Anybody have any games they really liked on a first play through and then fell out of love with it later on? I’m going through it right now with the city builder game Workers and Resources. I’ve got 26 hours in it on Steam. Most of those hours came years ago when I first tried the game. I had a good grasp of it then naturally hopped off it when something else caught my eye. Every time I try it now I just can’t get past how janky it is. It truly is Eurojank the city builder game.
My biggest issue is relearning the build order. Set up a village, import some power, setup water, build a bus depot. I think I’ve got all the boxes checked off for what I’m supposed to do but nothing happens. Busses take no workers to the coal plant. Everything is still on warning that I’m missing resources. Then I get into the weeds and can’t find what’s wrong. I give up. This is the last few times I tried the game. I’m prone to jumping off a game if it’s too complex but knowing I used to have this one down and it’s all different now has me really souring on it.
That’s the shame of it. I know I liked the game at one point but there’s been too much time between first seriously getting to know the game and it’s systems and now. It’s the probably the only city builder I’ve ever played that’s not a pick up and play type game. This is my genre of choice going back to SC2000. This one stings.
Anybody else have anything like this happen to them?
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Counter-strike. I remember it being a casual experience back in the 1.6 days and even in the earlier days of CSGO, but at one point competitive play took over. Eventually to be decent you had to know lineups, executes, economy, common angles etc.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I love watching competitive CS and think for viewers it’s one of the best esports games to watch, but I can’t get back into CS without having it take over my life.
Same with R6 Siege
Last time I went on 1.6 it was FULL of “exp” servers “mod” servers and all sorts of other weird jank. Heartbreaking.
I started on 1.3, and eventually version-up’d my way to css and played probably thousands of hours around 2007ish with an ex good friend of mine. Then tf2 came out and everybody moved over to that.
But then valve decided hats and new items and weapons and REAL MONEY needed to get involved. Oh and also cs would tell release go, but by that time, cs was visibly full of hackers. I know because I went like a year with my friend playing with hacks with each other until we got bored of it, so I know the mindset and mental process. I still remember the first time loading up in dust 1 and seeing my friend see me through a wall in… Oh jeez I don’t even remember the name of the area anymore. Like upper tunnel where everybody clashes? Anyway, seeing each other through that was like looking into a mirror for the first time… But yeah, tf2. Tf2 got boring when it became a sloggy grind that never had any stable balance and it was pretty obvious valve was engineering rage as a way to keep people engaged. You know, with the kill-cams and stuff. It’s undeniable.
But then the years passed and csgo apparently got better. I had long since moved on and decided I didn’t like go from the start.
And then, cs2 comes out, and I’m gonna be honest, I REALLY like the visual style of cs2. But I remember playing in csgo after valve copied league and really focused matchmaking, which to me was a huge misstep, because cs is(was) not that type of game. And I didn’t care for csgo one bit. They took all the worst parts of 1.6 and css and put them together, and I was just done. I needed innovation.
And so, now, I just played cs2 for about a dozen hours for the first time this past week… And… Boy do I have thoughts.
I’m not going to go into them. There’s too many.
But just one main one is that I’m really sad that cs has stagnated to the point of now relying on gambling and either deathmatch or matchmaking. There are a very small handful of custom servers like climbing and surf, but MOST of that stuff is absolutely dead. Even matchmaking is dead as shit. It’s all skinvesting (dude. Fuck paid skins and that ENTIRE industry across ALL games).
I looked for a community server that was mostly default settings and just had a million maps where a handful of players (6-20) could just fart around in, but that type of actual community just doesn’t exist anymore. The game got too fragmented by valve trying to oversimplify and remove the server browser, but inadvertently made it super messy. And the fucking ui is godawful. It’s flashy and sometimes even responsive, the console and game both have some extremely good improvements. But… It’s just attracted the most sweaty tryhard seriouspants people.
It’s my home game, where I came from, my roots. But Jesus. They turned it into a Borg.
I don’t think it’s a full gate train, since it’s a game that defined my early childhood, but Half-Life 2 had more flaws than I’d initially admit.
Some I’d the things you need to pick up on to enjoy the levels are not readily apparent in the moment. The gravity gun obscures your view, leading many people to get objects trapped against bits and bobs. They only introduced the intelligent save system in Episode 2, meaning many players get stuck just before a big fight at 20 hp.
The story, while often environmental, relies very much on Lost-style mysterious elements; not just relating to the G-man but the resistance’s ready acceptance of Gordon’s reappearance. Most crucially, what little further development we’ve gotten on it suggests Valve never really had concrete ideas for a conclusion, or even an answer for people’s burning questions.
