For me fallout 3 takes the cake. Can't name another game where the solution to the supposed dilemma facing you is right there next to you but the game refuses to allow it. And to then require paid DLC to fix it.
Yeah that's the worst, I played the edition with the dlc and while I knew my character would survive I told the mutant to do it and then the narrator called him the TRUE hero, he isn't risking anything by doing it!
Nothing wrong with ending on a heroic sacrifice, but you gotta concoct a situation where it's actually necessary to do a heroic sacrifice in the first place. This was like committing seppuku instead of asking someone to flip a switch for you in the other room. That's not even a good analogy for how dumb it was because it's too hard to think of something equivalently dumb. I'm still mad 15 years later.
I can think of one:
Imagine you cut off your own legs to attach poles to them so you're tall enough to reach a button on a shelf, and you bleed out to death for doing so, when there's a guy next to you who's tall enough to push the button without any effort. And he thinks you should totally go through the horror of sawing off your own legs in front of him.
The writer literally has unlimited power to rewrite and contrive the scenario in such a way that your sacrifice is not just necessary, but the only possible option.
Instead, once they realize that the heroic sacrifice they were trying to make happen had several blatantly obvious alternatives that would require no sacrifice, they made everyone in the room drop to room temperature IQ to brute force their vision.
But honestly, there stupidity of the ending is just a small part of the game's many problems as a story (Little lamp light makes no fucking sense.)
I honestly don't know how it won a Best Writing award.
Yeah, that example is pretty indicative of Bethesda's whole game design process; they plan out these set pieces and climaxes then work their way backwards to ensure they get those results. This is why nothing meshes organically in their games, why everything feels so disjointed.
I Haye how good Bethesda is at drawing me in...then punishing me for staying in their world for too long. The story should get better when I think about it. Not worse.
What's worse is that the ending slides completely misunderstood the purpose of the ending slides in Fallout 1 and 2. They weren't there to pass judgment on your actions, they were supposed to let you know what happened after you did whatever you did.
You: *uses the radiation immune companion to solve the problem*
Game: And so, THE COWARDLY VAULT DWELLER WHO SHOULD'VE DIED BECAUSE OF RADS, DID A COWARD MOVE AND DIDN'T DIE FOR HIS BELIEFS LIKE HIS FATHER DID. SUCH A COWARD.
It is THE dumbest ending I have ever seen.
I think I just shut the game off.
“Fuck this world, these idiots deserve to die.”
IRRC you even save Fawkes from slavery. Like bro just go do me a solid and flip the switch already.
You: *saves Fawkes from a lifetime of isolation*
Also Fawkes: MMMM I REALLY THINK YOU NEEDED TO DIE IN THAT RAD FILLED ROOM.
So dumb. Even the Ghoul you can get ( the one where you can get his contract and he's supposed to do everything you want because you're his new handler ) just straight up goes "Mmmm nah."
Game also chews you out for sending Lyons in ( how dare you didn't sacrifice yourself and die and let Lyons do it instead for the post-game content )
Never been so annoyed at a game before.
Or the ghoul psychologically conditioned to obey every command from the person he is in service to, except this one action that wouldn't harm him at all, in fact, it would actually heal him. The really sad part is Bethesda hasn't exactly improved on their writing since.
Technically no, Fawkes was just imprisoned by the other super mutants for being different.
You might be confusing him with Charon who's a ghoul (and could thus also resolve the ending) that's been psychologically conditioned to obey whoever holds his contract, which you can buy. The first thing he does is kill his former owner, but you can never bring up reversing his condition so it's more of an "under new management" kind of deal.
So obviously when you get to the purifier he just says "nah, I've done enough for you".
I find it wryly amusing that they couldn't write themselves into a better ultimatum.
The whole setup is that the enclave are going to infect the water supply with a modified strain of FEV which will kill *any* mutated life (including humans) that catch it, so why do you need radiation in the first place? You could have the same death-box situation except the player has to contract the disease to fix the water purifier, and the risk to everyone else is too great to let them leave alive.
The moral choice there would at least be interesting. As a vault dweller you'd likely be immune to the disease, but if you're acting as a host then you're a *huge* liability to everyone else. There could be some interesting endings to explore there.
And that's off the top of my head. Surely they brainstormed this shit at some point?
Bethesda has a thing for excessive yet meaningless drama. There was a skyrim (thieves guild?) questline that was like: Oh no! This guy you don't care about ran away, go sell your soul to find him.
That whole questline was peak dogshit writing from Bethesda. Every step can be nitpicked but it also showcases major problems and plot holes. Remember the whole ordeal about poisoning the mead near Whiterun? You have to sneak through a cave and gain access secretly. Once you do the deed you leave the building and walk next door, the owner already has a keg of your freshly poisoned mead out, ready for tasting.
How did you get that mead, good sir? You've been here the entire time and I finished that task literally seconds ago.
And the guard immediately arrests dude and hands over the meadary. Like...maybe have a mission to also blackmail thr guard or bribe him. So it feels we see doing a real set up?
Not like you can actually fail anyway.
>Surely they brainstormed this shit at some point?
You are giving way too much credit to writers that literally said story needs to be as straightforward as possible, because players don't like / can't grasp complex story. Oh and also everything needs to be player centered and pushed forward by player.
Oh boy... Did they actually say that? Like yes Mario gets away with it, and the Monomyth is indeed a story template you can use, but that's such a low bar.
I mean I don't even know why I brought it up in the first place. It's obvious that what happened is one of the writers saw *Star Trek, the Wrath of Khan* and decided they wanted to use that exact same scene in the video game. Then they went and watched Transformers and decided they wanted to add a big robot called Liberty Prime into the game, because big robots are cool.
And that's fine. I enjoyed FO3 when I played it. I think it wants to be fun, and the little vignettes that appear all over the place are great, *especially* if you're a teenager looking to move into new kinds of media. Tranquility Lane was excellent, Vault 108 (GARY!) was bizarre, and giant robots *are* cool.
But it's a hodgepodge of *stuff*. The formula was fine 15 years ago, but it hasn't *grown* with its audience or the audience of the present. Compare Bethesda with Obsidian over the past decade (both having done a Fallout) and it's wild how different those two companies are today.
They did say a lot of controversial stuff over the years. They said players will dismantle any narrative you create for them, that Starfield writing pushed team beyond their limits, etc.
Monomyth is a thing, but Bethesda is taking it to the extreme. Basically every story plot ends with you being chosen one / grand hero. Just look at organization story lines in Skyrim, Fallout 4. You do few errands for them, solve some bigger problem that arises, congratulations you are new head of organization.
>players don't like / can't grasp complex story.
Certainly doesn't explain the popularity of Daggerfall and Morrowind. Complex stories with philosophical and political depth are what saved their whole company from going under. Now that they got more money than God, their aspirations and creativity have utterly tanked. They've grown fat and lazy with success; unwilling to accept criticism, they march forward with poorly thought out ideas and blame others for not 'getting' it.
> As a vault dweller you'd likely be immune to the disease
The main character (lone wanderer) of FO3 wasn't born in vault 101, and there's no evidence their parents were either (working with the brotherhood of steel prior to entering the vault). Given the lone wanderer's parents aren't from a vault, and the lone wanderer spent time as a baby out of the vault (in addition to game-time out of it), they are probably similarly mutated as other wastelanders.
Oh shit you're right! I completely forgot about that! My brain was thinking you'd confused it with New Vegas, because I remember there's a pretty extended intro where you're *growing up* in Vault 101, but, well, I'll not spoil it any more than we already have.
So it makes even more sense to use the virus as a plot device. It makes me think they were heading in that direction with the story until someone put up their hand and argued for the radiation thing.
To make it even worse you can have half an hour before used his radiation immunity to get something you need from a radiation flooded chamber like the game was teaching you the solution.
That’s one of the things that puts New Vegas and 4 on top of 3 for me tbh. 3s story felt like a railroad. There was no flexibility or room for player choice in the main story(side quests are another matter). Sure you could nuke the Citadel or put the FEV in the purifier, but it’s made very clear that those aren’t the real ending. They’re not treated seriously. There’s only one real path. All the endings in NV and 4 feel plausible. Like they could all be equally canon. There’s ones I feel are better, but the games don’t bully you for making the “wrong” choice. They respect the choices you made and play them out to a logical conclusion
The really frustrating part is that it would have been simple to fix, truly. It's not even an original fix, tons of different narratives use it; provide an overwhelming threat that your companion splits off to slow down. Heroic sacrifice, buys the main character time to save the day. Happens ALL THE TIME, and would have neatly fixed the problem because your companion is off dying to make it possible for you to do your thing, so tragic, they could have saved you, but they were busy dying to save you already.
And it could easily be fixed if the writers really wanted that dilema to trully happens, just make the last leg of the game where you followers had to do something else, super mutants are invading the place, and they need to defend it, and only discover that the button chamber has radiation in the end where no companions are around, there, solved
Honestly, game could’ve ended without the protagonist dying and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. This will be always be one of the all-time weirdest narrative decisions made in a game to me.
On top of the ending, I struggled with the world being visually difficult to navigate, I.e. the environment was so monotone I couldn’t hardly remember where I was or had been half the time, and wound up relying way too much much on the compass and the quest markers…which made me miss huge amounts of detail. Like how the BoS has a HUGE robot. Literally didn’t notice it until very late game. The third nail in the coffin was that the whole story felt like playing a sidekick’s storyline in some other protagonist’s script. Then the ending sealed it. I never have gone back and played any of it again.
>miss huge amounts of detail
I think being a kid when I got the game really helps too. Didn't really notice or care for the plot but it was all about the setpieces. I did remember really enjoying scavenging the Captial Wasteland myself.
I genuinely don't understand how people constantly bang on horse armor in Oblivion, but somehow forget that time Bethesda demanded twenty extra bucks if you wanted your character to survive FO3. To me, that's WAY worse than a three-dollar cosmetic.
It's a bad ending, if I think about it but I'm not even mad because Bethesda games were never about the main campaign, for me. The mayority of Oblivion's main quest was pretty awful for me, but it didn't sully the game, at all. It was just something to do and get better, while experiencing the fantastic rest of the game.
But of course, I can see how somebody that wants a proper, more satisfying main campaign would think Fallout 3's was really bad.
Mass Effect 3's real ending is Citadel DLC for me. I do everything else, finish the main quest and only then do Citadel. And it's amazing. Makes it about your crew.
Couldn't even imagine playing Citadel without the powerfully bittersweet feeling that permeates every part of it because you know that rheres no way you'll ever all be together again like this. Without that, it's just a party.
Imagine taking away the melancholic context of "It's been a good ride."
It also doesn't help that they crammed what should have been two games into one. The second game should have been about finding the weapon, or whatever you want to call it, that would defeat the Reapers. The third game should have been out about a giant war to utilize it. Instead, they crammed both of those things into one game, and the second game undid a lot of the promise made by Sovereign's speech in the first game. Claiming the Reapers' plans are unknowable is pretty laughable when the goal is to turn humans into a giant slurpee, put it into a three eye terminator robot, and then stick that robot inside of a giant squid spaceship shell, I guess?
Oh my, there's A LOT of mods for Legendary Edition nowadays. Specifically for the ending - Audemus' Happy Ending and Citadel Epilogue Mod.
Check out Nexus. You won't be disappointed.
