Apart from good games, there have also been disappointments. Thankfully, there weren’t many for me!
The most obvious one is, of course, Cities Skylines 2. This is no surprise for anybody who follows the PC game scene. The developers even announced that the game would have a lot of issues at launch. I guess we can all agree that the game was released too early. I would have loved for them to put it out in an “open beta” state or something like that while postponing the official release. It would have been the same result but could have gone down a lot more positively. Alas, they did not. And so the game stands with 60 % positive reviews (a little more than 31k written reviews). My personal disappointment wasn’t even the performance, although I did not like having to tone down all the graphics. I was more disappointed with the bugs (no simulated exports, watching firetrucks do nothing even though there’s a fire right next to them, etc.). Thankfully, the developers are working on making the game better and there have been several patches already since release. So maybe, hopefully, the game will be great before 2024 is over.
The second game is Highrise City! Again, performance is an issue. In this case, it was game crashes. And the lack of public transport systems after release as the game only had buses. They have since released a cheap DLC (Metro & Planes) that adds what was missing: an airport and a metro. I have just started a new city, so I don’t know if the game crashes have been fixed (they always happened when I was painting new districts). When I look at the community hub on Steam, however, I see several threads complaining about freezes and crashes. So, while this game promises and delivers a different way of building and growing your city as you need to rely on several resources and not just on money, it was a huge disappointment because when the game keeps crashing, it’s just unplayable. We’ll see what 2024 brings.
Last and – compared to the other two games – least, there is Guild Wars 2. The fact that it’s been a disappointment is not the game’s or developers’ fault at all! It just feels so “more of the same parts of the game that I don’t like too much” without adding “more that I would want to see in an MMO”. I do love housing, for example, and while the game has housing for guild halls, it doesn’t have a personal housing system. I still like Guild Wars 2 and every couple of months, I return to the game and play it and I always do love it! But then, sooner or later, I also get bored with it again. I have a lot of nostalgic and happy feelings about the vanilla version of Guild Wars 2 and for some reason, I just loved the game so much more in the first few years.
Nerdy Bookahs 
Cities Skylines 2 definitely tops my list of disappointments for the year as well. Unfortunately it wasn’t alone though when it comes to ‘games of interest that were released in a poor state’ in 2023. There are a couple at least that have just been abandoned in that regard with no further fixes incoming. :(
Wo Long and Wild Hearts both being two examples of that.
So I am at least pleased that CS2 is getting the due attention so far, and I have no reason based on CS1 experience to expect that will stop.
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I’m pretty sure I would have refunded the game (or returned the pre-purchase) if it had been some unknown developer… or rather, I usually do not pay that much money for a game unless I already know the developer. So yeah, I trust them to fix the issues and keep working on improving the game!
I only know of one other game that I would have wanted to succeed which released in a very bad state, but the developer gave up after release (and thankfully, I had already seen the red flags beforehand and didn’t buy the game) – The Dark Eye: Book of Heroes.
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