The irony is the weapon rebalance was really good.
I didn’t play too much after the safes update so I don’t really have much of an opinion on it, though I hear that the meta actually diversified a lot after the weapon rebalance.
A similar thing happened to me when they did that in 2011 or 2012. I was still checking in on Runescape maybe once a year and one day they had re-done the graphics, added cutscenes with voice acting and overhauled the combat so that it was like WoW with abilities and cooldowns. It had me go through the tutorial again and the voice acting was busted on the cutscenes, playing twice per scene and it was such a drag I never logged in again.
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Psssst… as said earlier, you can revert the game to an earlier built with a code if you own it on Steam!
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I think there’s actually a lot of solutions to this. George Weidman (aka Super Bunnyhop) has been a pretty big advocate for bot matches (see video), especially in the context of online games. I think this could provide an emulation of an experience. Alternatively, you could always set up LAN parties, but that does require a volume of players.
But like… the goal of archival is not to preserve the experience a piece of media created at the time. The goal of archival is to preserve the cultural artifact itself. On some level, it’s not important whether or not we can recreate the “feeling” of playing Fortnite at its height. Bot matches and LAN parties help, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t feel these are prerequisites to archival. The reason we need to preserve these games is because they are massive parts of our culture. And preserving their individual builds is to keep track of the history of a game’s design and structure, which I think is culturally important.
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My guess would be that 9 times out of 10, these were less Updates that Killed the Game and more Updates that Failed to Stop the Game’s Rapidly Approaching Demise.
Sure, there may have been a dedicated group of fans, but somewhere in the corporate chain came the mandate to get the numbers up or shut it down, and these were last-ditch attempts at the former. As hard as it can be to accept, a small group of dedicated players is probably not enough to keep the lights on at most studios, and can sometimes discourage a wider audience from picking the game up, whether through self-enforced insularity or just insurmountable skill differences.
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Playing WoW has been harder for me in recent years, but its less one update and more lots of updates over time.
Without even getting into the broader systems: I started in Wrath of the Lich King. My main was a Warlock. I loved my Warlock. Every single RPG I’ve played sense I try to figure out if there’s a playstyle somewhat similar to WoW’s Warlock as it was from Vanilla to WOTLK. I can not play a Warlock in modern day WoW. I hate it, its actively painful. They trimmed away entire spell subsystems for lots of classes, and in the Warlock’s case that was Curses, a type of debuff unique to them. There could only be one Curse on a target per warlock, and you had a lot of them. It was class-defining in PVP and choosing the right one at the right time was a huge part of it’s gameplay. But because WoW is laser-focused on raiding, and these kinds of utility abilities are a headache to design around and usually not useful there or satisfying for people who want to top the damage meters, they were cut.
Likewise I can’t really play any class at all that I leveled past like 30 in WOTLK. In Cataclysm they scrapped the old talent trees and introduced a system where you pick a Specialization at level 10, one of three, and get abilities related to it.
For players who had been around before this point, what this meant was that you lost over half of your abilities because now they’re locked behind particular specs. On top of that the new talent system, where you choose single ones out of 3 options at given intervals, rather than putting points in a tree, often contains abilities that you just used to get. Playing a class you knew before all this happened feels like one of your arms has been cut off. It’s awful. Again this is not as bad for PVE but it makes PVP feel terrible to me.
Cataclysm also ruined what little was interesting about the setting by choosing to go the most boring possible direction with the Forsaken and making them lulz mad scientist evil zombies Scourge 2.0. Their towns have also looked like shit since then, Tim Burton-ass fuckin tesla-coils-for-no-reason garbage. Spit. The talent system and removal of abilities felt bad there too but it got worse as the years went on.
EDIT: Should also note when I say “not as bad for PVE,” I mean “not as bad for raiding.” Because you totally got to use all your utility stuff and stray from your standard damage rotation more in dungeons. Raiding OTOH has always been awful because stretching roles across 40-25 means a ton of you cool abilities become totally pointless and all that matters is Max Deeps for anyone but the healers. IDK why they looked at the game mode that in Vanilla consisted of, for most people, pressing 1 button, and then sometimes not pressing that button, and then pressing a less powerful version of that button, ad nauseum, for hours, was what should be the focus of their game. No turning back now though.
This is less of a games-as-a-service update, but Hyper Light Drifter had an update (the Invincibility Update) which allowed you to refill on health kits when you used warp pads, at the cost of enemies respawning when you warped. You know, like Dark Souls.
I bought the game before that update came out and was having difficulty getting anywhere since it didn’t really give you a skill level you should be at before trying an area or boss; it worked off the idea that you could do any area first technically, as long as you had the skill–imo, that’s the worst way to organize your game, but whatever. I played a lot when they put out the Invincibility Update, and then people complained that it made the game “too easy” and the developers took out the ability to refill health at warp pads. The switch to and from is what killed that game for me, and until something changes or someone mods that back in, I don’t see myself picking it up again any time soon.
The thing that really gets me about it is that recharging health kits at warp pads never made the game “easier”, because you could just go to one of the low level intro areas to grind out health packs. All it did was make the game less tedious, so you could spend time actually playing it and progressing instead of having to leave the area and grind out resources again.
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That’s a good point.
