Games I Can’t Enjoy Anymore

It was (mostly) fun while it lasted

In today’s article, I want to do something different. Instead of discussing a particular game or a meta topic, I want to give a small insight into my gaming history. More precisely, I want to talk about games that I used to enjoy but no longer can. I have no idea whether this is a general phenomenon or something that just happens to me. If you’ve experienced something similar, please let me know in the comments.

The Problem

So, what’s the problem exactly? There are a couple of games that I used to enjoy, but the mere thought of playing them again is physically repellent. Even when I try to play them again, I lose motivation after only a handful of minutes and stop playing.

This is somewhat weird, as these aren’t bad games, and I’ve sunk a lot of hours into some of them. I’m not exactly sure what ruins these games for me. Maybe listing some examples will reveal a pattern. So, let’s dive into the list.

DotA 2

When DotA 2 was released in 2013, I had just stopped playing Starcraft 2 excessively and, hence, was more than ready for a new multiplayer game. I had first encountered DotA when it was a Warcraft 3 fun map, so I knew what I was getting into. Over the years, I sank more than 250 hours into this game. Most of these were played with my brother, plus three random players to fill up the team.

The problem was that probably 60% of these hours weren’t fun. DotA matches take a long time, and once we’re at a disadvantage, it’s not very likely that we can turn it around. Given the fact that three out of our five players were random players, teamwork wasn’t exactly stellar. Few things feel as bad as having to invest another 20 minutes to finish a match that was already lost at the 30-minute mark.

Puck was one of my favorite heroes

The flipside of the coin is that DotA 2 can be incredibly fun when things are going well, especially when we’re carrying the match. That said, even after all these hours, I never had the feeling of actually being in control. I could play well and still lose the match thanks to my teammates, and vice versa.

All in all, playing DotA 2 was a very frustrating experience, and I have no desire to ever touch the game again. In retrospect, I probably only sunk so many hours into it because I didn’t have anything better to play at the time.

Darkest Dungeon

Darkest Dungeon is probably the most extreme case of this phenomenon. The game is purposefully designed to evoke a strong emotional response. It achieves this mainly by emphasizing randomness and by letting our heroes die permanently. Together with the fact that leveling and gearing up a hero take quite a while, this makes a failed mission run incredibly frustrating.

The fights can get incredibly stressful

I enjoyed the game a lot while playing it, but from the beginning I could feel the tension gnawing at me. After a disastrous attempt to beat the final iteration of a certain boss, I just couldn’t go on anymore. I didn’t have the strength to rebuild my hero roster, grind up again, and attempt the boss one more time with an uncertain outcome. So, I just stopped.

To this day I haven’t finished the game. I’d love to see the endgame and maybe even take a look at the Crimson Court extension, but I just can’t make myself. I even attempted a fresh playthrough in a special mode that’s supposed to minimize grinding, but even that didn’t help.

I think Darkest Dungeon’s high-stake design was too intense for me. I was definitely emotionally involved but not in a good way. While I feel a lot better about the time I spent playing Darkest Dungeon compared to my time spent playing DotA 2, it’s still not a happy memory.

Path of Exile

Diablo 3 was one of the biggest disappointments in my gaming career. So, I was very interested when Grinding Gear Games (GGG) released Path of Exile, given that it presented itself as the true successor to my beloved Diablo 2. I first started playing Path of Exile in the open beta in early 2013 and was quite impressed. The game was a bit rough around the edges and certainly not great to look at, but it had a lot of interesting ideas on how to advance the genre.

I dived deep into Path of Exile and quickly realized that I couldn’t keep up with the developer’s pace. The game features leagues that end after a couple of months. Once a league is over, all characters get transferred to the standard league that serves as a final holding place. Each league comes with new features, and ideally, we start a new character in each new league.

However, leveling up a character takes quite a bit of time. Path of Exile also features an extensive amount of endgame content that can keep us busy for a long time. Given that the developers often added even more endgame content when they introduced a new league, the amount of time we needed to sink into a new league increased more and more.

Atziri is an example of endgame content that I actually completed

Keep in mind that leagues are strongly separated from each other. We cannot transfer items from one league into another. As a result, all of our accumulated riches in standard league are useless to characters in a different league. All of this combined made me play standard league only.

It meant that I only gained access to the new features when the current league ended, but that was fine for me. Interestingly, not every new feature made it into standard league. Some were scrapped as they were found lacking.

In addition to the ever-increasing amount of content that I was struggling to access, I was also put out by the frequent amount of balance changes. It was very common for GGG to accidentally make some build overpowered and then nerf it into the ground when the problems became visible during the league. In addition, they expanded the already quite complex character system more and more over the years.

Whenever a big change occurred, the main component of the skill system – the passive skill tree – was reset. In such situations I had to figure out how to recreate my current build with the new system if it even worked at all anymore. Needless to say, this was very unwelcome. Over the years, all of my character builds were made obsolete.

Granted, I could hunt for new builds and adapt them accordingly. However, it’s far from guaranteed that I own the necessary items to power the new builds or the currency to get them. In the end, I stopped playing the game because I felt trapped in a weird kind of hamster wheel in which I could never run fast enough.

I think the big problem here is that Path of Exile is a service game that constantly gets expanded. This puts pressure on GGG to come up with something, and their results are mixed. The most puzzling addition I ever experienced was the addition of tower defense elements to the game. Needless to say that these didn’t work very well.

I think GGG should’ve started working on a proper successor for Path of Exile much earlier. That way, they could’ve kept the original game a bit leaner. It will be interesting to see how Path of Exile 2 will perform. The game is currently in early access, and upon release will have to compete with at least 13 years of feature additions to its predecessor. That’s not an easy task.

The Roguelites

In general, I hate roguelites, as I always feel “cheated” by the huge amount of repetition baked into these games. To me, these games feel like two hours of content stretched into 20. However, there are a couple of them that I enjoyed; for example, Balatro, Inscryption, Slay the Spire, and Dead Cells.

Inscryption can be great fun. It’s also infuriating at times, and tries too hard to be clever.

But even these good games aren’t immune to what I call the bubble pop. Suddenly, the game isn’t fun anymore, and I discard it to never play it again. It’s like a bubble popping and vanishing into thin air. Usually this happens when I have successfully completed a couple of runs but still have a lot of things to unlock. However, I just can’t be bothered anymore, and the game just ceases to exist for me.

This has most recently happened to me in Inscryption. I greatly enjoyed Kaycee’s mod and have almost unlocked everything. But then I just stopped, and I have no desire to play the game again. I’ve never experienced the bubble pop in any other kind of genre. It shows that roguelites just aren’t for me.

Conclusion

Writing this up has revealed a pattern to me. I think games become unenjoyable to me once I get the feeling that I’m wasting my time with them. This is ironic, as playing video games is hardly a productive use of time. However, these games leave a bad taste in my mouth and make me wonder what else I could’ve done with my time instead of playing them.

I don’t have this feeling with other games, and that includes heavy hitters like Persona 5, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft 2, all of which have consumed hundreds of hours of my life. I guess that shows that wasting time can be both rewarding and unrewarding.

All of the ruined games also feature a significant amount of randomness. By definition, this makes them more frustrating than deterministic games, as we’re not in control. While I don’t mind a bit of randomness in games to spice things up, I strongly prefer deterministic systems, as they are more rewarding to player skill.

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