• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Furukawa Speaks! We discuss the announcement of the Nintendo Switch Successor and our June Direct Predictions on the new episode of the Famiboards Discussion Club! Check it out here!

Fun Club What is the worst game made by a AAA developer?

lemonfresh

lemonfresh

#Team2024
Pronouns
He/Him
My vote would be

EyeCatch211208ENTM-1800x918.jpg



Babylon's fall from Platinum/Square Enix the game launched with terrible graphics, gameplay and lack of content plus being always online. I got actually hyped for this at first thinking it would be a solid release. The game did so bad it had to be shut down less than a year from launch.

what are some of your worst games made by AAA devs?
 
Zeal543 said:
idk how loose of a definition we're going for with AAA but fallout 76 comes to mind


Yeah this too
Click to expand...
I don't know if it's fair to call Fallout 76 the worst anymore. It was pretty bad at launch but they never abandoned the game and it has a pretty healthy player base as well. Definitely not the best Fallout game but it's successful enough that it's still getting brand new content 5 years later.
 
0
Assassins' Creed Origins and by extension Odyssey/Valhalla, though Odyssey was the most egregious of the three. Will bore you to death with their thousands of repetitive quests, busywork, and flat dialogue. I don't know how anyone could mess up a historically-based action-adventure RPG so bad.
 
0
Outright it's likely one of the super early NES games, something like Urban Champion

More recently? Probably one of the Madden games (especially those made after EA got the exclusive rights to them)
 
0
Probably stretching the meaning a bit, but Bubsy 3D is pretty dang bad and it was made by Eidetic, which is now known as Bend Studio.

I think Sonic '06 probably has to take the cake though. Like, there's bad games, there's broken games, and then there's Sonic '06. It is almost impressive just how poorly made and put together that game is; I really encourage anyone who's only heard about this game but never experienced it to find a playthrough to watch so they can fully appreciate what a true disaster that game is.
 
I don’t think I’d count Platinum as AAA. At the very least, Babylon’s Fall wasn’t AAA.

Sonic 06 is probably the best retro example. Avengers is a good modern one, mind blowing how badly they fumbled such an easy IP.
 
Cyberpunk 2077 on launch was absolutely incredibly bad. From someone who dropped 60$ on it for a pre-order, AND had specific faith that it would make it's final deadline of release, I was blown away by just how big of a financial blunder I had made.
That being said, glad they could make it eventually work. But holy hell, that is a TERRIBLE look.
And, hey, probably not something that everyone will agree with, but, Sonic Forces. Given that a lot of the marketing I saw from it recognized their past screw ups, insisting it would be different this time...I felt cheated when we got what we did. Character customization? Sure, cool, I think that's actually a good feature. But man, does the rest of the game need to be that dogshit to trade it off? It's inoffensive at best, but wears the corpse of the Sonic game I was promised, and desired.
We can all write books on how bad Sonic 2006 was, but, at least there's a genuine game underneath the surface. You can do things like have the AMAZING restoration project, and garner interest. I want to play a good Sonic 2006. Sonic Forces... You'd have to do a lot more under the hood to make it engaging.
 
AngryAlchemist said:
Bioshock Infinite
Click to expand...
AngryAlchemist W. I don't think it's the worst, but I maintain that it's such a terrible game, and for a myriad of reasons.

Best "bad" AAA games I've played are Resident Evil 6 and Mass Effect: Andromeda. RE6 in particular is fantastic, and I'm proud to be part of its defense force. I wish they'd make another RE game like it.
 
CYberpunk. it's frankly an embarrassment, and its today what it should have been day 1.

if you want a actual game that has made such marked strives in expanding upon what it once was look at no mans sky..
 
0
Megafan96 said:
Cyberpunk 2077 on launch was absolutely incredibly bad. From someone who dropped 60$ on it for a pre-order, AND had specific faith that it would make it's final deadline of release, I was blown away by just how big of a financial blunder I had made.
That being said, glad they could make it eventually work. But holy hell, that is a TERRIBLE look.
And, hey, probably not something that everyone will agree with, but, Sonic Forces. Given that a lot of the marketing I saw from it recognized their past screw ups, insisting it would be different this time...I felt cheated when we got what we did. Character customization? Sure, cool, I think that's actually a good feature. But man, does the rest of the game need to be that dogshit to trade it off? It's inoffensive at best, but wears the corpse of the Sonic game I was promised, and desired.
We can all write books on how bad Sonic 2006 was, but, at least there's a genuine game underneath the surface. You can do things like have the AMAZING restoration project, and garner interest. I want to play a good Sonic 2006. Sonic Forces... You'd have to do a lot more under the hood to make it engaging.
Click to expand...
i kinda agree on the last point.

i like sonic horizons or whatever it was called, but thats striaght up not what i want out of the series. which is fine
but also i cant help but be a bit snarky when every game that featured the expanded cast and roe was irrefutable shit and then they do this, okay enough on the first try.

being a sonic fan is the true meaning of pain.
 
