I definitely appreciate and like your defintion-ish. RPGs are games where character skill determines success to a far greater degree than player skill does. (...There really are people out there who try to claim the Horizon games are RPGs! Somehow.)
The vast majority of "roguelikes" and "-lites" are trash. But the few good ones have been so good that I tend to try others (to my disappointment). It's definitely important to try games outside your comfort zone. Sometimes they're good! But for genre-awareness -- a genre you know you tend not to like [even if you feel like you should, which is always my problem] -- it's "go with the greatest hits, once others have determined what they are" maybe? Unless you might like a niche that is farther than the typical "best games of genre", which happens. E.g., I tend not to like "soulslikes" I've tried, but something about Nioh 1+2, I freaking love them. Something about them.

Buying genres you don't enjoy and how to stop!

I noticed it's a question thread, but with a title like that, I was kind of hoping for sage advice. This thread motivated me to remove about 5 games from my wishlist. It's not a lot overall, but it brought it back down to a single page, so it's a start.

I don't have OP's exact problem, but I'd like to be more selective about what I wishlist and maybe what I end up buying. So far I try to keep in mind two things:
1. Take misleading trailers and screenshots with a grain of salt. This is especially true for "coming soon" titles that look promising at first glance. I've often changed my opinion after watching gameplay footage.
2. Can I see myself playing this at some point? What does that look like? It doesn't matter if a game is highly acclaimed, the pinnacle of its genre, a timeless classic, on sale at its highest ever discount, or what have you. Any examples?

You know that thing where you click on a BUY button to buy stuff. If you don't like the genre, don't click on that.

There, problem solved.

As a rule of thumb, I never put anything "Coming Soon" or "In Development" on my wishlist.

If they will be released here, we'll get a new news thread about it, so there's no reason to put these games on the wishlist.

You can't control yourself? Maybe you feel the void you can't fill and somehow you linked the "good memories" of playing games to your situation. In a way it's the same for any person with some extra money to spent, your options are greater so is the desire to keep digging though the vast amount of games to get more "good" emotions out of it, trying those you don't usually like in hope to find something new, a better emotion of satisfaction.

I did the very same, bought everything I *might* like, even in grocery store I tried to check new food stuff only because I longed for something different and better.

I think it's curable, here are 3 ways out of it:
1. Become poor or invest / giveaway all you free money (radical solution)
2. Try actually to know yourself better (maybe even with the help of therapist - you might be surpised in a good way), read a good book, watch a good movie instead of gaming, try sport or camping.

In case you have no family and you want to have it - give it a try.

3. Just wait and get old ;(
It's the worst one, but it always works best.

Don't take everything above seriously. But know this - that question you asked, you should ask yourself over and over to get a different answer until you understand the reason.

Retro shooters are a great example for me too. Funny thing is despite feeling this old school PC gamer loyalty to them, they weren't my favorite thing back then either. I do remember playing some Dark Forces and Doom of course, but did I fall in love with them like I did Lucasarts adventures and RPGs? Heck no I did not. So why do I eagerly buy every retro FPS today? So weird.

Honestly I think I played Battle Chess more than Doom as a teen.



Thread was spawned from me trying to play some fast-paced shooters recently and not enjoying them much. The other main genre I probably buy way too many of is 3rd person hack n' slash like God of War and Elden Ring, which I bought in the recent Steam sale and will likely not play or enjoy much.

A very good one at that :)

But personally, I feel like that's what's wrong with any attempts at new RTS games. Most everybody just views them as e-sports, competitive material and tries to make them into one. Nobody really seems to be putting in the effort to make good single player and campaigns anymore and goes straight for the "This is going to be the next e-sport!!" schtick, sucking out any fun out of the game in the process in the attempt to "overbalance" everything for multiplayer, often even ruining the single player part of the game post-release with all the changes (like Battle for Middle Earth 1, also heard it happened to Company of Heroes 2). To me, this is largely what led to the death of the RTS genre.

The last good newer RTS game to me was Ancestors Legacy. Really brought back the feeling of the good old Age of Empires campaigns.

I am a big fan of RTS games, and I pretty much never played any of them in multiplayer. The campaigns in games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Command & Conquers are what matters to me the most. 2nd would be a decent skirmish AI for replayability. Never considered multiplayer at all.

A highlight would the Uprising expansion for Red Alert 3. It was a single player only expansion packed with a ton of content .

