What genres have you fallen out of love with?

I tend to point to playing Oblivion at a friend's house in high school as my baptism into loving video games, since that was when I *really* got obsessed with them, but in truth my gateway drug into games was real time and turn-based strategy as a wee babe. One of the first non-edutainment games I ever played was the PC version of Lego Rock Raiders, which I spent an ungodly number of hours being bad at as an elementary schooler, before graduating to Civilization, Battle for Middle Earth, and Age of Empires as I aged. Nowadays, two decades and change later, I rarely touch the stuff. I play some Age of Empires multiplayer from time to time with old friends and spend a few weekends obsessed with Civilization every two years or so, but that old pull just isn't there. I blame Crusader Kings 2. After tasting the drug of Paradox grand strategy games in early college and beholding the batshit insane majesty of their capacity as emergent alt-history storytelling engines, the itty-bitty skirmishes and proc-gen nation building of RTSs and Civ-likes feel hollow and clinical in comparison. They just don't hit like they used to.

What are some genres y'all used to love but just don't click with anymore, and what drove you away?

I think I've always been a bit of a trendchaser. I loved side scrolling platformers and action games as a kid but they just seem old and played out to me now...because, in my 30s, they are kinda old and played out. I'm sure there have been many, many great games but I look at something like Rayman Legends and can't help but think, yup, that's that.

Then I loved first person shooters in the late 90s and early 2000s because they were new to consoles at the time - I even convinced the family to switch from Apple to Gateway for one ill-fated five year stretch in the early 2000s so I could conveniently also play Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty - but I felt like I'd seen the climax of the form with the original Modern Warfare and really didn't touch another one until DOOM 2016/the Wolfenstein reboot and then for a hot summer some Apex Legends.

Alongside both of those things were JRPGs, like most children of the 90s with an SNES/PSX in their home, and I can definitely say that Final Fantasy XII was the last what I'd call traditional JRPG I played. I don't consider FFVII Remake, or NieR, or Yakuza, or Scarlet Nexus to fall under that genre, though, more like third person open world games with heavy RPG elements told in a Japanese style. I tried to get into Final Fantasy XV thanks to it being free for PS5 owners, as well as Dragon Quest XI because it had a 10 hour (!!) demo available, and neither hooked me for more than an hour or two. They felt old.

(I've said certain types of games feel "old" twice now which isn't to say I don't enjoy playing old games - I'm constantly hovering over the Final Fantasies I used to love when they're on sale and constantly have to remind myself those who've played Chrono Cross Radical Dreamers have a lot of issues with its look and performance, and I could fire up Chrono Trigger today and have a great time. Just something about games that look brand new but adhere or heavily nod toward older structures, I suppose.)

Sports games have really only been the one constant in my life because the sport is the sport and if you enjoy playing it with the players who play it...that's really all you need, right? I get why some gamers prefer the more...game like interpretations of the sports and lament their absence in modern gaming, but it turns out that's also a lot harder to get right. If it weren't, those NBA Jam and NFL Blitz reboots would've saved the world, y'know?

Right now, I can trust that I'll be at least casually invested in just about any third person open world game since GTA III so it's been a pretty long, faithful relationship with no real end in sight...but I'd never say never!

Something on what I can think of:

• Super Smash Bros type fighting games including PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, because I don't really like its gameplay style these days, plus their fanbase is extremely toxic.
• Mario Kart type racing games including Modnation Racers, because I'm not a fan of vehicular combat games but I still love Bizarre Creations' Blur and Psygnosis' WipEout as long they don't feature go-karts.
• First & Third Person Shooter games, because of too much toxicity.

For the Mario Kart type games, I'm not saying that is a bad sub-genre of racing games.

I started writing this when your post was 13 minutes old. I spent so much time on this that I had to reload the page in order to post this.

