What was the game you were the most patient for?

People missed the point of this, its games that you waited for after release, not games you waited to release.
- Yeah, my intention was to ask more in the spirit of the capital Patient Gamer, as in the community name, instead of just a gamer who is patient. Some good discussions happening here so it's all good either way.

I turned 40 this year. I pledged for Star Citizen when I was 20-something 🙃
It's still my dream-game, so I'm still patiently waiting.
- I want to love this game but every time I try to play it I run into a plethora of game-breaking bugs within an hour. Maybe my grandkids will enjoy it.
  
  It sure hates to be played
- I gave up, I used to follow the subr*ddit to get news and all that was coming were sales of non-existent ships
  
  I remember the original announcement and worried it was a ponzie scheme. 20 years later and here we are.
  Alternatively, a friend of mine has sunk 10k into it.

Starbound. Waited years while it was in development, and my buddies and I just let the hype build and build. When it finally came out, it wasn’t even close to worth it. At the time, it still seemed like something that would eventually get to where we hoped (or at least for the most part), but picking it up every few months/years showed us the dev team’s ideas were great on paper, but they just weren’t capable of implementing any of it well.
More recently, I’ve seen YouTube docs that have gone into the awful development and bad treatment of young developers who weren’t paid, and fired after they caught on that they never would be.
On the bright side, it gave my friends and I a new appreciation for how great Terraria is, and why it’s similar features work so well when Starbound’s didn’t
- Maaaaan I bought this game on release and it was actually better then than compared to now. Before, you could be "evil" and kill innocent villagers and loot their stuff. The game also wasn't mission-based like they made it later on in development, the progression was more comparable to Terraria where you just find and craft equipment across planets.
  Then they started limiting what the player could do, railroading them into linear story missions, making progression slower etc. It was a big disappointment, because the game isn't bad, it's just built on many bad decisions.
  
  Wow, I played it very very early, while they were just starting to introduce the concept of missions at all. It seemed cool then, sad to hear it's got worse.
  
  Lol I do remember having more fun when it first came out, assumed that was just the honeymoon period but now I’m not too sure.
  It definitely had more of that Minecraft openness compared to the later “crappy Terraria” pre-built content. Doesn’t help most of the additions we were looking forward to at release ended up falling flat. But yeah, the game isn’t bad, just screams having more potential than it could ever have lived up to

Sonic adventure for the Dreamcast. It was released in 1998 and I played it for the first time in 2019... and it blew my mind. It's such a solid game, a really cool environment with amazing camera angles, diverse levels, and a difficulty that's just right.
- It was a game I spent my literal childhood on - I remember having a Dreamcast ever since I was 4 years old (I was born in 1996), and the one game I spend most of my time on was Sonic adventure and Sonic Adventure DX. I was replaying the Sonic Adventure a few months ago, and the game is still crazy good! But it was such a surprisingly different experience than I remember.

The Outer Worlds. Would have been the last game to date that I'd had pre-ordered, but they went Epic exclusive, so I decided to be patient and wait for the Steam release. Year goes by and it releases for Steam, but at original launch price. Decide I'm not willing to pay full price for a game I had to wait extra for.
Now it's turned into a game of seeing it go on sale and remarking, "Come on guys, you can do better than that."
- You can pick it up now, along with a couple other games for $12.
  https://www.humblebundle.com/membership
- The crosshair not being in the middle of the screen really killed that game for me.
  
  Fo3 Fonv and halo 3 were all that way also. It's a hard thing to unsee
- I got really excited for the first half of that game title.

I only buy games on steam or very rarely GOG. I refuse to buy a games that are exclusive to a single platform. I don't want to pay people to remove my choices. So there's been a few games I've waited to leave their exclusive deals with epic or whatever. Satisfactory is one. They had an epic store exclusive I think for 2 years and then they went to steam. I very much enjoyed the game. I'm still waiting for escape from tarkov to join us on steam.
Unless I have friends doing multiplayer at this moment, I just waitlist games until they hit $5. And when that happens I buy them. So I have a large game backlog. I don't anticipate or wait for games. I just wait list and forget and then I have happy surprises during the steam sales.
I think I had lost seas on my waitlist for 2 years 3 years.
- What if something is $6 and it’s never been this cheap for 7 years now? You wait more?
  
