Both AoC and War, but I voted for AoC because AoC promised sssssoooo much!

Originally posted by haggus71

You want to know the biggest disappointment in '08, and the one which people should be pissed off at the most?  Gaming sites!  Most of the disappointments of '08 got rave reviews from MMO sites, including THIS one.  They were having a "J*** in my Pants" moment with AoC.  Warhammer still has a high rating by this and other sites, yet garners the biggest disappointment rating in this forum.  Tabula Rasa garnered great reviews for its "innovative concept."  Even Hellgate London had good reviews and hype up to release.

Maybe we should ask theguys who review these games to quit smoking the crack that developers hand out to them and give a critical eye to such things as basic combat mechanics, content, and storyline.

Thanks to these hype machine supporters, the only way you can have even an idea about the game is to pay 50 bucks and play it, adding to the hype with sales figures.  "Objective" is not a word in a reviewer's vocabulary.

 

I agree but the prob is reviewing a mmo is not the same as reviewing a lets say fps/rts game etc

you cant just play it one or two days and base your whole opinion on that with mmo`s (look at Aoc for example...the lvl1/20 starting area Tortage was fking great! but after that the game gets worse and worse)

And i think thats the prob review sites have and thats why this games are high rated (ofc $$ plays a big role in this aswell..but ya)
 

Originally posted by 7Fold

Ah yes Warhammer the biggest dissapoitment of the year, wait doh!Q!!

 

PC Gamer 86 / 100
GamersHell 8.5 / 10
PC Format UK 87 / 100
Game Informer 8 / 10
PC Zone UK 92 / 100
Fragland 80 / 100
GamingTrend 89 / 100
gamesTM 8 / 10

Computer Games RO 85 / 100
Total PC Gaming 8 / 10
Gamers Temple 92 / 100
Gaming Target 8.8 / 10
PALGN 8 / 10
Game Chronicles 9 / 10
GamerNode 8 / 10
GameZone 8.8 / 10
AceGamez 9 / 10
UGO A
Jolt UK 8.7 / 10
AtomicGamer 88 / 100

Armchair Empire 8 / 10
Gamervision 8 / 10
Game Revolution A-

IGN 9 / 10
Gameplayer 8.5 / 10
1UP B
GameShark A-
G4 - X-Play 5 / 5
GameSpy 5 / 5
Cheat Code Central 4.7 / 5
Gameplanet 8 / 10
PC Gamer UK 88 / 100
Eurogamer 8 / 10

 

Others have already said it, but I still can't help myself:  It amazes me that people still take stock in game reviews with the blatant bias for advertisers.  7fold should be ashamed of himself for even thinking anyone gives 2 shits about what gets an "8/10" or what that number even means.

and 7fold, if you dont already, please start reading Penny Acade, I'll get you started:

www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/11/24/

I vote Tabula Rasa; I was really looking forward to something different from the usual fantasy RPG and the game engine and fresh IP really had potential to develop into something good.

Alas.

Well, given that most viewpoints on here end up balancing each other out, that poll definitely finished off any faint desire I had to try out AoC and WAR!

AoC burned me, AoC burned me good. I evenly stupidly gave the game another chance about a month ago. Missing gameplay and technical features, boring, pointless PVP, convoluted melee combat; I could go on; but it's pointless.

I have to go with Warhammer Online, and it's massive hype machine. In the end, for all their talk; for all their promises we just got a game with crummy combat, crummy mechanics and crummy level design. Oh, and bugs too! Does the postern door ability even work yet in that game? Oh well.

Darkfall is the genre's last hope; so yeah... Not looking good.

I had to go with AoC like most. I was following the game for quite some time only to find out how much it lacked and the little depth it actually had in a Conan world.

Warhammer by far

IMO, AoC was the uglier duck but I was just using that to get me through till War came out.

MJ and Paul must be extremely embarrassed.

I voted AoC.

I remember how excited I was when I read the description on gamestop.com.  'Awesome!' I thought. "Here is the first mmo marketed specifically for mature players." The next day I was the first person in the store and preordered the collector's edition.

All together now....1...2...3.      SUCKER!!!!