I am right there with you when it comes to RTS games. For me, it started with StarCraft in 1998, moved on to Red Alert 2 in 2000, and ended with Sins of a Solar Empire in 2009. In the decade between SC and SoaSE, there was some Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Star Wars Battlegrounds, Star Trek: Armada, Supreme Commander, and even Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. My love of building units and sending them to war extended to the tabletop, where my brother and I played Warhammer 40,000.

Eventually, I got to the point where starting a new base in every distinct level just wasn't what I wanted from games anymore.

I took a trip down memory lane and looked at the Wikipedia entry for a list.

Other games I enjoyed in the genre, with brief descriptions because these may suffer from obscurity:

Real War (2001): a game that used the voice of R. Lee Ermey to tell the player about tactics. This game was fucking wild because it was based on a real training game used by the military.

The Outforce (2000): a space-based RTS that was low budget, but pretty fun.

World in Conflict (2007): I have the collector's edition box on my bookshelf. This game is personally notable to me as the last game I played based on "realistic" modern war and tactics. With gorgeous graphics (I remember the smoke effects in particular), an alternate history story about the Soviet Union invading the Western US in 1988, and an emphasis on realistic units, this one was interesting. The collector's edition came with a fragment of the fucking Berlin Wall.

Games in the genre I never got into (for reasons like my computer couldn't handle it, or time, or money), but would probably love: Star Wars: Empire at War, Total War series, Demigod, Homeworld.

- I fell out of multiplayer FPS's circa early 2000s when voice chat became standard. I loved games like Unreal Tournament and Team Fortress Classic in the 90s on dial-up. But I just want to run around and kill some things, I don't need social anxiety triggered by 12-year-olds telling me I'm doing it wrong.

- For that matter I fell out of single-player FPS's too for the most part, but mainly because I found they were making me dizzy. Not sure what changed.

- JRPGs need to do something REAL special with their plot and characters (Persona 5) or otherwise be VERY competent with gameplay and respecting the players' time (Ys IX; Triangle Strategy; Persona 5) to get me to plunk down my time and money these days.

-I went through a GOOD two years where I migrated fighting games, and then suddenly this year: I bought and downloaded the new KOF and just...UTTERLY bounced off of it. The game didn't do anything WRONG (lackluster tutorial/onboarding aside), I just suddenly REALLY didn't want to start learning new moves for 3 entire fighters. Might be because I downloaded Soul Calibur VI when it was free, started to get genuinely into it and decent at it, then took it online and realized: the community has all but dried up. Fighting games are stickier these days, and pulling people off of one to latch onto another seems like it's getting harder and harder.

-Elden Ring might be it for me for FromSoft/Soulslike-style games too, I'm starting to see the strings and the seams more and more and it's turned fun into frustrating in the endgame two times in a row.

@nodima: You sound less like you're chasing trends and more like you enjoy sharing your hobby with others. The two often get conflated as trends move on, but so do large numbers of people engaging with them.

Multiplayer in general, really. Although its less of an instance of me falling out of love with the genre and more to do with one day my brain just sort of decided that from now on we're going to be very anxious about playing games online and that the experience would suddenly be really uncomfortable.

So now I have to push through a lot of bullshit to actually enjoy a multiplayer game and most of them aren't worth beginning the process.

Back during my early teens competitive shooters was all the rage. We played Quake tournaments on local LANs, moved on to Quake 2 mods once that arrived and graduated to online Counterstrike tournaments. At some point I got really into RTSs and put a ton of time into Starcraft and Warcraft 3. I remember very clearly going back to Counterstrike after a while and having a mind-opening moment of "oh, I can't play these games anymore". I've had a few flings with competitive shooters since then, but I can only enjoy them in casual public lobbies.

Outside of that, I just can't stand anything indie pixel/block-art anymore. I don't care how good the game is supposed to be, the older I've gotten the more I've realized that enjoyable animations and sound design is really fundamental to making a game engaging.

Open World games used to blow my mind, the freedom and potential was so exciting to me. But the Ubisoft formula that most games eventually fell into quickly became tedious, and I found that "Open world" often meant the games weren't as tight, both technically and narratively, as their linear counterparts. Open World fatigue is real and I have it.

