I actually liked 3079/89 back when I first played them. It’s been a while though, so it’s possible my opinion might change if I played them again.
One problem with a lot of Phroot’s games is he has a tendency to jump ship and start on a new project before the first project was really fleshed out.
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I enjoyed them both for like 30mins.
Afterwards you notice the absolutely horrendous and random balance, the constant repetition, the bad gunplay never gets better…awful design choices like losing a random piece of armor upon death…
The UI in every of his games is bad and he never improves them, every of his games feels like something a developer AI could come up within 48hs lol
And Phroot isn’t open to critique, he loves the game the way it is.
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Worst game I’ve ever played?
I used to do a “Let’s Play” video every day where I would play at least an hour of each game in my Steam backlog. When I got to this game, I was ten minutes in and had to stop playing, it was so bad. The game isn’t broken, there’s nothing wrong with the controls, but I just did not enjoy it one bit. The gameplay was perhaps too much for me to handle or something, but as I’ve said a number of times here on the forum, I’m an FPS player at heart, so it just didn’t appeal to me.
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You’re speaking more from a subjective standpoint than an objective standpoint. The game is a stealth game, so you would have to strategize a plan of action while avoiding the guards. I can understand if it isn’t your type of game, it’s not really my type of game either, but that doesnt mean that it is a trash game. I’ve put about 7 hours into the game and I didn’t notice any gameplay mechanics or bugs that would make me consider it a trash game. The game gets around an 80 on metacritic and a 90 on steam reviews. I didn’t watch your video on Monaco, but I’d have to guess that you played it alone. Playing it alone, i didn’t really care for it, but playing with friends was fun with the chaos going on.
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StarForge is probably at the top of that list. I even bought the $60 double pack cause it looked so good. I’ll never do something like that again. Along with seeing how Epic managed to utterly destroy every chance Paragon had of making it to release, I don’t trust any studio now. I’m also going to recommend staying away from all that Battle Royale hype that’s getting crazy like zombie games were a few years back. I actually have a game installed just for the daily logins (Tiger Knight: Empire War) and it’s dead as can be. It’s getting a battle royale mode though. 
wut u doing games industreay.
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Fight me, nerds.
EDIT: Okay, I’m not in a rush to get back to playing Psychonauts: Rhombus of Ruin now, so let me elaborate. Mass Effect 2 is a game I despise, for a lot of reasons. It occasionally hits a few right marks with its story, most notably in Omega when slowly introducing the characters. However, the entire plot of the game feels like a spinoff or DLC mission rather than any kind of main entry; the Collectors just don’t feel like a threat. They are never established as a true, galactic threat, but rather an old danger you happen to suddenly care about now. Then, you expect me to take these mildly annoyed bugs as the successor to REAPERS?
So many underused plot threads from ME1… the sudden rise in Earth’s power, the political turmoil, and most notably, The Illusive Man. So little was done with the Cerberus line. While I hoped throughout the entire game that it would get interesting, that your choices would continue to put you at odds with the Illusive Man and eventually make him turn on you, instead he just remains your friend. Even the Council was more hostile!
That’s not even getting into the way it gutted ME1’s deep combat. Yes, ME1 has problems… but its combat, as a whole, feels great, unique, and almost like a strategy game. ME2 throws away everything with retconning heatsinks for “thermal clips” (no more managing heat), generic weapon mechanics with gimped loadout systems, and regenerating health. ME3 feels like a step in the right direction and a functional version of ME2, but I’ll always hate ME2 nonetheless for being the game that ruined Mass Effect’s once-deep RPG mechanics. That’s not even getting into the way they butchered biotics.
For a less controversial opinion, I’ll cast my vote on ME: Andromeda because I can’t think of anything else at the moment. I’ve been playing Psychonauts: Rhombus of Ruin for so long that I can’t even think about bad games anymore.
Is Mass Effect actually the worst game? No, but it’s a bland bundle of really cool concepts that’ll make you more frustrated [in the sense of “THIS COULD HAVE BEEN SO COOL!”] than possibly enjoyed. The combat is good and the RPG mechanics are flawless, but the writing can only be described as amateur fanfic garbage. Every good idea it has going for it is underused, and there’s no point in playing a game with bland but serviceable sidecontent when every aspect of the main storyline, the thing that Mass Effect derives its fame from, has been thoroughly botched.
