The worst RPG you ever played?

[Tweed]

I've played some really shit things in my time so it's hard to pin it down, but even having played slop like Pillars of Shiternity, Dragon Age 2, and Fountain of Dreams I think the worst RPG I've ever played is still Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 is cargo cult experience from beginning to end by a company that didn't comprehend what made Fallout good. Bethesda took the basic elements of Fallout, threw them into the Frankenstein Gamebryo engine and then slopped it with their magic touch, hoping that somehow it would work out. So you get crap like people lived around an unexploded atomic bomb because that's weird and post-apocalypses are supposed to be weird. You get the 1950s art style going from background dressing to being the all-consuming motif of the Fallout universe. You get mandatory trudges through boring as fuck subways stations because of convenient piles of rubble blocking your progress.

That's only the start of what's wrong with this pile of shit. Everything is bad about Fallout 3. FEV vats in vaults for the excuse of having more super mutants, mercenaries who attack you for the crime of having good karma, and THREE DAWWWWWGGGGGG. The game insists that water is in short supply, but never bothers to show you that much the same way Skyrim insists that there's a war going on, but aside from a few camps and the chance to participate in two or three whole missions, you'd never be able to tell.

And who could forget the vampires? You don't grow fangs, but you'll get to use pre-war blood bags to restore your health! There's other real winning moments like wasting a perfectly good GECK to make a water purifier and Little fucking Lamplight, and just a few of its sins. Nothing about this game makes any sense and big hack Emil stealing an entire episode of Star Trek: Voyager didn't help. The ending of the puke-green tinted shitfest is the best part. The game wants you to heroically kill yourself when there's no less than three companions capable of turning off a radiation spewing water purifier (that shouldn't be) without suffering any problems and if you have the DLC installed you get chided for being a coward instead of throwing your life away like your father did. Fuck this game, when Bethesda finally goes under for Starfail and TES6 it'll be karma for ruining Fallout.

Yes, even having played Fountain of Dreams, I think Fallout 3 is still the worst RPG I've ever played. So, what's the worst you've ever played?

[rusty_shackleford]

From what I can think of right now, Elex 2 is definitely near the top. Everything about it is just Elex: But Worse!, took a ridiculous amount of time to make considering it's 2/3rds asset reuse, etc.,

[Nooneatall]

Gothic

[Tangerine]

Grotesque Tactics. I didn't think it'd be good, but I had a tactics RPG itch I needed to scratch and it seemed like it'd do the job. It did not. Besides being simple and easy, the game was peak 2000s wacky random Newgrounds humor. What a slog.

[Gunnar]

Most bad rpgs i just avoided or quickly turned off in disgust. The one I actually slogged through that comes to mind is Inquisitor (2009). A collection of terrible design ideas, braindead clickspam combat, potion spam, zero encounter design, etc, the list goes on and on, with it’s signature mechanic of uncovering heretics being the most disappointing aspect.

[1998]

Not considering any one-man or ramen-budget games, Tyranny is the one RPG I never managed to get pass the 5h mark. Sure, there were a lot of systematic issues with it, but it just took itself way too seriously. The writing is easily the worst of any game I have ever played and has all the issues amplified by 10 from these era of games (aka Kickstarter era where pitches included the word count, because more words = better RPG apparently).

[1998]

From what I can think of right now, Elex 2 is definitely near the top. Everything about it is just Elex: But Worse!, took a ridiculous amount of time to make considering it's 2/3rds asset reuse, etc.,

I still don't get it. Maybe if you are playing melee, but with range, the downgrade is there but its not that massively. Its not from Gothic reincarnated to worst game ever.

If you would play Elex 2 first, I think you would have a fine time with it. Just because its basically the same but (slightly) worse, doesn't make it the worst RPG ever.

[logincrash]

Dragon Age Veilguard.

[Tangerine]

Dragon Age Veilguard.

Why did you play it?

[logincrash]

Dragon Age Veilguard.

Why did you play it?

Morbid curiosity combined with self-loathing.

[MrTwinkls]

Wanted to say Skyrim but you reminded me about Fallout 3.
And then I remembered another RPG that I consider the worst. The thing that I detest the most in all of media is wasted potential and for me the biggest hated sinner in that regard is Encased.

[WaterMage]

Diablo 3 but is less RPG than shooters like FC3.

I really hate everything about it. Nonsensical armor design, flashy spells, cooldowns, everyone of the same class being a clone, your weapon determining spells, minions and unarmed attack damage(...)

[rusty_shackleford]

From what I can think of right now, Elex 2 is definitely near the top. Everything about it is just Elex: But Worse!, took a ridiculous amount of time to make considering it's 2/3rds asset reuse, etc.,

I still don't get it. Maybe if you are playing melee, but with range, the downgrade is there but its not that massively. Its not from Gothic reincarnated to worst game ever.

If you would play Elex 2 first, I think you would have a fine time with it. Just because its basically the same but (slightly) worse, doesn't make it the worst RPG ever.

I can't think of anything nice to say about Elex 2. It is completely bottom of the barrel with zero redeeming features.

[rusty_shackleford]

The thing that I detest the most in all of media is wasted potential and for me the biggest hated sinner in that regard is Encased.

Deserves an award for "best prologue followed by worst game ever"
Got pissed the moment I realized that it was yet another slavic fallout clone instead of doing its own thing, thanks for making a cool setting then just throwing it out the window.

[Lord of Riva]

MetalHeart: Replicants Rampage must have been the worst.

Septerra Core is up there as well.

I'm not sure if it counts but "Wrath unleashed" has a special place in Hell for me.