  I'm only human! It's a rule of thumb! Depends on my emotional state when I see the sale. So yeah I've snagged a $6 game sure.

The Witcher 3. I'd been following its development since the Witcher 2, and I loved the games and the books. After 5 years of waiting I knew that it wasn't likely to live up to my expectations, so I prepared myself for disappointment.
Then it came out, and it was the best RPG I'd played. Some of the Novigrad story lines went on for too long, but that was my only issue with it. I've 100% it three times. Best €30 I ever spent. The DLC was somehow even better than the base game. I have no idea how CDPR managed it.

Almost every game. I just can't afford most games for the full price so patience isn't a virtue but a necessity. Currently I'm waiting to play FarCry 6. My old GPU couldn't handle it, then I got a new one and another game sale happened. But as soon as I'm through with AC Valhalla I might give it a try.
The only full price PC game I played from release that I can recall was No Man's Sky (my hot take: it was great from the start). And I got that one gifted.
The next waiting will be done for Starfield, I think. But that's more for stability ("ripeness") and mod situation.
- Just about the same here except for me it's just that I don't have the time to play every game I want to. The Steam Deck has helped me to play more and fit a little bit of gaming in here and there. I did get Final Fantasy XVI right at launch and set aside a lot of time to play through it.
  But to answer the OP, probably Dark Souls. I played it a little at a friend's house years ago when it first came out but never actually bothered to buy it until the end of 2021 when it was on sale through Steam. Immediately played through it, fell in love, then played through the second one. I haven't played the third yet, but it is on my list.

I played Destiny 2 when it came out, but then they kept releasing more and more DLC and expansions I didn't feel like buying for how little content there was. My plan was to simply wait until the entirety of the game was released so I could buy the rest of everything in a single purchase and play it all.
I think I heard recently they have been actually removing old content so this plan no longer makes sense.
- Yea, the download size was getting too big (or they couldn't be bothered QA-ing new gear with old content) so they started deleting old stuff.
  Means if you start playing now you can't play the story from the beginning which seems pretty terrible to me.

I waited a while for sekiro. Finally broke down and got it on sale after it had been on my wishlist for 2 years.
I found it too challenging, even as a fan of their other games, it just didn't click. Finally I hit a wall on some enemy who I couldn't kill and gave up. Sad cuz I really wanted to like it.
- There's some mods that make it easier that might help.

I waited four years for breath of the wild, and when I finally played it, it was like I was playing an entire new genre. Like I was playing ocarina of time for the first time and the world seemed endlessly exciting. Except this time I could climb mountains and paraglide.
- I'm just now getting into it. It is so so so good.
  
  Oh awesome. Yeah I'm so glad I waited, because the game seemed, in addition to everything I mentioned just so smooth when I finally played it. I would just run in a direction for easily like 15 minutes and then just climb a mountain for another 15 minutes. After 30 minutes of that" game time," I was as satisfied with the experiences I was with almost any other game haha, even though I had done basically nothing. It's just pretty and fun and engaging.

Death Stranding. Completely forgot about the game until I got it in humble monthly, and... Damn it was worth playing. In retrospective, I'd have been happy dropping 60 on it. I thought going in it'd be boring gameplay for a weird story, but the gameplay was actually REALLY FUN and the story was weord.
- +1. It's one of those games that got better overtime. When it came out in 2019 there were people like, "Really? A hiking / Amazon Prime simulator?"
  But after the Pandemic, the isolation and theme of yearning connections really hit home, and the entire design and philosophy just clicked and worked for me. I started appreciate everything about the game. I think Hideo Kojima even said he's going to try and not predict the future in Death Stranding 2 😄

Fallouts. I knew they existed for, I don't even know, decades? I finally got New Vegas some years back (and others later) and it really is the greatest game ever made. I don't know why I waited.
- It's actually great that you started with New Vegas. This can help give you perspective about why Black Isle/Obsidian understands the IP so much better than Bethesda does. I truly consider 3 and 4 to have great moments, but are overall trash when you compare them to 2 and New Vegas.
  I really like Bethesda a lot as a publisher (Doom/Eternal, Hi-Fi Rush) but I really wish people would stop buying the games they develop until they figure some things out.
  
