MMNTech GOTY Awards 2021: Biggest Disappointments

Ho ho ho, it’s that time of year again. The time of year where we sit around a roaring fire with a cup of hot cocoa, and remember all the disappointing games we got this past year. Actually, 2021 wasn’t really a bad year in gaming overall. We had some pretty solid titles with very little in the way of controversies or outright stinkers. That’s not to say there weren’t any let downs, so lets get this “award” show on the road, shall we?

Dishonourable Mention goes to….

Cyberpunk 2077

Since we usually release our Biggest Disappointments at the start of December, Cyberpunk just squeaked in under our radar. Much like a particularly rotten silent fart that hits you when you least suspect it. The whole launch was an utter disaster on a magnitude we haven’t seen in years. Made especially disappointing by the fact that CD Projekt Red was the darling of the industry before it all went down. A shining beacon of how to do gaming right, choked out by a ladyboy’s massive dong. (Am I still allowed to say ladyboy?)

Nearly a year later and the studio still hasn’t fixed the game’s numerous bugs. 8th gen console ports still run like a rusty chainsaw. Now they have the gall to be talking about DLC? I think it’s pretty clear at the point that Cyberpunk was never going to be finished no matter how many times it was delayed. It really should have been cancelled. Cut your losses and save everyone some massive headaches. It’s going to take a lot of work to regain even a fraction of the goodwill they lost. I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to pull it off. Who knows, maybe with the next Witcher game.

Call of Duty 2042 & Call of Duty: Vanguard

Another dishonourable mention worth noting are the twin disasters that were Battlefield 2042 and Call or Duty: Vanguard. There’s really not a heck of a lot to say about these games other than they’re a rushed mess with a lot of popular features missing. It seems like this may have been the final straw for series fans, given sales numbers. But hey, if you’re still addicted to CoD and Battlefield at this point in time, I can’t help you.

The “all you had to do was remake the damn game, CJ” Award goes to…

Grand Theft Auto Trilogy “Definitive” Edition

We love it when our favourite classics get re-releases years later. It gives developers a chance to update the visuals, fix bugs and mechanical issues, and add all sorts of other goodies that weren’t possible on original hardware. Take the two outstanding “Kiwami” remakes of the PS2 Yakuza games. They took something that had aged terribly, and turned them into modern day masterpieces. All for $25 a pop.

Then there was Rockstar’s attempt to remaster the classic GTA trilogy from those same PS2 days. Games which many hold in high regard for their innovative gameplay and influence on the industry as a whole. And…, well, for all the resources Rockstar has, to call the end product amateurish would be an understatement. Seriously, this looks like something a first year dev student slapped together in Unity over a weekend.

The red flags were there early on. Sure, the trailer looked okay, if the new cartoony art style was a bit off putting. But 2K never showed any gameplay, nor sent out review copies. And for good reason. The game is a janky mess with ugly NPC models, misaligned textures, broken effects (just put “GTA definitive rain” into YouTube), numerous spelling mistakes, and frame rate issues across all platforms. Though the Switch seems to have been hit especially hard in the latter category, bordering on unplayable. Which is a real shame, because Switch fans had been wanting a GTA game for years. This is what they got? It’s like they didn’t do any QA testing at all. The three classics both look and play worse than their PS2 originals. All for the full retail price of $60 USD.

Adding insult to injury, Rockstar removed older versions of the game from digital storefronts. So unless you have the original PS2 discs, or hit the high seas, you’re stuck with this version. This is one Clucken Bell combo that even Big Smoke wouldn’t order.

The Island of Misfit Emulation award goes to…

Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack

No YouTube clip quite sums up the Christmas experience like that notorious Nintendo 64 unwrapping video. Where an extremely enthusiastic young man tears open the box screaming the console’s name with joy at the top of his lungs. Unfortunately for those looking to re-visit those glory days of pixelated polys, Santa Switch’s new Expansion Pack delivered a lump of coal instead.

At launch, the service was… rough, to put it mildly. Sure the games were perfectly playable. However, the emulation was substandard, even compared to Nintendo’s past efforts on the Wii and Wii U. Many games were missing effects like fog and reflections. One notable example is the iconic boss fight against Shadow Link in Ocarina of Time. The room makes heavy use of these effects to give the battle a dream like quality. However, their complete absence ruins the whole aesthetic, and makes it look rather silly. Other games suffered from graphical issues and glitches, while running worse than they did on original hardware. N64 emulation from third parties is very mature at this point, so many were left wondering how Nintendo themselves could put out something so sloppy.

Adding insult to injury, the Expansion Pack costs an additional $30 USD a year on top of the price paid for the already lacklustre Switch Online experience. And all it does is give access to a small, drip fed collection of Genesis and N64 titles, along with a single DLC for Animal Crossing. With NSO’s price inching closer to what Xbox Live and PS+ charge, many are wondering exactly what Nintendo is doing with that money.

“The Devil and Daniel Webster’s sexual harassment suit” award goes to…

Diablo II Resurrected

Oh, it wouldn’t be an MMNTech biggest disappointments list without Activision-Blizzard. It’s like our own little holiday tradition. I think it’s fair to say that 2021 hasn’t exactly been kind to the company. Blizzard has been rocked by harassment allegations from numerous employees. Something which has caused massive ripples throughout the industry, and has been met with a combination of anger and mockery from gamers. With the amount of back pedling they’ve been doing, they might actually be the first team to win the Tour de France entirely in reverse.

Then there’s Diablo II Resurrected. The original game is an absolute legend among early e-sports circles, so there were big expectations riding on the remake. It was what really cemented Blizzard’s place in the industry as a major player in online gaming. And, well, modern Blizzard absolutely blew it.

As I was writing this at the beginning of November, Diablo II Resurrected was sitting with a score of 2.5 on Metacritic. The online mode, arguably its single biggest selling point, was plagued with numerous server issues and outages. Even weeks after launch. While most players praised the graphics updates, others complained about numerous bugs and an wonky control scheme. Which made the overall experience somehow worse than the now 21 year old original. (Hmm, seems to be a bit of a trend this year.) Others called it a cheap cash grab. Proving that it’s often best to just to leave old classics in the past. Don’t you guys have old PCs?

And the “winner” of the MMNTech GOTY Awards Biggest Disappointment of 2021 goes to…

The chip shortage

Even if you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed how hard it is to buy new consoles or PC components. If stores aren’t sold out, they’re selling them for grossly inflated prices. Far more than what any reasonable person would be willing to pay for them. That is if you can actually snag anything before the scalpers get to them first. And we have our good friend the CCPVirus to thank for that. Yes, I will keep calling it that to remind you who’s responsible for it.

The problem started last year, but has only gotten worse in the time since. TSMC, the company that makes chips for everyone who’s not Intel, is still having difficulty churning out enough to meet soaring demand. Meanwhile, beer bug economic policies have been causing massive backups at ports bringing in overseas products. So all that overtime making consoles, undoubtedly being put in by Uighur slaves, is all for not. Much as I had speculated when I was eight, I suppose electronics are too complicated for Santa’s elves.

Many within the electronics industry, notably Toshiba, are now predicting these shortages to continue until at least 2023. At this point, we might as well be talking the PS6 and Xbox Series One 360 SEX by the time anyone’s actually able to get their hands on a 9th gen system, or Ampere/RDNA2 graphics card. Well, at least not without having to sell their left kidney for it. Gaming hardware still seems to be selling relatively well though. So it’s hard to say what impact the shortages will have on the industry, particularly development, if it has any impact at all. But so far the 8th gen consoles are still going strong by necessity, and are shaping up to be some of the longest supported systems ever.