On one hand I'd say maybe difficulty or pacing issues. On the other hand, you seem to like a hodge podge of games that I can generalize as slow paced "thinking man's games". Do you find these action-y games not stimulating in a cerebral sense, or more something that doesn't respect your self-defined pace and perhaps requires more immediate attention?

"Buying a bunch of games and not playing them" is just what modern audiences do, so in the interest of everyone conforming to these norms I would say your only mistake is if you've bought the game DRM-free instead of on another store loaded up with 1-3 different DRM schemes.

I don't think there's really a quick-fix solution to your problem.

I'd need to know more about your motivations. Maybe you're measuring other games of a specific genre against the memory of another you've played and you find others all lacking in comparison? I can understand that at least. We've all got memories of "that game" which you wish was somehow replicated and improved upon but games you think might meet those conditions all end up missing the target.

Maybe you're finding yourself easily moved by the advertising or what others say about a product rather than watching YT vids without commentary to form your own opinion before purchase? Trailers and sponsored reviews are designed to make you buy. What you want is time to realise you really want to play it.

Maybe you're trying to delude yourself that your interests are indeed wider than they truly are? In that case you need to come to terms that no-one plays "everything". Some games simply won't be interesting to you, and that's OK.

You did say yourself that money isn't tight, so in theory the purchases aren't bankrupting you. But I suppose in reflection you want to cut out waste ... or address an issue you have with gaming. Either way that's cool, but the only active thing I can suggest:

Cut down on the number of titles you buy and narrow your options down. Play those games you bought to the end. If they are genuinely unplayable then uninstall them and put them aside. Only buy when you've run out of fresh games to play. I think that may focus your spending habits a little. Don't be lured by sales, be lured by the games.

I meant if there are specific titles you wouldn't mind sharing, I'd like to know.
I don't like those two either. It's just a matter of taste for me. I don't think they look bad by any means. But I watched playthroughs of both God of War games on YouTube and at no point did I feel the urge to play them.
I tried and gave up on the first Dark Souls. After hearing even more endless praise for the series, I got to the end of Dark Souls 3. I regretted every moment I wasted. Nowadays I try not to get swept up in the hype and other people's excitement. I'm very content to never touch Elden Ring, others are happy to play it, and things are fine that way.

I remember getting Dark Souls 2 when it was like $30 because I heard the first was so good and everyone was riding it hard. Then I read that Dark Souls 2 isn't so good. I can understand why. I didn't like it either. That isn't to say I didn't get through it, I liked it enough to experience most of the game and I think it's a genuinely enjoyable game, but my impression of it was "that's it?" Here's this slog of a game you have to look up walkthroughs to get through, the combat isn't particularly impressive even though everyone was saying every RPG should have Dark Souls' combat, and yet I still got up to the big ol' red dragon, looked up to see what to do, went for the alternative dream sequence or whatever, died, and then I said, yeah, I got through the game. I fat rolled my way through the game, that's as far as I got.

My point is, maybe OP should attempt to get into the games they've purchased even if they don't particularly enjoy them for what they are to at least experience what others get themselves into. Or don't because massive backlogs are hip and cool these days. That's why I have so many games I'm not playing.

Thought I was the only RTS gamer that enjoyed campaigns more than multiplayer. I would take RTS with a campaign like WarZone 2100, Original War, Act of War, or C&C over RTS games, focusing mainly on MP. Wargame series is an excellent example of RTS games with bad campaigns. I played the first one the most because it had an interesting, well-made campaign.

The problem with that statement is that, from what I understand, Dark Souls's combat is not really RPG combat, and would in fact disqualify the game from being an RPG by my definition. In other words, if this were to happen, there would be no RPGs, and that would be rather sad.

Thing is, there are people like me who play RPGs for the strategic turn-based combat, and for which a game with action combat just can't fill that role.

Anyway, one problem I have is that there's the case of games being advertised as being in a genre that I like, but which aren't actually in said genre, or they make decisions that are contrary to why I play those games (things like non-interactive cutscenes to tell a story (when that's not why I'm playing these games), lack of enemy respawns so I can't farm XP or other resources, or games that take control of saving away from the player).

Edit: Or there's otherwise good games that, at some point, have some unmanageable section that changes the rules in a way that makes it not fun. This can include minigames, but can also include things like insta-fail stealth sections, and I suppose escort missions would also fit in this category.