Most Disappointing Triple A Title of 2004 (?)

One of my big concerns with the gaming culture is that it's desire for the best game in the world to be even better will eventually end up devouring itself. As we push gaming companies to be bigger, make better, things get more expensive and as noted below - we push out the little guy and probably innovation itself. As innovation dies down, gamers still demand better graphics and things get bigger and innovation dies a little again. Eventually it will get to the point where the only games that can afford a marketing budget to make a profit will undoubtably be beautiful, but safe and formulaic.


So may I herald the fact that Gamespot has nominated two major titles for Most Disappointing that it had previously rated 8/10 and 9/10 respectively as an omen? I speak of Doom 3 and Halo 2. Now I haven't played Halo 2 because I don't own an XBox (they're too big, too Microsoft - let's not get into it). But I found Doom 3 to be fun, scary and very pretty. It didn't wow me like the original did, but it was certainly worth my dough. From what I've read of Halo 2 - that makes even less sense.

I wonder how much id makes on titles versus licensing. At this point, I kinda expect one of the major 3D engine studios (Valve, id, Epic, Monolith, etc) to go pure middleware and leave the appeasement up to someone else.