  I was planning to start a full replay of FO1-2-3-NV this week, but man, those games have not aged well presentation-wise. I ended up installing only F:NV with the Viva New Vegas modlist; I tried adding visual mods, but the game kept crashing. But at least I've got a stable version of the best game of the series now.
  It would be nice if someone made a remaster of FO1 and 2 like they did with Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. I don't mind the top-down perspective, buv i would like some more graphical fidelity and UI improvements.

Red Dead Redemption 1. Played it for the first time about a year ago. I knew how it ended, but it was still worth the wait to experience everything myself.

Probably Duke Nukem Forever. I told myself that if it were ever $1, I'd buy it.
Then it was in the $1 tier of a Humble Bundle. Gonna be honest, still not really worth it, I don't think. Never finished it, didn't really think it was that fun.

World of warcraft. I'd been playing the games since warcraft 1. My parents wouldn't pay for my subscription so had to wait years to get it after release. 100% worth it. Amazing game back in the day.
Diablo 3 and 4. 3 was kinda worth it. 4 not so much.
StarCraft2 and hell yeah. Loved it.
Skyrim, again definitely.
Fallout 4. Despite some things lacking I thought it was awesome.
Seven kingdoms conquest. Was very shit.
- I was playing Guild Wars back in the days and I remember trying the free trial of WoW. At the end of it, I decided against getting a subscription, knowing how many hours I'd sink in the game. Truely a masterpiece.
  
  Yeah I wasted most of my teens on it haha
  Got bored after wotlk but it was fun while it lasted.
  Having to resist getting wotlk classic right now!

It's not a case of having waited for it as such, but I played The Last of Us this year, after watching the show. I'd say it was worth it, and I don't mind that a lot of the story beats and emotional moments were 'spoiled' as such, because I still felt them when playing the game.
Haven't moved on to the second one yet.
- Would you recommend game or show first for a new consumer of it?
  
  Apparently some people don't like that you asked that question.
  I honestly couldn't say. Usually I'd be able to give you a definite answer one way or another (and maybe my answer would be different if I'd played the game first) but I don't think there's a huge difference. Maybe just go with whatever you get a hold of first? That said, you can never go wrong with experiencing the source material first; at least not when the adaptation is of a similar quality. You'll have a good experience either way. It really just depends on whether you want to watch the show and say "oh that's how they did that in the show" or play the game second and say "Oh, that's what it was originally like!"

IDK, probably Mass Effect? I just got Mass Effect Legendary this year and I've been playing it, and it's fantastic! I didn't hear about it at release for some reason, and I had heard the game was great, but decided to wait to see if they'd remaster it or something. They did, but it was too expensive, so I held off.
I eventually got it for ~$15 on a Steam sale and about 6 months later, here I am playing it. And yes, it's worth it, the game runs fantastically on my Steam Deck and it's a ton of fun.
My main reason for being patient is to get the best experience (fewer bugs, all DLC, etc), not just to save money, and I think I got it at the right time. My coworker is also playing through it for the first time, so I have someone to talk to about it.

