Debate of the Day: When Did a Game You Loved Lose You?

It’s a straightforward question, when did your favorite game lose you, if it ever did?

This is probably mostly geared toward MMO players, as they’re the games with the most time commitment that make the most amount of changes over time that could turn off players. Above shows one person’s interpretation of the decline of the game, but I wonder what other titles lost fans and how.

Did you get bored of EVE Online? Was Everquest just no longer your thing? I want to know in the comments. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game long enough to have this sort of feeling. I ragequit Diablo 2 when I spent a month trading up for a rare rune that turned out to be a fake dupe item made by hackers, if that counts.

Let me know your stories in the comments!

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39 Comments

  1. Halo – After 3 I just couldn’t get back into the franchise. Just plain sick of it, at that point. Granted, I have the ability to play a game I love to the point of exhaustion. Also, I played Halo 2 repeatedly because of the whole “Halo 2/Deltron 3030” synch up I talked about in another post.

    CoD – After my 100th hour of Black Ops, I just said “Fuck it.” I remember popping in the game, sitting down & realizing how bored I was almost instantly. And I’ve been a pretty loyal fan since CoD 3 (late to the party, I know) buying all the DLC for every CoD game I got. I tried to force myself to play but I was just over it.

    Gears of War – To be honest, I haven’t played through an entire campaign once. I got the game later than my friends because I didn’t have a 360 at launch, so they were heavily into the multiplayer at that point. I had to play catch up so I just stuck with the MP from there on out, loved the game, played it almost religiously, but when 2 came out, it just felt…. different. Couldn’t get into it again after the initial playthrough. 3 was better, but I only really ever played Horde mode with my brother.

    Super Mario Bros – After the N64, I just didn’t have access to it, my friend had a Wii so I got a chance to play Super Mario Bros Wii, but it just didn’t grasp me the same way as the previous titles. To be fair, I was about 15 years younger when I played the earlier games.

  2. Diablo 1: Picture of ribs, steak fries, colorful garden salad, tall glass of coke.

    Diablo 2: Picture of filet mignon, garlic and clove mashed potatoes, butter-soaked broccoli, bottle of red wine.

    Diablo 3: Picture of a garden burger on a flat bun, stale potato chip crumbs, glass of gray water. Same price as the filet mignon.

  3. SimCity was freaking genius even through 4. SimCity 5 announcement: Published by EA! Always on-line! Origin! No thanks.

    Civilization 1 and 2 were also golden, then Alpha Centauri came out and had such longevity as to pretty much spoil Civ3 for me. I didn’t play 4, but I recently got 5 and had quite a bit of fun on that.

  4. Diablo 3 – Lost me after 2 days of playing
    Starcraft 2 – Lost me (after few months of playing)
    Mario Kart: Double Dash – I dont get it, they just needed to make the same game in every way and it would rocked!

  5. Tekken 6 – Fuck Lars, fuck Alicia, fuck Zafiera, fuck Azazel, fuck dropping Steve Fox’s storyline and turning him into comic relief, fuck Bob being such a lazy rip off he doesn’t even have a fucking sirname, fuck Zombie Armour King, fuck everything.

    But especially Lars – Lousy, mary-sue fanfiction “Kazyuya’s lost brother” bullshit with his cloud strife hair, his Squall Lionheart breastplate, his army troop he doesn’t fucking need because he’s so awesome he can take out a small army on his own, his fucking amnesia…

    Have I ordered Tekken tag Tournament Two?

    Of course I fucking have. *facefist*

  6. Final Fantasy VI was my first and favorite FF.
    I played through FF7, liked it, but it didn’t get me off.
    I played through the first disc of FF8. Meh.
    Played through FF9. Meh.
    Played through FFX. I really enjoyed the Sphere Grid. Other than that, meh.
    Played a demo of FFX-II. Lame.
    Skipped FFXI because I don’t like MMORPGs.
    FFXII was so boring.

    I went back and played through FFV. I enjoyed it. A little slow, but I played it right when it came out, I know I would’ve loved it. Same with all the ones before it.

  7. Since your picture was of WoW, I’ll talk about that. I quit WoW after Lich King, before Cataclysm. I quit more because I had the highest level character with the best gear you can get non-raid. The only way for me to improve was to join enormous raid guilds that would have set meeting times, usually whenever normal people would be going out and having fun (for some reason, these guys love playing WoW at 8PM on a Friday night), so I opted to go have fun with my friends rather than stay inside and get yelled at by a 15-year-old guild master for 5 hours in a row.