If you're on PC you have a pretty great stretch of games to pick from just this year with stuff like Jedi Survivor still being absolutely abysmal and unacceptable releases. Cyberpunk at release was way better in comparison.

I don't know what the budget was but Gollum has to be up there.

Otherwise given the price of the license I'd go with NBA Unrivaled way way back. It has a 25 on metacritic. How many games even score that low in general?
 
0
Djehuty said:
i kinda agree on the last point.

i like sonic horizons or whatever it was called, but thats striaght up not what i want out of the series. which is fine
but also i cant help but be a bit snarky when every game that featured the expanded cast and roe was irrefutable shit and then they do this, okay enough on the first try.

being a sonic fan is the true meaning of pain.
Click to expand...
the most pained yeah i have ever had to give tbh
 
0
Djehuty said:
i kinda agree on the last point.

i like sonic horizons or whatever it was called, but thats striaght up not what i want out of the series. which is fine
but also i cant help but be a bit snarky when every game that featured the expanded cast and roe was irrefutable shit and then they do this, okay enough on the first try.

being a sonic fan is the true meaning of pain.
Click to expand...
Just wanna say "sonic horizons or whatever it was called" makes this one of the best posts, open world names really do be that generic
 
AngryAlchemist said:
Just wanna say "sonic horizons or whatever it was called" makes this one of the best posts, open world names really do be that generic
Click to expand...
while I was posting it i realized im not on the sales sight so i dont have to be professional.

tbh i forgot alost evyerhitng about that game other than it looks like "how games will look like in 2013"

im not going ot celebrate that its okay. the bar for a sonic game should be, higher than that, but hey after decades of colsaal failures of gmae deisng, them finally catching up toe the average mario maker player is quite the reassuring sight.

idk, it jsut didnt stick with me.

i think alot of what makes sonic appeal to me is the characters universe and lore and stuff.
so when i saw sonic superstars i was a bit disspoitned that it was jost sonic amy, tails and knuckles.. again yipee. at least thats a start, then mario wonder gameplay got revelaed and i stopped caring

i also heard it had not the greatest update but idrc, the murder of sonic the hedgehog was neough to placeate me, and im optimaistaclly cautios (way more catauiss than optomist) of sonic superstars, im gonna play through wonder first while i waitfor impresisosn to come out.

sorry for the spelling im too tired to fix it.

but overall i jsut feel, frotniers i think and superstars are kinda, a reset across the board and hopefully we can go forward a bit more stable (please)

edit: if you think my sonic rants are bad wait till you see a minecraft rant from me
 
0
Paper Mario Sticker Star

Not only was it a terrible game that basically sent one of my favorite franchises into a death spiral, but it's lead to a never ending war of toxic arguments on any gaming site when Paper Mario as a series has been discussed.
 
Metroid: Other M depending on how many A’s Team Ninja was considered in 2010. It’s hampered by some truly baffling choices. Zig instead of zag on certain things and Other M could have been great though I guess that could be any game in this thread.

Resident Evil 6 has a meat dinosaur. And Chris has almost the same backstory as in Resident Evil 5 except Capcom turned him into a depressed drunkard who lashes out at everyone. Truly weird characterization. I’ll be here all day if I keep dunking on Resident Evil 6.

God of War: Ascension isn’t bad per se, merely forgettable. It’s the worst of the Greek anthology and that includes Ghost of Sparta. The series absolutely needed a reboot well before its actual reboot.
 
Last edited:
Forza Motorsport 7. The worst racing game I ever played, but I still believe in the team so I bought the new Forza Motorsport. Will play this weekend.
 
0
Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival by far.
It didn't launch broken or anything like a lot of the examples above, it was just a fairly polished version of one of the worst ideas any of these companies has ever had.
Toys to life party game with no minigames, only board interactions, that required a tap from an amiibo for every single roll of the die and it launched at SIXTY DOLLARS. That part is easy to forget when it sells secondhand for the cheapest of any Nintendo game I have ever seen. It didn't even come with enough amiibo for 4 people to play as a specific character and offset that price.
Why Nintendo didn't leave it just at Mario Party 10's lame amiibo party mode (which launched earlier that same year!) is beyond me.
 
Thunder84 said:
I don’t think I’d count Platinum as AAA. At the very least, Babylon’s Fall wasn’t AAA.

Sonic 06 is probably the best retro example. Avengers is a good modern one, mind blowing how badly they fumbled such an easy IP.
Click to expand...
When a game from 2006 is a retro example. My man is crushing everyone's backs.
 