Exactly 6 months after setting foot on Tortage beach, I closed my account. The games' shortcomings? Where do I begin?   My main complaint was that once you were away from Tortage, the game felt half-finished. Throw in broken quests, forced grouping at the highest levels and poor excuses for solo instances (how many times can you clear a villa before you get bored?) and you have....well, let's just say that the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage had a better success rate than Age of Conan. A real pity since AoC had the potential to be a great game. All it is now is a punchline.

I'm going to vote WAR, simply because it's the only MMORPG I played in '08. And it didn't manage to hold my interest for very long.

I don't think WAR was a bad game by any means, though. It's just that it felt like another linear/EQ1 based formula game to me - and these are not my cup of tea. And even with features like better PvP and PQ's, I could never quite shake the feeling while playing WAR that I was really playing WoW all over again.

But I am looking forward to Darkfall and SWGe*u in 2009. Although perhaps I'm just burnt out on gaming altogether. Because I've not been that excited playing Fallout 3 either, and everyone else seems to say this game is a pinnacle. In fact, online poker is the only thing that has been keeping me interested lately.

I voted AoC because it promised so much and didn't deliver, and multiple town instances is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of in MMO history.

i vote for AOC freaking grind mode and un friendly environment I really hate being freaked inside the game.

I say War. I heard about how bad AoC was so I avoided it. I was foolish enough to buy into the Warhammer hype and pre ordered it. The RvR was great, until you got involved in a  battle with 50vs50 or 100vs100 and crash to desktop.

Talk about a buzzkill.

I already know what my desktop looks like, I don't need to pay a game sub to show me. I quit after 2 months.

Game on.

I have to say WAR.

Originally posted by ZeppelinJ0

 I voted WAR.  I had a chance to try AoC and while it down right dismal, my personal disappointment was with WAR.  

 

Coming from the developers of DAoC, and Paul Barnett hyping the hell out of it as this great new game using the Warhammer IP got me really really excited.  While I looked forward to AoC, I was beyond excited for WAR.

 

However after playing through Beta and trying to force myself to like it for months, it was just too much like World of Warcraft for me and I was playing the same thing over again.  Not saying WoW is bad, I just needed something new.  Going nitpicky here but I was even looking at skills on my Witch Hunter that (mistakenly??) labeled "accusations" as "combo points" so I could pull off my "finishing moves."

Not only that but, just as I had feared, the Battlegrounds/Scenarios are the only real way to PvP since everyone flocks to them.  I just wasn't looking forward to BG queues and eSports again.

 

So overall WAR was a huge massive disappointment to me.  Instead of making a unique game, they took a successful project and changed it's look.  Can't wait for the new DAoC server to be released!

  Pretty much agree with this.

WAR was basically  WoW: PvP Edition, to be honest.  And WoW is better at being WoW than WAR is.

Voted Tabula Rasa. Overall "feel" of the game just didn't do it for me. I guess I was expecting something else, can't really put a finger on it though.

WAR.

it still the best game of the last year or 3, easily, but i knew the others were going to suck so no dissapointment with them.

Originally posted by Korby

TCoS was by far the biggest disappointment for me this year. I registered in June 2006 and applied with what I would consider a really good application (I actually put thought into this one like a real application). I received a Beta invite in November 2008, after the closed beta ended. What the fuck. Then, we find out that the game is F2P. Whatever, I thought, I have managed to get some good playtime in F2P games in the past. I started the beta with high hopes and quit an hour later, confused and disgusted.

While I dont intend to go near TCoS as it has the IP blocks and I find it the biggest dissapointment of 2008 because of it,The above quote is not right as TCoS is not a F2P game so your vote has no value,also the fact you followed the game since June 2006 and didnt read about it in all the time doesnt help you.

I voted WAR.

The logic I used was this.

Funcom had already launched AO... in pretty much the same way it eventually launched AoC.  So to me acting suprised to voting for AoC was illogical.. or you really just didn't do any research on the comapny (I was in AO beta and there for the launch.. while I didn't think it was as bad as some... its a pattern).

Mythic on the other hand had launched DAoC previously.. a game that was not only widely considered the first "smooth" launch for an MMO.. but the game that at least for me invented RvR (sorry pvp game of a lifetime was early UO).