So, without further ado, the mark of shame goes to… this thing!
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@spudmuffin I know, right? I feel like Epic has been almost deliberately undermining Paragon for years. I WISH they had just sabotaged the game, at this rate; the way they pulled all their staff away was just kind of insulting.
I saw a few UE4 demos that used the Paragon assets to recreate a basic clone of the game within days. While I appreciate the fact that they’ve dumped the assets for us, the way they simply threw out Paragon as a game was just insulting. I suppose I’ve only got one more week to say my goodbyes to it 
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@CptMold thanks for elaborating on why exactly you dislike ME2, I never played the original ME so I had my own reasons to dislike the game - now even more xD
I can only agree on the Collectors, I never managed to go through the whole thing, but in the 20h+ I played I never even felt the slightest cold breeze on my neck; there just wasn’t a thread besides what I had to fight on screen.
Gawd the whole check planets out and send drills to some spots on them way of collecting ressources felt so cheap to me. And boring. And uncreative.
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Seconded, but I don’t think most people liked this part of the game.
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@anon74641759 That was it! I was trying to remember what it was, I just remember ME2 being highly dull for some reason… it’s like ME3 completely overwrote my memories of the drilling system!
That was awful. Going planet to planet, essentially being forced to scan for minerals… all because you needed them to pass some arbitrary “armor check” at the ending. It was slow, tedious, expensive (not that it mattered because you were always rich), and most importantly, ALWAYS THE SAME. Representing the 0.000001% of people who actually liked ME1’s Mako (it was one of the few things Andromeda got right), this wasn’t just a disappointment-- it actively hurt the rest of the game.
Okay, I’m going to spoil a lot of stuff, so if you really insist on playing ME2 for the sake of using the character import tool…
Spoilers
Still, all my frustrations culminate at the “suicide mission” bit. Such a great concept, wasted. It essentially guarantees plot armor throughout the entire game, only to turn around and take away plot armor through a set of arbitrary and highly contrived “checks” to see which characters die. Why is it Mordin in specific that can’t hold the line… the guy who literally worked under a commander famous for yelling “Hold the line?” Why does not being loyal amount to a rocket to the face that won’t be fired if they ARE loyal?
Far Cry 2 was a game that never pretended your buddies were safe. They could be downed, they could revive YOU at random times, and depending on how it went, you could even put them down for a lack of trust. They also helped you in missions for extra rewards or alternative approaches, or they could be captured and need a rescue. They were actual companions that were just as vulnerable as you were, and it was an awesome system that made FC2 special. Just comparing that to ME2 makes it… pathetic.
There are so many things that could have made ME2 great-- ironically, many of them are the same things that ruined Dragon Age II. A focus on Omega, or Citadel; more pressure on actually forcing preparation for the Alliance, potentially invoking a guerilla war between Cerberus and the Alliance; and most importantly, NO STUPID CONTRIVED PLOT TWIST INVOLVING NON-THREATS AND THEIR LOVE OF TERMINATOR-RIPOFF STATUES THAT MAKE FOR A HIGHLY CONTRIVED AND TERRIBLE FINAL BOSS THAT DAMNS ME2 ALTOGETHER AND SENDS IT OFF ON THE WORST NOTE POSSIBLE.
I do love me some textwalls on why Mass Effect games are s!!!.
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It’s cool finding someone else who played the game! Even more so that I’m also in line 110% with what you said. Only other players I’ve come across have been from the salt mines of the Subreddit (the long-running toxic attitude of the Community at large certainly hammered a few nails in the coffin).
I tend not to participate in the Sub much especially as things have only become worse but I’ll give you my take on some events I think transpired that lead to the runaway death spiral of the game.
If you were unaware, Tencent acquired 40% of Epic a few years back. Epic is a privately held company so it’s safe to assume the acquisition of those shares were “hostile”. A lot of the big names at Epic left the company at that point. Presumably, Tencent wanted a stake in the Unreal Engine for their own projects. Today, Epic is absolutely nothing like the company they were known for. If you look up reports on Glassdoor, Epic comes across as a terrible place to work with intra-office politics and whatnot.,
The original Creative Director behind Paragon, Steve Superville, left Epic towards the end of the Legacy period of the game.
