Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
I really wonder what it is about TotK that makes for such wildly different opinions. Everything about TotK was a vast improvement over BotW for me. Up to and especially including revisiting the same locations to see how they’ve changed and exploring all 3 levels of the map to their fullest extent. I stopped playing BotW the moment I beat it after ~90 hours of play time. But I’ve continued to return to TotK nearly 300 hours in now, after beating it in about the same 90 hours originally. It’s just endlessly interesting wandering and getting sidetracked and finding / figuring out side quests.
I have a couple friends who beat it for the sake of beating the next Zelda game but the majority of my small circle continues to play, some even putting off beating it just to explore more. It’s very interesting seeing such different approaches, hearing what people focused on and how they tackled the openness. I’m not sure I witnessed the same phenomenon with games like Skyrim. Something about this one feels different at least. Hard to describe.