I can relate to this, actually. I think about 10 years ago there was a huge boom of indie games and game jams where people were pumping out platformers and adventure games without ever having any real art direction in mind, and the default was often pixel-art. I got bored of it very quickly.

I used to play a lot of turn based JRPGs from FFIV to Persona series but lately that kind of game doesn't really work for me. To me the most fulfilling part of those games was becoming overpowered and stomping mobs after many hours of struggling with them, and I appreciate games like Persona and Yakuza 7 for connecting story character growth with combat stat growth. The problem is that those games need to be challenging in spite of that, so boss fights by necessity have to be half hour long damage sponges that you have to whittle down while occasionally pausing to block and heal. I'm not sure what a satisfying end boss would look like in that case, which is why i think this category probably fits.

When console FPS' really took off with Halo and MW I was all the way invested, these days I don't even consider buying/playing them. I'm also in the boat of not wanting to voice chat with strangers (mostly don't want to voice chat with some loud mouth idiot kids tbh) so I don't play any competitive games online generally. I'll voice chat on Monster Hunter or FFXIV with pre-arranged friends but that's about it.

Like many I'm tiring of the formulaic open world but I still loved Ghost of Tsushima so I haven't quite given up on them yet, guess if they've got a hook I can overlook some basic design choices.

I'm still into every genre, there isn't really anything i won't touch besides games like Total War because i fall asleep.

I think maybe i could say 2D fighting games, i love Tekken and i always assumed i loved 2D fighters as well, they're in the same genre after all, but i've never found one that i really gelled with. I had lots of friends who played Street Fighter 4 and i played a decent amount of 3rd Strike when the Online Edition came out, so since then i've tried pretty much every 2D fighter that comes out but i always drop it after a couple hours.

I used to play a lot of fighter from Japan, but I just don't like it anymore. Games with more narrative are more interesting, I think teh quick done arcade gameplay of fighter just doesn't draw me as much. I lived Gran Turismo 1, 2, and 3. But the past few games have been too involved, too many races, too many tough licenses to get to open the games up. But, again now narrative heavy games are just far more interesting.

I still respect those games, but they don't thrill me.

I don't know that I've fallen out of love with entire genres, but I do think I've fallen out of love with specific parts of specific genres:

1. Open Worlds - Icon Vomit Subtype - I used to absolutely be a sucker for open world games. I loved the sense of exploration and freedom and poking around in every nook and cranny. Then UbiSoft took the idea and spun it into near exhaustion with a cookie-cutter approach paired with boring underlying gameplay. Now when I look at a map with a bunch of icons on it, I no longer get excited, I just immediately feel tired.

This is particularly true having played Elden Ring. That was a game that was confident enough in it's world design and it's player's intelligence that it doesn't need its map to have a bajillionty icons on it telling you where to go. The world is the star, not the content in it.

By comparison, I then moved to Horizon: Forbidden West and ended up bouncing off pretty hard. It's a really excellent game in a lot of respects, but I can no longer deal with that kind of open-world design. And it isn't necessarily in a "it's two different ways of doing things and I prefer this other way," but much more of a "there is a better way of doing this and we shouldn't make open-worlds like this anymore" kind of way.

2. JRPGs - Final Fantasy Subtype - I like turn-based RPGs like Dragon Quest. I like more action oriented RPGs like the Tales games. I used to like Final Fantasy. It was fair to describe it as my first gaming love. I have very distinct memories of biking over to the Eden Prairie Funcoland to try and get a copy of Final Fantasy VI because I saw it in Nintendo Power, being told they didn't have a copy, settling for FFII instead, and then falling in love anyway.

However, after FFXIII, the devs got it in their head that turn-based systems are automatically bad and people won't play them, which completely ignores the success and awesomeness of games like Dragon Quest, not to mention the past history of their own series. That was dumb. Then they decided to make an action-y style combat system instead, but ignored all the lessons of the Tales series and made a bad one in XV. That was also dumb.

