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.

Skyrim has aged REALLY poorly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

World of Warcraft. Was addicted for the first hundred hours but then was disillusioned really quickly.

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.

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 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.

I think I would put Super Mario Maker 1 and 2 here. At least, the online run part. The course editor is fantastic, and if you know some good builders or have a way to find curated courses. it's great.

However despite how much I'd like to be able to jump into a hundred-course run of Mario platforming (believe me, I would), it's almost entirely shit. Not even entertaining shit most of the time. It's either absurd enemy spam, empty courses, trap pipes/doors that lead to either instant deaths or inescapable dead-ends, invisible blocks over pits to trip you when you jump...

And a favourite of mine, the course that would be almost impossible except there's an invisible secret shortcut to the end right at the beginning. The infamous "dev door". Because you have to be able to complete your course before you upload it, and the worst kind of trolls obviously don't want to engage with their own crap.

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.

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.

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.

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 don’t think it’s a full hate 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.

::: spoiler 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. :::

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.

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.

Elite Dangerous. Beautiful game, wonderful atmosphere, fun flight model, but so so tedious and grindy. It wouldn't be so bad if they expanded the gameplay loop some, but its been markedly the same since launch minus a few attachments stapled on. I do hear that there is an actual update thats adding a new mission type that actually combines multiple forms of gameplay, so i might check that out when it comes out.

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.

Overwatch. Got into it several years back, before it became Overwatch 2. Nice gameplay, balanced and diverse characters, I loved it

Then comes realization thar matchmaking is fucked. Throwing someone who just installed the game into match between teams of players who have hundreds, if not thousands, hours in - that level of fucked

Then comes realization Blizzard doesn't give a fuck about lore they themselves built. WTF is these skins for Mercy that look like anime teenage girl? She is over forty, if I am not mistaken, and has seen tons of shit as battle medic - that level of not giving a fuck

So... guess I am done with the game. I gave them years to come to their senses, but no more

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. I loved everything in that tactical spaceship battle game and I play it at least once a year (modded to work on 2026 hardware).

It’s so sad they never made the second one and the other games that somewhat look alike are, meh…

Then it was KSP, Cyberpunk 2077 and recently Clair Obscur.

Chess.

Everyone started memorising openings and changed the game style.

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".

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.

Cyberpunk 2077. I played that game all the way through three times but lost the love for it when they completely reworked the talents for the DLC. I just couldn’t get back into it after that.

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.

Almost anything i found had a chore based quest with shit loot after finishing a campaign.

Eg: destiny2 and dying light2 DL2 was a great campaign and fun mechnics while i enjoyed some of the quests after until i ran into the sprint ones and then it kept force injecting this feature to compete with the person you’re finishing the quest with which just felt gross and overall detracted from the drama and fantasy like it was trying to inject a mario cart feature that was misplaced.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe Reus? I enjoyed the basic premise and the first few hours, but then the game's flaws started to become more apparent (e.g. repetitiveness, upgrade chains becoming unmemorisably complex) and I put it down around 12% of full completion.

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.

With the exception of Warcraft 3, Pretty much every game I have ever played. There are games I played for years and others for weeks but they all get boring eventually.

NieR: Automata. This game was definitely not something that I would normally pick up but it kept showing up on "must-play" lists so I figured I would give it a shot when it was marked down like 70%. The initial impression from the intro/tutorial was pretty underwhelming due in large part to the confusing change in gameplay from top down shooter to side-view to normal 3rd person but once I got through that I found the setting and presentation of the game really compelling. I was even reading about the lead developer and searching for other projects to potentially pick up once I finished this one. That lasted for about 10 hours or so...spoiler ahead but I figured out how to hide the text if you haven't played this and are considering it.

::: spoiler spoiler Once I got to the Friendly Robot village there was a subtle change and that kinda snowballed into something far weirder. The talking robots with their bizarre personalities (child robots, WTF?!) and all of the strange requests felt like such a break in the general tone that I just found myself less and less interested in finding out "what happens next". The difficulty curve was pretty good and there are a ton of areas to explore but I suddenly realized that I just didn't care anymore... ::: Obviously this is a bit of an unpopular opinion based on the super high scores it gets and others stuck it out for multiple replays to see the "good" endings but I just couldn't convince myself to even finish it the first time. YMMV.

Sea of Thieves. I've loved it for so long, played it endlessly but now I've permanently uninstalled the game and don't see myself ever going back to the game, I enjoyed the battle passes, I enjoyed the gameplay, enjoyed the quests I could do, made it finally to pirate legend and could keep going at it, but they made it really difficult to get doubloons, and that put the final nail in the coffin. I just can't stand them, even making custom servers a subscription, there was too much stuff. Alas, I shall very much miss it.

I could say every Final Fantasy game after FF9

But real answer is GTA V. I loved my first playtrough and enjoyed the game a lot. Since then i have tried to start it fresh half a dosen times and every time i just loose intrest about midway trough.

FFXIV. I was playing it for the story... then Dawntrail happened.