What games can you not get into because they feel too outdated?

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you'll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you'd never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I'll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren't generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn't enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren't new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin's Creed 1. I couldn't make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn't actually seem to matter...I just hated the game lol. I do think it's another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

When Witcher 3 was winning all those awards, I wanted to give the original game a go.

Don't. I imagine it's nothing like Witcher 3. It aged terribly poorly.

Pokémon, actually. Just a month ago I wanted to play Soul Silver. But man, it is tedious. There's so much slow dialog, long animations, and little inconveniences everywhere (even in the menus). And I feel like you also have to grind to progress, which I absolutely hate in games (but maybe I also just didn't play well enough, whatever). So yeah, quite disappointed with it since I remember the 3DS games being quite fun.

Baldur's Gate 3 was good, but I can't play 1 or 2. They definitely don't feel the same.

For newer games, I can actually play the older Zelda games, but I can't stand the latest games. Not a big fan of the gameplay with weapons breaking and how much they pushed the open world thing. I very much prefer smaller maps with more story.

Knights of the old republic 1 and 2. First my old PC couldn't run it and my new one it just feels too jank and ugly. I love star wars games and am sad if the remake stays dead.

Starfield

Probably going to get some hate for these.

FFVII. The pc port was ass, controls were a pain on keyboard and there wasn't great controller support. The graphics were really tough to ignore, and the combat felt like fighting the control scheme more than anything. I've played and liked many other titles in the series, but I couldn't manage this one by the time I got to it. The experience was also so bad I have no interest in the remake/remaster.

Morrowind. Played it a ton on Xbox, but I can't get back into it on pc anymore. Even with mods to alleviate the graphics and draw distance, the game is so dated. Building a character can be very punishing in the early game, and easily break able in the late game. Many weapon skills are garbage because they lack enough support in items. Movement speed was tied to a skill, jumping is significantly faster, but also a skill. The leveling process is arcane and not adequately explained in game. The journal is awful, so you better remember what quests you are doing. Item storage was a pain because crates had weight limits, and merchants had pitiful amounts of gold to sell items.

Personally, the earlier Witcher games. Great story, but it's trapped in an old RPG missing all kinds of modern features and mechanics.

I never did really beat morrowind or even finish any of the factions questlines, i was too young at the time to care about that i just did the infinite intelligence potion exploit to create an unbeatable god character slinging 50ft radius fireballs from level 1.

A part of me really wants to revisit it and and least complete the main quest, but damn does it feel dated.

I tried playing the original Deus Ex for the first time a couple of years ago and I sadly had to put it down before I escaped the tutorial. Early 3D graphics have not aged well, the controls were not very intuitive, and it just seemed like it wasn't worth the effort. I then played and enjoyed Human Revolution though; I know, I'm an absolute peasant.

Probably controversial but half life 2 for me. I got it very cheap on a sale after years of hearing how good it was. Just couldn't get into it. Even worse, every time I felt nauseated after a couple of minutes.

I guess this is just an example of a "you had to be there" scenarios. I was there as a gamer at the time but had no funds to play all the games. I skipped on HL 2 and can't get into it 20 years later.

Halo, even the remaster. The world's feel empty and vehicles make me long for the Mako

I've since been told it's just one of those "you had to be there" things. Was really hard to admit the hype cycle sometimes has value

Thief.

But I HAVE to try again! I want to write my bachelors about game design of stealth games and not analyzing Thief would be a crime against humanity

At this stage, I am loath to go back to any game where the UI takes up half the screen. RTS games especially just used so much screen real estate back in the day, that couldn't be scaled or hidden to get any back. Like playing your game through a letterbox surrounded by stickers.

FONV and Skyrim. Even with mods, FONV looks like microwaved dog shit. Im mot even a huge graphics nut but at a point it becomes too distracting and FONV goes far beyond that. Skyrim's sluggish movements keep me completely disengaged, although the graphics don't throw me off quite as much, it feels so outdated that the immersion is ruined right from the very start.

Morrowind.

Morrowind was always this for me. I started the series with Oblivion and Skyrim. Those have their own issues, but at least you hit things when you hit them, and their leveling systems won't actually screw you over if you don't Excel it correctly.

SMB 1 and 2. The SMB1 engine was revolutionary, but I hate the controls. SMB2, the Western one, just never felt like Mario, even back then. I also mostly started on SMB3 which had much better platforming and controls and was actually a Mario game, so that's probably why.

I consider myself, more or less, a "Zelda fan", at least from LttP to about half of Wind Waker. I will never play the first two NES games, though. Aside from 2 being "pretty much not zelda", 1 is so full of arbitrary wonk, "Guide dammit", and "Nintendo hard" that I don't feel like it even for historical purposes.

For me it was Ocarina of Time. Ugly, and very clumsy. And I play tons of retro games. Early 3D stuff can be rough.

Unpopular opinion for sure, but Vampire: The Masquerade. I've started so many playthroughs over the years but just cannot fall into it like other RPGs on account of its dated mechanics and graphics.