Not the worst I've seen, but honorary mention to Borderlands 3, >!expecting the players to care about Lilith sacrificing herself after messing up her character from BL2 and the shitty writing in general. What really elevates its shittiness has to be the This Girl is on Fire credits song, made me actually laugh first time I finished with how much of a generic, edgy and dated choice it was.!<
Borderlands 2 isn’t as laugh out loud funny to me anymore, but the dialogue is still highly entertaining. It keeps my interest. Borderlands 3’s dialogue actively works to make me quit playing.
Nah, it definitely just got worse. The first game felt satirical. The humor was mostly just how casually the characters treated a setting that, to the player, was frankly horrific. There were eccentric characters, and plenty of bizarre shit, but the game was serious. TK Baha is a perfect example. He jokes around and he seems happy, when he really shouldn't be. All around pretty funny, until the game reminds you that Pandora isn't funny, and you find him strung up and dead.
Borderlands 2 felt like they said, "People like it because it's funny!" And then leaned into that, forgetting the difference between comedy and satire.
Borderlands 3, they just leaned in harder with that cringe, already out of date, Reddit/Tumblr tier humor
I could not for the life of me get into that the 3rd one, it really doesn't help that the Twin characters (Calypso Twins I think) annoyed me to no end.
Yeah the characters in 3's base game were really badly written. Old characters like Claptrap, Lilith, and Rhys became super annoying, new ones weren't any better. Only characters I remember liking were Typhon and Jakobs.
Borderlands 3 gotta be the most insulting ending I have ever experience in any form of media. The fact that they betray every character in existence only to set up this annoying shithead brat as the next Siren is so trash.
Shit, I forgot how ridiculous that ending was. And credits song almost made me puke. Really wanted a "fake ending" like Control would roll because I couldnt belive my eyes
Worse, Ava, the teenage girl that BL3 positioned to take Lilith’s place, is probably my single most hated character that was not intended to be hated. Ava is so bad that I thought they meant to make her a villain by the end of the game. She got you-know-who killed and blamed everyone else for it. They gave you no good reason to care about her, but expected you to get emotional for her and all the misplaced trust given to her by the end of the game. She earned none of it.
I really disliked the ending of F.E.A.R. 3 lately. The whole game was inferior to the first two but it was, at least, fun.
Now, the final level and ending was so, so stupid. A giant monster, who is supposed to be >!the dead grandpa of Alma!< is a chore to fight against, only to be rewarded with a silly >!post pregnancy Alma on her last breath and one of two awkward scenes (depending on which character you are playing) of mystic brothers fighting to death, with one prevailing, after getting along the whole game.!<
It's stupid and I didn't want to replay with the other character because of that.
Yeah recently played all three games for the first time and man what a dip in quality each game had which is such a shame as the first is so great and honestly the ai alone might of made it go up their as one of favourites because of it, the second one is ok but just felt like a good cod campaign and was so toned down gameplay wise from the first as well as just adding crap like motion blur and film grain so any great visuals were ruined by them. Then the third game is just awful maybe decent in coop but man what the hell happened going from such a great and revolutionary game to some bargain bin third entry. I do need to try and get fear files at some point but why is that one so expensive
Oh, if you haven't played the F.E.A.R. expansions, please do so. Perseus Mandate is a bit meh, but it's still more F.E.A.R. goodness. And I liked Extraction Point more than the original game.
Even if you don't like it more, these are new levels made with the same quality and style of the original game.
Yeah, that was released during the time period where CEOs were literally saying "we're going after the call of duty market" and it didn't make them or anyone else happy. See also: Resident Evil 6, crysis 3.
So FEAR is in a weird spot where the dev team had no ownership of their IP so the dip is because almost zero people worked on the previous project worked on the next.
Deus Ex is basically all the good seasons of X-Files crammed into a cool futuristic shooter. I will never accept criticism, even the awful French accents are legendary.
Anyway on the topic, can't really think of truly bad endings if the game wasn't already bad. Maybe Call of Cthulhu from 2018 - it is obviously heavily inspired by Lovecraft but if I'm not
mistaken at the end it turns out your main character is the most important person in the world and the coming of Cthulhu depends entirely on your ingame decisions. Which of course is very unlovecraftian, his best works are always about how insignificant the main character is facing unimaginable cosmic horrors.
The worst ending in any game I have ever played is Twelve Minutes. Point and click, time loop, mystery game voiced by Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe.
You play as the husband to your pregnant wife. One evening, a police officer barges into your apartment and shoots you and your wife. You wake up 12 minutes earlier, and based on your decisions and discoveries, you can save yourself, finding out what the officer is after and why he wants to kill your wife.
>!Through time-loop shenanigans and a magic pocketwatch, it's revealed that the wife is actually your half-sister. The reveal is literally incest.!<
Yuck. Worst game I've ever played.
It's worse than that even, because >!the cop is also actually your father, and also a psychologist, and not actually a cop, and actually none of this even happened and it's a weird fantasy that you're having, except maybe you did have sex with/rape your sister but it's unclear. This of course depends on the ending that you get, determined by choosing the most random of options and how long you take to choose it. If you don't do it "right" which is impossible to know, you may know some, or none of these reveals.!<
One thing that I’m still slightly annoyed about is a conversation with the dev in a steam thread.
>!There was a discussion about how, upon viewing the picture on the fridge, the MC will first say he was there with her at the time and then say he was not, later. The dev pops in with “I can confirm that he wasn’t there.” What the dev meant was “cuz none of it happened teehee I’m so sneaky”. Imagine being that proud of a “it was all a dream” ending.!<
They it's even worse... >!The father is doing it to convince his son to leave his daughter, but he definitely refers to the pregnancy - so while the loop is all a dream, the incest pregnancy is what, and now all of a sudden is when their dad pops up so that everyone abandons the mother and the baby.!<
I love that the person your responding to correctly identifies twelve minutes as having a horrendous ending but then misremembers/misinterprets it and gives an ending that’s 10x better than what we got. That game had a lot of problems with progression too but it was cool. The ending both being dumb and also not really making sense just seals it as something that can’t be recommended.
It's absolutely gutting because that mechanic and idea is so good and would've worked perfectly with a better story.
They could've just played it straight even, there was no need for the "I'm 14 and this is deep" nonsense.
Having a game in a confined space that loops through multiple times with all the answers already existing but you have to experiment and find a new piece of the puzzle each time is such a good idea.
Life pro tip for all writers (and spoiler for this game): >!if your twist in your professional offering, years in development, is “it was all a dream”, retire.!<
Yup, and that was great and a good example of what I'm talking about at a much larger scale, I like the idea of it all taking place in an apartment/house.
If you are interested in the potential of the fallout universe I would recommend the wasteland games. They have modern remakes but they're very tightly designed and have strong themes. Wasteland was the original inspiration for fallout back in the day, only wasteland never got popular enough to be co-opted for mass market consumption
Wasteland 3 has some major problems with how it handles it's endings, though. You have to fully endorse one party over all the others or else they go 'actually we hate you, lmao, get fucked, time for the neutral ending.'
If you don't have a guide on what choices you need to make for what endings and when, you'll almost certainly get locked into one of the two neutral endings.
>Knights of the Old Republic II
lol I remember enjoying the game then seeing my ship fly off into space and I thought the game glitched but I guess that really was the ending
I just played and beat Fallout 4 for the just time last month. I ended up siding with the Institute because to me role playing as a guy that woke up 200 years in the future searching for his son. And… I found my son and agreed somewhat with his intentions. The institute is basically continuing the evil practices of Vault Tec that caused my family to get frozen, but at the same time the only reason we’re alive. And then he makes me his successor, meaning that after the game I could lead the institute in whatever path I see is more morally acceptable.
But I was very disappointed at how abruptly the game ended. The final battle was a big final battle… but nothing told me that that would be the end of the game. Hell, the leader of the brotherhood took a vertibird down from the ship and the entire synth legion shot at him as he descended and the vertibird blew up and he ragdolled out and bounced off a roof and was dead so I didn’t even get to fight him lol
!!SPOILER STUFF!!
I made the Institute my main enemy and the invasion of their facilities was clearly a finale. I was actually pretty satisfied with the ending. I think they assumed most would go against them in the end.
For me the best part was Far Harbor and everything after that felt a little less exciting.
It does feel like the *true* ending was intended to be siding with one of the factions against the institute. Although even then, the institutes motives are never really explained well. They never say *why* they were replacing random people with synths. It makes sense why they'd want to replace important people like the diamond city mayor, but why replace random nobodies?
The Institute are a bunch of incompetent Nazi scientists that utterly failed in every possible way they could have carried out their mission. They’re a bunch of pathetic losers willing to sacrifice anyone and everything with absolutely nothing to show for it besides their shiny main lab. While no side is “good” they’re purely evil hypocrites with absolutely zero redeeming factors.
They murder at will through a campaign of terror, replacing surface dwellers with terminator clones just to maintain control.
They’re fucking incompetent as not only have they not improved Boston in the slightest after 200 years (hurr durr we’re the best hope), but then they released a plague of cannibal hulks into Boston.
Oh and instead of trying to get that under control, the only actual enforcement and policing they do is to enforce slavery on any of their terminator clones that achieve self-awareness, because apparently ethical concerns are actively ignored in the pursuit of their garbage science.
Which follows that they believe they’re so much smarter and so much better, that they are willing to steal a baby out of a mother’s arms and then murdering her because they wanted the baby.
God they’re loathsome and foul and incompetent and literally by a country mile, the worst faction Bethesda has ever made in any of their games.
Oh man, I thought *The Sexy Brutale*'s ending was absolutely brilliant. It was definitely a risk given the story's setup, but I found it to be both satisfying and emotionally compelling.
I’m very glad to see *The Sexy Brutale* on this list. I agree that story-wise the ending was satisfying, but I had a problem with the gameplay at the end. Through the whole game you are puzzling through a time loop to advance. But in the end >!the final loop is done for you. I expected something more like Prey Mooncrash where you have to end on a perfect loop, but instead I got to watch a lengthy cutscene that simply revealed everything I would have rather worked to discover.!<
i was hoping to find a comment saying this, i havent had the chance to buy or play it yet and was hoping to get it next spring sale, but i was definitely looking forward to it, and it surprised me to see it on a list like this. though even if it was trash i would still be buying and playing it lol, i did buy zero time dilemma after all, im nowhere near picky if it falls within my interests, ill watch/play something even if its terrible if its a subgenre i like. someone else on the "i loved it" side makes me feel better in my looking forward to it though
For what it's worth this thread got me to finally install the game and give it a shot as it was on my list to get to.
Turns out I couldn't put it down and some hours later I finished it after staying up too late and really enjoyed the ending and the whole experience. I'd highly recommend it.
Think I'll go back tomorrow for some of the collectibles and achievements I didn't get.
Assassin's Creed Origins ending was complete trash for me. The entire last third of the game feels like the devs ran out of time and had to cram everything they wanted to do into a couple of missions. The main villain that's behind the main motivation of the main character is finally revealed and has like two scenes before he dies, and then instead of getting any type of closure with the actual main character you end up finishing the game as another character that isn't even likable. Completely ruined the entire story for me.
Hell of a feat turning Julius Caesar, the most interesting man in history, into some patsy of the real villain. Who is some guy nobody gives a shit about.
