I'am sure we all have at least one game that we regret spending any money on it. What's yours?

In my case it's Ghost Recon Wildlands. I know many of you here like this one quite a bit. For me it's really, really bad. Non existent or cheating (depending on the situation AI), Bolivia maybe looks nice but it doesn't feel alive at all, boring and comic type plot with comic type characters and bosses that can take up dozens of bullets, awfull driving and flying mechanics. I tried to like it, spent almost 20h playing but it was no fun at all. There's more Just Cause in it than Ghost Recon and i don't even like Just Cause. 45$ down the drain with this one.

The most recent regret would be GTA 5 for PC. I know it's extremely popular and successful. I've tried a few times to give it a real go, but I just find the dialogue so over the top juvenile.

Not really so bad, but of all the open-world type action/RPG mixes in the last time I just can't get into Mad Max. Maybe it's because I just can't connect with the main character.

The only reason I bought GR: Wildlands was for the cooperative MP. I knew from the very beginning that this was not going to be a realistic military shooter. Worst recent game purchase for me was Galactic Civ 3. It just put me to sleep due to its uninspired gameplay.

The original Arma, so buggy and just couldn't get it to run decently on a good rig. It was like Mike Tyson, Highest of highs or lowest of lows, no in between. Was all excited to build a brand new sli machine and the game ran like balls, one card, two cards and on a mates new single card rig as well. We kept coming back to it over a few months but just had to ditch it as a bad investment.

Your experience with ArmA is strange Ajay. It ran smoothly on my Core 2 Duo and my solo GPU back to 2007-2009. About bugs, it depends on how the missions were written by their respective authors. If they wrote it well, it was not so buggy.

It's not a bad game, but I just can't step in the story, and the hacking things of Watch Dogs. Another type of game, Silent Hunter 5 was a disapointment too.

I was pretty angry about the stand-alone expansion "Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna". Gameplay was ok for an ARPG and I still need it as source for the Ultima remake mod to Ultima VI Project and Ultima 5: Lazarus.

But the writing for Legends of Aranna is abysmal bad: Your character's ancestors commited genocide on a race of sentient reptiloids, and now that you are stumbling throug the levels you are massacring their remaining descendants in the thousands - just because they are obstacles. As if the game creators put no thought in the who, what and why.

As I said before it made me angry.

I was core2 duo as well, e6600, standard game, no missions or mods. If i remember it was fairly unpolished release, maybe it got better down the line? but we moved on after about three months of trying. It's funny because a lot of the original bugs are still in the DayZ standalone more than ten years later

Killing Floor 2 without a doubt.I have 900 hours in Killing Floor and only 10 in the sequel.

Flatout 3. Bought as a bundle on Steam that came with the whole series (although I owned the big box versions of 1 and 2 years ago).What a pile of crap 3 is. A joke of a game.

Honourable mentions go to Gal Civ 2 (although to be fair that was my first foray into a 4X game and I discovered I hate them).

ALL of my DCS modules. Should have learned my lesson after the first I bought,but no,I went on and bought 4 more.

I tend to avoid duff purchases nowadays thanks to the 'alternative demos' available.

Wow... at least I can say positive things about DCS A10C and DCS BS2...

In recent memory I'll say Wolfenstein :The New Order. Took longer to download than the time I spent playing it.

Many liked it and the screenshots looked great. And maybe I would have started to like it. But I disliked the opening 20 minutes so much that I uninstalled and never gave it another go. Paid full price for it too I think.

It seems to be a common theme of PC gamers buying games that they never install and/or play. Maybe it's wishful thinking? Thinking that you'll have the time and interest to play these games but then the reality turns out differently?

None that I can think of, really.

I never pre-order, never buy "early access", remain patient for the first couple of days/weeks post-release, read reviews (both professional and customer), and watch a couple of gameplay vids on YT. That tends to weed out 99% of the stinkers.