Plus, the series feels so creatively inbred at this point that it's the video-game equivalent of the Hapsburgs. Every single game in the series now has the same boring hi-fi but anime aesthetic. The party will always consist of (1) A moody hero with spiky hair who uses a sword (2) a hulking companion character with spiky hair who uses an even bigger sword (3) a delicate intelligent character with spiky hair and glasses who probably does all the cooking and (4) a loud-mouth comic relief character who is probably blonde (and has spiky hair). They will all wear too many belts and dress in some shade of black.

Seriously, if Final Fantasy games were a person, it would totally be Charles II, stumbling about with a receding jaw and drooling over itself while the rest of the world waits for it to die.

Whatever you want to call the genre isometric real-time squad tactics games live in. Growing up i was obsessed with Commandos and Commandos 2. But im not a PC gamer anymore, and i just cant handle the newer games like Desperados with console controllers anymore. Closest i can come is X-COM, which i adore, but the turn based part of those is exactly what saves me

I spent a lot of time playing games like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Tropico when I was younger. I have a theme park builder game in my Steam wishlist that I've never purchased and new Tropico games have come out, but I've only ever played one more of them past 1.

i used to love open world action adventure games , but these days they're full of bloat and always feel pretty samey so its hard to get excited for them. i still play certain ones but at this point it takes something special to really make me love it vs tolerate it.

i also used to love 'long' Jrpgs but in recent yrs alot of what i would and should have liked to my tastes i keep falling off of . i only got half into persona 5 before dropping it , and a few towns into dq11.

strategy games games of the AoE and total war variety i used to love back when i was in my teens ( i'll be 32 in aug) these days i'll buy ones that interest me try it for a few if at all and never play it again while kicking myself for it.

this is how i feel about MMOs , i liked FF11 and aion but later in ff i started running into a bunch of yahoos and had trouble finding parties cause they wanted to force war/nin instead of the war/mnk i'd been enjoying in early game , i didn't like ninja class at all and when i gave in n would play it ppl would bitch that i'd pull too much agrro. others forcing whatever is the current meta in games like that really sucks the life from ppl who just want to enjoy classes they enjoy . these days theres better quality free stuff than back when i played them but cause of that type of thing i don't even want to bother ... that n them being time sinks aside ( i used to feel guilty playing anything Else when i paid for a sub)

Been a long time since I really got into an RTS game

This might be the same for me. I beat Elden Ring, it took me 94 hours, I think the game is an achievement in a lot of ways and does some awesome things... but if their next game is going to be Elden Ring 2 or something along the same "massive open world" lines, I'll have to pass. This doesn't mean I'll never replay Dark Souls 1, 2, or 3, and it's possible I'll play Demon's Souls or Bloodborne if they ever get ported to PC, but Elden Ring killed a lot of the enthusiasm I had for From Software's particular thing. On that same note, I don't think I really need to see bonfires or corpse runs anymore. Just let me die and respawn at a checkpoint or reload a save again, please, thank you.

JRPGs. Used to be my absolute favorite, but I even started questioning my love of them when I hated (sorry!) Final Fantasy VII. After that it was diminishing returns, and I have never finished one of those games since...9? And then I thought, well maybe if it's an old school turn-based one then I'd like it. NOPE. Every retro-inspired one or new Dragon Quest or what have you annoys me less than an hour in. The only thing I can play that's similar is a Fire Emblem game.

Whatever genre pokemon is.

@justin258:The thing is: none of that stuff bothers me, it's all the "gotcha" stuff that really gets under my skin. It's the wind-ups that intentionally delay (sometimes), it's the combos that can end after 2 or 3 or 4 hits with no visual indicator, it's EVERYTHING about Malenia (though she makes more sense with the context of the final boss) and having a boss that requires pinpoint precision not because she's necessarily well programmed and balanced, but because they just loaded her up with STUFF.

