it too soon after D3 I guess.

Superappointments:

Kerbal Space Program: I'm honestly not sure how I lived without this before. Anybody with even the remotest interest in things that explode while going into orbit has to try this. The perfect blend of goofy fun and orbital mechanics!

Gnomoria: Anybody who was waiting for Dwarf Fortress to have graphics and yet be just as fiddly and complex is going to be thrilled with this game.

A Game of Dwarves: Anybody who was waiting for Dwarf Fortress to have good graphics and yet be much less fiddly and complex is going to be thrilled with this game.

Diablo 3: I really enjoyed this. Whatever the hardcore people were miffed about and whatever limitations the story had I didn't notice. This really grabbed me and I played through 1.5 times and had a blast.

Dishonored: A true spiritual successor to the Thief games. Awesome gameplay, fantastic stealth, and a really cool story. Loved it. This is where my XCom dollars went and I'm glad they did.

I don't want to tell you that you can't feel the way you feel, but these criticisms seem... unfair. The first one you're criticizing your idea of a game instead of the game itself, and in the second you're criticizing a roguelike for being a roguelike. You're free to dislike roguelikes, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim it as a casualty of "disappointment" -- you should know what you're getting into before you fire it up, and if you didn't, the failure does not belong to the game.

Bad roguelikes, maybe. But good roguelikes (see dungeoncrawl stonesoup) have to work pretty hard to ensure that the difficulty ramp up is even (which can be very hard when so much is randomly generated), difficulty spikes due to unusually strong monsters are rare and/or manageable, and you never feel like the game just says "haha u died". The number of times you come away feeling that there was nothing you could have done to overcome the random number generator should be very few. If anything, all the randomness in roguelikes complicates game design. I haven't played FTL yet, so I don't know where it falls on this spectrum.

Good points all around but I would compare my feeling here to the feeling I had with Star Wars I. Basically the movie sucked but it didn't have to. When people ask George Lucas what happened he basically says that the movie is for kids and blah blah blah but that doesn't make the movie stop sucking. FTL is way better than SW:TPM but in some ways it feels like an ARPG in a Roguelike's body. It wants to have save games, it wants to shed the painful time pressure, and it wants to dispense with impossible hydra-like boss ships but it just doesn't. It needs a genre change operation badly.

So that's why I'm disappointed.

I have to say that I also really don't agree with Hanacker 's assertion that roguelike design is harder due to randomization. I could probably agree that the getting the right balance is harder but that's only one component of design.

Yeah, I think a lot of the criticism of Xcom is unwarranted. It's of the "I only played through once or twice and thoroughly enjoyed my plathroughs but I won't be playing it again" Which, well, for me, is just about every game I've ever played and liked. XCom is a good game, a fun romp, and I'm not sure what people were expecting. It also plays well on the console, and I for one am hoping that it will herald in some more TBS games on the console.

(The DLC on the other hand, is basically on the level of horse armor disappointment)