End of Year 2014 – Jimizzle’s Biggest Duds

As a new part of my wrap-up for 2014 I wanted to make a new end of year category: the biggest disappointment of 2014. This isn’t necessarily the worst game of the year, just the ones that let me down the most. I limited this and my top of 2014 to games I’ve played, so if I didn’t play it I didn’t consider it.

That said, here we go!

Biggest Disappointment: Wildstar

Logo owned by NCSoft, linked from the Wildstar Wikipedia page

If you watched our episode where I played the Wildstar beta you’ll recall I wasn’t particularly impressed by the game. I mentioned a few times that I was really hyped for the game before it came out, making sure I saw what I could on it at the past two PAX Easts and following any developments online. The more I saw about the game the weaker that hype became, and when I finally got my hands on it during the beta it only solidified my decision to pass on the game. That’s not to say it was necessarily BAD, just that it had nothing going for it to convince me to drop $60 plus its subscription fee.

Fast forward a few months and the playerbase dwindled due to bugs, too many hurdles to leap over to get to the “fun” parts, and whatever else is easily found online for why there aren’t as many people playing the game as there were during launch. There have been a lot of changes to the game since its launch, such as the 40-man raids being scaled down for fewer people since hardly anyone was actually doing them, but the game is definitely on shaky ground. It isn’t dead, but it’s not exactly excelling either. Maybe 2015 will be the start of its foray into the F2P market where many games have managed to bounce back from the brink of destruction.

Runner-Up Disappointment: Destiny

Image owned by Bungie and Activision, linked from the Destiny Wikipedia page
It’s a bit of an on-going story, but I had to put Destiny on here. We can skip the discussion about the hype surrounding Destiny, because that reached levels no game could hope to reach. While I enjoyed the gunplay and PvP for the injection of old school Halo nostalgia, the more I got into Destiny the more “meh” it became. The story wasn’t pulling me in at all, things felt unbalanced in PvP, and the overuse of RNG (i.e. random drops) really pushed me away. It sucked going through several PvP matches in a row where me or my team played very well and we walked away empty-handed while someone who went 0-12 got a legendary weapon. Feels bad man.

Bungie has been working to improve, listening to the feedback people have so generously given them, and they have made a lot of improvements. Unfortunately it sounds like the latest expansion introduced another list of issues that makes me glad I decided not to buy the season pass after my gripes with the base game. Putting too much emphasis on new currency that’s scarce and locking non-expansion players out of daily and weekly missions isn’t a good call. They made some major fixes once, and they can do it again, but the way things have been going I’m not going to be sticking around to find out.

Thankfully I only had two items I really wanted to put here, as there was a lot of good that came out this year, or at least not a lot of “Holy shit why did I buy this?” My next post will be my TOP of 2014, or “Holy shit you SHOULD buy this.”

– Jimizzle

All images used in this post are property of their respective owners

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