[also helps to stay in touch with former colleagues and contacts in "the industry"]

Good point Jayhawk. I've never pre-ordered a game nor participated in early access or kickstarters, which I suppose could reduce the chances of getting a game I don't like. Matter of fact, the only game/sim related thing I've ever pre-ordered was the Cougar stick.

Not to derail the thread, but I think early access is a dangerous trend in this buisness, allowing companies to generate revenue irregardless of the quality of the finished product, if it ever gets finished at all.

I've paid for early access just once (ArmA 3) and I was not disappointed. I also hardly ever pre-order except for rare circumstances where I just know without a doubt that I'll like the game (TW: Attila, Sniper Elite 4).

Pre-purchase IL2-BoS.
(but hey, I got a gold bar at a forum I never visit)
I need to learn the ways of Jayhawk.

W3 was the worst buy for me because now my life is ruined and my waking hours spent on this game or in the forums. Plus it has now ruined my play for other games on my list and my desire to buy anything new knowing/fearing it will not come up to W3 expectations.

That's an awesome compliment for Witcher 3 Warbirds.


W3 is hands down the best RPG I've ever played and I plan on replaying the entire saga sometime later this year.

Age of Sail II (2001) It was named as the worst game of the year by two different PC gaming magazines.
Stronghold 3 (2011) After the first brilliant release and a lessor second full 3D offering, the 3rd simply sucked because it was poorly designed and buggy to boot.

Both highly anticipated and both buggy and disappointing at release. Patched numerous times and every patch broke as much as it fixed. Within a month, both pretty much abandoned by the developer.

Those taught me to not buy at release and wait for reviews

Cheers

I also made the mistake of buying Age of Sail II. I put about 3 hours into it before I uninstalled.

Operation Flashpoint on the original Xbox. It was HORRIBLE.
Graphically, looked like a PS1 game. Audio was like an Atari 2600. It was horrible.
When your soldier ran in 3rd person a friend of mine noted that it looked like he was facing away pleasuring himself. LOL

I actually returned it to Gamestop the next day. They were helpful back then if they knew you.

So many bust games over the years.

But I think "X Rebirth" (the sickening) is probably the worst in modern time. After that game I have never prordered anything.

You should have bought it for PC. A game like OFP doesn't really lend itself well for the console.

At the risk of getting on SimHQ's blacklist I'll have to say Elite Dangerous.
The space exploration thing, the "guilds" or whatnots, the fancy tech and the latest upgrades have left me terribly cold.
Something did not click, that simple.

Cheers,
Slug

Probably Back to Baghdad, way back in the day. The graphics were amazing, but there was no multiplayer option and no AI wingmen like Falcon 3.0 had, either. The manual that shipped with it had absolutely NO instructions for the radar, and anyone who's played F4 or F4AF knows you're not going to just pick it up by trial and error. By the time the detailed manual came out - at extra cost - I had no desire to bother with it any more. I'd probably gone back to F3 and Tornado and was having much more fun with their older graphics.

Didn't have a gaming rig then. It worked out, AA came out a week later, a port of the pc game. Wasn't perfect, but it was still really good just the same. Played that for a long time.

I pre-ordered once, and it was a mistake. My personal policy is never to buy anything in Early Access. I would name a game a failure for me only if it fails to grab my interest in the first couple of hours or if I do not get all my money's worth out of it. With the current money back policies of most digital outlets, it is easy to correct any judgement errors regarding expectations to enjoy a game. (Which has become another personal policy - never buy anything without a money back warranty).

Free DC!

I pissed 30 bucks grass cutting money down the drain on that stinker, all because my friend who was with me at the store suggested I buy it.

+1

True, but that's mostly for DCS World. I pre-ordered Guild Wars 2, MechWarrior Online, and MechWarrior Tactics. On the beta testing, I played the hell out of those games but had to admit they weren't for me or what I was looking for and got a refund for my money. I also pre-ordered Steel Division Normandy and do not regret it one bit! I am on the Kickstarter backer for BattleTech as well and so far love the game. So not all pre-order stuff is bad... but there are doozys out there. X Rebirth comes to mind; so glad I avoided that one. The hype was very strong there.

