MMNTech GOTY Awards 2023: Biggest disappointments
Santa Claus is coming to town, to put lumps of coal in the stockings of these disappointing games. The bad news is there’s not enough coal in the world to cover the sheer amount of stinkers we’ve gotten this year.
I’ve been gaming for three decades now. I’ve seen a lot of really great games come and go, and a lot of bad ones. Though 2023 is perhaps the single worst year in video games I’ve experienced, and that’s not an exaggeration. The bad has overwhelmingly outweighed the good, and the good is what would have been considered upper tier average at best back when I started this blog. Hope they kept the gift receipt if you find any of these under the tree Christmas morning.
Dishonourable Mentions
Lord of the Rings: Gollum
It’s hard to be disappointed in a game nobody really wanted, nor asked for. However, this one makes our mentions list just due to the sheer level of incompetence behind the game. Daedalic Entertainment was really only known for the Deponia series beforehand, which were traditional 2D adventure games. Gollum would be their first 3D action title. And ho boy was it a hot mess. PS3 level graphics, horrible gameplay, and poor performance even on very high end PC hardware. To really cap things off, the company issued an apology on Twitter for the game’s sorry state, which was later alleged to have been written by ChatGPT. So they couldn’t even be bothered to put the effort in to reassure their customers. That says a lot.
Forespoken
Forespoken is another game that nobody really wanted. It also falls beautifully into what I’ve come to call the “how do you do, fellow kids” genre. Those cringeworthy classics that were obviously written by Millennials trying too hard to appeal to Zoomers. Token minority protagonist, goofy Marvel humour, clunky and boring gameplay. Basically the works. It also had performance issues at launch, and SquareEnix also had the brass balls to charge $70 USD for the pleasure. Even the mainstream games press wasn’t defending this magical turd.
Redfall
Microsoft hasn’t exactly been batting a thousand with the Xbox Series. The consoles have seen a string of mediocre exclusives since launch, with very few standouts. Redfall was supposed to be them dipping their toes into the now tired live-service arena. You play as a bunch of diverse, hipster Zoomers trying to save a small New England town from hoards of vampires. Like many games this year, it launched incomplete, lacking a promised 60fps performance mode. Graphics looked late Xbox 360 era. Meanwhile the gameplay, for a game about slaying vampires, was about as dull as dishwater. Less than a year later, most people have already forgotten about it. Not that many people played it to begin with. Redfall only had an all time peak of 6,124 players on Steam, way back at launch. Typical daily players counts nowadays average in the low 60s.
The PS Quare? award goes to…
The PlayStation Portal (Sony)
Handhelds have been undergoing a bit of a renaissance as of late. The Nintendo Switch broke records this year, dethroning both the original Gameboy and PS4 to become the third best selling video game system of all time. Meanwhile, Valve’s Steam Deck has been picking up steam (pun intended), and has spawned numerous competitors from big brands. So what about the PlayStation Portable? Sony’s OG handheld was years ahead of its time, and arguably one of their best systems. The Vita was also quite good despite its flaws. With so much attention on portables right, gotta strike while the iron is hot. And strike out they did.
Early in the year, rumours started flying about Sony working on a new handheld system. Hopes were high that PlayStation fans might finally get that elusive PSP3. Then more info started to come out. Rather than a dedicated handheld, it was going to be a Remote Play device. Basically a screen with controllers for streaming games. And it looked utterly ridiculous from early leaked photos. Like someone had cut a DualSense in half and duct taped it to cheap Walmart tablet. Then it got officially announced this past summer, and the rumours were, unfortunately, true.
The PlayStation Portal was a Remote Play only device, that required ownership of an already expensive PS5. It could only stream games locally from the console, not even from the cloud, even if you had a PS+ Premium subscription. All to the tune of $200. It was rightly roasted online for being another silly accessory. Others made a valid point that Remote Play was already available for smart devices, and that official grip controllers were a fraction the cost. To really put the icing on the poop sundae though, the Portal didn’t even support Bluetooth headphones, even Sony branded ones. Only proprietary PlayStation Link headsets.
The Portal seemed like a device that was a solution in search of a problem. Of course that didn’t stop die hard PlayStation fans from scooping them up. I’m just waiting for the poor kid without a PS5 who inevitably gets one on Christmas day. It’ll be the Wii U debacle all over again.