If you look back on some changes made almost a year ago in the game you can see a lot of them hint at being done for the Chinese market. Tencent’s market. I theorize Tencent’s stake in Epic forced a redirection in the game so they could introduce it into the Chinese market as another game in their large catalog. This could explain why Superville left since the game was no longer being developed under Epic’s vision or his. This put Epic in a poor position as a developer that had to make concessions upon demand by Tencent (though Epic still carries a lot of the blame for the downfall in the end as well).
So I think Tencent was pulling strings well over a year ago. An agreement that they would get their personal localized build could have been made before development even started, though. Wukong was likely added to connect with the Chinese market. Even more damning is the Tencent authored DLL file that’s been in the game’s directory (for a year or longer on my installation). Then there were completely unnecessary changes to character facial models. That’s when a lot of players noticed they were done for Tencent reasons. And everyone started hating Tencent. Then Tencent became the saviors in their eyes because they would be the ones to continue the game after Epic shut it down.
No. The game had been redesigned 3 times at the point and ran awful. Every fix Epic introduced solved nothing and only made it run worse. Tencent wasn’t going to be able to fix something that bad. The player count had been decreasing and decreasing with every change and it seems as if Epic said F it, package a build and ship it to Tencent to be done with the project. They had already done the same thing in the past when they gave up development on Unreal Tournament.
I don’t think they had any project managers overseeing most of the game’s development. Just small teams all sending commits to the game’s code repository and a build would end up being compiled and shipped with hardly any testing. I read some information from a software developer who pointed out the development method they seemed to be using based upon their release cycle. They also pointed out everything Epic managed to do that violates fundamentals of that design philosophy. It’s as is if the team had very little actual experience in seeing a project through to the finish. Somehow these guys were hired by Epic though. I’m guessing that knowing Tencent could dictate changes at any time left the team in a pretty low state of morale.
While I don’t think they intentionally sabotaged the game (though it does strongly feel like it), I think most members of the team stopped caring about the project long ago. It ran like crap and wasn’t anything like how it was originally envisioned. The refund process is so pathetic, I’m firmly under the belief it’s being so half-assed that it leaves Epic looking like a great company for offering refunds while actually only refunding a fraction of the requests that were made. The Asset release was another pure PR move. No one releases assets to a game like that - except Epic is able to bundle it into the Unreal SDK platform and onboard people interested in using them. Another win for Epic while they just left us out to die. They knew this was the likely outcome for a while. The Community Managers should have expressed it is a possibility. I’ve thought about their positions for quite a bit and have come to realize any Community Managers job is to increase hype and minimize player concern. There is no actual connection with the Community, they just need to get the Community to think there is and market the game through social mediums.
The whole thing was a gross display of incompetence and disinterest in the project on behalf of Epic. I do wish they just ended it sooner now. I hate v42+ and it sucks seeing that’s the version the game shuts down with. I think the game would have faired an honest chance if Tencent was not involved in any way and though we’ll never fully know their extent in it, Tencent was certainly involved in the project.
That’s my rant and perspective on things. I’ve never felt betrayed by a Dev quite like this. I am 100% done with Epic at this point.
There are a few community reenvisionings of the game in development like you mentioned, and some of the teams have made impressive progress in short time. The Unreal Engine is quite approachable with art assets through its Blueprints system, though. I expect there will be some hurdles in the future when it comes to coding in a lot of the underlying systems, particularly the same things Epic really sucked with. Epic ain’t anyone letting see their stinky pile of source code that had been plaguing Paragon so I do hope for the best with the community team’s projects.
Sorry for text wall peeps. You shouldn’t have read through it but apparently you just did anyway.
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Yes, yes I did read through that entire textwall. 120% agreement, beat that.
I didn’t want to mention the elephant in the room, but Paragon’s subreddit is just filthy. Even in its current state though, I just loved playing it in PvE with friends. It still is my go-to multiplayer game, though I just haven’t touched it since the announcement… because what’s the point?