While there are definitely more objectively worse games like Heavy Rain and Sonic 06, I just want to say a bit on a more personal note that Final Fantasy XIII-2 was an absolute, unmitigated disaster from start to finish.

The story was pretentious, cringe drivel that made this sort of bizarre whiplash between being so absurd that it tackled its ideas with a comical shrug (the timeline split was being caused by a tomato fart) or smack it and smear it all across the player's face with all the subtlety with five bulldozers of varying size (Lightning is dead but gone but also not really but still but dead but gone but also not really) and it's all spearheaded by Noel Kreiss, a protagonist so poorly written that he was rejected from Kingdom Hearts. Just.. wow.

The battle system is a distilled array of confusing system after confusing system after confusing system with some monster-catching here and some spells there and a QTE or five too much, and the game does such a poor job with easing the player into its mechanics that I watch it all play out with glossed eyes and if I died, I had to force myself to pick up the controller again with all the determination of wanting to do homework, dishes, late-night hours and a few days of watching paint dry, simultaneously. The time travel aspect of it was a tad cool, so a tiny, teensy shred of redeeming factor is being found with the novelty of revisiting an area when you've changed the past to make it look different. But at that point in the game, I was so over it that I wanted nothing more than to pick up the game disc, tear it in half with my bare hands and use it in a game of frisbee only to realize that that incentive was being rendered moot by me having ripped the game disc in half.

And last but not least, the music. Oh my god the music. When that rapper in the battle theme goes "yo, yo, looking for paradoxes" I felt like a part of me just dissolved into the night in a million, tiny pieces of pure pain.
 
I don't care for (western) AAA games in general, but if you were to ask me which one I'd consider the worst, I'd always point to one of those inanely hyped-up pieces of perfect mediocrity that started this whole trend in the first place - games like Heavy Rain (a failed attempt at making "Zodiac meets Mystic River" made by a complete hack and utter creep with a penchant for total contempt for the medium he's working in), Uncharted (honestly, just the fucking worst of the bunch with gameplay that is sloppier and harder to control than a car with a flat tire, Amy Hennig's just straight-up awful writing, combat encounters that are just... annoying but somehow make the backbone of these games and of course, Nathan Drake, a fucking imbecile of a protagonist whose level of douchebaggery is just off the bloody charts), Gears of War (just... meh and don't get me started on how these games ended up being cloned so fucking much and each of those clones was even worse than the original), Grand Theft Auto (🥱), most of what Ubisoft has been making since the first Assassin's Creed (there have been a few bright spots here and there, I do love what they did with the UbiArt engine and that new PoP is looking mighty fine) and so on and so forth.

For Japanese "AAA" - well aside from these Gears of War clones like Quantum Theory (though admittedly I find that one so-bad-its-good again), the one to mention has already been mentioned and that's Metroid: Other M. What a waste of both Nintendo's and Team Ninja's resources.
 
If you consider it as an AAA (it was treated as such by the marketing team, at least), Balan Wonderworld is definitely on the top of my list. It might be one of the worst platformers I've ever played and shot himself in the foot with the "one button" gameplay idea. Honestly I think Sonic '06 is better than it.

I'd also give a shoutout to Duke Nukem Forever, who was a game that severely lacked any direction, was so dated by the time it released, was just not fun to play, and had some awful and distasteful humor.
 
I haven't had time to try Babylon's Fall but my vote would definitely go to another SE game: Dirge of Cerberus.
It's one of the very very very few games I actually hate, even to this day, so many years later.
 
0
AstroOhHey said:
Not sure I'd say it's the absolute worst, but time was NOT kind to that game lmao. Hell even in the same year as far as '''deep/meaningful''' games with a focus on narrative went The Last of Us completely overshadowed it.
Click to expand...
Yeah BI is an Interesting example where the press loved it, it scored really well, but six months later TLOU had completely overshadowed it and a couple years later people were unpacking the atrocious ‘both sides are bad’ nature of the story, to the point where it went from AAA darling on release to forgotten at best and maligned at worst.
 
Not sure if it would be considered AAA in the time but Capcom and Devil May Cry 2.
 
0
Party Sklar said:
If you consider it as an AAA (it was treated as such by the marketing team, at least), Balan Wonderworld is definitely on the top of my list. It might be one of the worst platformers I've ever played and shot himself in the foot with the "one button" gameplay idea. Honestly I think Sonic '06 is better than it.

I'd also give a shoutout to Duke Nukem Forever, who was a game that severely lacked any direction, was so dated by the time it released, was just not fun to play, and had some awful and distasteful humor.
Click to expand...
Agreed on 06 and Balan. I actually enjoyed some aspects of playing 06 sometimes. Balan was like, I was begging for the game to let me do anything interesting with the mechanics, and it just never did. 06 at least had like, the bracelets to play around with, a sandbox to run around and some cool areas/music. It obviously was aggressively broken in a billion ways, but I wasn't bored nearly as much as with Balan Wonderworld.
 
