I recently dusted off my old Guild Wars 2 account after YouTube recommend some videos of it.
I was a huge fan of Guild Wars 1, I especially loved its skill system. You had hundreds of skills available but you could only equip 8 at a time. This forced you to think carefully and craft builds, which was half the fun. There were some skills that were only available once you defeated some hard elite enemies, which was also a fun challenge.
When GW2 released I bought the game on the first week, but the skill system was very underwhelming for me. A huge part of why I loved GW1 was not there in the sequel, so I quickly stopped playing.
Around 10 years later I logged in again and created a new character. I’m aware that there were tons of changes made to the game but the very early game stayed pretty much the same (as far as I remember). However, the way I experienced it was very different.
It no longer bothered me that you only have a fraction of the skills available. I’m 10 years older than I was when I first played it and I have much less time. This means that I appreciate not having to spend days to craft a character, I can just go out and enjoy the game.
The story is also pretty good, I’ve heard that GW2 is one of the few MMOs where the early game is also as much fun as the late game, and it seems to be true. I don’t feel like I have to rush to max level to have fun.
Have you ever had a similar experience?
I think many of the games that I played as a kid. I have no idea how I actually completed games as a kid, because I find stuff in the game that I had no idea about. The games feel much easier when I use the knowledge provided in the game as well as my experience from playing so many different games over the years. KOTOR 1 & 2 are good examples. I just put points into stuff that doesn’t matter, but now I am able to create characters that are effective and potent.
For me, it was the very first Assassin’s Creed. It was the first game I ever played, when I still had a crap pc with an AMD Radeon HD 5550, bless it’s soul. I remember playing that game for hours, and then replaying it over and over.
Lately, I tried to pick it up again, and was hugely disappointed. The game didn’t change, I did. My standards have gone up, I got used to other games with better gameplay and replay value or something. It just wasn’t as fun as before, and I put it down without finishing it. A shame, though memories are forever.
I immediately exited Divinity: Original Sin 2 when I realised the combat was turn-based (I expected an ARPG like Diablo). Years later I gave it another go, and oh my, what a fantastic game that is!
The thing about GW2 is that it’s a good game in its own right, but you really need to not think of it as a GW1 sequel in its game mechanics.
Also, I actually got put off by the story in GW2, it was so very child of destiny, chosen one style. The writing for the side quests is so much better and way more interesting.
Yeah it gets much better after the personal story leveling stuff. It’s an eleven year old game, and unfortunately the content that new players see first is the most dated. They originally leaned more into a more generic RPG story that just happens to be set in an mmo. Heart of Thorns is markedly better, and it just improves from there. By the time of Path of Fire, the story, characters, maps, and mechanics all feel interesting and meaningful imo.
For me it was probably CSGO. I started playing at like 15-16 and while I really enjoyed it, I also found it really frustrating. Some of my highest highs and lowest lows were in the game lol. I would get really mad at the game and my teammates.
I stopped playing around 2018 and picked it back up a couple weeks ago with all the CS2 news going around and now I don’t really rage or anything. It’s just fun and when I lose I don’t really care. I think I just matured and playing it casually without caring about my rank has definitely helped.
Big Souls series fan here. I started on the first back when barely anyone was still playing and skipped to 3 right after around the time it released.
I wanted to go back and finish DS2 to finish the series and absolutely hated every thing about the way it played.
Me and a buddy just finished Scholar of the First Sin about a week ago and I promised I’d just brute force it even if I didn’t like it, but its grown on me and I now consider it to have the best DLC of the series
I’ve dusted off a number of online games, replayed them, and actually liked them more than when I was younger. One thing I really miss is server browsers, because that’s how I spent the majority of gaming when I was a kid. It’s nice when there’s a community in online gaming. Examples that come to mind are battlefield 4 and halo 3/reach.
For me, Halo 1 and 2 came to mind when I read your question. I was a happy kid getting my Xbox with Halo included, played it quite a lot, and same for Halo 2. Loved those games!
