Disappointment isn’t all that bad. To be disappointed you’ve got to be excited and enjoying yourself in the first place. It’s the yin to the yang, although it never feels particularly good when something you’ve been excited for fails to live up to your expectations.

Now, my actual biggest disappointment is Arsenal’s woefully stupid defence and turgid midfield but, in the sphere of gaming, I sadly cannot direct my ire at Raul Sanllehi. So, despite my huge, I shall stick to the world of games.

To be honest, it’s been a mighty fine year for me, it really has. The quality of the games has been outstanding and there have been a huge number which have lined up with my particular tastes, as you may have seen in a previous UFD on everyone’s favourite three games of 2019.

That said, it wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies. I have an enormous number of issues with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s multiplayer which really do sadden me. It’s a game right on the cusp of greatness. The core is strong. But some of the decisions made are just mind-blowing to me at this stage. Killstreaks suck as a mechanic, I thought we’d learned that by now. They definitely do not have a place in no respawn modes such as Cyber Attack. Then there’s poor weapon balance, atrocious spawns, an over-reliance on camping, and bang average map design. With a few tweaks here and there, COD: Modern Warfare could end up being fantastic though so, tentatively, it isn’t my biggest disappointment of the year.

Metro: Exodus would be a (dis)honorable mention but I think the real winner has to be Google Stadia. I didn’t even have particularly high expectations, I was just looking forward to mess around with it. The messaging around the launch has absolute sucked though, and none of the potentially unique benefits of Stadia are even ready. Just to top it all off, I feel Google flat out lied about the capabilities of its racks of Stadia hardware. For months they claimed Red Dead Redemption 2 would run at 4K/60. The same with Destiny 2. In the end they’re 4K streams but the games are being rendered at 1440p and 1080p respectively. You’re getting 1080p quality and forking out for the bandwidth of a 4K stream. That’s disgraceful. 

Stadia needs reasons to use it. It needs exclusives, it needs promised features like save state sharing and crowd play, and Google needs to get on top of the messaging. For now, Stadia is an abject failure and it’s going to take some serious manpower to turn that negativity around. Whatever though, that boat has sailed.

So that’s enough of me successfully winding myself up. There was a whole lot more to love about gaming in 2019 than there was to be disappointed by, at least from my perspective. I’ve had an incredible time playing the likes of Outer Wilds, Resident Evil 2, Sekiro, Fire Emblem, and more. Not everything can live up to these standards though, sadly, which is just how it is. 

With 2019 now pretty much consigned to the history books, what would you say goes down as your biggest gaming disappointment of 2019? Was it a hotly anticipated game which let you down? Or perhaps a graphics card which didn’t give you the FPS you hoped for? Misery loves company, so let us know below!