  8. Morrowind. Lost interest after completing the main quest, if you can believe it. Althought there were some faction quests still left for my character, he was pretty much perfect, kitted out in top of the line gear, chugging copious amounts of strenght potions, had good enchantments. The game just felt complete after punching the main bad guy while having 4000 strenght.

    Diablo2. Huh. Lost interest after finishing 9000 LK runs in singleplayer and making Infinity. Regained interest with 1.13, found some runes, traded for some runes, made Enigma, lost interest.

    Borderlands. All the quests are the same and boring. Doesn’t really feel like characters are progressing during the second playthrough. Doing the same quests that are allready repetitive to start with twice got old fast.

    WoW. Lost interest as soon as I saw how the combat was. Click on monster. Wait. Game makes my character exchange blows with the monster automatically. Dreadfully unengaging.

    Minecraft. I seem to lose interest when I start a project that is too big. When you just place blocks all day and see no end in sight. I always get my interest in this back, however. All it takes is a new set of mods, or a new world, or just people to play with.

  9. I agree with PiJus on both Morrowind and Borderlands. I forced myself to play Morrowind, but never got very far. I tried to get my character up there, but the progression of abilities was just too slow for my tastes. When I’ve played for a solid 24 hours and I still can’t hit anything more than 50% of the time with my sword I get pretty frustrated.

    Pijus is right about Borderlands as well. It’s just the same thing over and over. Everything became stale in quick succession. My friends raved about Borderlands, but after upgrading to another machine gun that looked just like my last ten machine guns I was ready to give up.

    Farcry 2 was another one that got me. It had the same problems as Borderlands. After running around doing the same milk-run missions just to get money and buy more guns I stuck it back on the shelf and haven’t touched it since.

  10. Kev: Lmao!!! Yes. Yes and yes on Tekken 6. Best review ever.

    Me…?

    Everquest 2: After the second big expansion I realized all my gear was worthless (again) and that I’d have to start the hamster race all over for new gear. Screw that.

    Skyrim: When I discovered I couldn’t kill the guards. They just kneel down then get back up again. Broke the freedom of the game.

    Portal 2 co-op: Because one person figures out the puzzle and drags the other person through before they can figure it out. I felt like I only played every second level.

  11. WoW Wrath of the lich king, i loved burning crusade, i played a lot of WOTLK but never got into it as much, that and black ops, i have played cod since it first came out on pc, i loved the cods before it, but Black ops just sucked

  12. EVE Online, because Guild Wars 2 came out and is such a blast, when I tried to go back in my almost-empty wormhole farming… I couldn’t stand it and realised how much more fun I have in GW2.

  13. I used to play Spore all the time. The main game got to be boring after a while, especially since I could never master Space stage, but the creation aspect of it was awesome. I liked creating my own “games” in Galactic Adventures, and I also had Spore Creatures and Spore Arena for the DS (Creatures > Arena, big time).

    Once EA came out with DarkSpore, I had lost interest completely for the original PC game and almost anything associated with it. The online community seemed so hate-filled all of the sudden, and the website wasn’t updating things as much as it used to. I still have Creatures and Arena, though. I play them occasionally whenever I get the chance.

  14. WoW- Lost me at the price, and the free realms weren’t as fun.

    CoD- Lost me when i realized it was the same thing over and over again. Even in games where I went 30 and 0 I would be kind of bored. It lost the adrenaline rush I used to get with that game.

  15. Phantasy Star Universe: They just ruined it by destroying the online economy, not adding anything substantial. They just added higher difficulty levels instead of new levels.

    Halo: Halo had a good plot in the beginning, quality music, and great gameplay. After 2, it got worse. But after 3 is where I draw the line between good and bad. Reach sucked in every way except multiplayer, and even that is arguable. Hopefully 343 will not drop the ball.

    Super Monday Night Combat: For this one, I’ll be honest: It’s not them, it’s me. Once you hit level 50ish, you get put in the upper bracket of players. You get in with the hardcore PC gamers who know their shit, play very well, and are just too good for me to keep up with. I went from consistent top of the score board to the bottom/middle. That just ruined it for me. I couldn’t get better, I tried. I just never learned how to keep up. Otherwise, it’s an amazing game. I just wish the bracket was based on skill level instead of actual level (base it on overall k/d?)