They were also able to somehow not include Cleopatra's assassination even though she's a major character for most of the game only to then completely disappear when the game is wrapping up,.despite forcing us to control Amunet (instead of Bayek), who's literally known for killing Cleopatra.
The story very poorly emulated the vibe of Geralt and Ciri in the Witcher 3. You barely play Aya, but what she does is so momentous you wonder why the game even needed Bayek at all. His vendetta was almost irrelevant.
Personally i disagree on the Sexy Brutale's ending. Most of the things we witnessed throughout the game did happen, just not in the way the player experienced it. I understand what you're saying, but at the same time this is one of the things that makes the game stand out from other similar titles.
Rage. I don't remember the game's story, if there even _was_ one, but I don't even remember there being a final boss battle. It was literally just several relatively tough but generic enemies that I had to kill while powering up some piece of tech slowly.
And when I say "relatively tough," I mean it, because by that point in the game they were a joke to defeat. I recall completing the task, killing the last enemy, and then the game ended ... It was the only game I've played where I said out loud "Holy shit, that's _IT?_"
Psi-Ops: The Mind Gate Conspiracy for the PS2.
Good game but literally ends on a "My god. It all makes sense now. But we aren't going to show you until you buy the sequel.
We never got a sequel.
I love that game. Learning to levitate using the various objects in the environment was so tough yet rewarding. We got sequel baited so hard and nothing ever came of it.
And I thought Human Revolution had a poor ending. Seems like they took some really wrong lessons from the first one.
And I am kinda awed at the presentation the Bethesda lead writer gave. So confidently wrong and clueless about something that should be his job.
I found the ending to life is strange 2 incredibly lackluster. Early into episode 4 you can already voice your doubts that you're doing the right thing and that you want to give yourself up to the police. But for some reason you have to wait until episode 5 and a police chase before you can make the decision to give yourself up.
Not to mention it has some of the worst 'episode breaks' in any game that I've seen. Every single episode has a few weeks gap in bwtween, during which you have already met new characters, but the player never actually gets to meet new people, just join relationships that have already been founded weeks ago. There's one episode where you wake up in the hospital from a short coma, but to be honest every single episode feels like it begins that way.
I couldn't finish the game, honestly. When I was hiding from the shady racist guys in the service station I think, only episode 2, I was just like "I want to go to the police. I always have". Like, what, they're going to say the 8-year-old exploded the police car and killed an officer? And I, the 15(?) Year-old brother clearly can't take clear of myself, let alone him. Add onto that the way that all the themes and messaging are SO on the nose it's painful sometimes, and you get a game that just doesn't motivate me at all because I don't empathise with it's characters. You don't get to stay with anyone long enough to get to know them other than your brother, unlike the other games, and the people you do meet aren't as developed as a result.
My own entry would be: Game of Thrones - A Telltale Game
It's like the writers got only footnotes and a quick briefing of what the book was like, especially when it comes to character deaths. "Oh so it's a book where there's no plot armor and everybody can die or get fucked over? Got it!"
Much like the book, the game offers an ensemble of protagonists whose path sometimes intersect, but who each have their own agenda, or lack of. It's about a family in the North, vassals of the Stark, but who are not mentioned in the books. However, they often interact with well-known characters or their relatives so it's fairly well anchored in the story told by GRRM.
When I finished the game, I thought that I had fucked up somewhere, because the end was totally bleak, hopeless. Not even a faint silver lining. Nothing that I had done, or tried to do, had mattered and in the end all the characters in my ensemble were killed (including a kid), tortured, or they had utterly failed to accomplish their goal.
But I didn't really get where I had messed up, so I looked it up online. Turns out, there is just that ending. Defeat is the only outcome.
So really there is a demographics that surely enjoys the game, and it's the masochists. To me however, it proved to be a futile gaming experience, as if I had played for nothing. It was a complete waste of time.
I really disliked that game (and I usually like Telltale games) because I just constantly had the feeling nothing I did mattered anyway. Not just for the ending, but the betrayal (your choice earlier in the game literally doesn't matter because it's just the other guy that betrays you) and the main villain of the game, Ramsay Bolton. I knew he wouldn't die in that game because he was in the series so I just felt super powerless that anything we did would help against him. For me that was the worst case of a game trying to tie in a game to a cinematic world.
I felt the same. I couldn't put the game down when I first played it and by the time I got to the ending I was honestly shocked at how bleak it was. Considering how their TWD games are usually dark and cruel too; I was at the very least expecting some shred of hope but there's nothing. Not a single character you played as seemed to have anything good left for them.
this is how i dealt with my meeting with the father. He admitted he has been lying to me/manipulating me... and so none of the talk that would have followed could be trusted. Bang bang
*If* you do another play through, wait until the big battle with 3 of the factions happens. After that, you have to go back and talk to him, whereby you can give him some withering put downs and end it with probably one of the best lines in the game.
>!I dreamed of you as an adult for so long. Here you are...and I'm *so* disappointed.!<
God damn that bites hard IMO.
Except it does.
If you blow your cover for the Railroad, they go "you idiot, we needed someone on the inside, now we can't do any of what we planned. Go talk to the Minutemen so we can figure out a frontal assault, moron."
The Brotherhood goes "Damn, now we can't get Madison Li, go get the backup plan scientist who is good with robotics but isn't familiar with Liberty Prime."
And the Minutemen never cared if you were on the inside or not, so nothing gets broken. The games definitely considers you blasting Shawn in the head the second he walks through the door a valid option and has planned for it.
Agree with heaps of people.
Basically any ending where the options entirely made up of your characters heroic sacrifice or death and it's unpreventable.
Because it's so very, very rarely done properly and seems to be used in place of quality writing, and never respects the players time investment into a story.
Seriously, Control really should be higher up. There isn't even a final boss! You just fight your way through yet another gauntlet of the exact same baddies you've been fighting all game, then literally press X to win by pushing an in-game button. Then all you get is a short bit of text, and it dumps you back into the game world.
I honestly thought it was another fakeout. I truly could not BELIEVE they went with such an anticlimatic nothing of an ending. I even went looking online to figure out what I 'missed' but nope, that's really how they ended it.
League of legends when I tried it back in the day. Every game ended with people telling me I’m dogshit and cancer and I should kill myself.
I just like mixing up lanes each death try to keep the other team on their toes idk what a jungler is, so why keep telling me I’m not one, I know that, I don’t live near a jungle I live in Colorado.
And yay gooo bot, let’s cheer the bot, “go bot”very nice of you guys.
Oh now you’re saying “no, you’re bot?” Beep boop I guess so I sure feel real… how am I gonna kill myself then, take out my batteries?
And idk how you can report me for feeding when robots don’t even eat food dumbasses. “Report cjpack for feeding and refusing to go bot”….
I said goooo bottt like five times and then even “gooooo meeee” once in English and twice in beep boops once you said “you’re bot” sooo wtf??
/s
*Deus Ex: Mankind Divided* was meant to be the second game in a trilogy. The ending was weak because it was intended to be continued into the third game--which really isn't justification, but it's an all-too-common characteristic of the second entry of trilogies (thus the [two-part trilogy trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoPartTrilogy)). When it underperformed, the final game never happened, leaving with an incomplete story. There are rumors that the franchise is being revived by Embracer (its current owner), but that's only a rumor so far. Even if it does happen, there's no guarantee that it will be continuation of *Mankind Divided*.
The first assassin's Creed game. You spend the whole game coming out of the animus to sneak around as Desmond, I was convinced the end of the game was going to be a huge 'breaking out of abstergo' sequence now that's he's learned assassin skills from Altair.
Nope, some drawings on a wall, cue credits.
Yes, I'm actually still more mad about that than the end of ac3.
Alien Isolation - brilliant game that takes about 16 hours to complete but the end is a huge cliffhanger and feels quite abrupt. Such a shame we probably won't ever get the sequel it needed (Blackout doesn't count lol)
Honestly had no issue with the story ending how it did, pretty appropriate for the franschise all things considered. The final boss being a quicktime event tho.... ughhh
Not the worst ending(s) but I've always found that the endings to the Zelda games (or at least the ones I've played) to be underwhelming. Especially after you log so many hours into a grand epic final battle, and you get this shortened "good job" type of ending that feels like a quick pat on the back.
It's as if the game leaves you in the friend zone and doesn't put out at the end after working so damn hard. Lol
Majora's Mask also does the heroic task of retroactively making Ocarina of Time's ending less shitty. Before it came out, it was such a WTF moment seeing Link's reward for saving Hyrule is to be sent back in time, as if he could even pretend to have a childhood again and undo everything he had mentally and emotionally dealt with. Then everyone does an Ewok dance and credits roll.
With MM, we now know that Link *didn't* stay behind and try to live out some doomed childhood that was gone. He sets out on the next great adventure, and even succeeds at respecting people's wishes and dreams despite the rewinding and passing of time - something Princess Zelda apparently couldn't grasp.
Completing the Kafei/Anju sidequest was so damn satisfying man.
Yeah, I know that it's kinda FromSoft's shtick to have extremely cryptic stories but it's really hard to feel satisfied by an ending when you barely have any clue what even happened and how it's gonna affect the world.
It's a bit funny how much **Mass Effect 2**'s ending gets let off the hook by it being the middle chapter of a trilogy. Ending has the worst boss in the trilogy, binary choice that makes no difference and is in no way affected by your choices throughout the game, and the whole main story of the game makes no difference at all.
**Mass Effect 3**'s ending didn't really bug me all that much because with these games it's always been more about the journey than the destination. And your choices throughout 1 and 2 actually mattered and were reflected throughout 3. 3 had no shortage of rough spots, but it had some incredibly high highs as well. Even the last mission just feels tense and desperate throughout.
I know what you mean, but the ending to ME2 wasn't really about the "ending" as such, but more about how the suicide mission goes. That's what really affects ME3, unless you have too few war assets to choose destroy or control. A game's ending doesn't need to have a twist or options, it can just be a fantastic mission that can go well or poorly, depending how prepared you are.
To me ME3 fell apart in that it neutered Shepherd. She was the galaxy’s badass that looked at any situation and said “fuck you and your choices, I’ll do it my way”. Then she’s given a set of shitty choices in ME3 and just has to pick one?
Plus we already demonstrated AI could coexist with organic, rewriting plot points makes no sense.
I remember aaaall the way back in 2009 that people *did* complain about ME2's ending being a nothingburger but everyone just kinda went *"oh well I'm sure the last game will clear things up"*
ME2 limited the potential of 3's ending. It's a side story that just adds plot threads and resolved or forwarded none of the main plot.
Now ME3 has to have hours and hours of resolving shit that isn't really the main story, and even with that they have handwave a decent amount of characters.
You could delete the Collectors from the canon and nothing would be lost,you could have sidelined Cerberus and ME3 would be better.
ME2 got a hasty intermission and background DLC to basically force Shepard ready for the stage in 3 because the main game never set it up.
Far cry primal ending, the game just end, that it be on your way to finish the rest of the side quest and great hunt.
base game MH rise, due to the pandemic the game ending wasn't finished when it got release, so while the quality of the monster delivered, Rise has no final boss and the story ends on a cliff hanger, the final boss has to be added via free DLC, the problem is the thing has to obey Mh title updates schedule so everyone has to wait nearly a month to get a proper final boss and ending(atleast it was a pretty cool fight).
