1. Spore (2008)
2. Oblivion (2006)
3. Empire Total War (2009)
4. Hellgate London *before F2P (2007)
5. Star Trek Online *before F2P (2010)
Spore because Will Wright is a blatant liar and the team was utterly incompetent. It's a great editor but it's a terrible game and it's annoying that EA never created a commercial license for the Zbrush exporter because I would actually use spore to make game models as it's probably the fastest tool for building base meshes and kitbashing. Wasted potential.
Oblivion because Todd is a blatant liar and the game just isn't that good it was a huge drop in quality from Morrowind and the level scaling and oversimplification of mechanics really got to me. It was so insulting and incompetently made given how many show-stopper issues the game had at launch and never got patched out.
Empire Total War because 1.0 was unplayable and still to this day it's a terrible game even despite modding because the AI is hardcoded to do
dumbshit, especially the diplomacy, the naval battles were dreadful, siege battles didn't even work the AI would just sit on the flag while you fired canister at them over and over. That pic btw is of the Ottoman AI giving the Native Americans Greece this was vanilla unmodded latest version. The game is still borderline unplayable.
Hellgate London I fell for and even bought the big box copy. I was attracted to the idea of playing a game inspired by Diablo with shooter mechanics because I had ideas of making such a game myself so it appealed. My god the game was so poorly developed that it barely functioned and the team half jumped ship almost immediately after the game shipped.
Star Trek Online, I bought in pretty heavily because I was looking for an MMO to really get into. 1.0 was just terrible but unfortunately I was unable to get a refund, I fell for the bait. Fortunately though once F2P happened the game ended up being ok and I ended up with a lot of free paid content as a result so it made me a lot less bitter.
ok I can stop grinding my axe. Felt good to get it off my chest.