Games you love at first, but then come to loathe in the last act

One part of the end sequence in Dying Light sucked so much joy out of the experience for me, I abandoned the game for months. It was just so difficult and frustrating. I eventually figured it out but that sequence was a momentum killer.

I also hated the last fight in **The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine but the rest of the expansion was so great that it didn’t detract too much from the experience.

X-Wing Alliance. On the balance, I still love the game, but the second Death Star run makes Rogue Leader look like a cakewalk. Enjoy flying through samey-looking early-3D-era corridors for ten minutes each way with opposition, no checkpoints and a secondary objective that actually requires you to diverge from the normal path for a non-trivial amount of time at tremendous risk to yourself, all the while listening to a bad Lando impersonator.

A younger me absolutely despised that mission. Sure, you can speedrun it in under six minutes if you know exactly what you’re doing, but the typical time is going to be 15-20, especially if you want to take out the superlaser while you’re in there. Hope you don’t screw up.

I started to look through my Steam library to see if anything like this just jumped out at me, and at first a LOT of them did: games that I dove into with relish but kind of petered out on… but then I realized that I just don’t finish a lot of games and that’s not what the OP is asking about.

However: Shadows of Mordor. A game that I adored when I first got it, really diving into the whole concept and loving the combat and the “Nemesis” system. But it really soured on me fast. It got very grindy and there are only so many orcs you can kill before they all start to blend together. I didn’t peter out on this one, I pretty much quit in disgust.

And again not really in the spirit of the OP, but: Duke Nukem Forever. Somehow I managed to not read any reviews or spoil myself for this game and… yeah.

I agree, but come on, it was like a little fan wankery type mission anyway. The character you had been playing through the whole story, that part was over, and they stuck the second Death Star run in there at the end, kind of like a little bonus. And they made it balls hard. Still, I didn’t mind, because it was after the story was over.

Monopoly

The very first time you play this as a kid, it’s awesome right out of the box. It may be the first “adult” board game you play, so everything is exciting. Look at all the little green houses and red hotels! Oh boy! Someone gets to be the bank and dole out the money! I want to be the race car! Vroom! Buzz around the board! I’m buying St Charles! Now, a railroad! Choo choo! Roll the dice! Vroom! I get money from everyone for winning a beauty contest! I got $200 just for passing GO! Yay!

Two hours later, you hate everyone on Earth and you beg for the sweet release of death.

Hear hear! What a pile bullshit that game is.

GREAT NEWS ACE.

Fuck I hated that game upon release. Didn’t give a whit about the family. I eventually used an editor to skip to the Rebel missions and finish it that way, but fuck that Death Star mission.

I thought I saw you post recently and enthusiastically about playing PoE for the first time, so I’m surprised you burned out on it so soon.

In recent memory, I’d say Darkest Dungeon. I absolutely loved that game when I first started it, almost my dream game. Great art, I enjoyed the party and character building, and turn based combat. Then one of my main characters got one rounded from full health to zero, without anyone in my party even taking a turn. I don’t care what anyone says, that is shit game design and soured me on the game for life. Actually, this happened to me twice before it put me into rage mode.

My three have already been mentioned:

Divinity Original Sin 2 - great game with great combat until we reached that Teutonic “In Soviet Larian, Game Plays YOU!” difficulty roller coaster. Heck, roller coaster, that last Act was a difficulty space elevator.

KOTOR2 (as originally released before mods/patches) - truly great game with great writing that was both unfinished and also had scripting bugs that made it possible to miss huge chunks of context, making the already unfinished ending simply incomprehensible. (It’s become a great game with the right mods.)

Vampire: Bloodlines - Great, story based RPG with great writing and arguably the best voice acting in a game, until the Hollywood Sewers and everything after that. OH MY FREAKING GOD THOSE SEWERS! I still replay this from time just to hear the voice acting in Santa Monica again, but yeah, no more sewers.

The first FarCry.

A brilliant beginning, followed by a linear corridor and goofy ending boss battle.

I’ll give something this year. Prey. First 3/4 was solid fun, but the last part became frustrating and a chore to see the…odd ending.

The game that always sticks with me when this topic comes up is Grandia 2. I loved the hell out of that game and then the ending came along and… that was the way they chose to wrap things up?

I’m still probably going to rebuy it on Steam. Maybe the ending aged well.

Super Mario 2: After all the efforts and dying, it turns out to be a dream…

Oh, I’m still loving Path of Exile. Pillars of Eternity has been abandoned. :)

Were you guys playing Divinity Original Sin 2 on normal difficulty? Asking for future reference.

Doh! Got those mixed up. I started Path of Exile recently and enjoying it…thought I was going to be in for dissappointment shortly after your post!

For me, it’s any game that gives you a relatively blank slate character to develop… and then railroads you into a decision where the character you’ve built up in your head would never choose any of the available options.

As an example: GTA IV. Not a roleplaying game as such, and obviously you can’t expect to be able to play coherently as the sort of person who wouldn’t get into the dire straits Nico does, but there’s plenty of leeway for decisions on how you approach some of the characters in the story.

And then there’s a point in the game where two of your close associates have fallen out and you are forced to choose one of them to kill on behalf of the other. I strongly felt that the Nico I was playing would have told them to sort it out themselves. Unfortunately, this is part of the main plot, and you can’t proceed without choosing one.

I’ve not got any further. Maybe I should go back to it now I’ve forgotten who the characters are. I guess I don’t loathe the game so much as I’m jarred so far out of character that I’m too irritated to want to continue playing.

Psychonauts was such an awesome, fun game until you got to the meat circus. That put me off so much I’m not sure now if I even finished it. .

Shadows of Mordor
Civ 5
Civ 6

Game that took precipitous drops from an early high, but which I still like to one degree or another:
The Division
Dragon Age Inquisition
Overwatch
Nier: Automata
Skyrim
Actually come to think of it this second tier is probably much longer than I’d care to consider

Monopoly was the only board game I could get the whole family to play when I was a kid, so I loved it just for that. My family thought I loved it so much that as an adult, they gave me Monopoly Christmas tree ornaments. I had to sit them down one day and explain to them that Monopoly is a torture that I will not inflict upon their grandchild.