So I had expectations based on that... WAR to me launched in a state that it should have been Mythics first game.. it is in fact still in that state (currently on the downside of a month "go back").  It would have been logical to go from a launch like WAR... to making a game like DAoC.  Since it was the reverse the expectation versus the reality of WAR... was a huge disapppointment.

Those for me were the only two games I could consider.

The fact that any place gave WAR mmo of the year for 2008 only made it a larger disappointment for me.  I would have given the award to WoTLK because it at least set sales records and upped the ticker on WoW's population numbers.

I don't even like WoW but 2008 was a sad year for MMO's.. thus my sig.

AOC and their hype machine easily overshadowed everything else.  This is a perfect example of how a company should not launch a game, and they should keep most of their cards to their chest rather than laying em out with a ton of promises that they could not possibly keep.

First was the combat system.  Originally as they talked, at great length, they explained a combat system that would take players actions to figure out combinations, that the swings of their swords and the shooting of their bows would be 100% under control of the player.  What they released, instead, was an added complication to the standard fair.  Instead of pressing a key to fire off an ability now you had to press a key plus another 2-5 keys, wtf? lol.  Apart from the occasional "fatality" type of kill nothing really seemed very special concerning the combat.  The rest of the game was cookie cutter, except with so many bugs that overall entertainment was sucked dry.

There were other let downs to be sure.  Warhammer's ORvR mechanics played out in launch far different than in beta, luckily Mythic has been quick to address these issues.  Hellgate tried to do far too much and had they scaled back a bit may have been far more successful.  TR's closing while kinda sad overall does speak of the folks at NCSoft where they will kill an underperformer and dedicate resources to something else rather than waste those talents on a dying product.  And SOE?  Well I expect little from them and it is kind of neat that earlier predictions of RMT being legitimized in their dying product line being accurate.

AoC. I played since the begning of beta and always believed they would make things right by release or shortly after. Boy was I wrong... WAR, despite some issues, has been rather enjoyable for me.

Flophammer (WAR) biggest PoS. hyped up to much, Mythic `"Bullshitter of the year" BS`d the player and lied about how things work. empty servers, none existant chat, no ingame community, constant crashes poor PC performance, rushed to market (EA)

delivered a poor mans WoW

Poor POOR POOR

I  voted for War heres why....

#1  Players are STILL currently testing this game for Mythic while they have to PAY mythic...sound rediculous??? well it's true....

#2 Servers have merged.....yes they didn't actually merge them, but they instead proded you into a corral and let you move to certain servers and then they killed off those servers...hence they merged...and we all know what server mergers mean=players in underpopulated servers complaining of no one to play with.

#3 Population Imbalance....Mythic in all their wisdom decided to create a COOL side versys a BLAH side...what you get is a severe imbalance in population on servers...they also created some very OP classes in the BW and SORC....now they nerfed the BW and SORC and all th  BW's and SORC's moved to the Witch ELF......now after Thousands of threads on how OP the WE is they are moving to Nerf the Witch ELf...geez....talk about a disfunctional game...

#4  Game is UNFINISHED UNFINISHED UNFINISHED....endgame is BROKEN, DUNGEONS are Boring and the DRops are rediculous......

I dont think EA will keep War open past the Fall of 2009....an MMO"S window closes fast now at days, it isn't like the old days when you didn't have many choices on MMO's ....but now at days you can even find some Free ones that have been successful and fun (guild wars)   by the TIme Mythic gets their act together GUild Wars 2 will be upon us...and if WOW doesnt' kill War by then GUild wars will....

BTW, I dont like WOW, don't play WOW....so don't bother.

SWG:NGE

is the all time STINKER of the MMO market  and get my vote

Originally posted by DarthRaiden

SWG:NGE

is the all time STINKER of the MMO market  and get my vote

Old news? Not in the 2008 department.

But!! Following that, SOE wins biggest disapointment with me hands down. Did not see a cash shop coming to EQ, EVER! I thought they would keep their RMT to their upcoming FREE games.

I can't even explain how much of a sucker punch to the gut this was. I freakin' did not play FFXI this summer for EQ2. Can someone build me a time machine?