I remember a discussion a while back about why people hate CliffyB, and a lot of the things he said about the future being mobile gaming, about how Epic had been bought out by foreign stakeholders… a lot of it wasn’t just rational, but even things I agreed with. Epic hasn’t succeeded once with their projects. They’ve made two games that have fallen apart, one bug-riddled and unimpressive remaster, and one PvE survival game that has been abandoned in favor of a cash-in gamemode that by fluke chances ended up catching on. The fact that a locked-down version of Fortnite where nobody can even tell you what the names of the characters are, or think of a single highlight other than “one time x player did this really dumb thing and…” makes me just generally sad about all the wasted potential.
The Epic Games I grew up playing games from seems to have phased into two primary places: Boss Key Productions and The Coalition. One is continuing to do their own thing with whatever stupid and fun ideas CliffyB has (with Radical Heights being the perfect example of how he can put a fun and unique twist on anything, even something as common as Battle Royale). Meanwhile, The Coalition is finishing up one of my favorite franchises of all time, and doing a pretty good job so far.
Speaking of favorite franchises under Microsoft, I’d like to retroactively add Halo 4 and 5 to my list of “trash games that are trash-garbage.” It’s what happens when a company with no real love of the franchise nor understanding of its fans gets a hold o a beloved IP. I get that things change, that they need to broaden the appeal or otherwise keep things fresh… but not Halo. Halo was already a multi-million franchise. It had a good foundation that needed to be ever so slightly improved to succeed. Instead, it’s bogged down by fundamentally flawed changes at the lowest level, awful map design, terrible writing with uninteresting characters, and-- most insultingly-- THE REMOVAL OF SPLIT SCREEN. WHAT THE FLYING ____ WERE YOU SMOKING, 343. I could go on for about as long as I did about Mass Effect 2 and Andromeda combined (even more so, actually) for these games, but I’ll leave it to the most egregious examples of their failure to get the point across. It was so bad that I was genuinely afraid to play Gears of War 4 out of fear that it would be as terrible as the Halo reboot. Then, CliffyB okayed it as a “mildly too-safe but pretty good sequel,” and I got way less nervous.
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I think you’re all being a little harsh on ME2. I played the ME trilogy for the first time last year and had a good time with each game, especially the Lair of the Shadow Broker dlc from 2. In fact I’d go so far as to say of the three games I felt ME2 was the best…certainly not trash tier!
Just goes to show how opinions can differ.
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It’s not bad, I think the point is it’s not nearly as good as it easily could have been. It’s simply quite flawed.
Edit: Don’t compare them to the trashy games I listed, ME is more fit to something like
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I share the irritation (anger is too strong a word) about the change in focus about the antagonist, with the Collectors being a pale imitation of the Reaper menace and Saren, and I’m not sure Cerberus was done as well as it could have been, but mechanically I felt that the game was so much better than it’s predecessor. It improved on the first for me and didn’t have the problems of the third. The many different story arcs of the second was a huge improvement on the first, with the Archangel segment particularly memorable. ME2 is definitely not trash, many of the annoying things can be ignored (don’t like the probing for minerals…don’t do it?) and I’d honestly recommend it to anyone looking for an epic scifi game.
In many ways I’d say that the loss of plot that happened in Mass Effect also happened in the Dead Space series…the Marker’s purpose seemed to have been hugely retconned in the second and third games of that series. It’s purpose seemed to have been changed without thought.
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@xist Like I said, ME2 was more of a throwaway comment. It’s a game I personally hated, but at the same time I feel like I could play it again if I really had to for the sake of going through the whole series. Also, you can’t skip mineral mining-- if you do, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll fail some of the arbitrary skill checks at the end. Telling everyone you love their Citadel store only goes so far. On that note, ME2 fits well into this category-- games that looked fun, even legendary, on the store page, but turned out to be a complete regression from the first game. I felt like ME3 was just “2, but refined to be actually fun,” but part of that may be the fact that I never actually played the Xbox 360 versions. I have them all, but never even touched them when they were relevant, having just played the entire series back to back over the course of last year.
