Call of Duty Warzone.

When it first released it was a very fun battle royale, a much better implantation than CoD’s first go at it, Blackout. You could actually buy back your teammates if they die, they added the Gulag as a chance to come back if you’re killed, you can create loadouts and use money you find in game to buy them. The map was big and expansive and you could usually find some interesting places to drop and not get absolutely dumped on immediately.

My friends and I played it for a long time, both on PS4 and later PC. When they moved the map to Black Ops Cold War’s version I’d argue it was a bit of an improvement even though all the Cold War guns outshined the Modern Warfare 2019 guns. That was the start of the decline in my eyes. Making the guns from the new game perform better than from the old one was how they pushed you to buy the new CoD so you could level up the guns and play better in Warzone.

Warzone moved to Vanguard’s Caldera map, which I think was a fantastic map, had some cool limited time modes and events, but at first they had some kind of issue with the light rendering because it wasn’t the easiest to spot enemies or items on the map. They fixed that and it was fine, we had some amazing games and lots of fun on Caldera.

Then they released Warzone 2.0 (which was arguably Warzone 4.0 but that’s an argument for a different day) using the Modern Warfare 2 engine. It was a very bad Warzone. The map was boring, the sound effects like hit markers by default were new and ear piercingly awful, and whatever rendering system they used made it extremely difficult to see enemies. Keep in mind I’m running this game on a 3090 so it’s not a graphics issue, it’s an engine one. Also on that note, the game literally struggled to run on my friends 3070 and 3060 12G cards. It was bad.

We stopped playing for a long time, moved onto other things, then did try again when MW3’s version came out. It was fine, map was better but the engine still had the rendering enemies issue.

Between the bad changes they made, the horrible monetization with the obnoxious skins and shit, at one point there was a gun you could only unlock through the battle pass or buy a skin for later which was an OP gun, and a plague of other issues we stopped playing. The game stopped being a fun shooter with friends and just became a slog to play. If we could go back to the original 2020 Warzone we would, but even when they rereleased Verdansk in MW3 it wasn’t the same.

BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

Probably Overwatch and PUBG.

Both games started out with huge potential, and then proceeded to squander all of it as time went on.

Overwatch was kind of doomed from the beginning. The 6 player limit is really oppressive and makes the game feel more like ‘work’ than ‘fun.’ As time went on, the game became less fun because MMR meant you were always playing with people around your skill level. Some people like that. I don’t. I want to see myself getting better by having more fun killing others who aren’t on my level. I don’t care about some symbol that says I’m in a higher league or whatever. Then they decided to drop the player count down to 5 and I literally haven’t been back since.

PUBG just went in the completely wrong direction. It’s like they knew the right answers, and specifically chose the wrong ones. 8-man squads, TDM, 50v50 wars; that’s really where the game shined. Unfortunately, it’s next to impossible to play any of that with any consistency.

I’d wager the main reasons these games failed (for me) is that they don’t allow people to host their own servers. Valve never got to make retarded decisions with TF2 because they always had to compete with a playerbase that could tweak the game to suit their needs.

TF2 still holds up to this day. As it turns out, having fun in games is more fun than taking them seriously.

I really liked the start and middle of that playstation 4 amazing spiderman game, and then i remebered why i never like open world games. Just so much mindless busywork.

I fell out of love with Team Fortress 2 after they murdered the art style with the cosmetics and extra weapons.

I didn’t realize it at the time but later on I fell further out of love with it for its role in normalizing lootboxes. In retrospect we should have shut that shit down as hard as horse armor was. Tribes: Ascend and TF2 were patient 0 and 1 in the pandemic. It was seen as acceptable at the time since the games were free, but we didn’t anticipate the broader effects it would have.

I still like team fortress 2 but after 6000+ hours of actual playtime I’m not in love with it anymore and I only play it on rare occasions with old friends.

Ive lost the kind of romanticism i had for gaming as a kid, so I dont really fall in love with games anymore. Im also generally self aware enough to stop playing before I start hating a game. I may get sick of a genre, leave it be and return in 5 years.

Reading the title of this post though, the first game that came to mind was gta. Last time I played gta V was on the 360 when I 100% the campaign and I didn’t really feel the same way as I did for IV. You might say I fell out of love with gta, as a franchise. This after having playednand loved all of them in the 15 years before V launched.

For me it was Warframe. I adore the style of the game and it’s lore. The gameplay and variety of the different weapons and characters gave me a lot of fun playtime. But the way RNG is used and how timed special missions are abusing dark patterns became more and more clear, the longer I played.

And at a certain point I realized the addiction it nurtured in me and I had to stop cold turkey and never touched it again afterwards.

fallout new vegas just bores me to sleep now. literally, I’ve fallen asleep playing it more than any other game

World of Warcraft. It was a magical, formative game for me as a kid who had just got his own PC. When eventually I had to stop paying subs because I was a poor teenager with no income, i always yearned to go back, and mostly played on private servers. When I finally got both the time and money to revisit… bizzard was in their cosby suite era, and the game kinda sucked ass. It felt gross and i havent been back since.

Generally just online games where the changes are enough that they don’t play the same way that I enjoyed them. Counterstrike, WoW, Overwatch, and others all did reworks that ruined the gameplay I enjoyed.

Older single player games aren’t as fun because they are clunky compared to newer games, like Neverwinter Nights compared to Baldur’s Gate 3. But I didn’t fall out of love, just don’t enjoy interacting with their controls.

The Forest. Man, I had a fantastic time in that game. Solo, and co-op. But after I beat it with a buddy, and we used the end-game artifact to create an excellent trap and base, it basically lost its appeal. The fun is in the struggle.

I love elite: dangerous and there’s still so much I haven’t done but it’s all as deep as a puddle, after 300 hours it started to get boring. (makes sense) I planned to take a break and come back to it but then they tried to add p2w microtransactions (they went back on it from backlash) and now the company behind it has replaced the ceo who cared about the game with a marketing guy and that’s made me lose interest in it entirely.

I’ve tried to get back into binding of Isaac. I love it still, but I can’t get into it like I once did. I spent probably a solid 3-4 years playing little but it and civ, and it’s not like I wasn’t gaming much, I was a shut in using rounds of boi as my reward for steps in homework. I’d say at least 600 of my logged hours were already playing it.

I think it’s largely that I’ve fallen out of it and already passed my skill peak but still know enough to not be excited to find new things. 11 years ago I was 20, disassociating, single, and didn’t really have any friends in college yet. I had all the reflexes I’d ever have, the most free time until retirement outside unemployment (and even then, I exercise, socialize, and spend a lot of time with my wife even when unemployed now), and the energy to throw myself deep into a game that I could just lose myself in. These days gaming is a few competitive hours after work or a Saturday.

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.