Not "has a game ever spoiled a genre for you", but the other way around. Not a game so bad it puts you off the genre entirely, but a game so good that you find everything else in the genre disappointing by comparison.
For me, the genre was fantasy MMORPGs and the game was Guild Wars. It was the first MMO I ever played and to date I've never found another one I like nearly as much. Guild Wars has no level grind (if you LIKE grinding there's title grind, but that's almost completely optional), a startling lack of fetch quests of the Twenty Bear Asses [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyBearAsses] variety, fantastically well-balanced PvP and the best skill system I've ever seen.
Since then I've tried a variety of free MMOs (I'm in the middle of trying out Mabinogo at the moment), Tabula Rasa, Aion and EVE Online and none have come near to Guild Wars. Well, I liked Tabula Rasa, but it was cancelled on me just as it was starting to get good, which was a pain in the ass (that's a sci-fi MMO anyway). I played EVE obsessively for a long time before quitting when I had to face the hard fact that I didn't actually enjoy the game, but that's an almost completely different genre anyway.
The most obvious example of this was when I tried Aion, the only other "proper" fantasy MMO I've tried. I played it for a few months and enjoyed it at first, but eventually I realised that the game was grindtastic, the quests were all as dull as shit, the PvP was horribly unbalanced and boring and the skill and character development system were a dead end where pretty much all characters of the same class would end up the same. While I might have enjoyed the game enough to keep playing under normal circumstances, having played Guild Wars just made me feel that this wasn't good enough, so I unsubscribed from Aion and went back to Tyria. And you know what? Despite taking a lengthy break from Guild Wars to try other games, the game is STILL awesome.
Has this happened to anyone else? What games have spoiled you for an entire genre?
For me, the genre was fantasy MMORPGs and the game was Guild Wars. It was the first MMO I ever played and to date I've never found another one I like nearly as much. Guild Wars has no level grind (if you LIKE grinding there's title grind, but that's almost completely optional), a startling lack of fetch quests of the Twenty Bear Asses [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyBearAsses] variety, fantastically well-balanced PvP and the best skill system I've ever seen.
Since then I've tried a variety of free MMOs (I'm in the middle of trying out Mabinogo at the moment), Tabula Rasa, Aion and EVE Online and none have come near to Guild Wars. Well, I liked Tabula Rasa, but it was cancelled on me just as it was starting to get good, which was a pain in the ass (that's a sci-fi MMO anyway). I played EVE obsessively for a long time before quitting when I had to face the hard fact that I didn't actually enjoy the game, but that's an almost completely different genre anyway.
The most obvious example of this was when I tried Aion, the only other "proper" fantasy MMO I've tried. I played it for a few months and enjoyed it at first, but eventually I realised that the game was grindtastic, the quests were all as dull as shit, the PvP was horribly unbalanced and boring and the skill and character development system were a dead end where pretty much all characters of the same class would end up the same. While I might have enjoyed the game enough to keep playing under normal circumstances, having played Guild Wars just made me feel that this wasn't good enough, so I unsubscribed from Aion and went back to Tyria. And you know what? Despite taking a lengthy break from Guild Wars to try other games, the game is STILL awesome.
Has this happened to anyone else? What games have spoiled you for an entire genre?