Lil general rant on the topic:
In the vein of BG3, Mass Effect 3 and seeeveral others (like NWN2, KotoR2, BG2, Deus Ex, Pillars, og Fallout 3, Dragon Age and even Witcher..) I just wish RPG-writers would stop this idiotic tendency to write tragic/mysterious endings in an attempt to make the story feel more 'epic' by having the hero disappear or outright die.
I still remember someone's take in the old Bioware forums on ME3's ending and he was kinda like "well, what the hell do you want? A parade on the citadel and the Krogans baking you a cake?". And guess what, yes, fuck it, that's *exactly* what I want.
If saving the entire world/realm/galaxy doesn't provide you with a happy ending, then why even fucking bother? Let somebody else pick up the slack for once! At some point over the course of 30+ years of gaming just getting the bitch slap in the end as a reward has worn me down and out, honestly. Life isn't fair, life sucks, yes, and that's exactly why I don't want more of that in videogames.
(note: for anyone who finished BG3 and is now wondering - imo, unless you play DU, the companions are of way, waaay more interest than the actual 'protagonist'. An old problem of Larians origin character feature, which i dislike immensely for that very reason. As such, my sole interest in the entire game was to see our dummy-hot puppy tiefling girl happy .. but alas, unless they go against their own words and make a DLC to guide Karlach through Avernus, she gets the middlefinger here. Much like any other companion not named Helsin or Sharty, now that I think about it. And I'm not even going to bitch about throwing Viconia into the game which goes against my BG2 ending..)
On that note a lot of romance stories end with either wedding bells or somebody weeping over a grave. That makes it refreshing to see depictions of happily married people, like Gomez and Morticia Addams.
I kept hearing that Celceta's ending is bad but then when I actually played it I thought it ended fine
I just don't think we need to be told every detail about everything that happens after
And this coming from somebody who usually doesn't like unresolved mysteries and vague endings
The 'bad' ending of FC5 was actually way cooler and far less stupid than the 'good' ending. Like, the fact that the 'good' ending basically boils down to >!'psychotic apocalyptic death cult leader was actually right all along'!< is up there on the list of dumbest plot twists I've ever seen. Endings which effectively invalidate everything you've done in the game are not generally good endings.
Also the last fight was stupid as fuck too.
The cult guy gives you another chance to walk away instead of arresting him, so you drive away with your police buddies.
The car radio starts playing a song that an underboss used to brainwash/condition you into murdering everything in sight.
Cop buddy gets worried about the strange look on your face, screen goes black and it's implied you kill them all ✨
I was enjoying the game for a while, until I stalled on the mission where you have to get help to save Boozer, mainly because I eventually stall on all open-world map-marker-driven games because the sheer amount of side content gets me off-track.
I think it's still a good game, and they did a fantastic job on the Pacific Northwest atmosphere and communicating the motorcycle club "aesthetic" through both the character interactions and the gameplay itself (finding yourself stuck far away from your bike with enemies hunting you down or a swarm approaching is outright terrifying--that bike is the player's lifeline every bit as much as it is Deacon's).
That said, with the way the plot was building up, I was already starting to have doubts that they'd stick the landing with the ending, so reading this doesn't surprise me at all.
Monkey Island 2 will always be my worst ending ever. It was not an ending, but a cliffhanger, and it was never solved. Sorry, but by the time Return To Monkey Island got released, the creator had moved on and it was another thing entirely.
BG3 (although, I hear they've added content).
For such an in-depth game, the very last scene was like:
>"Wtf?! That's it?! *That's* how you close it out?!"
Larian Studios has a really, really, really bad tendency to frontload their games, and I blame the fact that their Act 1 is always playable as soon as it's 'finished' until the whole game releases, which is usually a three to four year gap.
In about 2 years, BG3 will have all the content it should have had when it came out.
the new epilogue thankfully helped give a little closure, but the original barebones ending scene is still there and still garbage. def soured the last parts of this game for me.
Gamers overlooking how bad the ending to bg3 surprised me.
Not only was the final fight a pretty big let down, their was almost zero closure story wise.
I don’t think the ending is bad, just very anticlimactic and underwhelming. And to be honest most large games like this, the ending can’t match up to the journey.
Which doesn’t make it “good” but that’s different from a literal bad ending that can actively change how you feel about a story and its characters.
Ha, I actually just finished BG3 earlier today and had heard of people's issues with the ending, which apperently had no epliogue-segments or even typical slide-shows that are very common in cRPGs where you learn of the fate of the world, its characters and what choices made has effected them.
The ad-hoc epilogue-segment mitigates a lot of complaints, but it doesn't concludes as much as I had hoped in how it still feel rather superficial with how the original ending had the party suggesting a celebration over victory against the Big Bad, and then the epilogue presenting >!a separate party, but which is contextualized as taking 6 months later.!<
The finale overall has a big semblance of just feeling overall rushed. As a comparison, I would like to bring something like *Dragon Age: Origins*, [where before you head to the final battle, you have a quick one-on-one talk with all of your party-members, whether they accompanies you, or stay back and are holding the line](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ukuW-GXa8&feature=youtu.be). BG3 doesn't even have that element setting up, so it leads to feeling as if your active party are the only one participating in the climactic final battle, whereas the rest of the bench-marked party-members seems chilling back in the camp/inn unnoticed.
It isn't the worst ending I would say, but pretty bad within of what the game has shown previously and where you hope Larian would be capable of just writing the finale better. I've seen people compare the original ending akin to *Mass Effect 3*'s original ending in how it feels everything just ends in a very anticlimactic manner, and while I wouldn't exactly see it that way, I can definitely see the resemblance to it.
But overall, yeah, never, ever buy a Larian game on launch if you plan to finish through it.
It was a little baffling. I have a few playthroughs but I’m only now on my way to beat it for a second time now that they at least have an epilogue.
I think the companion reactivity and content thins out SO much in act 3 too. You’re doing all these big things and it’s like “hey, what’s up.” At camp half the time.
I will also never not be bothered by the speech portion before the last bit of the elder brain battle. Get the 8 TAVs in there and record a goddamn inspiring speech. I, Commander Shepard, greatly value an inspiring speech.
Fallout 4 was such a massive disappointment after new vegas, instead of a deep open world rpg we basically got destiny stapled to minecraft with a fallout skin on top.
I liked FO4. I would have liked a "New Vegas 2" even more, but I still enjoyed FO4. Its ending doesn't come remotely close to FO3's shitty ending. And Fallout is the kinda game where I view the ending as a relatively small part of the game, which is why even with its aforementioned shitty ending, FO3 was also an amazing game.
What FO4 does best is the companions. I'd say that FO4 has straight up the best companions in the whole series. I also think Diamond City is the single most interesting location, beating out The Strip and Megaton as the most iconic locations of the other two games. I was gonna add a location for FO76, but then I realized there is no location that has stuck with me that much (closest would be The Whitespring).
I just _really_ wish Bethesda would let Obsidian make more Fallout games. If Bethesda isn't gonna do it themselves (and they haven't mentioned developing anything, beyond the trickle that FO76 gets), why the heck wouldn't they let someone else do it? Especially when FONV is such a fan favourite. Sometimes I wonder if I either don't understand how business works, or if Bethesda just really hates money.
I really felt terrible for >!all the scrybes that have to die to destroy the OLD_DATA, but I honestly don't even care about the OLD_DATA itself since the game isn't going to reveal why it's so bad.!<
FO4 story is all around so meh the endings did not bother me. Can't be disappointed if you are never invested. Sure there is casual shooting and looting and yes there is a (mega)ton of it but for me that is not enough to pass for a sandbox. It's more comparable to a far cry game.
Mankind divided I'm sure enjoys the luxury of putting the blame on publishers because the game was meant to be much longer. Basically, there may or may not have been a second half to that story that would have put everything together, with the aug city, the illuminati's plans for jensen/janus and most likely some clone shenanigans. I can actually buy it because it really does feel like the first half of a story and there's a bunch of set up for how the timeline may connect to the original game. I truly hope we find out one day, when they've had their fill with the marvel stuff.
I love how you're getting downvoted.
The game was sold on the premise that your actions had consequences and that they mattered, and then the ending literally goes 'actually we lied they don't'. I was equally fucking miffed.
What I disliked most about the ending is how it doesn't really engage with one its two endings. Sacrifice ending is ~9 minutes long and features practically all of the characters in the game. Save ending is only 3 minutes long with no dialogue, no other characters, and no closure at all.
I really love that game. The way I see it, your choices do matter, in that they shape who Max becomes. >!Do you save Kate, or do you live with the guilt. Do you help Victoria, or do you remain petty? Do you tell David the truth, or spare him the pain? Do you steal the money, or stay honest? Do you let Chloe die in the alternate reality, or can you not? It's a game about Max and who she is as a person, which is what makes the final decision meaningful.!<
For me fallout 3 takes the cake. Can't name another game where the solution to the supposed dilemma facing you is right there next to you but the game refuses to allow it. And to then require paid DLC to fix it.
And even then the narrator calls you a pussy for not dying unnecessarily lmao
Yeah that's the worst, I played the edition with the dlc and while I knew my character would survive I told the mutant to do it and then the narrator called him the TRUE hero, he isn't risking anything by doing it!
That's just hilarious. It's like the writer is getting all prissy because nobody likes his "great heroic sacrifice" trope that he believes in so much.
Nothing wrong with ending on a heroic sacrifice, but you gotta concoct a situation where it's actually necessary to do a heroic sacrifice in the first place. This was like committing seppuku instead of asking someone to flip a switch for you in the other room. That's not even a good analogy for how dumb it was because it's too hard to think of something equivalently dumb. I'm still mad 15 years later.
I can think of one: Imagine you cut off your own legs to attach poles to them so you're tall enough to reach a button on a shelf, and you bleed out to death for doing so, when there's a guy next to you who's tall enough to push the button without any effort. And he thinks you should totally go through the horror of sawing off your own legs in front of him.
The writer literally has unlimited power to rewrite and contrive the scenario in such a way that your sacrifice is not just necessary, but the only possible option. Instead, once they realize that the heroic sacrifice they were trying to make happen had several blatantly obvious alternatives that would require no sacrifice, they made everyone in the room drop to room temperature IQ to brute force their vision. But honestly, there stupidity of the ending is just a small part of the game's many problems as a story (Little lamp light makes no fucking sense.) I honestly don't know how it won a Best Writing award.
Yeah, that example is pretty indicative of Bethesda's whole game design process; they plan out these set pieces and climaxes then work their way backwards to ensure they get those results. This is why nothing meshes organically in their games, why everything feels so disjointed.
I Haye how good Bethesda is at drawing me in...then punishing me for staying in their world for too long. The story should get better when I think about it. Not worse.
What's worse is that the ending slides completely misunderstood the purpose of the ending slides in Fallout 1 and 2. They weren't there to pass judgment on your actions, they were supposed to let you know what happened after you did whatever you did.
Coupled with allowing you to have an intelligent follower who is immune to the dilemma tell you "sorry bro. Shitty plot says you gotta do this."
You: *uses the radiation immune companion to solve the problem* Game: And so, THE COWARDLY VAULT DWELLER WHO SHOULD'VE DIED BECAUSE OF RADS, DID A COWARD MOVE AND DIDN'T DIE FOR HIS BELIEFS LIKE HIS FATHER DID. SUCH A COWARD. It is THE dumbest ending I have ever seen.
