Games you used to like, but don't anymore

The Game Room
1

Or games which have been released as part of a long-running series, which is what my two examples are.

Civilization. Yes, I got Civ IV, and played it to death for like a month. But eventually, despite all the new bells and whistles, and despite the devs fixing Infinite City Sprawl (which really soured me on III), it’s at its core still essentially the same old Civ-same old combat system, same basic strategy, same tech system (in general), same cheating AI (at higher levels), same middle game ennui. Haven’t played it in about a year-took a brief look at the expansions, didn’t spring for them.

Heroes of Might and Magic. Number III all told was the best of the series, but when I broke down and got V a few months back, the same syndrome above arose. The new skill system was terrific, and the 3D graphics were pretty cool, but it’s still the same old Heroes. Combat system had a few new wrinkles (like how initiative worked), but we still have the old 2D battleboard which dates back to the original King’s Bounty. Spells-only a few novel incantations, still had Mass Slow, Armageddon, etc. AI was annoying and made for boring games because it invariably kept trying to invade you relentlessly until you invaded it and finished it off-since I like to explore away from my home base that was hugely peeving.

You see the designers of games for such long-running series are between a rock and a hard place: if they try to innovate like crazy they risk pissing off their core fanbase, which is precisely what happened to Heroes IV. As an effort, IV was a noble experiment; as a game, a quirky failure, with severe balance issues and brain-dead AI. Reinventing the wheel like that always entails risks as you push the envelope beyond the tried-and-true, only to find that your innovative game system completely lacks balance or gameplay.

If on the other hand they stick with what worked over the previous X iterations, even the most hard-core player will get bored with it eventually. In my ideal world the next Heroes game will have fully 3D battlefields, where if you have 10 dragons in your army you will see 10 dragons on the battlefield, and get to watch them as they swoop down upon a pack of hapless orcs and fry them. A overhauled and dynamic spell system and skill system. But I understand the risks with going that route.

2

Oblivion - liked it a lot but eventually got bored with the stupid levelling system and I’m not interested enough to get my head around how to install mods (I don’t care how simple it’s supposed to be, when I sit down to actually try and do it the instructions are anything but, and I consider myself at the very least as moderately computer literate for these purposes!).

WOW - loved it initially but then the grind set in, and I simply don’t have the time or inclination to devote the huge amount of my life necessary to get the most out of the end-level content. As a consequence of this never became part of a good guild and soloing past lvl 40 is dull.

Civ 4 - I too got bored of it, more for the cheating past prince level. What’s the point when you’re no longer actually competing in a fair challenge? I loved one of the mods that was created, Fall from Heaven 2, but that is geared up to very long play and again I don’t want to sit at my computer for 5 hours at a stretch.

3

I played enough Civ to finally get it out of my system, I think (hope). I still recognize and acknowledge that Civ4 is a masterpiece, and is likely to be the Best Game Ever in it’s genre for quite awhile, maybe forever, but after thousands of hours I just can’t play it anymore.

Halo3 is another really good game that I just can’t play anymore. I didn’t put nearly the amount of time into this one before getting bored, though. I think I played something between 75-100 online matches, and I can’t think of a good reason to turn the game back on.

4

I haven’t liked any of the Civ games since 2.

I liked the *F-Zero * series less with each passing iteration.

Of all the GTA 3+ games, Vice City is now the one I can’t stand. Have no idea why; I still love 3, Liberty City Stories and San Andreas.

Any Madden game before 2002 or so now seems horrifically dated (and I haven’t even gotten to the Wii/XB360/PS3 versions yet!)

5

How about a gaming genre?

RTS

I just to love playing AoE1, Warcraft and Starcraft… but once everybody started playing multiplayer and klickfesting, I completely lost interest.

Nowadays, I don´t even try the new ones - it´s just more of the same :frowning:

6

I’ll dispute that. I really tried to like Civ 4 but all the bells and whistles slapped on top of the game kept getting in my way. Even after I disabled them all I found the pace of the game to be even slower than the traditional Civ game and if that wasn’t enough there were quirks that made the micromanage/macroscale thing hard to juggle. It seemed like for the sake of making things “pretty” (and I thought the 3D crap looked ugly as sin) they made the game more difficult to manage.