The basic procedure, I believe, applies to all of Paradox’s games. It used to be simpler, but the laws changed and so now you have to go through more of an opt-in rigamarole.
Similar-ish issue for me with Path of Exile. The way that each new league (season) bolts on a new set of mechanics to interact with. I started playing properly during quite a fun league so it is super disheartening to run into the mechanic very infrequently, but generally the issue is there is just so much cruft now.
When I was playing, you had your map of waypoints for each zone/act, and then at a certain point you would unlock a hideout which would always be available on the LHS of that screen which provided an easy location to collect all the different vendors that you might want in one place. The only other thing that would be added there was a specific randomised dungeon that you would only interact with at specific times, but was rewarding enough to feel worthwhile.
Now there are four new options on that sidebar, and all these new things that pop up in the game themselves, none of which are particularly interesting or compelling. I would love an option to play either straight vanilla, or with a subset of league options enabled.
On a GaaS note, I really dislike the new battle pass mechanic that Warframe has started up. I really liked the fact that whilst things would disappear in game, you could always trade for them, which meant you could be quite picky about what you wanted to chase. Now the pass means that you have to do a minimum amount of content each week and I can feel myself burning out on it, because I’m sort-of-worried that once the rewards are gone they’ll be gone for good.
I’m not sure that the new update is even good for new players which was ostensibly who it was aimed at, since it significantly kneecaps a specific endgame resource which was hard to get before, and now is far more easy to get, but in very limited quantities.
I haven’t played Overwatch in several months now, outside of one play session to try out Baptiste. I am not sure what update specifically did it but with changes like the addition of Brigitte and Mercy’s rework the game just doesn’t feel like an FPS anymore. Its just a lot of stalling and healing (with the new hero literally having an ability that drops a 200 hp box that you have to destroy before you are able to kill anyone else). It’s the coldest take in the world at this point and most people have moved on to other games but I still miss the super chaotic and fast-paced matches of earlier Overwatch and I haven’t found a good replacement yet.
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If Overwatch was a better shooter than it is right now, I would probably be playing less Crucible in Destiny 2 than I am.
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I also started playing Destiny 2 because of it! Its fun but unlike Overwatch you have to unlock certain guns and perks so there’s always a bit of FOMO when I die to a gun with a weird ability I didn’t see coming
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Goodness gracious, where to start. Paradox is probably a good point.
Stellaris and Hearts of Iron both hit huge dead periods for me. I want to love Stellaris’ new update more than I do (Victoria 2 rests as a work of that may never be replicated in my heart), but I can’t tell if the poor implementation is turning me off or just the sheer complication built into the system that didn’t exist before.
Hearts of Iron now has the same problem, a friend and I played it daily competing and sharing strategies for getting better, then the frontline rework came in and it died. God I miss that period.
No Quitters mod for Civ 5. Feels weird to complain about a mod but a bad call in a policy change in an update utterly derailed my monthly organised scrim and we never really came back.
And I guess currently Destiny 2. It’s less a decision and more just burnout. The move in vanilla to make playing everything a requirement to level finally destroyed my desire to level last season and now this season. I just want to play Crucible, I want to get better at competitive, I want to put the work into Mountaintop, and Destiny 2 just feels like it hates that I only want to do one thing.
Dailies, weeklies etc. are genuinely the bane of anything that looks remotely like an MMO for me, especially if they have unique rewards. Logging in should not give me a list of chores to do, that feels like work, I should be able to set my own goals, and when I was a teenager it created genuinely addictive behavior in me that kept me playing games (WoW in particular,) while hating every minute of it.
I refuse to play Magic Arena because of its quest system, and I love Magic. Fuck that noise, seriously.
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I feel like Destiny would be so much more enjoyable if you just had “x” powerful gear bounties, that would progress from whatever you played. Strikes? They might take you a while, but throw in some NFs and you’ll get them done. Your squad only wants to raid? Sure, go wild. You only like Crucible? Grind away for the Mountaintop and get some powerful gear at the same time.
I also really dislike the way they paced out the content for Black Armoury. I’m honestly not sure it was significantly better than CoO, other than existing in a time of random rolls - the prophecy weapons with random rolls would have been pretty brilliant IMO. The pacing, and the catch up bounties have made me skip this season entirely, and I’ll come back for the last two weeks and tick off what I can
To be fair, this is literally an update in which the game died, as opposed to personal gripes with an update
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And it RUINED EVERYTHING T^T
But my lack of a real answer here is basically because I never really see a single point as when a “living game” will be completely ruined forever, just points where you don’t like the game and then, separately, points where you no longer care about returning to the game.
For example, World of Warcraft lost its iron grip on me post-Burning Crusade, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t still pop in for a few months here and there time to time or pay attention to how the game was evolving. It really wasn’t until the current expansion and some extremely questionable story beats that I stopped following it. Doesn’t mean the game is ruined. Doesn’t mean next expansion can’t grab me. I’m just not as open to it as I once was.
Magic: The Gathering is another example. I haven’t enjoyed the game at all this expansion, but I’m still looking at every card reveal this spoiler season and excited to get back into Arena to try it out.
The only real way for a game to be ruined is for it to die, either by being taken down, like Gigantic, or just from lack of interest, like Monday Night Combat. I can’t return to these games, no matter how much I like their current iterations or how much I follow their scene.
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