Tap for spoiler
This even goes so far as to create a time travel retcon in Half-Life: Alyx to undo a character death that may have only happened to up the “drama” levels.
I still love Puyo Puyo, but I don’t love Sega’s decision to rehash the same bad crossover again and again and again. It’s been nearly a decade since the last main series game and I’m convinced we’re never getting another. And queue times have gotten rather sad whenever I relapse and try to play Champions ranked again, Sega’s mismanagement has hurt the playerbase pretty badly.
Furi was such a profound experience for me, changed my outlook on life altogether, and helped me realize how much I enjoy action games, but it’s too limited and I can’t justify revisiting it when there are much more fun action games out there.
Fallout 4 is the first to come to mind. The story was all too predictable and the options for resolving the story were far too limited in my mind.
spoiler
I mean, they basically hand control of the Institute to the player’s character (assuming you play nice with Father at the onset), but give you no actual control over the Institute. Why not give the player the ability to steer the Institute away from their evil ways and direct them to helping what’s left of humanity on the surface as well as doing right by the synths rather than being forced to choose between two equally bleak and frankly disappointing outcomes? It just felt like such a kick in the nuts after playing for hundreds of hours (I spent waaaay too much time building elaborate settlements) only to find that whatever you do your going to have to hurt a lot of people.
Besides the story issues and the usual Bethesda jank, was just how clunky the settlement building process was. In addition, I had a major issue preventing me from doing pretty much any of the Brotherhood of Steel missions besides the basic ones offered by the BoS solders holding out in the police station.
I was also pissed at how no matter how good your perimeter defenses were hostiles always spawned inside the settlements when you weren’t present at the start of a raid. Tall walls/fences + dozens of automated turrets of various types all arranged carefully with overlapping fields of fire as well as traps were apparently still not enough to keep motley group of poorly equipped raiders from pillaging and ransacking my settlements repeatedly.
I’ve played other Fallout games repeatedly, but I have no interest in playing Fallout 4 again.
Alright, here’s a long one. Overwatch.
I’ve never been a fan of PvP games, but hero shooters might be my one exception. Even then, I almost exclusively play support because I prefer helping my team to fighting the enemy. But the better I got at the game, the more I realized support was just the damage role but you also attack your team sometimes. A Lucio with only 1,000 damage or with 80% healing uptime by the end is a bad Lucio. I guess what I was looking for was a healer role, not a support role.
This pushed me more and more into just playing my favorite character, Mercy, because she kinda lives in her own world and rarely interacts with the enemy team. Her movement is fun, and I genuinely enjoy playing her. So I’d be more than happy to pick OW back up as a Mercy one-trick, but that brings up several other problems.
First of all she’s straight up ass in high-level play. Which is fine I guess, I don’t need to play comp, but the more consistent matchmaking than what shows up in quickplay was appreciated. Secondly, people expect you to switch if things aren’t going well… the game’s been called counter-watch for a reason. This is also fair enough, I understand my team shouldn’t need to baby me if I’m hard-countered, but like… I don’t want to. At this point I’m here to play Mercy, not OW, so I’d rather just lose than switch. Which can make me a useless teammate.
The biggest issue though is their expensive and greedy monetization and abusive use of FOMO. Anybody that has played the game before knows Mercy is one of a few characters that gets beautiful limited-time skins every season, because they sell extremely well. Most of them cost $20, and some can only be bought in $45+ bundles. Unfortunately I’m a sucker for pretty Mercy cosmetics and struggle to stop myself from buying a lot of them. So I stopped playing entirely, because hating myself for spending $20 on pretty Mercy skin #37 is bad for my health and wallet.
I feel this one. I was a Mercy main too. I picked up Zarya as a second but couldn’t really get into anybody else. Then the game just stopped being fun after a while.
Haha, that’s funny, I was also a Zarya player on the off chance I did play tank. Bubbling others was always fun.
Same, but I got out before OW “2”. I was a platinum Symmetra main in the 2.0 days and adored her. I’ve never done much head clicking in games and don’t have the precise mouse control needed to do it well, so I really gravitated towards being able to play a fast paced pvp game as a strategic, lateral thinking problem solver. I have so many fond memories of my team-mates groaning when I picked Sym only to later sing my praises after a clutch teleport or a flick shield saved them. I collected screen shots of enemies cursing me and calling me horrible things for my devious turret placements. It was just fun.
