Anybody have any games they really liked on a first play through and then fell out of love with it later on? I’m going through it right now with the city builder game Workers and Resources. I’ve got 26 hours in it on Steam. Most of those hours came years ago when I first tried the game. I had a good grasp of it then naturally hopped off it when something else caught my eye. Every time I try it now I just can’t get past how janky it is. It truly is Eurojank the city builder game.
My biggest issue is relearning the build order. Set up a village, import some power, setup water, build a bus depot. I think I’ve got all the boxes checked off for what I’m supposed to do but nothing happens. Busses take no workers to the coal plant. Everything is still on warning that I’m missing resources. Then I get into the weeds and can’t find what’s wrong. I give up. This is the last few times I tried the game. I’m prone to jumping off a game if it’s too complex but knowing I used to have this one down and it’s all different now has me really souring on it.
That’s the shame of it. I know I liked the game at one point but there’s been too much time between first seriously getting to know the game and it’s systems and now. It’s the probably the only city builder I’ve ever played that’s not a pick up and play type game. This is my genre of choice going back to SC2000. This one stings.
Anybody else have anything like this happen to them?
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.