Worst for PC was Outpost by the old Sierra house in the mid 1990s.

I think that was the first PC game (at least that I can recall if not in history) that was surround by incredible marketing and journalistic hype and so miserably failed to deliver.

If you don't know, it was basically a turn-based Simcity in a Sci-Fi setting. It was supposed to have intensive focus on resource management (which in honesty it did), advanced planning, and AI. And it was supposed to have been created with state-of-the-art scientific consultation on exo-planet colonization.

The end result was an ultra-buggy half-baked game that had entire portions of it missing from the launch product and were--with great audacity--even acknowledged as being missing in the manual--this is in the days of physical giant manuals--and promised in future updates. This was also in the days prior to mainstream internet so the idea of post-release patches was still pretty exotic.

In addition to the above it had a preposterous premise for off-world colonization--and an equally silly opening game. All presented in crude early PC CGI. Gameplay, when it worked, was equally poorly thought out with the potential to run down resource levels where the player would basically be stuck in a city building situation where nothing could be performed and no options to recover.

I don't think X Rebirth is the mess it was at launch.Since update 4.0 it's improved a lot. In fact it's one of a handful of games I still have currently installed.

You guys dont even understand the definition of bad game purchase lol.

Bought The Stomping Lands on kickstarter. It went on steam for maybe a week then steam took it down because it was so bad. Then the developer and publisher got into a dispute over payment and the artists took their assets and left leaving the game in limbo.

Latest News on Steam
It's been a long, slow, and ugly process, but it seems certain now that The Stomping Land, the multiplayer survival game set in a land of dinosaurs that raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter, has been abandoned. After losing contact with developer Alex "Jig" Fundora in late 2014, modeler Vlad Konstant...

I've got several games like that. Spin Tires almost went that route.

Payday 2, I know some of you guys like this game but the single player ai is horrible and kept getting constantly kicked from multiplayer.

Battlecruiser 3000AD.
For anyone who hasn't heard of it, the idea was a space combat exploration diplomacy game where you control a battlecruiser, and can manage lots of things, leave it up to the AI, explore a fully functioning universe, and so on. In reality, no. Just no. Awful micromanaging of every single crewmember, bad graphics, a universe consisting of less life than Frontier Elite 2, and awful controls as well.

Ah, Derek Smart. Who can forget such a colorful personality?

I haven't heard that name since Frugalsworld.com days.

I'd probably say the same. It makes the mistake many old MUD RPGs made - by adding complexity it just feels like work.

I love the setting, but MP seems to consist of waiting for a parking space or getting dusted by a 1,000,000MW beam laser.

I bought an early access game a few years ago called Nether. Back when I bought it they did not Steam had not instituted refunds yet. I bought it for $40(shame on me/never again). I was under the impression that for an EA game it was really underway and polished. I could not even play it once I downloaded it. The developers had one of those stupid setups where you had to go through their 3rd party site to create and account and password to play instead of just through Steam. There were all kinds of problems with their own site not only being confusing but failing to properly work. You'd never get a password generated or it would not work, "please try again later". One dev did try to help and gave some of us an email to contact him with problems but I never, ever, ever could get connected to play the game. So I don't even know if the game would have worked or not. With nothing that I could do I got fed up and put it away. To this day I still have not played this game that I paid 40$ for. It left such a bad taste in my mouth I don't even want to attempt it now (though I know its been updated over the years) because if it fails to work AGAIN because of non-existing or non-functioning 3rd party account and password nonsense I think I'll truly crack a nut.

Another regret was StarForge or how I like to call it StarForgery. I don't want to even talk about this one.

Space and Medieval Engineers. These seem to be in perpetual development for years and years and even though they are not finished with one, the start another. I've gotten little to no enjoyment out of SE and even less in ME. Poor performance and no direction. SE is probably better since last I played but I just don't have a desire to try at this point and the same goes for ME. If I could I'd get my money back.