ME:A is, as I would elegantly put it, “the mega poop.” There’s no enjoyment to be had, other than ironically. It was a game so tragic, so messy, so poorly written that they couldn’t even trust BioWare Montreal to make DLCs for it. They pocketed the missing story arcs so as not to waste their potential on ham-fisted and over-opinionated “writers.” I really did try to see the good in that game, and I even did-- I love its gameplay refinement, the return of Mass Effect 1 style RPG mechanics, the proper use of open world environments to scavenge in a way that doesn’t bore me to tears like in ME2 (sorry, I’ll move on), and even many of the awesome concepts. It would be like trying to tolerate Mass Effect 1 if it had the writing of Ride to Hell: Retribution behind it, a story bad enough to actually ruin a game.
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Yeah…I’m not playing that one.
As far as the ME2 planet mining, personally I went at it full steam ahead. I knew ahead that in ME3 there were bonuses for having above a certain threshold so I sucked it up and drained every planet dry. In my mind the worst thing about the series was the egregious DLC. Whilst this wasn’t a problem for ME2 (reasons), I’d love to have tried the Citadel DLC for the third game but the pricing was insane. The first Mass Effect felt like it didn’t differentiate classes enough and the environments were dull and repetitive…the first game was like a colouring book that wasn’t started, whilst the second filled in between those lines.
It’s funny, the story took just a nose dive for me in the third game, and they’d got rid of characters I liked, that even if there were refinements it felt inferior. I didn’t even have major problems with the “choose your own adventure” ending, the game just didn’t feel as interesting bar a few exceptions (such as the Ardat-Yakshi Monastery).
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The DLCs for ME3 were generally from “okay” to pretty terrible. I didn’t like ME2 at all, but Kasumi’s Memory and LotSB were great additions. Citadel is… well, the best way I can put it is that it turns Shepard into a ME Andromeda character. It’s really just bad Mass Effect fanfic, rather than any kind of substantial content.
I know I’ve thrown that word around a lot, but it’s honestly true for Mass Effect. BioWare Montreal’s writrers are terrible, and if you take a look, a lot of their lead writers are either known for being dramatic on Twitter or for writing particularly lewd fanfics, rather than any kind of meritable track record.
I actually loved ME3’s storyline, because it felt like what ME2 should have done. The main ending was disappointing, sure, but the ending to the main storyline is more of a “Does the Universe Exist? Yes/No”. It doesn’t take away from every plot thread you tied up (or permanently left frayed and torn to shreds) throughout the main story, resolving conflicts spanning all the way to the first game and even earlier. It gave a real sendoff to several old characters, rather than the cheap kills that ME2 scored through arbitrary checks. It felt like you were ACTUALLY sending your squad into dangerous scenarios knowing full well that your decisions could hurt them, rather than “If not loyal, rocket hits face.”
Where’s ya boi Tim Schafer when you need him? Oh wait… he’s making a new Psychonauts game 
Also, I love how we managed to turn a general game discussion on trash vs not trash to an entirely Mass Effect-centric debate. 
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I still have Dragon Age Origins to play…need I be concerned??? 
As far as topic derails…I think that when we’re flinging around criticism about well regarded and often loved games, it’s important to fully justify reasoning else it comes across as cheap shots intended to score points and encourage vitriol. You’ve put a lot of effort into your commentary and it’s plain to anyone reading the reasons behind your thinking. In the end there’s a large element of subjectivity in these matters.
As far as terrible games of no merit go I pretty much filter them out through reviews. I haven’t played something I’d regard as irredeemably awful for ages, and the only game that I’ve ever played that I couldn’t tolerate was the PS2 game, Magna Carta Tears of Blood. That one was terrible…
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Nope, no cause for concern at all. BioWare Edmonton is the main studio behind Shattered Steel, MDK2, SWKotOR/SWTOR, Dragon Age 1-Inq, and Mass Effect 1-3. BioWare Austin (a new studio) is working on Anthem. Montreal made the DLC for ME3 and all of Andromeda… so in my opinion, they’re 0 for 2 so far.
I get that a lot of my opinions end up being subjective, but in the end, I think defining reasons behind criticism is the single most important thing. I’ll listen to any criticism as long as it’s justified by something tangible. It’s kind of what sets apart the Critics from the Crowbcats, so to speak.
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