All that said: if they announced Bloodborne 2 tomorrow, I'd absolutely come running back. But that's because Bloodborne feels truly novel, it's ONE play mode (agile/aggressive) and they design every weapon around it. Plus subtly-executed cosmic horror is my jam.

@beggary:Don't apologize for disliking 1/3 of a game shoved out by a company increasingly losing touch with its audience. I've lived through "LOST" and "Game of Thrones," I no longer take it on faith that "we'll definitely nail the ending," and with Square following it up with Babylon's Fall, and then immediately promising ANOTHER Kingdom Hearts, I kinda refuse to get invested in Final Fantasy VII until they declare an ending.

Games that aren't RPG's that have RPG elements. Like skill tree's or extremely basic dialog choices.

Example: Horizon 1 and 2. Id rather play with that stick and hoop thing that kids liked in the 1910's then ever have to play a Horizon game.

That and 99.9% of open worlds. Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring are the only good open worlds in like a decade. Red Dead 2's is decent, but it was almost more of a nuisance as I was trying to traverse three states on a HORSE to do a mission.

Probably any form of online PvP. I'm always going to be in my head about a meta playing against me in the background. "Then just play the meta". The fun for me in Titanfall 2 is not because I went 37 to 1 sporting the CAR/Alternator in a lobby full of new players coming in from a Steam sale, you know? It's chatting with those newcomers in Frontier Defense and helping them get up to speed after mowing down 30 nuke Titans while everyone has a smorgasbord of a build.

A group of buddies chatting with each other is always going to stomp a crew of randoms as well. Is there even a "Lone Wolf" lobby in any game? TDM, but no parties allowed. They had that for one of the Modern Warfare games back in the PS3/360 era. It was the most even keeled I ever felt about wins/losses during a session. It was less about going to sleep after a win, and more of me shaking my head with a smile because I cost the team a win because the person on the other side used some weird build.

Shooters. Specifically CoD and Destiny. There are a lot of reasons to have fallen off CoD, not the least of which is the online community and the ick rah-rah jingoistic shit. But also, the gameplay loop of it have grown so stale for me. But that was years ago, I went over to Destiny 2 for a few years but after Forsaken I fell out of that too. And after Doom Eternal didn’t measure up to the Boomer Shooter I wanted it to be (other than the challenge levels, those were alright), I’ve found myself mostly done with shooters other than immersive sims and even those are usually my RPG-like, such as Deus Ex, Prey and Cyberpunk (and cyberpunks shooting sucked, even fixed, BUT it is a good game narratively.)

I’m also gonna say that all the shootings in this country have also turned me off from shooters. Not in a hard line way, I’ll still play the next Wolfenstein, but it’s not a genre I really clamor to anymore.

All of this stuff bugged me as well. I honestly was pretty tired when I made that original post so I didn't expand all that much, but since you mentioned Malenia... let me expand on her a bit and better state what I mean.

Funny thing about Malenia, she is a brilliantly designed boss fight for a specific playstyle. She's fast, precise, powerful, has that health stealing mechanic, requires near perfect execution, and if you can pull it off the whole fight looks beautiful. For an example of what I'm talking about it, go look up the video of a player named Let Me Solo Her doing it. It's awesome to look at.

But if you didn't happen to build that character - meaning, a dexterity-focused speedy slasher type, probably with katanas - the fight is either going to be clunky, frustrating, or cheesy. I've told this story on these forums before, but here it is again - I built up a strength-only character who was swinging around the Starscourge Greatswords and when it worked, it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, Elden Ring is not balanced for this playstyle. I know some people did it and think it's great, but jump attacking everything fucking sucks and not doing that makes a lot of fights way harder. And even with jump attacking, Malenia's just too damn fast for that playstyle to be reasonable. So I respecced into a Dex-focused build, equipped Rivers of Blood and got it to +9, made a Chilled Katana and got it to +25, improved Mimic Tear to +25, and then slashed her to ribbons without even really trying. Seriously, I recorded the fight where I killed her and the actual fight is like a minute and change long, she's stun locked for almost the entire thing.

