My most disappointing games of 2021

These games were either boring, failed in concept wise or just didn’t survive long enough. As I am more into online games so is the list all about online games.

Outriders

It’s a coop game what was meant for people who enjoy single player games. So it is basically a game that requires always internet connection and can be played with up to ~4 players (Don’t remember exactly), but was designed to be played alone. I mean you can play all content alone if you want.

…but I wanted to play with others and that is where the game failed. It was hard to find other players and when you got matched you got these boring combos where most players were playing same role. Because playing more of supportive role or tank, you were just handicapping your team. If I was fan of single player games I prolly would enjoyed it, maybe. But as I am online games oriented player and play for online aspect, this game wasn’t that much of a fun.

World War 3

Game that is called “more real Battlefield” or “If EA made good Battlefield game”. Truth is this is Bollywood version of Battlefield.

Initially the game failed to launch and was discontinued. Then My.games bought the game and is now trying relaunch the game.

Concept wise the game resembles Battlefield series, but there is nothing hardcore or closer to milsim. It fast paced fps with tons of audio and balancing issues.

Also when you buy it in Steam and run it from there, it will launch 2nd launcher what downloads the game. The time you have that launcher open steam will count that as play time. Means if you can’t download and try it without going over 2 hour limit, you can’t use steam “2 hour refund” policy. Isn’t that convenient. Luckily this game is going to be free to play, when it is released. Just right now if you want to play it, you have to buy it.

New World

No surprise on this one. We saw it year or two ago that this game is going to be bad. Sure it sold many copies and time to time still has 100 000 concurrent players.

But what an mess this game has been. There are tons of bugs and exploits. When they release patch they fix 1 exploit and introduce another one. Some of these problems were brought up by players in testing phase and they just didn’t bother fixing them. Basically Amazon Game Studios used Ostrich algorithm. It’s strategy in computer science were you ignore the problem because you think it is going to be rare and there is no point fixing it until it is starting to lose money for you.

Even if New World would been super polished game I would still been disappointed in it. Because it problem is on conceptual level. The endgame is just too boring. I am not going into details. The game just is bad and that is why it has lost over 900 000 players and still losing them.

Hood: Outlaws & Legends

This one had really interesting concept. It was supposed to be game where you goal is to steal valuables from castle vault. To make things challenging you had opposite team made of players trying to do same. Addition to that you had NPC players that you could assassinate or just avoid. It was up to you. Also you had 4 classes to choose from. That looked so good, but the execution of the game was so bad that right now there is average 13 players playing it.

In short the game turned into team deathmatch game rather than game where you tried to steal valuables. People just ran past NPC not caring about alerting them and just started battling with opposite player team. Also you could do 90% of the game- find the key, find the safe, not alert npc, carry the chest, winch up most of the chest, but if enemy did the last 10%- winch up the last part, they would win the game. See how flawed that is? No wonder players stopped caring about playing objective.

Crowfall

This was the most disappointing game for me in 2021. New World was bad, but I knew already year and half ago that it is going to be that bad. Hood: Outlaws & Legends was bad, but I never waited that game. I just saw it one day and bought it. Crowfall was game that I followed years. I saw magic in its concept and I knew PVP oriented MMO will not be played by millions, but I never thought I will stop playing it after completing tutorial.

Crowfall tutorial is basically first 30 levels where you spend your time questing and crafting some basic things. It takes around ~6 hours to complete.

You can skip that by buying character with real money from cash shop. See the problem in that. On first 30 level you don’t have real idea of what talent are good. So you choose them based on feeling. So you end up with character with mixed talents and generally that is not good. To reset your talent tree you need to buy monthly membership or spend days farming gold. It is faster to delete character and spend 6 hours again in tutorial. See how bad that is.

For experiment I tried to ask refund. I was fairly sure there is no way they are going to give me one. I would been surprised if they did. I just wanted to see if they are man enough to do that. In forums when I tried to contact costumer service about refund they didn’t even bother replaying. No surprise in there. After that I went to publisher. They had form for refund. I filled it up and the answer came back negative with answer along the lines- You request was denied as your game Crowfall is not refundable.

Another interesting thing is that Crowfall dev ran $10 000 prize pool tournament while game wasn’t even out. On release when player numbers were so down that it was hard to find activities to do (Remember it was PvP oriented game) they told that it was all intentional. Their idea of release was that it was just testing and then comes real release where they spend money on marketing. And so the game died, basically day one. At one point they started hiding player numbers. I guess the numbers were just so bad. By now the game has been sold. Half the dev team is creating another game and other half is sticking with Crowfall.