Video Game play stagnation

So, I sit here, having gotten myself into a hype over Assassin's creed 3, and I decide to play through the series up to it, to get myself prepared for it.

Problem is, I find myself getting frustrated, and everything is down to a methodical pattern, and I'm wondering how I can break this pattern. I don't want my enjoyment of a game to be filtered through the lens of pseudo-OCD, trying to collect and do everything one at a time so that it ends up a list of things to do rather than a game to play.

I decided to make this topic to ask others about this: Do you sometimes feel that you've become too set in your methods of play, does it detract from the fun that you can have, and have you any suggestions as to how to break out of the mold that you've ended up once casting yourself in? Or is it just a matter of not playing for a while then coming back with fresh eyes and renewed ADD?

This isn't about games becoming homogenized or anything to do with the industry, I should add. This is about your personal experiences playing games and finding yourself bored with them through mastery of a methodical means to learn the game.

edited 19th Jul '12 1:44:36 AM by Enkufka

I'm playing Kingdoms Of Amalur right now, and aside from the horrifically identical quests (I don't care! Go kill ten bears your goddamn self! The world is being invaded by demons, evil fae, giant spiders and ghost pirates ALL AT ONCE! I have better things to do!) I notice that I do the same thing in every encounter; which is do a combo with my chakrams then dodge and go back to step A. It's simple and it works.

Part of this was that I'm going by the Self-Imposed Challenge of never using potions during combat. Sometimes the game seems to expect you to whore the crap out of it but I hate the "Chug as many health pots as you want in 1/20th of a second" game mechanic so many games have. But this means that I basically have to be as careful as possible while fighting some of these monsters, as on hard a solid hit from them can take a quarter of your life and then stun you so his buddy can hit you so his other buddy can stun you so he can hit you again.

This is mostly a problem with poor game design though. Adding a penalty to drinking a potion, like forcing you to drop your guard for a precious second, would go a long way to adding some tactical depth. Instead It's mostly chakram spamming and running around a big tree so this troll can't smoosh me.

Those are more problems with that specific game, though.

I find that games that let you improve your capabilities as you progress tend to go better. Like, changing things up every so often really helps. For example, in Mech Warrior 4: Mercenaries, I was getting more and more 'mechs as I went along, so that meant more mechs to experiment with (you get a bunch of Arguses from salvage at one point, so you get a lot of possibilities for experimentation).

I have a big problem with filtering sidequests. So if a game offers many, many sidequests, it will take me a long while to go anywhere near the actual plot, long after I tire of being a glorified delivery boy for a whole nation.

It sucked a lot of fun out of playing Xenoblade.

The "Free health potions for all!" gameplay mechanic will force any player in any game to either just spam them whenever they get low on health and become effectively immortal or not use them and play as safely as possible. KOA is just one example. The same thing happened to me with Fable (Shooting everything from a very far distance) and The Elder Scrolls (Abusing the create-a-spell system).

Definitely.

edited 19th Jul '12 3:23:31 PM by ShirowShirow

Well, I can say that in KOA the problem is that they mix hack and slash combat, of which one of the principles is that you have to watch your health because healing is few and far in between, and an RPG's indiscriminate use of potions and the like. Hotkeying it was an even worse decision.

I notice safespots are rather common in modern games, and I rather frequently use them. Being constantly untouchable is rather boring.