Then came her 3.0 rework and they basically deleted her. Her new kit played nothing like my skinny legend. I think what made Overwatch originally such a viral game was how welcoming it was. It had characters for seasoned pvp fps vets but also a bunch of low skill-floor heroes that you could get your girlfriend or your dad or somebody who had never played the genre before, in and having fun and contributing. I think each subsequent update after that felt like they were steering the game away from being fun for everyone, and towards being just another head clicking game. They gave me the loud and clear message that they didn’t want people like me playing.
I heard they tried walking it back, and that they added a mode in OW2 that’s like “vintage” Overwatch. Unfortunately the trust is gone now and I lost touch with my community. It’s nice that they realized their mistake in killing it completely but for me it’s just too late.
Hearts of Iron 2
When I realised Aurora 4x, a free space 4x game with an ugly UI, does ground trooper even more in-depth than a specialised WWII game, it starts to feel like a toy; there’s just no contest between these two when it comes to complexity in terms of moment-to-moment decision making.
Destiny 2.
Started playing it shortly after launch, then they completely fucked it up. Stuck around for a few years playing with friends from time to time, but the latest Diet Star Wars expansion completely killed any vestige of enthusiasm I had for it. Refunded it after two hours when I realised it…just wasn’t fun.
Played Destiny 2 when it went free to play (or shortly beforehand, they gave it away a while before they went F2P on Steam).
Had a lot of fun for a while but eventually it was just… always more of the same all the time.
And nowadays they apparently don’t want me playing as I switched to Linux (unless they changed their stance, don’t know, I’m not keeping up with it anymore).
Workers and Resources is pretty janky and it’s really unfortunate because the premise of the game is so interesting but it just doesn’t work in practice. I also played a lot of it in Early Access but dropped it hoping it would get better with time. Turns out it’s just as janky after 1.0 release.
I guess Apex Legends could be a game I fell out of love with, a couple of years back. I don’t even know why, I enjoyed the mechanics and the level design but something stopped clicking for me. Maybe I just got burned out on it.
Early access was when most of my time was in the game too. Stuff like underground pipes was barely integrated yet. It felt better then compared to now. Now there’s almost too much to do to get a town starting and that’s the most frustrating thing.
Avorion… like, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got 1,200+ hours in it, and on paper it still features literally everything that is like digital crack cocaine to me… but the updates and changes just keep going in directions that don’t interest me, at all, and even though they’re not explicitly bad per se, I find myself overwhelmed with disappointment about what the updates could’ve been, and I just become less interested, and end up playing less and less, to the point that I never even bothered installing it in 2025 and still don’t have it installed and when I do install it I generally just play it for a little bit and quickly become bored and disillusioned and end up going back to the X series or something to scratch the itch that it’s just not scratching for me anymore.
I checked the Steam page and damn near every review is over 500 hours. Even the not recommended ones. Might have to check this one out.
Check out the workshop for it too. The ship builder is extremely flexible and people create works of art with it, and it can make the game look truly incredible. Of course, things like battle-bricks and battle-sticks (or battle-bricks WITH battle-sticks) reign supreme at actual combat effectiveness not to mention cost effectiveness, so it’s sort of a tradeoff.
It’s hard to go back to Avorion after they ruined subordinate auto-trading. You used to be able to tell your traders to make money and they’d figure out trade routes and grant you a decent passive income. Now they can only trade within a few sectors (each good’s price varies in a gradient spanning the galactic map, so trading with a neighboring sector is barely worth it due to prices being nearly identical), and you need to invest heavily in both the captain and trading hardware upgrades for their ship to make it even remotely worthwhile.
I know I shouldn’t expect an X4-level economic simulation, but they straight up ripped out an already working system and replaced it with something barely functional.
There’s a mod adding the ability to set up manual trade routes, at least.
After 1300+ hours in Elden Ring, I have come to hate a lot of the enemy designs. So many things teleport or slide to you so you can’t maintain good spacing, have combos that never end or can be started up ad infinitum with no openings, have hitboxes that do not match the visuals of what’s going on, or have so many effects happening all the time you can’t even see what is going on.
I’ve began to wonder if ER stretched their imagination of what could make a difficult challenge because it often feels very unfair compared to all the prior games.
I also thought the ER questlines were counter intuitive. You would easily miss next steps or have no idea where to go to (at least, I did). And as such, it felt ER was designed to be played with the wiki next to it. Previous games did not really had this issue because of the more linear approach.