7

The first time I played NWN2 I enjoyed it quite a lot. Sure, there were more flaws than there should’ve been, but my druid was too busy turning into a dire bear and eating people to really care. I finished the “good” storyline, and figured I would try a different character class for the “evil” story… and ten minutes in, realized that I just couldn’t bring myself to play through the whole thing again.

I don’t know what it was, either: I played NWN1 over and over (and in fact still do, on occasion), but the second iteration just didn’t interest me past the first playthrough.

8

Games have passed me by. I will not spring for 60 bucks for a game and then pay monthly for on line. I have to have single player mode. That is being less and less easy to find. I only do strategy and RPG games. They are made less and less for a computer.

9

Codemasters driving games. The original Colin McRae and TOCA games were great. They had the right balance between arcade & sim. When Colin McRae DiRT came out I downloaded the demo and gave it a go. It looked very nice, but I found it unplayable. Same with Race Driver: GRID. They seem to have lost the plot when they went multi-platform and expect people to only use gamepads. I admit that I’m a bit of an oddball as I play driving games with a joystick instead of a wheel, but I just couldn’t get it set up to handle properly. I’ve had no such problems on PC-only racers such as GTR2 or GT Legends

10

Age of Empires

Collect this, build that, fight them.
repeat

11

That’s what I thought about 3. Culture was implemented all crappy-like and didn’t make sense sometimes, and armies were completely broken. I really liked the rebalancing they did with 4, especially the way governments worked and how they implemented religion.

12

I feel the same about all RTS games now also, new graphics only carry a genre so far. Total Annihilation was the zenith of the era, IMO.

JRPGs are mine (Final Fantasy, Eternal Sonata, etc). They have all stagnated into linear story lines, ridiculous leveling systems with silly grind-based combat, (Eternal Hammer Combo hits for 3573 points!), and obligatory contrived boss encounters that serve only as leveling/progress gateways for the next obligatory contrived boss encounter, and character customization based solely on selecting the current max-damage or max-defense item while waiting for the next-tier item to become available.

13

I’m gonna go with GargoyleWB for the hate on Japanese console RPGs
(which is 99% of them). I got into it for a while (especially Final Fantasy), but the fact that you’re essentially playing the same formulatic game over and over eventually got to me and I can’t play them to this day.

I liked the Wizardry series on the PC, but I’m pretty disappointed in Wizardry 8. I’ve seen a lot of support for this game, but can’t figure out why. The combat system is absolutely terrible, making the game a dull, tedious, and drawn out experience. You get swarmed by dozens of mobs at a time, and if you can’t maneuver your party into a corner before they’re on you, you’re toast. You’ll be surrounded and forced to watch 20+ monsters hit your spellcasters, re-load, go through the whole combat again, die, re-load, etc. The rest of the game is ok, nothing major. Arx Fatalis came around at the same time and was pretty similar except for being a much better game.

14

Tic Tac Toe.

It’s always a tie.
[sub]The only way to win is not to play.[/sub]

15

And therein lies a lesson that it was important for some to learn, no?

16

If you liked Total Annihilation as much as I used to, you’ll LOVE Supreme Commander as soon as you drop $2k on a PC that can play it with more than 250 units in a 1v1. =P

This exactly. Used to love them. Tried to load up Suikoden II again, and damn near shot myself after a few hours.

Also, flight sims. When you can even find one it’s either hyperrealistic or practically point-and-click, and either way it’s never multiplayer for anything except maybe dogfights–I want my happy medium and I want my multiplayer objective-based maps, bring back Crimson Skies and Jane’s Fighter’s Anthology! (and, respectively, Kill the Zepplin and Airbase Assault modes).

17

Sim City etc.

Time management games like Plant Tycoon, Lemonade Tycoon, all that. Bleh.

18

Guitar Hero III. It’s not a failing of the game at all, but I bought it and played it constantly for about a week and then eventually realised that, as much as I love the game, I prefer playing my real guitar. So I dusted my guitar off and have been playing that a lot more.