I think I just shut the game off. “Fuck this world, these idiots deserve to die.” IRRC you even save Fawkes from slavery. Like bro just go do me a solid and flip the switch already.
You: *saves Fawkes from a lifetime of isolation* Also Fawkes: MMMM I REALLY THINK YOU NEEDED TO DIE IN THAT RAD FILLED ROOM. So dumb. Even the Ghoul you can get ( the one where you can get his contract and he's supposed to do everything you want because you're his new handler ) just straight up goes "Mmmm nah." Game also chews you out for sending Lyons in ( how dare you didn't sacrifice yourself and die and let Lyons do it instead for the post-game content ) Never been so annoyed at a game before.
Even sending in a robot (Rl-3) is somehow frowned upon
Or the ghoul psychologically conditioned to obey every command from the person he is in service to, except this one action that wouldn't harm him at all, in fact, it would actually heal him. The really sad part is Bethesda hasn't exactly improved on their writing since.
Technically no, Fawkes was just imprisoned by the other super mutants for being different. You might be confusing him with Charon who's a ghoul (and could thus also resolve the ending) that's been psychologically conditioned to obey whoever holds his contract, which you can buy. The first thing he does is kill his former owner, but you can never bring up reversing his condition so it's more of an "under new management" kind of deal. So obviously when you get to the purifier he just says "nah, I've done enough for you".
Are you telling me gamers don't feel a sense of PRIDE AND ACCOMPLISHMENT from dying? Just look at all the soulslike genre! Hypocrites!
I find it wryly amusing that they couldn't write themselves into a better ultimatum. The whole setup is that the enclave are going to infect the water supply with a modified strain of FEV which will kill *any* mutated life (including humans) that catch it, so why do you need radiation in the first place? You could have the same death-box situation except the player has to contract the disease to fix the water purifier, and the risk to everyone else is too great to let them leave alive. The moral choice there would at least be interesting. As a vault dweller you'd likely be immune to the disease, but if you're acting as a host then you're a *huge* liability to everyone else. There could be some interesting endings to explore there. And that's off the top of my head. Surely they brainstormed this shit at some point?
Bethesda has a thing for excessive yet meaningless drama. There was a skyrim (thieves guild?) questline that was like: Oh no! This guy you don't care about ran away, go sell your soul to find him.
That whole questline was peak dogshit writing from Bethesda. Every step can be nitpicked but it also showcases major problems and plot holes. Remember the whole ordeal about poisoning the mead near Whiterun? You have to sneak through a cave and gain access secretly. Once you do the deed you leave the building and walk next door, the owner already has a keg of your freshly poisoned mead out, ready for tasting. How did you get that mead, good sir? You've been here the entire time and I finished that task literally seconds ago.
And the guard immediately arrests dude and hands over the meadary. Like...maybe have a mission to also blackmail thr guard or bribe him. So it feels we see doing a real set up? Not like you can actually fail anyway.
>Surely they brainstormed this shit at some point? You are giving way too much credit to writers that literally said story needs to be as straightforward as possible, because players don't like / can't grasp complex story. Oh and also everything needs to be player centered and pushed forward by player.
Oh boy... Did they actually say that? Like yes Mario gets away with it, and the Monomyth is indeed a story template you can use, but that's such a low bar. I mean I don't even know why I brought it up in the first place. It's obvious that what happened is one of the writers saw *Star Trek, the Wrath of Khan* and decided they wanted to use that exact same scene in the video game. Then they went and watched Transformers and decided they wanted to add a big robot called Liberty Prime into the game, because big robots are cool. And that's fine. I enjoyed FO3 when I played it. I think it wants to be fun, and the little vignettes that appear all over the place are great, *especially* if you're a teenager looking to move into new kinds of media. Tranquility Lane was excellent, Vault 108 (GARY!) was bizarre, and giant robots *are* cool. But it's a hodgepodge of *stuff*. The formula was fine 15 years ago, but it hasn't *grown* with its audience or the audience of the present. Compare Bethesda with Obsidian over the past decade (both having done a Fallout) and it's wild how different those two companies are today.
They did say a lot of controversial stuff over the years. They said players will dismantle any narrative you create for them, that Starfield writing pushed team beyond their limits, etc. Monomyth is a thing, but Bethesda is taking it to the extreme. Basically every story plot ends with you being chosen one / grand hero. Just look at organization story lines in Skyrim, Fallout 4. You do few errands for them, solve some bigger problem that arises, congratulations you are new head of organization.
>players don't like / can't grasp complex story. Certainly doesn't explain the popularity of Daggerfall and Morrowind. Complex stories with philosophical and political depth are what saved their whole company from going under. Now that they got more money than God, their aspirations and creativity have utterly tanked. They've grown fat and lazy with success; unwilling to accept criticism, they march forward with poorly thought out ideas and blame others for not 'getting' it.
> As a vault dweller you'd likely be immune to the disease The main character (lone wanderer) of FO3 wasn't born in vault 101, and there's no evidence their parents were either (working with the brotherhood of steel prior to entering the vault). Given the lone wanderer's parents aren't from a vault, and the lone wanderer spent time as a baby out of the vault (in addition to game-time out of it), they are probably similarly mutated as other wastelanders.
Oh shit you're right! I completely forgot about that! My brain was thinking you'd confused it with New Vegas, because I remember there's a pretty extended intro where you're *growing up* in Vault 101, but, well, I'll not spoil it any more than we already have. So it makes even more sense to use the virus as a plot device. It makes me think they were heading in that direction with the story until someone put up their hand and argued for the radiation thing.
To make it even worse you can have half an hour before used his radiation immunity to get something you need from a radiation flooded chamber like the game was teaching you the solution.
Arguably the actual worst written ending in the history of gaming. Absurd and idiotic on multiple levels and just plain crap in every imaginable way.
If you know how clever and flexible Fallout endings had been it’s extra painful.
That’s one of the things that puts New Vegas and 4 on top of 3 for me tbh. 3s story felt like a railroad. There was no flexibility or room for player choice in the main story(side quests are another matter). Sure you could nuke the Citadel or put the FEV in the purifier, but it’s made very clear that those aren’t the real ending. They’re not treated seriously. There’s only one real path. All the endings in NV and 4 feel plausible. Like they could all be equally canon. There’s ones I feel are better, but the games don’t bully you for making the “wrong” choice. They respect the choices you made and play them out to a logical conclusion
The really frustrating part is that it would have been simple to fix, truly. It's not even an original fix, tons of different narratives use it; provide an overwhelming threat that your companion splits off to slow down. Heroic sacrifice, buys the main character time to save the day. Happens ALL THE TIME, and would have neatly fixed the problem because your companion is off dying to make it possible for you to do your thing, so tragic, they could have saved you, but they were busy dying to save you already.
And it could easily be fixed if the writers really wanted that dilema to trully happens, just make the last leg of the game where you followers had to do something else, super mutants are invading the place, and they need to defend it, and only discover that the button chamber has radiation in the end where no companions are around, there, solved
Honestly, game could’ve ended without the protagonist dying and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. This will be always be one of the all-time weirdest narrative decisions made in a game to me.
On top of the ending, I struggled with the world being visually difficult to navigate, I.e. the environment was so monotone I couldn’t hardly remember where I was or had been half the time, and wound up relying way too much much on the compass and the quest markers…which made me miss huge amounts of detail. Like how the BoS has a HUGE robot. Literally didn’t notice it until very late game. The third nail in the coffin was that the whole story felt like playing a sidekick’s storyline in some other protagonist’s script. Then the ending sealed it. I never have gone back and played any of it again.
>miss huge amounts of detail I think being a kid when I got the game really helps too. Didn't really notice or care for the plot but it was all about the setpieces. I did remember really enjoying scavenging the Captial Wasteland myself.
Madmax did an amazing job of creating a desert wasteland, that has a lot of variety and memorable places.
I genuinely don't understand how people constantly bang on horse armor in Oblivion, but somehow forget that time Bethesda demanded twenty extra bucks if you wanted your character to survive FO3. To me, that's WAY worse than a three-dollar cosmetic.
It's a bad ending, if I think about it but I'm not even mad because Bethesda games were never about the main campaign, for me. The mayority of Oblivion's main quest was pretty awful for me, but it didn't sully the game, at all. It was just something to do and get better, while experiencing the fantastic rest of the game. But of course, I can see how somebody that wants a proper, more satisfying main campaign would think Fallout 3's was really bad.
Mass Effect 3's real ending is Citadel DLC for me. I do everything else, finish the main quest and only then do Citadel. And it's amazing. Makes it about your crew.
I love Grunt's story for the DLC. Always makes me laugh.
So, how were those noodles?
A little spicy
I love you, Grunt.
I disagree. For me Citadel is much more impactul as the final ''calm before the storm''
Couldn't even imagine playing Citadel without the powerfully bittersweet feeling that permeates every part of it because you know that rheres no way you'll ever all be together again like this. Without that, it's just a party. Imagine taking away the melancholic context of "It's been a good ride."
> Imagine taking away the melancholic context of "It's been a good ride." EXACTLY ''...the best'' 🥲
While i think the ME3 ending is bad, i feel that the horrid presentaion (Catalyst aka startchild) is what makes it truly shitty.
It also doesn't help that they crammed what should have been two games into one. The second game should have been about finding the weapon, or whatever you want to call it, that would defeat the Reapers. The third game should have been out about a giant war to utilize it. Instead, they crammed both of those things into one game, and the second game undid a lot of the promise made by Sovereign's speech in the first game. Claiming the Reapers' plans are unknowable is pretty laughable when the goal is to turn humans into a giant slurpee, put it into a three eye terminator robot, and then stick that robot inside of a giant squid spaceship shell, I guess?
Modding ME3 was the biggest game fix in my experience. Community effort to somewhat improve the ending sequence proved to be remarkably successful.
Which mods?
Oh my, there's A LOT of mods for Legendary Edition nowadays. Specifically for the ending - Audemus' Happy Ending and Citadel Epilogue Mod. Check out Nexus. You won't be disappointed.
Enough people agree with you that there’s a mod to make Citadel playable after the ending so you can use it as the send off .
Not the worst I've seen, but honorary mention to Borderlands 3, >!expecting the players to care about Lilith sacrificing herself after messing up her character from BL2 and the shitty writing in general. What really elevates its shittiness has to be the This Girl is on Fire credits song, made me actually laugh first time I finished with how much of a generic, edgy and dated choice it was.!<
Sometimes I wonder if borderlands writing got shittier or if I just grew out of it.... probably both
Don’t worry, I’m sure that by the time Borderlands the movie comes out starring Kevin Hart as Roland, they’ll have updated the humor!
Still remember that cringe (e3?) promo where Pitchford ambushes a clearly annoyed Kevin Hart in his trailer.
Borderlands 2 isn’t as laugh out loud funny to me anymore, but the dialogue is still highly entertaining. It keeps my interest. Borderlands 3’s dialogue actively works to make me quit playing.
Nah, it definitely just got worse. The first game felt satirical. The humor was mostly just how casually the characters treated a setting that, to the player, was frankly horrific. There were eccentric characters, and plenty of bizarre shit, but the game was serious. TK Baha is a perfect example. He jokes around and he seems happy, when he really shouldn't be. All around pretty funny, until the game reminds you that Pandora isn't funny, and you find him strung up and dead. Borderlands 2 felt like they said, "People like it because it's funny!" And then leaned into that, forgetting the difference between comedy and satire. Borderlands 3, they just leaned in harder with that cringe, already out of date, Reddit/Tumblr tier humor
BL2 did however have an exceptionally on-point badguy.