  16. WOW, after Burning Crusade. I loved the raid progression in the original and in the BC expansion, but after that you could get geared in a day and now you can max level in about a week. Even more upset about yet another raising of the level cap.
    Also D3 was a really big disappointment, I played for about a week despite having been really excited about a possible upgrade to one of my favorite games.

  17. I used to play too much Tekken, at first hated 4 but in a second glance it wasnt a bad game. And then they made 5, and to me, when they put the player names instead of the character names in the health bar it was enough to dislike the game, and then i found the useless customization, the new stages, new mechanics, what a piece of crap. Tekken 6 did even worse and to be honest o dont know if they made a new one aside tag Tournament 2. One of the reasons I regret buying street fighter x tekken is all those new players from the tekken side. It wasnt enough to put so many new faces but they must go with the “innocent cute small girl with sexy outfit going to kick your ass” card

  18. WoW: I pressed on up to Cataclysm, but the game lost it’s depth and challenge for me at T.B.C. Gear became easier to acquire, and guilds became more childish than the barrens chat, as well as some “forced” unrealistic meeting times, which isn’t really the games fault, more so the other players.

    Black Ops/MW3: Between the crappy random spawning that just happens to be directly behind you, or in the room that you just cleared out, and the “try hards” that rambo themselves to the other side of the map that CAUSE these crappy random spawn points. (don’t believe me, try it… play domination, run to A or C flag depending on where you start out, your team will start to spawn next to you after a few seconds, if you don’t get killed.) Sure, these two games took out some major flaws of MW2, spawn trapping, boosting with tactile insertion, and the horrid One Man Army noob-tube frenzy, but it ruined the flow of the game to me.

  19. I used to LOVE the Resident Evil titles. I played the old ones like hundred of times. (RE1 was my favorite tho) but then, RE 5 came out, I just hated it. This whole action game wasn’t the creepy mansion I went during my years as a teenager. Magic was gone. I also hated Chris Redfield’s new appearence. . .

    Anyway, I’m just hoping that RE6 is gonna change the title. Even if, maybe, this is an illusion. Survival Horror like old RE and Silent Hill may be the past…

  20. Crash Bandicoot lost me after 3.

    Mario hasn’t interested me since 64.

    The only Metroid I have any regard for is “Super”.

    I loved The Legend of Zelda for exactly two games, then lost interest when “Wind Waker” happened.

    Halo lost me at ODST.

  21. Everquest was the best mmorpg hands down, I spent hundreds of hours logged on doing quest after quest exploring the world making my epics. Then one day sony took over and made way to many changes, killed pvp servers, mad made planes of power killing the need of druids, etc. damn you sony… Damn you.

  22. Metroid was ruined with other m. Prime 3 also kinda sucked, but was still good enough. Prime 1 & 2 were pretty great.

    Zelda is still amazing, even if it IS the same game over and over.

    On the mmo front, DCUO is slowly losing me. Too many changes to make it easier for the noobs to catch up, not enough new content for the people that have been around since day 1. The grind is so annoying and the game is easy enough where all the extra feats you can complete for skill points are pointless due to already being overpowered. New update is out today, maybe it will renew my love. In all honesty, if I hadn’t JUST prepaid for a years sub to save money I probably would’ve given up while I took a break for darksiders 2.

  23. When Day of Defeat was “updated” with the Source engine. The gameplay of DoD: Source simply wasn’t the same. Altough you could still play the classic DoD, the servers simply died as less and less people played.

  24. Quit Halo 2 the minute they nerfed the battle rifle/plasma pistol combo.

    Halo 3… made it about 10 minutes of single player and was like … pfffffft. Done.

    I would still be playing Syphon Filter and Resident Evil 2 if I didnt have to work, pay mortgage, pay bills, eat, etc… 1999 might possibly have been the Greatest Summer Ever.

  25. Star wars galaxies amazing at first then 5 years later sony decides to destroy the game and take the reason we play out of it. No game will ever be like the original SWG from the pvp to player citys, the way you grinded your character and choose what you wanted to me. The whole time i played that game it was a great time. Until the “new game enchanment” took place and the servers all went dead. F U SoE

  26. WoW – WotLK – It just killed the game for me and made it easier to faceroll all the things. I stopped then and whilst I may look at the new stuff as it arrives it’s just not the same.