When I grew older, I switched to PC gaming, and when the Halo collection released on PC, I was so ready to dive in to my favorite childhood games again! But the aiming on both games felt so weird and simple, which is probably (I think) because they were designed for controllers, not keyboard and mouse. The crosshair is so big and clunky, it felt very off to me. I didn’t progress very far and gave up on the PC releases, so it doesn’t stain the beautiful memories I have of Halo 1 and 2 :)
Fallout 1: I’m not good with isometric RPGs, the top-down view makes me feel less immersed in the game. Because of that, I didn’t feel engaged by Fallout 1 the first time I tried. I was able to enjoy it when I revisited it years later.
Armored Core 1: I loved this game when I was a child but trying to play nowadays the lack of analog stick support makes the control really suck and I stopped playing before even finishing the first level.
There’s probably more but I can’t remember right now.
I put down Fallout 4 after doing the main quest line. I think I started to get bored and another game caught me at the time. I decided to come back to the game after seeing the Starfield stuff and it has me hooked. I’ve probably put 50 hours into it in the past two weeks. The progression is just so satisfying and there are so many interesting quests that have cool lore and jokes. I don’t think I’ve even done any DLC story segments so far except the very beginning of Far Harbor.
FFXVI just released so… I might have to put it back down for awhile xD
For me it was RESIDENT EVIL: Code Veronica.
My dad bought a Dreamcast in early 2001. I was 7 years old and long story short, he also bought Code Veronica and Maken X which both were the fuel of my nightmares back then. My English proficiency was barely enough to understand the menus and such, but I couldn’t follow the story. I could never get past the first cabin and all I remembered were the burning, pale zombies, twitching on the ground.
Years later in my teens, I bought it when it was released for PS3 and I couldn’t get past the first half hour of gameplay due to extreme boredom. I thought it took itself too seriously and was super mediocre.
Now, at almost 30, I downloaded it for my iPad and I’m having a blast. It’s not serious or boring AT ALL… all the contrary; it’s the goofiest, corniest RE game I’ve ever played and that’s saying a lot considering "Master of Unlocking”, “Jill Sandwich” and “boulder punching Chris” are a thing. Granted, it has a ton of annoying backtracking, but once you get to the dialogue bits, the cringyness makes all the backtracking worth it.
Me with Morrowind. I first played it back when Oblivion launched, but the general clunkiness and jank were very hard to swallow. I did spend some time around it, and learned about mods thanks to it, too!, but never got too far in any questline.
Skip to a few years later (2014 or so) and I gave the game another go. The more mature me actually paid attention to stuff on screen, realized how the main story was all about this prophecy being fulfilled through several coincidences, understood the rivalry between the noble houses. Exploration was much more “magical” to me, there were so many things around and the game didn’t “beg” for you to find it (no map markers ), but it was easy to feel pulled towards “something over there”. Getting kinda lost, being where you weren’t supposed to be yet.
That second experience made me realize why so many people still despise the direction Bethesda took with the series. I don’t blame Todd, he went for the safe route, and Oblivion and Skyrim both took right steps in making the experience fun, but Morrowind truly is something that teenage me wasn’t “ready” to fully understand.
I had a similar experience with GW1, go figure.
Surprisingly, GW1 is still relatively popular. There are still massive events held by Guilds, there are server events held by ArenaNet, and the fact that most people who play end up getting sucked into a MegaGuild by proxy (that’s just where everyone plays…) it left me with sort of a worse experience overall in some form. Don’t get me wrong, the game is great, and the community is too but playing during the golden years versus playing now, there is a clear discrepancy between what was fresh and new at the time and what is overplayed. There are tons of bots. The large Guild communities focus on end game min-max, and you can’t really do that without the pcons (consumables) that are extremely expensive. The largest Guild there and it’s leader participate in mass-botting (even though they deny it, I know they do because I became an Officer for a bit when I played and met the real faces behind the wealth of players in game and they all bot) and there is incentive to mass recruit new players so the cycle can continue.
Other than that, Maple Story has been giving me a crazy nostalgia trip as of this last week and I don’t think I will be stopping playing that anytime soon. I put WoW on the backburner for now as I grind out on MS.