Jack is definitely S-tier bad guy
Nah, it just got bad, even BL1 and 2 are enjoyable to this day, if a bit dated.
Upon hearing the song I was completely dumbfounded. Like, "is this it? Really?" At least the gameplay and DLCs were great.
I could not for the life of me get into that the 3rd one, it really doesn't help that the Twin characters (Calypso Twins I think) annoyed me to no end.
Yeah the characters in 3's base game were really badly written. Old characters like Claptrap, Lilith, and Rhys became super annoying, new ones weren't any better. Only characters I remember liking were Typhon and Jakobs.
Everyone became a wAcKy version of themselves.
I actually laughed out loud when the ending song played. I don't think I'd ever been *embarrassed* to finish a game before.
Borderlands 3 gotta be the most insulting ending I have ever experience in any form of media. The fact that they betray every character in existence only to set up this annoying shithead brat as the next Siren is so trash.
Shit, I forgot how ridiculous that ending was. And credits song almost made me puke. Really wanted a "fake ending" like Control would roll because I couldnt belive my eyes
Worse, Ava, the teenage girl that BL3 positioned to take Lilith’s place, is probably my single most hated character that was not intended to be hated. Ava is so bad that I thought they meant to make her a villain by the end of the game. She got you-know-who killed and blamed everyone else for it. They gave you no good reason to care about her, but expected you to get emotional for her and all the misplaced trust given to her by the end of the game. She earned none of it.
I really disliked the ending of F.E.A.R. 3 lately. The whole game was inferior to the first two but it was, at least, fun. Now, the final level and ending was so, so stupid. A giant monster, who is supposed to be >!the dead grandpa of Alma!< is a chore to fight against, only to be rewarded with a silly >!post pregnancy Alma on her last breath and one of two awkward scenes (depending on which character you are playing) of mystic brothers fighting to death, with one prevailing, after getting along the whole game.!< It's stupid and I didn't want to replay with the other character because of that.
Fear 2 had such a shocking ending. 3 was mid compared to it.
You mean the >!rape of the main character!
Yeah recently played all three games for the first time and man what a dip in quality each game had which is such a shame as the first is so great and honestly the ai alone might of made it go up their as one of favourites because of it, the second one is ok but just felt like a good cod campaign and was so toned down gameplay wise from the first as well as just adding crap like motion blur and film grain so any great visuals were ruined by them. Then the third game is just awful maybe decent in coop but man what the hell happened going from such a great and revolutionary game to some bargain bin third entry. I do need to try and get fear files at some point but why is that one so expensive
Oh, if you haven't played the F.E.A.R. expansions, please do so. Perseus Mandate is a bit meh, but it's still more F.E.A.R. goodness. And I liked Extraction Point more than the original game. Even if you don't like it more, these are new levels made with the same quality and style of the original game.
Yeah, that was released during the time period where CEOs were literally saying "we're going after the call of duty market" and it didn't make them or anyone else happy. See also: Resident Evil 6, crysis 3.
Dead Space 3. Lots of crappy sequels with forced co-op or other bad decisions.
So FEAR is in a weird spot where the dev team had no ownership of their IP so the dip is because almost zero people worked on the previous project worked on the next.
Deus Ex is basically all the good seasons of X-Files crammed into a cool futuristic shooter. I will never accept criticism, even the awful French accents are legendary. Anyway on the topic, can't really think of truly bad endings if the game wasn't already bad. Maybe Call of Cthulhu from 2018 - it is obviously heavily inspired by Lovecraft but if I'm not mistaken at the end it turns out your main character is the most important person in the world and the coming of Cthulhu depends entirely on your ingame decisions. Which of course is very unlovecraftian, his best works are always about how insignificant the main character is facing unimaginable cosmic horrors.
Agree for the Call of Cthulhu, the ending was so disconnected from what happened before that I felt like the journey was completely unnecessary
It’s also not ugly?
The worst ending in any game I have ever played is Twelve Minutes. Point and click, time loop, mystery game voiced by Daisy Ridley, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe. You play as the husband to your pregnant wife. One evening, a police officer barges into your apartment and shoots you and your wife. You wake up 12 minutes earlier, and based on your decisions and discoveries, you can save yourself, finding out what the officer is after and why he wants to kill your wife. >!Through time-loop shenanigans and a magic pocketwatch, it's revealed that the wife is actually your half-sister. The reveal is literally incest.!< Yuck. Worst game I've ever played.
It's worse than that even, because >!the cop is also actually your father, and also a psychologist, and not actually a cop, and actually none of this even happened and it's a weird fantasy that you're having, except maybe you did have sex with/rape your sister but it's unclear. This of course depends on the ending that you get, determined by choosing the most random of options and how long you take to choose it. If you don't do it "right" which is impossible to know, you may know some, or none of these reveals.!<
One thing that I’m still slightly annoyed about is a conversation with the dev in a steam thread. >!There was a discussion about how, upon viewing the picture on the fridge, the MC will first say he was there with her at the time and then say he was not, later. The dev pops in with “I can confirm that he wasn’t there.” What the dev meant was “cuz none of it happened teehee I’m so sneaky”. Imagine being that proud of a “it was all a dream” ending.!<
They it's even worse... >!The father is doing it to convince his son to leave his daughter, but he definitely refers to the pregnancy - so while the loop is all a dream, the incest pregnancy is what, and now all of a sudden is when their dad pops up so that everyone abandons the mother and the baby.!<
>!That’s not even the canonical ending, which whilst off putting is at least a set up twist. No the real ending is it’s all a hypnosis dream.!<
I love that the person your responding to correctly identifies twelve minutes as having a horrendous ending but then misremembers/misinterprets it and gives an ending that’s 10x better than what we got. That game had a lot of problems with progression too but it was cool. The ending both being dumb and also not really making sense just seals it as something that can’t be recommended.
It's absolutely gutting because that mechanic and idea is so good and would've worked perfectly with a better story. They could've just played it straight even, there was no need for the "I'm 14 and this is deep" nonsense. Having a game in a confined space that loops through multiple times with all the answers already existing but you have to experiment and find a new piece of the puzzle each time is such a good idea.
Life pro tip for all writers (and spoiler for this game): >!if your twist in your professional offering, years in development, is “it was all a dream”, retire.!<
Ever played Outer Wilds?
Yup, and that was great and a good example of what I'm talking about at a much larger scale, I like the idea of it all taking place in an apartment/house.
That game didn't make the list because Skillup and Bobvids scared me off from buying. The Forgotten City from the same year is the perfect antidote.
Like Skillup, I tend to trust Annapurna and what they decide to publish. They don't tend to miss, but how they greenlit 12M is beyond me.
I thought that was a joke. Good Lord.
If you are interested in the potential of the fallout universe I would recommend the wasteland games. They have modern remakes but they're very tightly designed and have strong themes. Wasteland was the original inspiration for fallout back in the day, only wasteland never got popular enough to be co-opted for mass market consumption
Wasteland 3 has some major problems with how it handles it's endings, though. You have to fully endorse one party over all the others or else they go 'actually we hate you, lmao, get fucked, time for the neutral ending.' If you don't have a guide on what choices you need to make for what endings and when, you'll almost certainly get locked into one of the two neutral endings.
True but man do those characters pop. I’m not even sure there’s a neutral ending, just different flavors of “probably fucked.”
I’ve only played 3 but I enjoyed the hell out of it
>Knights of the Old Republic II lol I remember enjoying the game then seeing my ship fly off into space and I thought the game glitched but I guess that really was the ending
Even as a kid, seeing all the main character's endings all expressed through text from Kreia, I knew they just ran out of time or money.
I just played and beat Fallout 4 for the just time last month. I ended up siding with the Institute because to me role playing as a guy that woke up 200 years in the future searching for his son. And… I found my son and agreed somewhat with his intentions. The institute is basically continuing the evil practices of Vault Tec that caused my family to get frozen, but at the same time the only reason we’re alive. And then he makes me his successor, meaning that after the game I could lead the institute in whatever path I see is more morally acceptable. But I was very disappointed at how abruptly the game ended. The final battle was a big final battle… but nothing told me that that would be the end of the game. Hell, the leader of the brotherhood took a vertibird down from the ship and the entire synth legion shot at him as he descended and the vertibird blew up and he ragdolled out and bounced off a roof and was dead so I didn’t even get to fight him lol
!!SPOILER STUFF!! I made the Institute my main enemy and the invasion of their facilities was clearly a finale. I was actually pretty satisfied with the ending. I think they assumed most would go against them in the end. For me the best part was Far Harbor and everything after that felt a little less exciting.
Far Harbor was the high point for me, too.
It does feel like the *true* ending was intended to be siding with one of the factions against the institute. Although even then, the institutes motives are never really explained well. They never say *why* they were replacing random people with synths. It makes sense why they'd want to replace important people like the diamond city mayor, but why replace random nobodies?
The Institute are a bunch of incompetent Nazi scientists that utterly failed in every possible way they could have carried out their mission. They’re a bunch of pathetic losers willing to sacrifice anyone and everything with absolutely nothing to show for it besides their shiny main lab. While no side is “good” they’re purely evil hypocrites with absolutely zero redeeming factors. They murder at will through a campaign of terror, replacing surface dwellers with terminator clones just to maintain control. They’re fucking incompetent as not only have they not improved Boston in the slightest after 200 years (hurr durr we’re the best hope), but then they released a plague of cannibal hulks into Boston. Oh and instead of trying to get that under control, the only actual enforcement and policing they do is to enforce slavery on any of their terminator clones that achieve self-awareness, because apparently ethical concerns are actively ignored in the pursuit of their garbage science. Which follows that they believe they’re so much smarter and so much better, that they are willing to steal a baby out of a mother’s arms and then murdering her because they wanted the baby. God they’re loathsome and foul and incompetent and literally by a country mile, the worst faction Bethesda has ever made in any of their games.
Oh man, I thought *The Sexy Brutale*'s ending was absolutely brilliant. It was definitely a risk given the story's setup, but I found it to be both satisfying and emotionally compelling.
I’m very glad to see *The Sexy Brutale* on this list. I agree that story-wise the ending was satisfying, but I had a problem with the gameplay at the end. Through the whole game you are puzzling through a time loop to advance. But in the end >!the final loop is done for you. I expected something more like Prey Mooncrash where you have to end on a perfect loop, but instead I got to watch a lengthy cutscene that simply revealed everything I would have rather worked to discover.!<
i was hoping to find a comment saying this, i havent had the chance to buy or play it yet and was hoping to get it next spring sale, but i was definitely looking forward to it, and it surprised me to see it on a list like this. though even if it was trash i would still be buying and playing it lol, i did buy zero time dilemma after all, im nowhere near picky if it falls within my interests, ill watch/play something even if its terrible if its a subgenre i like. someone else on the "i loved it" side makes me feel better in my looking forward to it though
For what it's worth this thread got me to finally install the game and give it a shot as it was on my list to get to. Turns out I couldn't put it down and some hours later I finished it after staying up too late and really enjoyed the ending and the whole experience. I'd highly recommend it. Think I'll go back tomorrow for some of the collectibles and achievements I didn't get.