    Diablo 3 – I got to level 16 and that’s as far as I got before going back to Diablo 2

    Final Fantasy – I stopped at 7 and only have 13 as it was given to me, but it has never gone into my XBox

    Resident Evil – The first 2 were good and after that it just got tedious

    Sonic – Sonic 2 is where it ends for me, especially with all those spin offs

  27. Soo many mmos loose me after a couple of day. Mainly because they pull the “we’re free to play” scam, and then I find out that I have to pay for better items, or after level 10 I have to pay for membership. I’m not wasting my money on online crap. And, you can blam it on Gaiaonline. I love it. But out of the 8 yrs I have been on it, 5 of those years my account gets hacked and I never get my stuff back. I’ve wasted so much money on the crap, that its not even funny..so..I quite paying for fake stuff like that a few years ago. I should also mention that, for whatever reason I get very bored, very easily with mmos.

    Diablo 3, after two seconds of play I quit. Why? Because they should have made it an option to play online. I shouldn’t have to be online to play it. Diablo 1 and 2 I didn’t have to be online, theres no reason(except for their own greed) for the game to be online only. And yes…I love..LOVE Diablo 2.

    Everquest, I loved it, loved playing it, but then we moved. I wasn’t allowed to play on my parents computer anymore so for years I didn’t play it. Then like 2 yrs ago I finally get it again. It bored me, I couldn’t play for more than a few hours.

    WoW lost me after a few months. I was surprised that it had kept me going for while. Reason? Boredom. That and the monthly bill that came along. What can I say…I’m cheap.

    DCUO captivated me for a while, but I’m a shy person on mmos, and I hate it when in order to do some of the tasks, you have to do it with a group. So, unable to find a group to help me complete some of the lvl 30 quests, I stopped. I’m not very social, I mind my own business, and I don’t like to announce or be announced to the world that I’m a “noob”

    Most facebook games for me either loose me a few days of play due to boredom, or loose me after a couple minutes of play due to the fact that, yet again I have to pay for an imaginary item.

  28. WoW– Loses me and wins me back every 4 months or so. It’s just long enough for me to build a romanticized image of the game in my head. I forget that every time I renew it’s the same thing over and over (durr its still the same game). I play the game for PvP, but what kills me is that in the 32 years the game has been out, they have only built a handful of battleground maps. If there was more variety to the maps (not even the game modes– ctf/c&h/pve-race) it’d be more bearable. But doing the same set of 5 maps over and over for hours on end kills me. Also the player base. It’s the same with every single online game ever, but the only people you tend to come in contact with are just the worst. The good people tend to stay quiet (or are in guilds), so you don’t notice that some people who play online games aren’t jabbering whiny idiots.

    Diablo3– It lost me when I remembered that Diablo2 only became a lot fun when I found bots to do the horrible part of the game for me (MagicFind runs). Diablo3 has done a fairly good job of combining the MF runs with the leveling runs (via the paragon system) but having a 4 player max is boring. I miss my 8 man cow runs, and then the cow run’s less fun cousin– the 8 man baal runs.

    I will return to both games. I always do, but these are the things that will frustrate me and eventually get me to swear to never ever play those stupid games again… until I beat whatever game I buy on steam out of frustration. I’m looking at you Max Payne 3.

  29. I played WoW for 7 years…. Since Beta.

    I loved Vanilla and Crusade… WotLK lost me a bit but the place was still beautiful and they kinda made up for it with Ulduar and the ICC ( I thought anyway because they were both fun with interesting bosses and an overall very chilling but beautiful feel to it). And then Cata came out… it brought everything back to Vanilla. And for a while, it was wonderful. The new expanses were great, the new mounts were interesting, the guild system was fun, the new raids were interesting and challenging, and the phasing was a nice way of being able to feel like you were the hero. (I do have to compliment Blizz on the Challenge tames they put into the game at this time as well. Seeing as I played a hunter, it was a lot of fun to actually be able to show skill and not just “I waited for three days for this bastard to spawn” when parading around with rare pets)

    And then… BAM!! They announce Mists… I quit the very same day they announced it.

    I’m not going to pay 30 bucks every 2 months to play KUNG FU PANDA!! That very day, I sold my gear, gave all my gold to my friend to buy the last stage of the legendary staff, and retired my old troll hunter. I’ll never pick up that stupid game again and I hope blizz runs it into the ground after this… Seriously… Not to mention the minipet fighting arena thing… Hey blizz, why not just make a pokemon MMO??