I can't recall right now disappointments from the old days. With only so many games I tried to enjoy to the fullest of whatever I had. If I'd buy something I usually spent a very long time thinking about it, reading about it and then mulling over a choice. Also in the late 90s early 2000s Electronic Boutiques still had a large variety of PC games and they also paid cash for trade-ins on PC games as well as console games. So if I ended up picking up a booger, I could usually without much headache either get some actually money back on it or switch it out for something else and not have to live with it.

Same here. I got it during a Steam sale and did give it well over 100 hours before I just got bored to tears with it, so I guess it wasn't a total loss. I was playing it with nothing more than an old Sidewinder joystick and realized to get any more efficient, I was going to have to invest in eye or head tracking plus probably some voice command software. It's still on my hard drive, but I might as well remove it since I don't think I'll ever play it again.

Cheers

Interesting all the hate for Elite, though, I agree with some of it--especially the boredom. The game is a million miles across but a slip of paper deep. I got 500 hours or so out of it, due to me both buying it upon release and choosing to forgo the boring life of a trader or bounty hunter and jumped straight into robbing, err, ahem, taxing human players in my lowly Viper, and slowly worked my way up to a Clipper. Who says crime doesn't pay? It paid me! Haha!

But then the player pool in Open started to dry up, all the wimps and wusses went Solo or worse, Mobius(talk about sausage party) and alas, robberies were far more wait than rob.

500 hours wasn't bad, I can't complain, and had some of the most thrilling fun online ever while it lasted. But, without the people, and the risk they bring, the game doesn't have much left to give.

Yeah, it's an odd one. It's beautifully realised, but beyond the rare moment of excitement before annihilation, the gameplay is like doing the end of year accounts.

I often don't regret buying a game as much as I do investing hours of my time before coming to the conclusion that it's crap. In those terms No Man's Sky is the worst offender, without any doubt. I've never felt so mislead by the pre-release hype and let down so much by the result. A budget indie game dressed up as AAA.

I'm another one who got bored with Elite. Loved the setting and the flying, but the lack of depth in the gameplay made the grind intolerable after a while. The way new stuff - like the aliens I occasionally read about - are added every now and then feels very arbitrary, but I can understand why that's necessary from a development point of view.

GR Wildlands was bought in the recent sale and is the only game I've ever requested a refund for. That might not have turned out to be too bad, but initial impressions were that it wasn't worth my trouble finding out.

Never pre-ordered anything, no kick starter etc. Sucker Bet if you ask me....

Kinda PO'd about the direction Eve online took. They pretty much mismanaged at least half their customer base away.

Still skill training for free but down to only about 100B net worth. Haven't undocked a ship in months.

Might go full pirate whenever I have the time to play...dunno.

The only game I participated in early access was ARMA 3. I new there was no way I would ever not buy it.

Holy crap, I forgot about Nether lol. I played it for a bit then just shelved it and never looked back. It wasnt bad but it wasnt good either.

Two "worsts" for me. Only one is a sim.

1) Tabula Rasa - I bought this JUST before the announcement the game would be closing. I was so disgusted I never even bothered to install it. I never even opened the box.
2) Mechwarrior Online - I bought a Founder's package, hoping they would deliver the game they promised. PGI "released" the game while it was still in beta testing. They started charging for ingame items, which was (and should ALWAYS be) unheard of. After a couple years, I got disgusted and left, never to return. Most of the features they promised STILL weren't in the game. I have less than one hour actual ingame time.



-Irish

In terms of game itself - CFS3. After months of screwing with it trying to make it run even half decent I finally BURNED the discs - as in combustion.

But the actual worst was a DRM incident - F.E.A.R. Never even got to play it. I got flat out ripped off on that one.

It was around that time I finally learned (and not just with PC games, but with almost anything in life) to never buy "version 1.0" of anything, and never be an early adopter.

I was a "beta tester" for a LOT of things up until my mid thirties.

Now I wait. My time on this earth is running out, and I refuse to spend my precious time (and money!) on headaches. My money only goes where a great reputation has already been established by the people willing to go through what I used to go through.