The “Gee, I wish I wasn’t back in the Army” award goes too…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (Activision)
Activison, my old friend. It’s not a biggest disappointment list without you. Call of Duty is a bit like the Simpsons. It was once extremely popular, well liked, and well regarded, but it has been running on fumes for over a decade at this point. Everything has already been done to death, and each successive outing has been getting lazier and lazier.
Modern Warfare III is actually the second Modern Warfare III, if that makes any sense. Maybe they did this to confuse fans of the older game into thinking this was a remake, but remake it is not. Fans ripped the campaign apart for being boring and playing it too safe. Its multiplayer meanwhile, which is the core of every COD game, was described by Gamesradar as being “tired”, with the publication citing a messy progression system and little new to see and do. It’s a rare example where both fans and the mainstream games press were in agreement. Except Forbes, who really seemed to love it for some reason. I guess the cheque cleared.
The “In God we trust, all others pay cash” award goes too…
Diablo IV (Blizzard)
Oh look, it’s Activision yet again, and its weird special needs child Blizzard. Diablo IV is a game we’ve mentioned before, when we named Diablo Immortal as one of our biggest disappointments back in the before-times of 2018. After Diablo 3 kind of had a rough start, players were hoping for something a little better going into the new generation. And the game itself is… actually alright. Not great, but not terrible either. Though it did largely get overshadowed by 2023’s other big cRPG, Balder’s Gate 3. Which is arguably the better game by a country mile.
What really ruined the game though was Blizzard once again going whole hog on predatory microtransactions. With its high $70 price on top of multiple battle passes and the like to really milk players dry. They even toyed around with the idea of charging $100 for a DLC package. While it’s perhaps Blizzard’s least controversial game in recent history, it perfectly encapsulates the problem with live services and the bloat in the AAA industry. Where games have become less about being fun, and more a glorified extortion racket to prop up unsustainable budgets.
And the “winner” of the most disappointing game of 2023 goes to…
Starfield (Bethesda)
Bethesda is a the perfect microcosm of everything wrong with the current AAA industry. Tod Howard has been known to indulge in a little BS-ing over the years. But at one point their games were generally pretty decent. Even a bit creative and fun. That was before Fallout 76, and before they started milking Skyrim dry for over a decade. Now they’ve just devolved into soulless corporate gobbledygook, pumped out as a minimum viable products for the mindless masses to lap up.
Starfield was supposed to be their big return to form. After all, the entire Xbox brand was relying heavily on its success. What Toddy billed us was a NASA-punk game that would allow you to explore the vastness of space. In reality, it’s a rather dull affair that feels like they put a bunch of different sci-fi tropes in a blender to see what would come out. Sort of like how my friends and I would make nasty milkshakes with everything in the cupboard as kids.
Starfield is basically No Man’s Sky without the thrill (or even ability) of exploration. It’s TIE Fighter and Wing Commander with bad space combat. It’s Mass Effect without the emotionally gripping story and likable characters. It’s Elite and Freelancer without decent trade mechanics. It’s just a thoroughly mediocre game by every metric. A tired formula that has you traversing cookie cutter “procedurally generated” worlds to complete generic quests, combined with all the worst aspects of Fallout 4, and all the bugs Bethesda is known for. All for the low, low price of $70 USD.
I’ve heard Starfield described by one YouTuber as a “Great Reset” simulator. And it pretty much is the WEF’s ideal of utopia. A boring, ugly, vapid future shat out of the corporate machine. Where you live in the pods, eat the bugs, can’t own a vehicle, and do nothing but farm adaptive frames for whatever scraps of currency they throw your way. And the first thing the game asks you is what your character’s pronouns are, because of course it does. Something which got another YouTuber, HeelvsBabyface, in a bit of trouble for ranting about. But it shows the rot within the Western AAA industry. Where design decisions are made based on partisan politics and corporate malarkey, rather than on artistic merit or actually making a game that’s fun to play. All it needed was to be jam packed with microtransactions and loot boxes to be the real icing on the cake. Todd did invent them after all with his “horse armor”, so it’s a bloody miracle they left them out of future games.
Howard has of course billed this as his next forever game, which will be released and re-released until the heat death of the universe, no doubt. But even the mainstream games journalists weren’t impressed, nor hopeful about its staying power. That cheque mustn’t have cleared. Well, I guess Microsoft will have to turn to Activision to save Xbox now, he laughed sarcastically.