Fallout 1&2. I love isometric top down rpgs and have played every title since fallout 3 to completion. Something about the clunkiness leaves me with a lot to be desired. I didn't pay more than $4 for both titles on a steam sale so I'm not mad they're in my library, I just wish I could break through the barrier and experience the beginnings of that world.

The first witcher. The story seems really interesting and it has some great rpg elements but the combat is just so boring that I ended up startin witcher 3 without knowing the lore

Anything with consoles as the primary focus. You know the games, the ones where the controls suck if you don't use a controller..like witcher, and all those dark souls copy/paste clones. Cameras are too jank

Quite a few, but more recently:

Neverwinter Nights. Even the Enhanced Edition.

Diablo.

Other older RPGs just start off too slow, but that isn't necessarily age related, but by design.

Morrowind, but only because I've lost where I was up to in my saved game from 3-4 years ago, not so much because of the mechanics; they didn't bother me too much.

a lot of the invisible language used through game design from that era, I do not understand. There are many things that the game didn’t explain, and I assume they were just understood by players

A lot of the UI/UX and game mechanics from HOMM3 were taken from Sid Meier's games, like Colonization and Civilization. When you say you didn't understand stuff in HOMM3, I want to ask if you've played CIV6 or CIV5 or other modern games in that same genre? If not, you're going to be confused by them regardless of whether you're starting with CIV1 or HOMM3 or CIV6.

Super Mario 64, while i started with the nes i never really fully played the 64 title

I played it on stream some time ago but eventually stopped cause mario just felt so weighty and clunky to control. I tried 3 different controllers just in case it could have just been me, but unfortunately, i just didnt jive with it.

Final Fantasy Tactics. I always hear its praise and apparently the story is really great, but... I just can't stand it. Despite being a massive fan of its sequel on the GBA.

I've had multiple story battles end before I even got a turn it, just because the NPC I was supposed to protect walked straight into his death. And that's kinda true for every NPC, in a game with permadeath and NPC companions for a big chunk of the inital hours. Sometimes you just gotta repeat a mission several times for a single chance to actually play and win.

You want to recruit monster? Great! Now they multiply like rabbits and your whole squad will forever be clogged with monsters.

Outside of NPC suicide, a lot of the battles are stomps. Either you know how to abuse the jobs and become a literal god or you kind of suffer, since once again permadeath. Oh, but even if you struggle through, you just get the most overpowered unit for free, making the last part mostly trivial anyways.

There a literal softlocks if you save right after a mission with a mandatory follow-up without being able to handle it. Your save will just throw you into a battle you cannot win.

It just feels like a game made before proper playtesting was a thing.

My two are Morrowind, where I loved the quest design and lack of handholding, but the random hit chance and BS difficulty distribution were just... too much to handle.

And also, KOTOR, which I expected to love as a huge Star Wars fan, but the "stand around while dice are rolled" combat was just... exceptionally boring and tedious.

Life

Pretty much all of the iconic games from my early teens. (I was a teen in the late 80s and 90s). The games that I grew up with, that I fell in love with, are unplayable now.

Dragonstrike, a flight sim where you fly a dragon in the D&D Dragonlance world was mind blowing when I first played it. Now, it's so bad that replaying it spoiled my memory of the original experience!

I feel like after BotW and TotK, older 3D Zelda games seem clunky yet easy. I can't get used to the cameras in OoT and MM it feels so stiff as opposed to an old game like Kingdom Hearts where the first game aged well and the controls are still good.

This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I'd bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There's definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.

Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I'd paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money's worth.

Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels 'modern' enough that I don't usually have this problem.

Persona 1 and 2. As a Persona fan I see some people saying how great they are, and the story does seem interesting, but I can't deal with that map movement, battle system and endless random battles.

Really, any RPG with random battles is a little harder to get into compared to overworld monsters you can avoid or target at your own pace.

Lord of the rings online looks terrible but I’ve always wanted to explore.

I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic right now. The only thing that makes the graphics tolerable is playing on my switch. The screen is small enough to minimize the bad graphics and jank. But if I was playing it on a TV or computer screen I wouldn't be able to continue. It hasn't aged well at all.

Gta 5. Story progression is just awful. You play a mission, it ends and you're forced to do open world activities instead of continuing the story. Then just when you're getting into the groove in the open world you get a call to do a story mission and it turns out to be shooting imaginary aliens. The missions are too linear and short. Gunplay is weak. Also the characters feel like they were written for 10 year olds who think swear words are funny.

I'm hoping rdr2 is better

I tried to play fallout 3 and new vegas after falling in love with fallout 4 but I just could not stomach it. The games looked ugly and controlled strangely. I had more fun and enjoyment playing the original fallout from the 90s.

You'll have to sail the high seas since it requires THUG2 which isn't for sale anymore but THUGPRO is a mod that will let you play classic Tony hawk levels with all the mechanics from later games.

I was always a console gamer in my childhood so I missed the boat on a lot of the most iconic PC games.

I feel like I might catch some heat for this one, but recently I tried Half Life 1 and I just couldn't get into it. The game just feels so...lifeless. I got about 10 chapters in, which is like 60% or so of the way through, and every moment just feels like I'm playing House of the Dead in the arcade, walking down a hallway and shooting jumpscare enemies. I think the lack of any semblance of story or motivation for what I'm doing is especially egregious to me.