I mean… I had to use a guide to figure out how to access the DLC in Dark Souls 1 because it is rather convoluted compared to everything after it. So that I was prepared for. At least the biggest one (Ranni’s) is pretty easy to follow… Up to a certain point. Unless you rest at that one specific site of grace after picking up the mini Ranni doll, you may never know you can speak to the doll itself. It should have had the prompt appear at every site if you had the doll and not conversed with it.
I also was always disappointed with the MP. After the kickass MP of 2 and 3, ER pulled back on everything except the convenience. I do like the effigies so you don’t have to just literally stand around in a spot waiting to be summoned; but that is just about the ONLY thing I love about ER’s (vanilla) multiplayer.
Damn, that’s a long time to figure that out. Did you feel that way early on and work around it, or did you have that realization 1200 hours in?
It’s like a bell curve. First you don’t know but can still feel the unfairness. Then you manage to win and think “maybe it is fair, I just haven’t learned enough,” and then you learn more and go back to thinking “this shit is unfair AF.”
The games I fall out of love with are always online games. They are the type of games I spent my most time with. By far. They give me the highest highs but also the lowest lows.
So yeah, Team Fortress 2, Minecraft, League of Legends, you name it. Not even an Ocarina of Time or a Baldur‘s Gate 3 can come close to the fun I had in these games. But I still love the latter and not the former. Not anymore.
I still play online and co-op games that I very much enjoy but one day I will feel burned out by them too.
Skyrim has aged REALLY poorly.
Starting in December of 2011.
What does this even mean?
It means that like most mediocre games, this one had a short half life as a good game, regarding its overall quality.
IMHO, it was never even decent. Also, I strongly fellate Morrowind and the Gothic series, so yeah.
you, fellating es4
As one should.
yeah swinging swords makes that cheap metallic noise. Quests don’t have the pull that we expect them to. None of the characters are interesting. No continuity with quests. I notice the bugs that Tod Howard never fixed but re-released with bigger textures, which only makes the greed more palpable.
Without mods I can kinda see it. With mods I still enjoy it a lot.
There’s a series of mods where you can change the combat into something very souls like. Combos, lock on, dodging, etc. It’s kinda complicated to set up though but it breaths a lot of new life into the game
Bethesda has a tendency to take features from popular mods for their previous games to improve future titles. Skyrim’s combat, for example, is heavily inspired by the Deadly Reflex mod for Oblivion. I wouldn’t be surprised if TES 6 cribs the Souls-like combat formula due to those mods’ popularity.
I just started skyrim for the first time in December. Stealth archer obviously and then a mage character. I’ve been surprised how much fun it is. Clearly lacks depth in a lot of areas but damn there is a lot of it. Definitely think I missed out on playing it when it was released.
I could write a book on eve online. That one is insidious. The hook is that you dream of getting the upgrade, which takes real world time to get, both in farming and in “skill training” time that’s passive and works while you’re offline but measured in real world time and can only be boosted but still takes months to do. So you sit there and think “oh boy it’ll be so cool when I finally can do X” and then you get it and it’s pretty much the same you were doing before, but bigger numbers.
It also got community and then you have friends and don’t to leave your friendgroup
And the devs? Deliver banger shows that show what they’re planning. Planning being sort of the catch, because in the nearly 15 years I’ve been watching what they’re doing, they did things I would call “correct”, one which they reverted (because the players were running away) and the other which they nerfed.
More recently skilksong. All the elements for a fantastic game are there, art, especially the music are unbelievable. But upgrade system, the placing of where you can get them, what they actually do, some of the resources and currencies. That part just sucks.
And for some reason, the game and the community ship the main character and a mass murdering psychopath? Just wild.
call of duty black ops zombies. black ops 3 in particular because of the custom maps and mods. i play it on pc with friends here and there and i always get so excited to play but then we do and then we play 1 or 2 games then get too bored to play and hop on something else. it’s pretty repetitive once you learn the movement, because at some point you learn how to just never die because the gameplay is pretty much the same after round 20.
I’m in a similar boat with BO2 and BO3 Zombies. Except in my case, it’s because I don’t have any friends even remotely interested in the game anymore. And holy shit is training a group of zombies in circles for hours boring when you’re alone. It’s a shame because I do really like the early game setup still. Buying perks, finding and upgrading weapons, and opening up the map. Especially on high quality custom maps I’ve never explored before.
I still find easter eggs fun to do, but most require a group which completely kills my chances of doing them. Origins is my favorite vanilla map though, and at least that one can be completed solo.
