Fable 2
I couldn't sleep the night before this released. I was so excited. And it was an irredeemable piece of ****.
Everything about the game was bad. It looked dated even when it first came out. The story was meandering and poorly written. The characters were either forgettable at best, or completely annoying at worst (Hammer and Reaver being the chief offenders on that one). Gameplay was stripped to the ****ing bone compared to the first game. They added nothing to the game at all and removed a whole host of fun things. Spells were all direct or area-of-effect attacks, no cool stuff like Assassin's Rush anymore. They took out a lot of the worldbuilding stuff, like religions. The social mechanics were just as shallow and nonsensical as the first game, despite the dev team supposedly focusing on making them better. The dog was a complete waste of time, a gimmick so shallow and devoid of meaning that it fades into the background and may as well not exist.
They intentionally moved the game 500 years into Albion's future so they could make use of the highwayman aesthetic of the 18th century, and then did absolutely nothing with it. There aren't carriages in this game. You see one or two in towns, but they aren't on roads, using the carriages just teleports you to your destination. What is the point of basing the design on highwaymen if you aren't going to have carriage robberies? That thing that defined what highwaymen were. The whole reason for setting the game in this period boils down to replacing bows with guns. They do call one of the enemies a highwayman, but they're just bandits with a different hat.
This game was utterly devoid of any creative spark from anyone working on it. These people took Fable — a great game that was rough around the edges and dripping with potential to be expanded — and instead of building on that foundation they ripped it apart until almost nothing was left, and then shifted the aesthetic in a vain attempt to justify their own lack of imagination. I ****ing hate this game.
Fable 3 is even ****ing worse, if that can be believed, but after Fable 2 I expected nothing more than a steaming turd.