Mario 64. it's so frustrating.

I don't really understand what it is about HMMIII you don't get. It is a relatively simple game concept, and the fundamentals has remained largely unchanged from iteration to iteration. I personally prefer III over most of the later ones exactly because of its simplicity (and none of those ugly 3D graphics).

For me what mostly antiquates a game is if it was primarily based on graphics which have been outdated, otherwise I don't really have a problem even with much older games. But then again I also grew up playing games in the 80s, so I have been used to those my entire life. Some of the games which fascinated me on account of the complexity, like the early Ultima games (at least I and II), doesn't exactly stand revisits, because they were very barebones compared to the later games in the franchise. Ultima V still holds up beautifully, simply because it is so complex behind those primitive graphics.

Suikoden III really should have used voice acting. I think it came out at the beginning of the voice acting era, but chose to make the player read everything. It's a fantastic game otherwise, but that makes replays unappealing.

These days, for me the absolute minimum is full controller support due to the wife acceptance factor. She loved Dragon Age Inquisition so we tried to play Origins a couple years ago, and even though I'd cloned the displays, me sitting behind her at my computer instead of next to her on the couch was a deal breaker.

There are other plusses in terms of WAF, full voice narration and a good story being chief among them. There's a reason the only soulslike I've ever really played is Fallen Order. 😆

For me playing alone (which I almost never do anymore), one example I can think of is trying to go back to Dark Age of Camelot after playing WoW for a while. That was...painful.

In general I can play any game regardless of age, unless the controls are complete garbage and cannot be changed. Luckily on PC a ton of games can be modded for the better, but not always and it's always down to controls feeling too off that I'll drop something I'm otherwise interested in.

Reading the comments here hurts my soul, everyone hates all my favorite games. 🤣

Emperor: Battle for Dune was a solid Westwood RTS but it only allowed for one-button controls, rather than the two-button system that arrived with Age of Empires 2 which dominated all RTS games since.

Also from AoE2 the idle peasant button.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater games that I can't fully get into because they're missing mechanics from the later games.

What mechanics is the new THPS1+2 remake missing besides being able to get off your board and walk around? Or do you just mean mechanics from other skate games like Skate or Session aren't in it?

Watch Dogs 2. It was going cheap on steam, but it feels so outdated, the most generic game-themed game with all the game elements you've seen before.

It bothers me how fucking monumental of an achievement Xenogears could have been, how incredible it still is, and how unbearably painful it is to try and play today.

It's still one of the most wild sci-fi stories I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, [and I read a LOT], but even at the time it was a really clunky combat system and the controls can be absolutely maddening.

shin megami tensei III nocturne. the lack of useful information in combat compared to what's available in other smt/persona games i have played is frustrating (strange journey, smtv, p4, pq, p5)!

Zork I guess. Or IDK.

I heard good things about some of the earlier Star Wars games like Knights of the Old Republic and others... maybe Jedi Academy?

Struggled to get into them due to overall clunkiness and outdated menu stuff.

If someone could recommend a remake on Switch or Steam maybe with decent controller support? I might be convinced to give them another try...

I got the PS1 anniversary edition which had Metal Gear Solid on it, and I don't get how that game was ever as popular as it was. The handling is super janky, and the graphics is so dark that you basically cannot discern the environment and the enemy unless you stay still and watch for moving pixels.

I bounced right off Super Metroid because of the controls. Mind you I first picked up the game in 2016. It's a game that wants more than a SNES pad, really overusing the shoulder buttons. I didn't grow up with that one, and I just can't get a feel for it.

From way back, first onimusha game I played was onimusha 3: demon siege, loved it so I wanted to play the other games in the series, 1 big issue, the 3rd game used analog sticks to move, the original 2 didn't, and I could not get over that fact, onimusha dawn of dreams (the 4th game) was great... maybe because it was modern enough to use the analog sticks to move.

Betrayal at Krondor. What an amazing game, I love it, but if you imagine what the graphics would be like if it were made today, I think it's hard to recommend anyone play it.

Starcraft 1.

2 is still bearable but 1 looks like actual dogshit, especially the cutscenes

I'm a big Guild Wars 2 fan, though I don't play that much anymore. Often in the game, Guild Wars 1 references, and stories told by players of how great it was, made me want to try it.

It still fully works, and can be played. But for me, it was a no-go. I could live with the graphics, and the environments were fine. Good music and sounds.

The interface killed it for me. Dozens of windows, shortcuts, clunky ways of doing things, the inventory. I couldn't take it anymore after a few hours.

It's not about disliking old interfaces. I basically live on the Linux-shell, and I still play xcom: ufo-defense. But the gw1 one is all over the place, like it hasn't been planned but just happened by random people dropping into the studio and adding some stuff for the fun of it.

Come to think about it, it isn't even about old games. I couldn't play Xenonauts for the same reason. I suppose I just don't enjoy clunky interfaces...

Shovel Knight. I like 90s platformers, I own an SNES. It was just boring.

The Elder Scrolls Online. Bought it, played 2 hours max.