Be it a certain game, series, or video games altogether, have you ever experienced video game burnout? How did you overcome it? Generally, are video games something that you can play for a long time, or do you tire quickly?
I'm currently experiencing a good amount of Pokémon burnout. The series has been a lot of fun for years, but I just can't bring myself to play it right now. Talking about it is something I do all the time, and I still love the series, but my hiatus is necessary right now. Other games that I love but I'm burned out on are: Fire Emblem: Awakening, Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Final Fantasy 7, and Undertale. Great games that I will return to someday, no doubt. Those games aside, I could play all day, every day if I could. Unhealthy, I know, but at least I'm involved with a ton of things irl to keep me grounded.
Call of Duty comes to mind. I loved the series to death during the online multiplayer from Call of Duty 4 all the way to Black Ops II. Lots of good times in forming clans, playing against others, dominating and simply having a good time. You knew you were going to slaughter the other team and were going to get slaughtered, so it was all in good fun. There was a lot of stuff to make things interesting and no two matches I've ever played were the same. After Black Ops II, I kind of saw the franchise take a dive. Instead of having one studio developer make games, it began to alternate between 2-3 with an annual release. The story modes began to lack actual developing characters as its popularity was towards the online multiplayer aspect. Eventually with Black Ops 4, they removed a single player campaign entirely and made it pure PvP. All the games beyond Black Ops II were just not fun for me. The new mechanics in some games such as booster exo jumps and faster TTK made me feel as if my character was made of glass. Changing strategy to become more defense didn't really help either. Often in the successive games beyond, I lost more often than I won and it got frustrating. Overall the series has put quantity over quality, rehashing the usual run & gun shooting that is nothing like actual firefights and wars being fought. I don't think I'll ever go back to playing Call of Duty anyway, since the average age of the players online is half my own. Not worth it.
I hit a temporary burnout after about 60 hours of any one game without playing anything else. Even the expansive 80+ hour games: Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Pokémon, Pathos. Luckily that's enough time to complete most of these games without DLC or post-game exploration, so I get into a comfortable habit of beating "the game" focusing on it all at once, then I'll take a break with a shorter game and come back for DLC and postgame later. I really don't know anything that's immune to this for me. It's one of the reasons I'm afraid to start paying subscription for any game. I'll play it for a month or two and then fall away, wasting subscription money.
They come off and on. Sometimes I want to spend all my free time on games and other times I want nothing to do with them. The longest real burn out was about a month. I was getting really ingaged with learning Japanese and I spent little to no time playing video games. It was a nice break.
I see the title of this thread and I instantly think of the burn damage in Overwatch and how much it sucks lmao. But hmm, I have noticed that I really don't play video games much that more? If I'm really into a new name, I'm liable to play it non-stop for a week, but that's it? Quite a shame, too. I've loads of games in my backlog to still get to.