    Ugh… Blizz… seriously… You’re beating a horse that died at the beginning of Wrath…

  30. I’m surprised not that many people have mentioned Legend of Zelda. Majora’s Mask was a fantastic, innovative, risk-taking game, and not one has been able to match it since.

    Wind Waker was good, I liked the cartoonish art style and it did something different with the water, even though it was rather boring. Not as good as MM, but still good.

    Twilight Princess’s only thing was going back to “adult Link”, but all it did was retread the same ground as Ocarina of Time.

    And Skyward Sword? I think this might be my last Zelda game. I can’t take this any more. There’s just so much content that seems amateurish, not from a franchise 25 years old. The game is constantly beeping. The characters are unmemorable and downright annoying, anime archetypes. There is no exploration, no overworld.

    They took out the obnoxious “identifier” prompt for rupees that was in TP, but they left it for monster treasure, which there are MORE of. Instead of just getting a red potion, you have to “enhance it” with junk you need to search for. And I’m constantly fighting the controls to get the sword to do what I want. That first battle with Ghirahim took half an hour because I couldn’t get the sword to do what I wanted. So many little things and not enough big things.

  31. After I found out the Flood were back yet again in Halo 3, I bought a PS3 instead.

    Final Fantasy 8 began my estrangement from that series, and FFX finalized it.

    All the extra survivalism crap in Metal Gear 3 bored me so I never finished it, and abandoned the series all together.

    The “combat” systems of Borderlands, Fallout, and the Elder Scrolls games were so terrible they all pushed me away within the first couple hours of play and now I avoid all of those kinds of “action” RPGs.

    After binging on Quake, Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament back in the day I made a bit of personal discovery, online multiplayer isn’t actually fun. I still experiment occasionally, but unless they’re hanging out in the room with me, people only seem to detract from the gameplay experience. Obviously mmorpg’s were a non-starter.

  32. WoW- Lost me a little after the Burning Crusade was released. Elves in Horde and Aquamen just didn’t do it for me,plus a lot of stuff to make the game more gear-based.

    Oblivion- Lost me after i played nearly every single mod..

    Diablo 3- Lost me in less than one hour, it is a disgrace to its predecessors…

  33. Mario Brothers – I loved the challenge, but with the release of Mario 64 the controls just got way out of hand… that was it for me. I still play the classics every once and a while but I won’t really touch the new games because of all the changes.

    The Legend of Zelda – A game series that still holds my heart, though it’s always been a challenge for me and (honestly) I have never finished any of the games to the very end due to my own lack of ability as a player. However, this series I loved right up until Wind Waker…. I have NEVER seen more horrific graphics on a game than that… even Paper Mario was better than that! I’d rather go back to the old black & white pkmn pixels than the graphics used for that game, I can’t imagine what they were thinking…

    Pokemon – So far this series has gotten better and better with each generation and the spin offs have had pretty good stories (speaking of Pkmn Mystery Dungeon games & Pokemon Ranger games) to back them up. I’m not too thrilled with the whole Pkmn Black & White 2 thing… but I’m reserving judgement on those games for when they get here. The only disappointing game I’ve played of this series is Pokemon Channel. It is just too short of a game to make any sort of a difference and really was geared towards the lower aged generation. It has absolutely no plot to it, the whole point of the game ends once you’ve unlocked all the channels; which you can do in a single day’s time. Other than that… each game has been challenging and very fun. I’ve been a fan since the very first game and I continue to be to this day.

    The Sims – I played the very FIRST version… there wasn’t really much to it. It wasn’t very fun either really, now that I think about it. I don’t know why I bothered playing, but I did. I only wish I had the money to collect all the PC & game system versions of the Sims that has ever been made. I always find each new release a new challenge. Although I admit the games are a repetitive after many hours of playing, I still keep going back to them no matter where I am. There’s just something about building a life from the ground up that keeps me going back to the games again and again and again. Even sometimes starting new ones from scratch.

  34. Diablo was and still is one of my favorite games of all time, however that franchise is lost to me now.

    I really wanted to love Diablo II, i like the story the atmosphere the monster designs, the characters. But the problem is that i’ve never been a multiplayer guy, and Diablo II is tailored to multiplayer. Everything to the stupid save system, bosses who comes back to life, your charater never stays dead etc etc.

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