I'll change the question a bit for my answer to fit in but I hated my time with God of War III more than anything else.

A juvenile edgy game that felt dirty to play.
Its controls don't feel good (search for "God of War III double jump". Many people have issues performing basic movement when in motion!), QTEs litter everything and yet are positioned on perimeter of the screen so you don't even get to see action, fatalities are boring with Kratos just beating people, and the anti-hero feels like it was written by someone whos mom took away their Xbox.

I couldn't finish it. There's a section where you push a terrified half-naked lady around that was legit, no irony, the most horrifying moment I've ever seen in a game because I was afraid a rape scene would start. No, but you just shove her into a funny zelda mechanism and crush her to death. I've decided to give devs benefit of a doubt there and went to wiki to hopefully see how in lore she's super evil and had presence in other games but no, she's a sex slave.

Fuck that game. Like, at least glitchy messes like Sonic '06 are funny.
 
I'd say Redfall from Arkane was a big fumble when they mostly released good to great games, not only was the game pretty buggy but it just was a bad "one of those".

And to this day I still maintain the vampires look goofy af which is a bit weird when they're supposed to be the main enemies.
 
Vookatos said:
I'll change the question a bit for my answer to fit in but I hated my time with God of War III more than anything else.

A juvenile edgy game that felt dirty to play.
Its controls don't feel good (search for "God of War III double jump". Many people have issues performing basic movement when in motion!), QTEs litter everything and yet are positioned on perimeter of the screen so you don't even get to see action, fatalities are boring with Kratos just beating people, and the anti-hero feels like it was written by someone whos mom took away their Xbox.

I couldn't finish it. There's a section where you push a terrified half-naked lady around that was legit, no irony, the most horrifying moment I've ever seen in a game because I was afraid a rape scene would start. No, but you just shove her into a funny zelda mechanism and crush her to death. I've decided to give devs benefit of a doubt there and went to wiki to hopefully see how in lore she's super evil and had presence in other games but no, she's a sex slave.

Fuck that game. Like, at least glitchy messes like Sonic '06 are funny.
Click to expand...
Yeah this was just vile
 
Catsylvania said:
God of War: Ascension isn’t bad per se, merely forgettable. It’s the worst of the Greek anthology and that includes Ghost of Sparta. The series absolutely needed a reboot well before its actual reboot.
Click to expand...
this one is throwing me off because Ghost of Sparta is high tier classic GoW and it's Chains of Olympus that's the terrible one
 
Metal Gear Solid 4

A rare kind of game where every time I think about it I dislike it a little bit more. Boggles my mind that anyone thinks it’s better than 5.
 
0
Irene said:
While there are definitely more objectively worse games like Heavy Rain and Sonic 06, I just want to say a bit on a more personal note that Final Fantasy XIII-2 was an absolute, unmitigated disaster from start to finish.

The story was pretentious, cringe drivel that made this sort of bizarre whiplash between being so absurd that it tackled its ideas with a comical shrug (the timeline split was being caused by a tomato fart) or smack it and smear it all across the player's face with all the subtlety with five bulldozers of varying size (Lightning is dead but gone but also not really but still but dead but gone but also not really) and it's all spearheaded by Noel Kreiss, a protagonist so poorly written that he was rejected from Kingdom Hearts. Just.. wow.

The battle system is a distilled array of confusing system after confusing system after confusing system with some monster-catching here and some spells there and a QTE or five too much, and the game does such a poor job with easing the player into its mechanics that I watch it all play out with glossed eyes and if I died, I had to force myself to pick up the controller again with all the determination of wanting to do homework, dishes, late-night hours and a few days of watching paint dry, simultaneously. The time travel aspect of it was a tad cool, so a tiny, teensy shred of redeeming factor is being found with the novelty of revisiting an area when you've changed the past to make it look different. But at that point in the game, I was so over it that I wanted nothing more than to pick up the game disc, tear it in half with my bare hands and use it in a game of frisbee only to realize that that incentive was being rendered moot by me having ripped the game disc in half.

And last but not least, the music. Oh my god the music. When that rapper in the battle theme goes "yo, yo, looking for paradoxes" I felt like a part of me just dissolved into the night in a million, tiny pieces of pure pain.
Click to expand...
FF13 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I never played the sequels. 13-2 sounds dreadful from the way you’ve described it.
 
Red Monster said:
FF13 is one of my favorite games of all time, but I never played the sequels. 13-2 sounds dreadful from the way you’ve described it.
Click to expand...
XIII-2 is actually one of the best games in the franchise if you want to engage with the combat systems. There tends to be a pretty stark divide in people who are willing to indulge in its bullshit and those that aren't, so YMMV.
 
0
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom