The Worst in Video Games 2017

Worst Best Game – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Xbox One

When it was announced that one of the most popular games of 2017 would be coming to the Xbox One as a console exclusive, Xbox One owners had something to look forward to this year.  Unfortunately, PUBG on the Xbox One is a game that is good “in theory.”

Being part of the Xbox Game Preview Program means that there’s going to be some rough edges around the game, and PUBG has a lot of them.  There are currently a ton of problems with this game on the Xbox One, which include things like hard crashes that kick you out of multiplayer matches, network latency, lag, and numerous graphical issues that just make it feel like a game that needs a ton of optimization before it rivals its PC counterpart.

That said, PUBG is still a lot of fun to play, and that’s mostly because of the concept of the game.  While it’s expected to see optimizations that take it to 1.0 status in 2018, until then PUBG is the “worst best” game you can play on the Xbox One, or “best worst” game you can play on the console… choose your poison.

Worst DLC –  Curse of Osiris

Bungie doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to downloadable content for its Destiny series.  Sometimes they release DLC that corresponds with updates for the game that appease the community, sometimes they don’t.  With the release of Curse of Osiris, Bungie missed an opportunity to reel in a community that’s been lodging complaints left and right about numerous facets of Destiny 2.  Everything that could possibly go wrong with the first expansion for Destiny 2, did.  Mercury ended up being a tiny new landmass to explore.  The story aspects of the expansion were not fleshed out, and had a very short run time.  They even went so far as to use the story missions of Curse of Osiris as new strikes.  At a third of the price of the core game, Curse of Osiris feels lacking in content and what end game content it does offer isn’t that great.

While the new Raid Lair content was good, it wasn’t quite as fulfilling as a completely new Raid could’ve been.  Curse of Osiris is more The Dark Below than Rise of Iron, here’s hoping that Bungie starts to right the ship in 2018 as Destiny 2 is a great shooter.

Worst Service – Steam

A lot of developers and publishers use Valve’s Steam platform to reach PC gamers.  It’s not a bad platform.  It’s feature rich, Valve offers decent support with the addition of new updates incrementally, but right now there’s more bad games than good on the platform.  Valve opened the flood gates for “developers” to release cash grab, asset flip titles on Steam and it’s a buyer beware situation right now that’s not only affecting gamers, but developers as well.  By allowing anyone to pay a nominal fee to have their game added to Steam with Steam Direct, there’s just too much noise on the platform.  In 2017 alone, there were over 7000 games released on Steam and most of them are shit.  To put that in perspective, that’s close to the same number of games that were released between 2005 and 2015.  While they’ve done things in recent years to try and push players toward games that will suit their tastes with things like community curation, good games from small developers are getting lost in the shuffle to games that have no more value than to just give players easy achievements.

The bottom line for Steam users is that it’s harder for users to find good games.  For developers, it’s harder for their good games to be found in a sea of sewage.

It’s time for Valve to take a more hands-on approach.

So there were some of our thoughts on the Worst things in gaming for 2017.  Let us know in the comments section your thoughts on the worst things in gaming for the year, or if you’d like to see our favorite things, check out our Best of 2017 and Top 10 Staff Picks for the year.