[rusty_shackleford]

I can't think of anything nice to say about Elex 2. It is completely bottom of the barrel with zero redeeming features.

FYI I've played every PB game but the first Risen. Elex 2 is on par with unpatched Gothic 3, if not worse. Gothic 3 is better by virtue of having a ton of fan content.

Risen 2 & 3 are decent and IMO get too much hate. Risen 2 particularly, it is one of the few humorous RPGs that doesn't land flat.

[Lord of Riva]

Elex 2 was pretty bad, total shitshow that one.

[TKVNC]

I strongly disagree that it's an RPG - but since I'll just pretend to make a point:

The Witcher 3.

[cleansingcarnage]

Dragon Age Veilguard.

Even though I hate to admit that I also tried playing it out of curiosity, I have to agree. I almost never just bounce right off of games, but I couldn't find the will to continue playing this past about 7 hours. Everything about is is so repellant and condescending that I figure self-loathing has to be a primary motivation for playing it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Ao no Kiseki/Trails to Azure: I cannot recall any other game I have played where the story made me feel so angry. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it.

I played this game with the fan translation patch back in 2018. A few issues here continued from the first Crossbell game, Zero no Kiseki/Trails from Zero, namely the boring setting of Crossbell which is just a modern urban city rather than an interesting place I want to visit like the pre-modern or early-modern Kingdom of Liberl or the Erebonian Empire. Boring main cast of characters. Combat is boring. Crossbell City has several hundred NPCs which makes the game a slog when they update every few hours and you have to stop the plot to go talk to them. Boring 40-50 hours of story until you reach the final chapter. Forgettable soundtrack. But what really makes me dislike this game is the final act. The first half of the final chapter is really exciting and engaging, with high tension and a fast pace. But then you climb up to the top of the tower, and the villain starts doing his "justice" rant, and it goes all downhill from there, and the protagonists start making utterly infuriating, hypocritical decisions that made me hate the hero, hate Crossbell and characters, and detracted my enjoyment of the latter Trails of Cold Steel games whenever Crossbell and its characters intruded upon the plot. Crossbell is a buffer state situated between the two superpowers that are in a cold war with each other. Crossbell's leaders foolishly attack both superpowers attempting to claim their own sovereignty, only to then start freaking out when the hammer comes down and both sides mobilize their armies to invade and it looks like Crossbell is about to become a smoking ruin for the impending world war. The leaders of Crossbell then begin scrambling to use a plot device to remake the timeline to prevent the current predicament, but the heroes say "no, you can't do that! You can't use magic to make things better! You have to endure suffering!". Disregarding the fact that it is revealed that the heroes actually died to the final boss of the prior game, and are only alive in this game because Crossbell's leaders manipulated the timeline specifically to save them. If the heroes had put their money where their mouth was, they would have requested that the timeline be reverted to the original state and that they be returned to death. So Lloyd lives and damns his country, damns the world, damns countless people to be killed or suffer. Fuck you Lloyd. Fuck the SSS. But then it gets worse in the Cold Steel games with the historical revisionism, and the people of Crossbell acting as if they are the purely innocent victims in this when they cheered on their leaders as they launched an unprovoked attack on Erebonia. And then in Reverie, Lloyd damns the world AGAIN by rebuffing the last words of a dying timetraveler's attempt to warn him about the impending apocalypse and how to avoid it. Fuck Lloyd. There is more (such as how the heroes KO mass murderers but then don't cap them in the head or even cuff them, and instead just walk away and allow the villains to wake up and continue haunting the franchise. Good job heroes!), but for the sake of my sanity I am going to stop.

[Tweed]

ELEX 2 is bad enough that I didn't bother past 20 minutes, but it also means I can't pass judgement on it the way I suffered through Fallout 3. I'll have to subject myself to it again at some point.

Of course that means having to play as Soyjax.

[Roderick]

Fuck Bethesda.

[DrSneed]

ME Andromeda. Everything about it was worse than original trilogy. Aliens designs downgraded, awful animations, toddler body proportions, ect.

[asf]

bg3

[NotAI]

Starfield

[Tinky Winky]

From what I can think of right now, Elex 2 is definitely near the top. Everything about it is just Elex: But Worse!, took a ridiculous amount of time to make considering it's 2/3rds asset reuse, etc.,

I still don't get it. Maybe if you are playing melee, but with range, the downgrade is there but its not that massively. Its not from Gothic reincarnated to worst game ever.

If you would play Elex 2 first, I think you would have a fine time with it. Just because its basically the same but (slightly) worse, doesn't make it the worst RPG ever.

Elex 2 started out to be okay-ish, then the game degraded to literal "kill 50 robots to progress" type of lazy copypasta shit in the later chapters. It's very clear that PB doesn't care about gamedev anymore other than collecting government gibs.

The worst RPG for me is nuMaplestory (post big bang), can't complain though since the "game" is obviously designed for autistic sweats only.

[J1M]

Diablo 4. Since it is apparently an RPG now.

[1998]

ELEX 2 is bad enough that I didn't bother past 20 minutes, but it also means I can't pass judgement on it the way I suffered through Fallout 3. I'll have to subject myself to it again at some point.

Of course that means having to play as Soyjax.

Did you like elex 1?

[rusty_shackleford]

Just remembered your reward for exploring in elex 2 is cooked food 99% of the time.
Why is there chili con carne sitting around in random places, freshly cooked and not spoiled? Who knows.

No cool places to find, you're expected to rely on quest marker, no random events (iirc)
Tons of immortal npcs, too.
Nobody cool to find outside of towns, no people just surviving.

[wndrbr]

Dragon Age 2.