4. Rome: Total War 2
The Total War franchise has had a lot of bad press in the last few years, with some underwhelming titles being shipped out such as Empire: Total War, however I have opted to include the latest release in this list to highlight that some developers just don't learn their lessons. Many gamers seem to simply accept that developers such as Creative Assembly can release part-finished games and that they'll slowly be completed in the months following their purchase. You just need to look at reviews at the time of Rome 2's release to see a bevvy of respectable critics pointing out glaringly obvious faults that needed to be addressed; surely these should have been picked up in the Beta phase and fixed? A new feature for the Total War series was the new co-op campaign, which allowed gamers to complete the campaign part of the game with a fellow gamer. This understandably generated a lot of excitement among loyal followers of the series and new-comers alike, however the finished article was very buggy and made the experience unenjoyable. Not only did many people suffer problems even playing it due to frequent crashes (even after a day 1 patch), but the time taken between turns meant that the gamer felt disengaged from the mode and frankly, quite bored. Even in the single player mode, the gap between ending your turn and the computer taking theirs was longer then any other incarnation, and this poorly implemented aspect of time management made gamers feel that they had spent hours playing a game but hadn't been able to get the "bang for their buck", so to speak. The game, as a rule, has an option to turn off seeing enemy movement, but even selecting this doesn't have much impact, as the game now cycles through all the towns under enemy control, even if you haven't discovered them on your map yet. Gone, it seems, are the days of speeding up turns and getting that special new unit type made or valuable research completed; instead, you're made to wait 10 minutes while the computer has its turns. A game should never be released unfinished, yet have a queue of purchasable DLC waiting in the wings. The time spent on these should have been used to make the main game as complete as possible. Instead, Creative Assembly made sure that gamers had various shiny extras to purchase, such as having the Greek states become a playable faction, instead of ironing out the creases. As per the standard rule, it appears we'll have to wait until after Christmas for this to be the case, and not only will we get a more polished article, but we'll pay a lot less than those who invested in it on launch day.