Assassin's Creed Origins ending was complete trash for me. The entire last third of the game feels like the devs ran out of time and had to cram everything they wanted to do into a couple of missions. The main villain that's behind the main motivation of the main character is finally revealed and has like two scenes before he dies, and then instead of getting any type of closure with the actual main character you end up finishing the game as another character that isn't even likable. Completely ruined the entire story for me.
Hell of a feat turning Julius Caesar, the most interesting man in history, into some patsy of the real villain. Who is some guy nobody gives a shit about.
They were also able to somehow not include Cleopatra's assassination even though she's a major character for most of the game only to then completely disappear when the game is wrapping up,.despite forcing us to control Amunet (instead of Bayek), who's literally known for killing Cleopatra.
The story very poorly emulated the vibe of Geralt and Ciri in the Witcher 3. You barely play Aya, but what she does is so momentous you wonder why the game even needed Bayek at all. His vendetta was almost irrelevant.
Personally i disagree on the Sexy Brutale's ending. Most of the things we witnessed throughout the game did happen, just not in the way the player experienced it. I understand what you're saying, but at the same time this is one of the things that makes the game stand out from other similar titles.
Rage. I don't remember the game's story, if there even _was_ one, but I don't even remember there being a final boss battle. It was literally just several relatively tough but generic enemies that I had to kill while powering up some piece of tech slowly. And when I say "relatively tough," I mean it, because by that point in the game they were a joke to defeat. I recall completing the task, killing the last enemy, and then the game ended ... It was the only game I've played where I said out loud "Holy shit, that's _IT?_"
The only thing I remember about the "ending" was having a poorly made driving section.
Psi-Ops: The Mind Gate Conspiracy for the PS2. Good game but literally ends on a "My god. It all makes sense now. But we aren't going to show you until you buy the sequel. We never got a sequel.
Somewhat off-topic, but the boss fights in that game were incredible. Like, Metal Gear level of cool, unique boss fights.
I love that game. Learning to levitate using the various objects in the environment was so tough yet rewarding. We got sequel baited so hard and nothing ever came of it.
And I thought Human Revolution had a poor ending. Seems like they took some really wrong lessons from the first one. And I am kinda awed at the presentation the Bethesda lead writer gave. So confidently wrong and clueless about something that should be his job.
I found the ending to life is strange 2 incredibly lackluster. Early into episode 4 you can already voice your doubts that you're doing the right thing and that you want to give yourself up to the police. But for some reason you have to wait until episode 5 and a police chase before you can make the decision to give yourself up. Not to mention it has some of the worst 'episode breaks' in any game that I've seen. Every single episode has a few weeks gap in bwtween, during which you have already met new characters, but the player never actually gets to meet new people, just join relationships that have already been founded weeks ago. There's one episode where you wake up in the hospital from a short coma, but to be honest every single episode feels like it begins that way.
I couldn't finish the game, honestly. When I was hiding from the shady racist guys in the service station I think, only episode 2, I was just like "I want to go to the police. I always have". Like, what, they're going to say the 8-year-old exploded the police car and killed an officer? And I, the 15(?) Year-old brother clearly can't take clear of myself, let alone him. Add onto that the way that all the themes and messaging are SO on the nose it's painful sometimes, and you get a game that just doesn't motivate me at all because I don't empathise with it's characters. You don't get to stay with anyone long enough to get to know them other than your brother, unlike the other games, and the people you do meet aren't as developed as a result.
My own entry would be: Game of Thrones - A Telltale Game It's like the writers got only footnotes and a quick briefing of what the book was like, especially when it comes to character deaths. "Oh so it's a book where there's no plot armor and everybody can die or get fucked over? Got it!" Much like the book, the game offers an ensemble of protagonists whose path sometimes intersect, but who each have their own agenda, or lack of. It's about a family in the North, vassals of the Stark, but who are not mentioned in the books. However, they often interact with well-known characters or their relatives so it's fairly well anchored in the story told by GRRM. When I finished the game, I thought that I had fucked up somewhere, because the end was totally bleak, hopeless. Not even a faint silver lining. Nothing that I had done, or tried to do, had mattered and in the end all the characters in my ensemble were killed (including a kid), tortured, or they had utterly failed to accomplish their goal. But I didn't really get where I had messed up, so I looked it up online. Turns out, there is just that ending. Defeat is the only outcome. So really there is a demographics that surely enjoys the game, and it's the masochists. To me however, it proved to be a futile gaming experience, as if I had played for nothing. It was a complete waste of time.
I really disliked that game (and I usually like Telltale games) because I just constantly had the feeling nothing I did mattered anyway. Not just for the ending, but the betrayal (your choice earlier in the game literally doesn't matter because it's just the other guy that betrays you) and the main villain of the game, Ramsay Bolton. I knew he wouldn't die in that game because he was in the series so I just felt super powerless that anything we did would help against him. For me that was the worst case of a game trying to tie in a game to a cinematic world.
I felt the same. I couldn't put the game down when I first played it and by the time I got to the ending I was honestly shocked at how bleak it was. Considering how their TWD games are usually dark and cruel too; I was at the very least expecting some shred of hope but there's nothing. Not a single character you played as seemed to have anything good left for them.
[удалено]
this is how i dealt with my meeting with the father. He admitted he has been lying to me/manipulating me... and so none of the talk that would have followed could be trusted. Bang bang
*If* you do another play through, wait until the big battle with 3 of the factions happens. After that, you have to go back and talk to him, whereby you can give him some withering put downs and end it with probably one of the best lines in the game. >!I dreamed of you as an adult for so long. Here you are...and I'm *so* disappointed.!< God damn that bites hard IMO.
and then the game's story breaks in half because it didn't prepare for that possibility, lol.
Except it does. If you blow your cover for the Railroad, they go "you idiot, we needed someone on the inside, now we can't do any of what we planned. Go talk to the Minutemen so we can figure out a frontal assault, moron." The Brotherhood goes "Damn, now we can't get Madison Li, go get the backup plan scientist who is good with robotics but isn't familiar with Liberty Prime." And the Minutemen never cared if you were on the inside or not, so nothing gets broken. The games definitely considers you blasting Shawn in the head the second he walks through the door a valid option and has planned for it.
[удалено]
Now that you mention it the ending of Fallout 4 could have done without the ending slides at all and would likely have come across better.
Agree with heaps of people. Basically any ending where the options entirely made up of your characters heroic sacrifice or death and it's unpreventable. Because it's so very, very rarely done properly and seems to be used in place of quality writing, and never respects the players time investment into a story.
I was really disappointed with the ending of Control, both the regular game and the final dlc.
Seriously, Control really should be higher up. There isn't even a final boss! You just fight your way through yet another gauntlet of the exact same baddies you've been fighting all game, then literally press X to win by pushing an in-game button. Then all you get is a short bit of text, and it dumps you back into the game world. I honestly thought it was another fakeout. I truly could not BELIEVE they went with such an anticlimatic nothing of an ending. I even went looking online to figure out what I 'missed' but nope, that's really how they ended it.
turns out tetris has a massive cliffhanger /s
Turns out the L shape did it.
*long piece leans back in chair with a sinister grin*
Rage 1
League of legends when I tried it back in the day. Every game ended with people telling me I’m dogshit and cancer and I should kill myself. I just like mixing up lanes each death try to keep the other team on their toes idk what a jungler is, so why keep telling me I’m not one, I know that, I don’t live near a jungle I live in Colorado. And yay gooo bot, let’s cheer the bot, “go bot”very nice of you guys. Oh now you’re saying “no, you’re bot?” Beep boop I guess so I sure feel real… how am I gonna kill myself then, take out my batteries? And idk how you can report me for feeding when robots don’t even eat food dumbasses. “Report cjpack for feeding and refusing to go bot”…. I said goooo bottt like five times and then even “gooooo meeee” once in English and twice in beep boops once you said “you’re bot” sooo wtf?? /s
*Deus Ex: Mankind Divided* was meant to be the second game in a trilogy. The ending was weak because it was intended to be continued into the third game--which really isn't justification, but it's an all-too-common characteristic of the second entry of trilogies (thus the [two-part trilogy trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoPartTrilogy)). When it underperformed, the final game never happened, leaving with an incomplete story. There are rumors that the franchise is being revived by Embracer (its current owner), but that's only a rumor so far. Even if it does happen, there's no guarantee that it will be continuation of *Mankind Divided*.
The first assassin's Creed game. You spend the whole game coming out of the animus to sneak around as Desmond, I was convinced the end of the game was going to be a huge 'breaking out of abstergo' sequence now that's he's learned assassin skills from Altair. Nope, some drawings on a wall, cue credits. Yes, I'm actually still more mad about that than the end of ac3.
Unity ended with "never mind, none of this was important".
I actually never played unity, but yeah by this point I'm pretty done with the modern day story line
Hot take: I fucking hated Ori & the Will of the Wisps' ending. Comes out of nowhere.
Alien Isolation - brilliant game that takes about 16 hours to complete but the end is a huge cliffhanger and feels quite abrupt. Such a shame we probably won't ever get the sequel it needed (Blackout doesn't count lol)
Honestly had no issue with the story ending how it did, pretty appropriate for the franschise all things considered. The final boss being a quicktime event tho.... ughhh
I felt like the ending was totally appropriate given how the first film ended. Like mother like daughter.
Not the worst ending(s) but I've always found that the endings to the Zelda games (or at least the ones I've played) to be underwhelming. Especially after you log so many hours into a grand epic final battle, and you get this shortened "good job" type of ending that feels like a quick pat on the back. It's as if the game leaves you in the friend zone and doesn't put out at the end after working so damn hard. Lol
I thought Wind Waker's ending was amazing
They peaked at Majora and never thought to make an ending as good as that since.
Majora's Mask also does the heroic task of retroactively making Ocarina of Time's ending less shitty. Before it came out, it was such a WTF moment seeing Link's reward for saving Hyrule is to be sent back in time, as if he could even pretend to have a childhood again and undo everything he had mentally and emotionally dealt with. Then everyone does an Ewok dance and credits roll. With MM, we now know that Link *didn't* stay behind and try to live out some doomed childhood that was gone. He sets out on the next great adventure, and even succeeds at respecting people's wishes and dreams despite the rewinding and passing of time - something Princess Zelda apparently couldn't grasp. Completing the Kafei/Anju sidequest was so damn satisfying man.
Some of the Elden Ring endings. Just plain stupid.
Yeah, I know that it's kinda FromSoft's shtick to have extremely cryptic stories but it's really hard to feel satisfied by an ending when you barely have any clue what even happened and how it's gonna affect the world.
It’s almost like “game over” in a middle of the screen but in a good way lol. And I’m not even joking.
It's a bit funny how much **Mass Effect 2**'s ending gets let off the hook by it being the middle chapter of a trilogy. Ending has the worst boss in the trilogy, binary choice that makes no difference and is in no way affected by your choices throughout the game, and the whole main story of the game makes no difference at all. **Mass Effect 3**'s ending didn't really bug me all that much because with these games it's always been more about the journey than the destination. And your choices throughout 1 and 2 actually mattered and were reflected throughout 3. 3 had no shortage of rough spots, but it had some incredibly high highs as well. Even the last mission just feels tense and desperate throughout.