The two worst games that stand out for me were:

Battlecruiser 3000, at least it was free and even at that it was a price too high, never ever got the thing to run.

X-Rebirth (Stillbirth?) It's one redeeming feature was the nice music.

Cliffs of Dover. With it's pedigree and hype, caused so much outrage when first released.
There was another Flight Sim that hijacked a reputable name, Jane's Fighter something; so awful my mind has blocked the trauma of remembering the title.

Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters? I dodged that one luckily.

Cliffs of Dover was no doubt a huge disappointment. I uninstalled it after about 7-8 hours of game time.

Ugh,I think I paid around £25 for my copy. I don't understand why DS has a hate campaign against Star Citizen.I know I like to moan about Star Citizen a little,but when I look at what that gave me for my £55,even in its current state,it's head and shoulders above the POS DS delivered.

I would suggest reinstalling and toggle the teamfusion beta. The tf beta improves it a lot.

Isn't the teamfusion beta almost exclusively for head to head MP. I don't even think it adds the cooperative mode that the IL-2 series had.

I got my copy as a freebie with a Creative Video Blaster DVD drive and MPG video card, those I still have and they still work unlike the POS BC30k. I remember the hype around the BC game at the time and it was one of those it can do it all: Fly a spaceship; run and gun on the ground and fly around in between, great idea but sadly the product was not up to the hype.

SC does have it's own problems, but as you say, it is a better game now than BC ever was. I think DS' problem is that Chris Roberts is doing what he can not, SC is what DS wanted to make but didn't have the skill, his one talent is trolling.

Maybe you are thinking of Jane's Attack Squadron. It went through several developers and publishers and took so long to get to market that it was in shambles by that time and dated looking to boot. I had forgotten about it until you mentioned a Jane's title. I gave it a go, but after 10 or 12 hours of buggy play with questionable flight physics, I gave up.

CFS 3, already mentioned by Zamzow, was another horrible release--especially since version 1 and 2 were decent. It's amazing that modders were able to take the engine and turn it into OFF.

I also bought Battlecruiser 3000 and couldn't get it to run. This was back in the day with Electronics Boutique was still a business and would take returns on PC games for store credit. I took it back the day after I bought it.


Cheers

Ah I forgot Jagdverband '44: Screaming Eagles. A friend gave me that and I never spoke to him again!

haha priceless.
We have a winner!

Back then Sierra had a 30 day exchange policy. I mailed back my Outpost to Sierra and had them exchange it for Aces of the Deep.

Bad game purchase for me recently was Miscreated. Was watching a twitch streamer play it and he said it was "totally worth it" so I bought it. It's just like DayZ and is pretty much a clone of DayZ.

It does, but as much awesome work as they have done(a lot!), the AI leaves much to be desired.

Around here someplace is a video of two guys that used to work at Sierra in customer service, being pulled in on their weekends to be used in the cut screen videos and telling the history of it. They talked alot about the 30 day garrentee. If I remember right Outpost came out right after Sierra was sold to a conglonerate, so they didn't have any control over it and it got pushed out the door.

Many years ago, my brother found a PC game called "Blood Bowl". Near as i can recall, it was basically a board game of American Football or something vaguely like that, but instead of fit young men, the players were Orcs and Goblins and such.

I think.

This was back in the DOS days. When computers actually were quite pricey.

So after weeks of my brother's pleading, I went to install it...

and...

Where the heck did your brother find that CD? I hope it wasn't some street corner seller!

That game is still around, and seems like it has good reviews too.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/58520/Blood_Bowl_Legendary_Edition/

That was it! *Shudder*

I bought this one and it was bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftwaffe_Commander

Said he got it from a guy on his university campus... I think what happened is they put a drive-wiping virus on a blank CD and then did a water transfer of the "Blood Bowl" logo.... I don't believe this CD ever came from the factory where the proper game was being made.


Buuuuut... to me when I hear the words "worst game purchase" that one will never leave my mind!

