Starcraft; Brood War

The new medic unit was good in itself (ability to heal Terran infranty units at last, yay!), but their Optic Flare capability... Sheesh, that must be the single most irritating thing in the game, at least when playing the single-player campaign.

What can you do when the enemy Terrans send several medics towards your troops and suddenly most of your big units are blind as bats, and you have to micromanage them more (basically they don't fire at enemies anymore on their own, you have to tell them to attack an enemy unit, one by one).

Then it is hard to decide whether you should still keep those blind units (they are still extra firepower, as long as you keep pointing the enemy units to them), but in the end I usually just send them to their own doom towards the enemy base, and replace them with fresh units that can see and fire at enemies on their own. It is extra irritating because you have to destroy your own units which have become much less capable for the rest of the mission.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that it is not easy to even see fast if any of your units have been smitten by Optic Flare. With other kinds of things like e.g. Parasite, the unit icon has a different color so you can see their status right away. But with Optic Flare, you have to click on each of your units one by one, in order to see whether their status says "Blind". So if I have a group of 12 big units, every now and then I have to click on each of them just to see if I have any blind units among them.

Terran medics can remove Optic Flare with the Restoration skill, but I don't think Zerg or Protoss can do the same.

I would like the Brood War campaign much more without Optic Flare (or if there was a way to remove it for all races).

I guess it was just RA 3, and they removed that.

Eventually, after hundreds of complaints from fans like myself.

Prince of Persia. The eastern soundtrack really gave Sands of Time its specific flavor (along with the light banter, lost aswell). The sequels went for the same kind of generic videogame music you hear in videogames of every genre and every setting.

Also, Cannon Fodder 2 went to SPAAAAAAACE. No gameplay change, purely cosmetic shift, but completely lost the provocative, cynical and melancholic anti-war undertones of the original.

There's also a subtle change I disliked in NOLF2. NOLF was a parody of 60s spy flicks, so, it felt like an affoectionate, silly, over-the-top parody all along. NOLF2 felt like an ordinary action game with some comedic sequences, and other sequences that played it seriously. On average the content is the same, but it's unevenly distributed. Instead of going from vaguely supenceful to overly wacky and back to pseudo-dramatic, NOLF 1 was walking the fine line all along, and I preferred that (as I do in movies aswell).

And AvP2 decided to go for the AvP comics fanboys, and it showed. AvP1's tone and design felt much closer to the movies, and less cartoonish. So, the sequel was a disappointment to me. As well as the re-edition of the original, with the in-game videos replaced by a highly irritating actor.

Lastly, while I liked the plot and structure of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, with its alternate solutions available at all time, I wasn't thrilled with the plot of Fate of Atlantis (The Dig, plus scifi martians atlantes, plus Myst-like ancient machines) and by its three pre-chosen approaches. But again, as for AvP2, it's usually the game preferred by most players, so...

Vietcong 2
It's hard to pinpoint a specific shittiest change in this mess of a sequel but an obvious one would be the new command system. As much as I like the idea of choosing exact positions for your guys (it did work pretty great in Brothers in Arms, Freedom Fighters and the Conflict series), in this case it went pretty much against everything great about the original game. These kinds of command systems work great in rather abstract and almost puzzle'y games where you also have the ability to get a good idea of your surroundings. The original Vietcong was a highly organic and chaotic game, one of its main appeals was the unpredictability of the enemies and huge independence of your allies. The last thing the formula was suitable for was giving specific commands, working with positions and angles and whatnot. And surprise, surprise, it just didn't work in the sequel.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Regenerating health. The first two Brothers in Arms games were often frustrating and unfair but in the third game they just messed things up in the exact opposite direction. Regenerating health made the player so powerful that the whole "four Fs" gameplay introduced in the first game just went belly up as any situation that required you to use your squad before could now be handled manually with ease by playing the game like a standard cover shooter.

Dawn of War II
The lack of base and unit building in the campaign. It just wasn't Dawn of War anymore but some weird and insanely repetitive poor man's Diablo or something.

Stalker: Clear Sky
Faction wars. I don't mind the mechanic as such but it just doesn't fit the Stalker series at all. The system felt more appropriate for a multiplayer shooter or something, not the RPGish Stalker series. One of the first game's main appeals was how everything was shrouded in mystery, how alive the world felt and that feeling that you just didn't belong. This organised warfare with neatly organised scores was just the opposite of that.

Edit: Oh yeah, and another:
Resistance 2
Two weapon limit. The brilliant thing about the first game was the weapons. You had a wide array of completely unique guns, the usefulness of which was entirely situational - at first this was frustrating to me, I'm the kind of player who usually avoids gimmicky weapons in shooters and as a result I would only use the standard assault rifle at first. However, in Resistance most (if not all) guns could be REALLY powerful if you mastered their use and knew when to use which gun. And it was absolutely essential to the base gameplay that you could carry all guns at once. It meant that at any point you did not just have to make your standard combat decisions but choose the right gun for the job on the fly. And the result was really diverse and fun gameplay. In the sequel they stupidly decided to adapt to the genre standard of allowing the player to carry only two guns at once and it completely ruined the first game's main strength and turned it into an extremely generic shooter. You'd just use whatever you had at your disposal at any given point and usually stick with the most universal weapons since you never know what to expect around the next corner.

