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What game did you hate even after sinking a lot of time into it?
(media.piefed.social)
I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
WoW. I sank hundreds of hours in vanilla. Spent forever getting tier 3 armor completed and most end game content completed and then Burning Crusade was launched. I was so excited that myself and about 15 guildmates road tripped from across the country to meet up and play in person for launch.
I remember crossing the portal and within 15 minutes a common mob dropped an item that was better than one of my tier 3 armor pieces. Pieces I had spent weeks farming for. I was so frustrated that I couldn't enjoy the next 2 days playing, even with everyone there. I got home, played a few more days, and had already replaced half my armor. I quit WoW cold turkey and since then have only logged in once in all these years.
I wasn't even that mad that my armor was replaced, I was mad that it was replaced so quickly, and not even at boss fights. It was normal mobs dropping rares.
Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!
So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!
What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the "fly" in the right direction and wait ... Soo funny).
And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you "had" to walk everywhere first, before getting your "fly", but that just made it worse because now you'd be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.
Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.
Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game...
It's one of those great ironies, because flight was a requested feature since the beginning and being locked into fixed flight paths left people wanting free flight even more. Back in 2006-7, I don't think most people, or even Blizzard, could predict how much it'd hurt the social aspect of the game.
That was an integral part of the game design.
Those things, like underpowered weapons for example, is something "gamers" pester about and want changed, but any good gamedesigner knows better than to listen to them, it breaks the gameplay.
Today it's worse in many games because the "annoying" things still exist but you have to pay to get around them, and it just makes the gameplay suck. IMO.
I'd never be able to find it, but back in the Vanilla days, there was an interview where one of the designers literally explained that flying was a bad idea and would ruin the game for the exact reasons it did. They knew, but someone must have overruled that.
This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn't do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game's life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that's it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)
GW was my jam back in the day. I couldn't get GW2 to click for me because by the time I got into it, it was information overload and I found it hard to keep up. However, GW3 is going to be a no brainer buy when it releases.
TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.
I am completely turned off by mmo rpgs. I like my videogames to convince me that I'm not wasting time playing them; things with short levels or engaging gameplay loops....
Rpgs just take so long, and so little progress is made.
Now I haven't play WoW specifically, but these mmo rpgs usually have this problem where people get insane loot and xp bonuses for playing in a party. But nowhere in the game does it say "please for the love of God join a guild and play with them all the time!!" No sir-ee, so when people play in a guild or a party for the first time, they notice this. And many completely lose interest in the game, seeing how much time they wasted. I've been the same way.
The only mmo I've really engaged with for more than a few months on one go is FFXIV which for me is more of a social game with stupid amounts of random side content and a fairly relaxed long story to chip away at. Wow was just a series of ever moving goalposts. I've played loads of MMOs and the best ones are good because you're playing them with people tbh.
WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience what was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.
And it's extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I've had with the game.
For me it's kind of like if you love cheesecake but can't buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago but will never get to have again because the restaurant closed.
I hear this. I kept trying to get back in to it over the years but without my old guild and friends at my back its a hollow shell of the game I loved.
I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn't must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn't revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven't wanted to play an MMO since.