This may be a little off-topic but you mentioning the 'drive-wiping' virus,have you seen those flash drives that destroy the device they are plugged into? At worst the device is hosed,but usually the USB port(s) and rendered useless.

Reading this thread, I note to myself that I haven't bought anything that I would call a really bad game in years. Some I may not have cared for but nothing actually terrible. I imagine there are more bad games now than back in the earlier days of gaming due to digital distribution practices--the continuous dump of games onto Steam being a prime example. But the easy availability of reviews/opinions currently available lets the customer be more informed now than ever before. Previously it was only gaming mags that did reviews and coverage and timing across the breadth of gaming was spotty--not so much now.

I played the hockey version on Sega Genesis. It was hilarious. LOL
Very little to do with hockey.

When it comes to sports games it's exclusively auto racing for me (mostly Formula 1 and rally racing). I haven't played a NASCAR racing sim since 2005 when "NASCAR SimRacing" came out.

I got that in a 4 pack with some other sim games. It was like having bonus dvd content where the directory just screams at you until you shut the movie off.

iRacing has the best Nascar right now but its MP only. No idea why they stripped out the Nascar 2003 AI code I'd love to be able to race any track with AI and some friends instead of the dirtbags online.

Yeah, MP with human opponents only and the a la carte pricing scheme made "iRacing" a DOA game for me.

I hear you. I just want iRacing content with coop and AI without a monthly fee and without individual content fees. FFS why cant a game company make that game? Instead they try to make Nascar appeal to non sim fans by jazzing it up and making it crashy. Those people dont #%&*$# want a Nascar game... They will never buy a nascar game. Why are you trying to sell games to people who dont even play your game! Make it for the hardcore sim racers where there are hundreds of thousands of who would buy the game!

Why? WHY!!!!!

They are marketing them as if they were mobile games. There is a NASCAR Heat game on Steam that is $30, and currently has $82 in DLC items. Mixed reviews too.

Yup, I passed on Heat due to the bad reviews. Apparently it was way too much like a console game and too little like an actual PC simulator.

Its junk too. The physics are a joke, there is no proper control customization and the AI doesnt even recognize where the player is so they crash into you on the straight. But all dem console players obviously jumping at a chance to play nascar!

I've bought many, many budget games over the years. I can't even remember them all. One of the last one's I bought was Sniper: Art of Victory by City Interactive. Pretty terrible. I tried, really tried but I could not even past the first mission as towards the end it was bugged or had some slightly obscured enemy that could not be reached.

Not all of them are so bad though. City Interactive has gotten a little better and I stress the "little" with things like the Ghost Warrior series. They still aren't great but at least 1&2 are significantly better than Art of Victory.

Another budget game that I remember liking was "Deadly Dozen" and also the "Conflict" series.

MAG for ps3.

Massive Action Game...over 100 people in a server...made by the SOCOM Team. What a terrible game, returned it about 3 days later. Battlefield/CoD at the time series were so much better. Only time I've ever bought a game just off hype...wait...no I bought Destiny day 1 as well and just couldn't get into it. I wanted it to be just like Halo. It was not. I hate grindey games unless they are RPGs with good storylines.

Battlefield 3 season pass or whatever they call it, no server host those maps,battlefield 4.......and i'm not even talking about the garbage release,the game itself is not fun, you can clearly see they left the good map ideas for the DLCs and leveling up is a piss,how come i need to have kills on the gun to unlock attachments for it ? a store i can buy with xp would be better
Recently Just cause 3......its just not as fun as the second game, and the landscape is boring, maybe i got spoiled by the diferent biomes of desert,snow and rainforest in the second game but there is not much other then the best explosions you will find in a game,i'm dreading to follow campaign,i already freed most of the islands and i didnt even bother to play the 4th mission yet....

All the tychoon and RTS games i bough in the last 3 years cos as interesting as they are, i just dont have the time to invest in them so i will never play them like patrician,wich is kinda civ like + age of empires with pirates, and Wargames RTS of the cold war.......i miss being a teenager......
Why those games released 12 years too late ? what kinda of God would do such a thing !!!!