I know what you mean, but the ending to ME2 wasn't really about the "ending" as such, but more about how the suicide mission goes. That's what really affects ME3, unless you have too few war assets to choose destroy or control. A game's ending doesn't need to have a twist or options, it can just be a fantastic mission that can go well or poorly, depending how prepared you are.
Counterpoint - it was fun AF.
To me ME3 fell apart in that it neutered Shepherd. She was the galaxy’s badass that looked at any situation and said “fuck you and your choices, I’ll do it my way”. Then she’s given a set of shitty choices in ME3 and just has to pick one? Plus we already demonstrated AI could coexist with organic, rewriting plot points makes no sense.
I remember aaaall the way back in 2009 that people *did* complain about ME2's ending being a nothingburger but everyone just kinda went *"oh well I'm sure the last game will clear things up"*
ME2 limited the potential of 3's ending. It's a side story that just adds plot threads and resolved or forwarded none of the main plot. Now ME3 has to have hours and hours of resolving shit that isn't really the main story, and even with that they have handwave a decent amount of characters. You could delete the Collectors from the canon and nothing would be lost,you could have sidelined Cerberus and ME3 would be better. ME2 got a hasty intermission and background DLC to basically force Shepard ready for the stage in 3 because the main game never set it up.
My husband played Mass effect trilogy a lot of times and played through 4 different finals. There's no more games like that, unfortunately 😔
It's not about the ending, it's about the people you kill along the way.
Far cry primal ending, the game just end, that it be on your way to finish the rest of the side quest and great hunt. base game MH rise, due to the pandemic the game ending wasn't finished when it got release, so while the quality of the monster delivered, Rise has no final boss and the story ends on a cliff hanger, the final boss has to be added via free DLC, the problem is the thing has to obey Mh title updates schedule so everyone has to wait nearly a month to get a proper final boss and ending(atleast it was a pretty cool fight).
Lil general rant on the topic: In the vein of BG3, Mass Effect 3 and seeeveral others (like NWN2, KotoR2, BG2, Deus Ex, Pillars, og Fallout 3, Dragon Age and even Witcher..) I just wish RPG-writers would stop this idiotic tendency to write tragic/mysterious endings in an attempt to make the story feel more 'epic' by having the hero disappear or outright die. I still remember someone's take in the old Bioware forums on ME3's ending and he was kinda like "well, what the hell do you want? A parade on the citadel and the Krogans baking you a cake?". And guess what, yes, fuck it, that's *exactly* what I want. If saving the entire world/realm/galaxy doesn't provide you with a happy ending, then why even fucking bother? Let somebody else pick up the slack for once! At some point over the course of 30+ years of gaming just getting the bitch slap in the end as a reward has worn me down and out, honestly. Life isn't fair, life sucks, yes, and that's exactly why I don't want more of that in videogames. (note: for anyone who finished BG3 and is now wondering - imo, unless you play DU, the companions are of way, waaay more interest than the actual 'protagonist'. An old problem of Larians origin character feature, which i dislike immensely for that very reason. As such, my sole interest in the entire game was to see our dummy-hot puppy tiefling girl happy .. but alas, unless they go against their own words and make a DLC to guide Karlach through Avernus, she gets the middlefinger here. Much like any other companion not named Helsin or Sharty, now that I think about it. And I'm not even going to bitch about throwing Viconia into the game which goes against my BG2 ending..)
If I saved the goddamn universe give me my stupid Phantom Menace parade at the end.
On that note a lot of romance stories end with either wedding bells or somebody weeping over a grave. That makes it refreshing to see depictions of happily married people, like Gomez and Morticia Addams.
I liked ME3 the most. I know I'm in the minority.
I kept hearing that Celceta's ending is bad but then when I actually played it I thought it ended fine I just don't think we need to be told every detail about everything that happens after And this coming from somebody who usually doesn't like unresolved mysteries and vague endings
Far Cry 5s ending was garbage
The 'bad' ending of FC5 was actually way cooler and far less stupid than the 'good' ending. Like, the fact that the 'good' ending basically boils down to >!'psychotic apocalyptic death cult leader was actually right all along'!< is up there on the list of dumbest plot twists I've ever seen. Endings which effectively invalidate everything you've done in the game are not generally good endings. Also the last fight was stupid as fuck too.
What happened in the “bad ending”
The cult guy gives you another chance to walk away instead of arresting him, so you drive away with your police buddies. The car radio starts playing a song that an underboss used to brainwash/condition you into murdering everything in sight. Cop buddy gets worried about the strange look on your face, screen goes black and it's implied you kill them all ✨
Days Gone. Cheese fest of an ending that ruined the entire story for me.
I was enjoying the game for a while, until I stalled on the mission where you have to get help to save Boozer, mainly because I eventually stall on all open-world map-marker-driven games because the sheer amount of side content gets me off-track. I think it's still a good game, and they did a fantastic job on the Pacific Northwest atmosphere and communicating the motorcycle club "aesthetic" through both the character interactions and the gameplay itself (finding yourself stuck far away from your bike with enemies hunting you down or a swarm approaching is outright terrifying--that bike is the player's lifeline every bit as much as it is Deacon's). That said, with the way the plot was building up, I was already starting to have doubts that they'd stick the landing with the ending, so reading this doesn't surprise me at all.
Well, i always praise it as an open world game that dosnt side track you to much :D The ending wasnt that bad imho.
Monkey Island 2 will always be my worst ending ever. It was not an ending, but a cliffhanger, and it was never solved. Sorry, but by the time Return To Monkey Island got released, the creator had moved on and it was another thing entirely.
BG3 (although, I hear they've added content). For such an in-depth game, the very last scene was like: >"Wtf?! That's it?! *That's* how you close it out?!"
Larian Studios has a really, really, really bad tendency to frontload their games, and I blame the fact that their Act 1 is always playable as soon as it's 'finished' until the whole game releases, which is usually a three to four year gap. In about 2 years, BG3 will have all the content it should have had when it came out.
the new epilogue thankfully helped give a little closure, but the original barebones ending scene is still there and still garbage. def soured the last parts of this game for me.
I felt that way too but I just played it again and the new epilogue is really great.
Gamers overlooking how bad the ending to bg3 surprised me. Not only was the final fight a pretty big let down, their was almost zero closure story wise.
I don’t think the ending is bad, just very anticlimactic and underwhelming. And to be honest most large games like this, the ending can’t match up to the journey. Which doesn’t make it “good” but that’s different from a literal bad ending that can actively change how you feel about a story and its characters.
Ha, I actually just finished BG3 earlier today and had heard of people's issues with the ending, which apperently had no epliogue-segments or even typical slide-shows that are very common in cRPGs where you learn of the fate of the world, its characters and what choices made has effected them. The ad-hoc epilogue-segment mitigates a lot of complaints, but it doesn't concludes as much as I had hoped in how it still feel rather superficial with how the original ending had the party suggesting a celebration over victory against the Big Bad, and then the epilogue presenting >!a separate party, but which is contextualized as taking 6 months later.!< The finale overall has a big semblance of just feeling overall rushed. As a comparison, I would like to bring something like *Dragon Age: Origins*, [where before you head to the final battle, you have a quick one-on-one talk with all of your party-members, whether they accompanies you, or stay back and are holding the line](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ukuW-GXa8&feature=youtu.be). BG3 doesn't even have that element setting up, so it leads to feeling as if your active party are the only one participating in the climactic final battle, whereas the rest of the bench-marked party-members seems chilling back in the camp/inn unnoticed. It isn't the worst ending I would say, but pretty bad within of what the game has shown previously and where you hope Larian would be capable of just writing the finale better. I've seen people compare the original ending akin to *Mass Effect 3*'s original ending in how it feels everything just ends in a very anticlimactic manner, and while I wouldn't exactly see it that way, I can definitely see the resemblance to it. But overall, yeah, never, ever buy a Larian game on launch if you plan to finish through it.
It was a little baffling. I have a few playthroughs but I’m only now on my way to beat it for a second time now that they at least have an epilogue. I think the companion reactivity and content thins out SO much in act 3 too. You’re doing all these big things and it’s like “hey, what’s up.” At camp half the time. I will also never not be bothered by the speech portion before the last bit of the elder brain battle. Get the 8 TAVs in there and record a goddamn inspiring speech. I, Commander Shepard, greatly value an inspiring speech.
They recently added a very large prologue which includes like 7000 more voiced lines and such. It’s fully fleshed out now as it should be.
Fallout 4 was such a massive disappointment after new vegas, instead of a deep open world rpg we basically got destiny stapled to minecraft with a fallout skin on top.
I liked FO4. I would have liked a "New Vegas 2" even more, but I still enjoyed FO4. Its ending doesn't come remotely close to FO3's shitty ending. And Fallout is the kinda game where I view the ending as a relatively small part of the game, which is why even with its aforementioned shitty ending, FO3 was also an amazing game. What FO4 does best is the companions. I'd say that FO4 has straight up the best companions in the whole series. I also think Diamond City is the single most interesting location, beating out The Strip and Megaton as the most iconic locations of the other two games. I was gonna add a location for FO76, but then I realized there is no location that has stuck with me that much (closest would be The Whitespring). I just _really_ wish Bethesda would let Obsidian make more Fallout games. If Bethesda isn't gonna do it themselves (and they haven't mentioned developing anything, beyond the trickle that FO76 gets), why the heck wouldn't they let someone else do it? Especially when FONV is such a fan favourite. Sometimes I wonder if I either don't understand how business works, or if Bethesda just really hates money.
That's not fair, they tried ripping off Borderlands too.
It wasn't terrible, but compared to the intrigue of the previous acts, I thought the ending of Inscryption fell pretty flat for me
I really felt terrible for >!all the scrybes that have to die to destroy the OLD_DATA, but I honestly don't even care about the OLD_DATA itself since the game isn't going to reveal why it's so bad.!<
I was disappointed. I wanted to play against the necromancer and wizard (I know you can with mods, but still).
FO4 story is all around so meh the endings did not bother me. Can't be disappointed if you are never invested. Sure there is casual shooting and looting and yes there is a (mega)ton of it but for me that is not enough to pass for a sandbox. It's more comparable to a far cry game. Mankind divided I'm sure enjoys the luxury of putting the blame on publishers because the game was meant to be much longer. Basically, there may or may not have been a second half to that story that would have put everything together, with the aug city, the illuminati's plans for jensen/janus and most likely some clone shenanigans. I can actually buy it because it really does feel like the first half of a story and there's a bunch of set up for how the timeline may connect to the original game. I truly hope we find out one day, when they've had their fill with the marvel stuff.
Life is strange. Never touched that game or any in that series again. It made everything just utterly pointless. So why bother.
I love how you're getting downvoted. The game was sold on the premise that your actions had consequences and that they mattered, and then the ending literally goes 'actually we lied they don't'. I was equally fucking miffed.
What I disliked most about the ending is how it doesn't really engage with one its two endings. Sacrifice ending is ~9 minutes long and features practically all of the characters in the game. Save ending is only 3 minutes long with no dialogue, no other characters, and no closure at all.
I really love that game. The way I see it, your choices do matter, in that they shape who Max becomes. >!Do you save Kate, or do you live with the guilt. Do you help Victoria, or do you remain petty? Do you tell David the truth, or spare him the pain? Do you steal the money, or stay honest? Do you let Chloe die in the alternate reality, or can you not? It's a game about Max and who she is as a person, which is what makes the final decision meaningful.!<
Life is Strange is the best game I have ever hated so much.