2002: Kingdom Hearts ......... 2005: Kingdom Hearts II ......... 2019: Kingdom Hearts III
14 years!
- Love the kingdom hearts games but never had a console as a kid. I always had DS's tho so I played the shit out of 358/2 days, re:coded, and Dream Drop Distance. Still haven't played 1, 2, or 3 yet. Well I played a little of one and two at a friends house but not all the way through

Yakuza 0. Had a PS4, but wanted to play it on the PC instead so kept waiting hoping it would be ported to the PC. It later then did and I waited longer for a price drop and it ended up showing up on a Humble Bundle so finally snatched it years later.
It was worth the wait. Very enjoyable and I did all the side quests. Cabaret club was an amazing part of the game.
- Yakuza 0 is one of those rare "game of the century" candidates, especially since most people are able to buy it on steam sales for $5. It is truly unbelievable how ambitious each Yakuza game is, yet they still manage to have amazing QC and polish in spite of how widely scoped they are.
  
  Yeah, I've played up to Yakuza Kiwami 2 so now gearing up to play through 3-5. Excited for it. The games side quests are so fun and wacky.

Morrowind would be my choice, since there was almost a decade long gap between when i first wanted to play the game and when i actually played it. it didn't reach my expectations but that doesnt matter that much to me since i still really liked that game. i didn't finish it in my first playthrough, but i did once i got around to doing my second
- I adore Morrowind but can't say its aged well. I can't wait for skywind.

I'm still waiting for a Hogwarts Legacy sale
- Don't bother, it's antisemitic
- I'm definitely going to borrow it from a seafarer on the high seas in the future.

Dark Souls trilogy, waited a long long time to try it out due to the memes of the brutal difficulty.
When DS remastered came out, I finally took the plunge and am now a through enjoyer of souls games. They are difficult, but fair (as long as you're not doing pvp lol)
- The memes about difficulty I think helped them gain a community, but now they only hurt. They really aren't all that hard. They can be if you want them to be, but most of the time they're somewhat easy (well, with a few bosses that are exceptions, like O&S). The meme needs to die.
  
  It really depends on your build and playstyle imo, you definitely need to be able to learn and adapt to what you're fighting which can be construed as difficult. I agree though the meme should die (and I think it kinda did with ER)

Skyrim, and yes it was. Got it on disconnected in a pack with Prey for €19, so that was excellent value for money.

I only played the first Half-Life about 6 months ago despite having friends who grew up playing it. Well worth the wait, it was fantastic (I played Black Mesa to be fair, not the original Half-Life, but I’ve heard they’re near identical). That’s definitely my longest. The main other one is Dark Souls, I’ve been wanting to play it since it came out and only started it a month ago. I’ve played DS3, Elden Ring, and Sekiro, but this is my first time with DS1.

Uru. I spent hours wandering the halls of D'ni waiting for something to happen.

By the time I finally said "fuck it, I need to see what the fuss about this game is" for Dark Souls, 3 was about to be released. All I ever heard about the game up to that point was how hard it was; but that the difficulty wasn't bullshit. I figured it was just pattern recognition, and was right; but there's so much more nuance to that. The difficulty brought me in; but the game feel and the lore got me hooked and I now own every single one of the Souls/Borne/Ring/Sekiro games. And even a few knock-offs, like The Surge and Mortal Shell.
- I bought the Chinese version of demons souls before it released here in the UK because of the reviews it was getting.
  I then loved Bloodborne.
  I still haven't played one bit of a dark souls game. It's on the list, it's just not time yet.

A couple of games I've been looking at for a while like The End is Nigh and 20XX ended up being free on Epic, they were great games and definitely worth playing if you picked them up for free. Glad I didn't have to buy them.

Spiderman 2 for the PS2. I used to watch the updates, disseminating every screenshot. When the game came out, I thought it was okay. It was only months later when I realised that I was still playing it that I realised how perfect it was.

I still haven't played Red Dead Redemption 2 despite getting it on sale two or three years ago.
I'm generally just more interested in indie games for some reason.

I'm still waiting for Silk Song, if that counts.