This sucks, frankly. I think it's fun to figure out how to break a game's balance, but when a boss fight requires either absolute perfection, the correct build that the devs had in mind, or just cheesing the fuck out of it, I get little satisfaction from the fight. Just relief that it's over. And this complaint stretches to so much of the game. I get the sense that From Software were so concerned with making the biggest game they could that they forgot entirely about balancing their game such that any reasonable character build can make it through the game without demanding perfection. DS 1, 2, and 3 were difficult games, sure, but I never felt like I had to be a top-tier player to make it through. I just had to learn the game well enough to win. Elden Ring feels like there was so much game they didn't have time to go back and make everything good. It feels like a rough draft of like four Dark Souls games smashed into one.

@justin258: And here's why I loved Bloodborne so much: it told you upfront that it would be focused on agility and aggression, there isn't even a block button and you get health back by hitting someone after they hit you. So every weapon and every encounter is limited by: this boss must be beatable by dodging and hacking slowly at them. And I can't help but compare Malenia to Maria, and find that Maria is a masterpiece of a boss fight, and my absolute favorite FromSoft encounter, VS Malenia who I almost fully gave up on.

I got a very similar frustration from Dark Souls 3, actually, because I did a STR/END build, essentially, and I had a lot of trouble with some bosses, and unfortunately I ran into a lot of walkthroughs or forums that started with "have an agility or a ranged build."

I'm familiar with your points of reference, and I did the same thing. While I'm thrilled that they actually let you respec (LONG overdue for a series that encourages a range of plays and experimentation), someone made the salient point: changing your entire build for a single boss doesn't exactly scream "great design!"

However, as I said above, some of those points fall away with the (SPOILER for the final boss) Elden Beast, and how it actually IS geared for a pure str/phy build. I beat the Elden Beast handily with the Grafted Greatsword, the weapon I used for 85% of the game, but I had to respec to use the Rain of Blood and finally take her down after 30+ tries not even getting her halfway down in her 2nd form.

The thing that bugs me is the lifesteal, it felt like she was done and then they either added that, or had it still work through blocking. It felt like ONE thing too many to juggle in that fight, but on the other hand: I have to give them a certain amount of credit since she's entirely optional, and only gives equipment that's good/usable to a Dex-build. And I know, the response to that can easily be "but a lot of players will want to beat all the bosses," but at a certain point, that's on the player and the easy respec is there for THAT reason.

The frustration comes from the fact that if you haven't been playing DEX, you have no idea if changing your entire play-style will actually work.

Elden Ring suffers from being "too much birthday cake," there's so much stuff and it's all incredible, but eventually it's just too much for a single, story-driven game.

Learning to deal with a boss on loan from Sekiro with a Greatsword was still a great time I think.

I don't think there's a fight in that game that necessitates a respec so I dunno if it speaks bad about boss design there. I do think it speaks a little bad about weapon design when the Dex/Arcane builds can be so busted if you build them a specific way though.

Elden Ring made me realise I no longer care about beating bosses solo. There comes a point where the health pool's just too large for me to grind against. The win's treated the same and I might as well keep moving. To the game's credit, you have the option to do that with ashes. Or even just coming back at a later stage of your character's development.

It's going for the same end goal as Bloodborne, to me. Bloodborne does it by simplifying the decisions you'd normally make. The stats screen is smaller, there's no encumbrance do you can wear what gear you have and pick any available weapons. Theoretically, you're geared and ready for the rest of the game by the end of Central Yharnum. There's a lot of room for error and the combat rewards you for keeping the pressure on.

It's still bizarre, though. I see Elden Ring as a lesser game but I've played it for over 170 hours and I'm still coming back. I do feel From have went down the wrong street on bosses, though. They're trying to impregnate (sure, I'll use that) them with a degree of surprise. You can't be 100% sure a combo's going to end or what they'll follow it up with. It used to be simpler but players are never static.