10 Most Disappointing Triple-A Games Of 2023
Here's to the AAA games that fell short this year.
There's an extremely strong argument to be made that 2023 has been the best year for video games ever, and if not it's absolutely right up there.
Even the most committed of players won't have been able to play every single great game released this year, but despite so many hugely anticipated titles delivering on or above expectations, there have also been some sizeable disappoints.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect every hyped video game to deliver fully on its promises, but all the same, it stings when buzzed-about games end up falling far short of the mark.
And so we come to these 10 games, which represent the biggest letdowns in the AAA gaming space over the last year.
From promising franchise-starters to new entries in reliable ongoing franchises and arguably the single most anticipated game of the entire year, these titles all landed with a bit of a shrug.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they were all terrible or even bad by any means - though some of them certainly weren't good - but simply that they failed to fully deliver on player expectations...
10. Forspoken
Even accepting that Forspoken was a bit of a punching bag prior to its release - largely due to some of its wonkier cutscene dialogue - there was at least the hope that the action-RPG would deliver some visually stunning open-world thrills courtesy of Final Fantasy XV's gorgeous Luminous Engine.
Ehhh, about that.
If aggressively generic video games are often mockingly referred to as resembling AI-authored creations, that's exactly how Forspoken feels in reality.
As moderately enjoyable as the traversal and combat are, the fantastical world of Athia has little personality of its own, the narrative is a hackneyed hodgepodge of other, superior fantasy media, and, yes, the game's toe-curlingly cringe-worthy dialogue didn't help it at all.
From its brutally slow prologue onwards, Forspoken is a mega-budget tentpole that stumbled early and never managed to recover, serving up a tiresomely generic campaign that failed to invest most.
And unlike some entries on this list, Forspoken's disappointment was also reflected in its sales figures, with the game flopping commercially and resulting in the closure of studio Luminous Productions barely a month after the game's release. Ouch.