Secret of Mana 2, when I was a kid in the 90'. I knew back then it was released in Japan, and I was waiting for it in Europe. … and it never happened. 😂 I think I've seen they finally translated it recently, as a retrogame, but hey, my tastes and priorities changed a bit in 30 years.
- That's actually the third in the series (Seiken Densetsu 3) and also known as Trials of Mana, released in Japan in 1995. A fan translation was actually completed in 1999 and kinda big news so you could have played it way back then if you were able to run a ROM patch. But the official translation to English wasn't released until 2019.
  
  Oh yeah, indeed, there was Mystic Quest (the european name for the first game) before. Although, it was such a different beast it's only with Wikipedia later that I discovered the two games were related.
  A fan translation was actually completed in 1999 and kinda big news so you could have played it way back then if you were able to run a ROM patch
  Oh really? Nice, I missed that. But well, I didn't speak English either back then, so it probably wouldn't have helped. :)

Pretty sure it'll be the latest God of war when it finally releases for PC somewhere next year?

Breath of the Wild.
I got a Switch a few years after BOTW released, and couldn’t stomach paying full price for a game that had been out that long.
Finally got it on PC via methods a few months ago and glad I waited, playing at 2k 60fps with better shaders is great.

I only played Doom 1 and 2 when D3 was about to come out, so it was about 10 years old. I played some mod with polygonal models/hires textures so it wasn't a vanilla experience, but in terms of game and level design I was quite blown away.
Also I played Metal Gear Solid 3 only about 5 years ago, so that was a ~15 years old game.

My dad commented that One Man And His Droid was supposed to be good, when we were in a shop (Woolworths?) looking at games. Mid-late 1980s. I finally played it a couple of years ago.
- And, was it good?
  
  I think it was, yes!

Mega drive version of Theme Park.
I saw it getting closer in the release section of gaming magazines, closer.. then delayed.. closer.. delayed.. then I finally got it and the cartridge casing was deformed and wouldn't fit in the console.
My mum had to brute force it because I was losing my shit.

I finally completed fallout 1/2/tactics at the end of last year.
I'm looking forward to playing baldurs gate, planetscape and arcanum soon.

Duke Nukem Forever. And no it wasn’t.
- Same. What a dumpster fire of a release.

Persona 5 on PC. Fuck Sony and their exclusive policy.
- Is there evidence to suggest that Sony was responsible for Persona 5 being exclusive for so long, and not Atlus's usual confusing nonsense? Honest question.
  I know that when Xbox decided to consider PC as part of the "Xbox ecosystem" it lit the fire under Sony's butt to start porting some of their banger titles onto Steam, which is much appreciated. Days Gone, God of War, Uncharted 4, Spiderman, and Returnal were all fantastic on day one. Horizon needed some time to fix the issues but the PC version now does it justice way better than the original 30fps version.
  
  Obviously I don't have first-hand information, but from I'd guess Sony is responsible for a lot of (japanese) games not coming to PC or Xbox, as Atlus isn't the only studio doing this that isn't owned by Sony.
  Another thing that shows, that Sony has no interest in connecting gamers between systems is cross-play, which it blocks in various titles iirc.
  I know it's the smart move to drive out competition when you're in charge of the biggest market share, but preventing gamers to play on any platform they choose is bad for them. I play exclusively on PC since the Gamecube (with the exception of the switch) so I'm very happy to see the PlayStation gulag crumbling with increasing Steam releases. We all profit from open platforms.

Mound and Blade 2...and nope.

Metroid prime 4.. it’s been far too long

As an oldschool GM for the Cyberpunk 2022 P&P Roleplaying game I was immediately hooked when CD Projekt Red announced the video game of Cyberpunk 2077. Despite the initial bugs, I enjoyed it. A lot. Probably the only game so far for which I got all achievements. Now patiently waiting for the Phantom Liberty DLC.
Hellooooo Night City!

For shit thats coming out:
Baldur's Gate 3. Waoweee 22 years
For shit that isnt out:
Star Citizen... one of these days man :| yes i have an unrelated copium subscription @
Command & Conquer 4. C&C3 was/is great, so it makes sense to get C&C4 eventually.