Street Fighter V: They removed arcade mode and, initially (it was patched into the game later, at least), also removed the vs CPU mode completely, leaving only the not so interesting survival.

Half Life 2: added steam.*



* Yes, I know, it's an incredibly dated joke that doesn't quite work anymore. But I had to do it. :P

Since only sequels and expansions were mentioned so far, here is something about a "remastered" version

Simon the Sorcerer CD version - some idiot decided that because voice acting was added, dialogue text could be removed. To ensure that not only those with hearing disabilities and non-native speakers are disadvantaged, they gave some of the characters such heavy accents or unlear voices, that even native speakers would have trouble understanding them.

How about a patch changing a major core mechanic of a game? Tempest originally had strategic ship boarding but is currently a FPS type thingie. Bleh.

Dead Space going from survival horror to a pure action shooter by the time number 3 rolls around.

And Hitman 2 having everyone suffer from runnophobia. Because of course someone who's running has to be up to no good. And it's not even like it added any extra challenge to the game, just extra annoyance and frustration at having to take more time for no reason. Thankfully all future Hitmans no longer had this.

There was a lot wrong with Command and Conquer: Tiberian sun, but one thing I really disliked was the change from at least semi-realistic technology to all those weird sci-fi weapons like giant mechs, sonic tanks etc...destroyed a lot of the atmosphere of the original C&C imo. Also didn't make much sense...in one mission you can acquire some Mammooth tanks left over from the first war. And they're much more powerful than the mechs you can build as GDI. If so, why the heck did GDI replace its tanks with those stupid mechs which actually are weaker than 40-year old tanks?

Batman: Arkham City

They left out the Ultra Batclaw which was the best weapon in Arkham Asylum.

I nominate "Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals". The game is a reboot of a JRPG called Lufia II, which was heavily focused on puzzles. While I don't mind changes like the reworked story (Lufia II was fairly bare-bones), Curse of the Sinistrals genre shifted into an ARPG, and altered the design of dungeons and the puzzles they contained to reflect that.

Mind, an action-oriented player might prefer Curse of the Sinistrals...but I tend to be disinterested at moving at a fast pace. I guess you can say that the game is similar to the Ys series, but more awkward due to being on the DS.

Not sure if I am being a nolstagic luddite. :(

Lufia II: Tutorial Cave

Curse of the Sinistrals: Soma Temple

Dragon Quest 6; I actually have a couple small examples.

1. In the original game, there was a rather useful, if somewhat on the powerful side, attack called Vacuum (mistranslated as Thin Air in the English DS version). This was a rather useful ability, as it cost 0 MP and was actually quite good for a 0 MP ability, to the point where using it all the time once learned isn't a bad idea. Also, some enemies could use the attack against you.

In the DS remake, they actually made the attack *stronger*; in other words, they took an attack that was already on the edge of being possibly overpowered and made it *stronger*; it now qualifies as overpowered.

2. Then there's Magic Burst (Madante in the Japanese version). In the original, it did 3 * MP damage, but at the cost of all your MP. So, while a character with 230 MP could use this skill to do 690 damage, it cost all of the character's MP to do so, which meant this ability isn't that useful under typical conditions.

In the DS remake, it now does only 2 * MP in damage, making it now useless. In other words, they took an underpowered (for its cost) ability and made it useful. Even worse, this happens to affect the character who tends to suffer from the problem that she's clearly meant to be a mage, but if you make her one, she doesn't have enough HP to survive.

(By the way, that 230 MP figure wasn't pulled out of a hat; it's the amount of MP that Barbara/Ashlynn (the character I was referring to) has at level 45 with no class.)

Another little change that I don't like (and which also applies to the remakes of Dragon Quest 5): Level ups, which originally had fixed stat growth, now have slightly random stat growth.

Speaking of which. another little change in the Dragon Quest 4 remake: Healusall/Omniheal (spell that fully heals the entire active party) originally cost 36 MP (which felt about right and is also the cost in DQ5, DQ6, and DQ8*), but in the remakes (both PSX and DS) now only costs 20 MP, which is too cheap for a spell that powerful; that one change makes the endgame a little too easy.

* I am, of course, referring the *base* cost of the spell, not the cost if you have a passive ability that reduces the MP cost (which you necessarily will if you have the spell in question).

Do spinoffs count? If so, Valkyria Revolution.

They changed the most unique thing about Valkyria Chronicles, that being the unique mechanics, and the new combat system is just terrible. It's like playing red light/green light while trying to beat someone to death with a piece of paper. Whoever decided that taking one of the most innovative combat systems in a decade and replacing it with floaty, generic action trash full of tedious damage sponge enemies was a good idea should be fired out of a cannon into the sun.

Orcs must die 2 - multiplayer focus. Two players are basically required as levels are designed for two.
Sanctum 2 - multiplayer focus. Logging in. Arbitrary limits on building towers. Bleah. The first one was brilliant, the second one could be, if it was less arcadey.