Source: CD Projekt Red

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As someone who has teetered on the fine line between the Millennial and Gen-Z identity for their entire life, I’ve been gaming online for longer than I’ve been able to grow a full beard. *Counter-Strike 1.6 *lobbies, *Halo 3 *custom games, and LAN parties in internet cafés with Hamachi — that’s the era I grew up in. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder than during those chaotic, unplanned, beautifully stupid nights when nothing mattered except having fun with strangers who somehow began feeling like family.

Fast-forward to 2025, and online gaming is bigger than ever — but I’ve never felt more disconnected from it. Not because I’ve stopped playing, though. In fact, I still can’t get enough of online gaming. I still log in daily, but somewhere along the way, something fundamental changed in the culture, the design, and the purpose. The soul of online gaming has changed, and I can’t help but scrunch my nose up at seeing the way it’s going.

Online servers used to be a digital neighborhood

Now, it’s more like living in a gated apartment complex

There was a time when online gaming felt like walking into a pub where everyone *kind of *knew everyone. You’d browse through server lists like picking out a movie, decide which map rotation looked the most fun, jump in, recognize a few names, and suddenly, you were hanging out with friends you’d never met or seen. Server hosts could change maps on the fly. Mods made every server feel like a unique pocket universe. Admins kicked troublemakers immediately (no democracy required). And if you didn’t like the vibe, you could very well just host your own space and invite the world into your personal brand of chaos.

Today, however, a button labeled “Play” tosses you into the void with random players you’ll never see or hear from again. Matchmaking is fast, yes, but it’s also pretty damn hollow. The only way you make friends now is if you blindly send someone a friend request after a match. I think the best way to describe it would be “disposable interactions”. What we gained in convenience, we definitely lost in community.

Games with server browsers aren’t extinct, no, but major AAA releases don’t come with them anymore. With those, it’s still the big yellow “Play” button you click on, and a handful of company-curated game modes to choose from.

No, I don’t want to know ten things I can do to get ahead

This, I think, is perhaps my biggest complaint about modern online gaming, and I myself have a part to play in it. Arc Raiders just came out, and even though my friend and I bought it at the same time, it wasn’t long before I went down the YouTube rabbit hole of finding the “best places to loot”, or the “best weapons to use”. Five days after the game came out, my friend seemed to be taking in the game slowly and naturally, while I robbed myself of the joy of chancing upon some rare loot, or exploring an area because it looked interesting instead of being told to go to point A and then point B by a YouTuber.

We used to grab weapons because they felt and looked cool, and explore maps because we just didn’t know where anything was. That’s why we played — to figure things out. Now, however, it’s all about “5 META builds you MUST use”, or “Fastest loot route — NEVER go anywhere else”, or “How to level up 50x FASTER.” I’m tired, boss. The hundreds of thousands of teenagers and kids who watch these videos and then get ahead of the curve, or even team up with us and tell us that the guns we’re using are “trash”, is just insurmountable.

It’s like speedrunning your own fun. There’s no joy in discovery anymore.

It’s like speedrunning your own fun, and I’m done doing it altogether. It feels like robbing your own self of the exact joy that made older online games unforgettable. Sure, even back then, forums existed where somebody with more time on their hands in a day than you had in a week would tell you to go to a spot for some rather significant weapon, but there weren’t millions watching those videos, crowding the same spot on a map because they all already knew what they’d find inside. There’s no joy in discovery anymore, plain and simple.

Systems

Released October 30, 2025

ESRB Teen / Violence, Blood

Developer(s) Embark Studios

Publisher(s) Embark Studios

Engine Unreal Engine 5

PvP used to be playful, but now, it’s a performance

Everyone and their dog wants to “cut a clip”

With every word I’m writing, I do feel like an “old-head”, shaking my first at a bunch of skateboarders, but I really do feel like this needs saying. Even though the only way I can enjoy online gaming today is to play it with friends (even if it means buying them a copy sometimes), we still do have to hop into games with other people from across the world. When we do that, no matter how relaxed we want to be taking things, we do find ourselves facing down the barrels of others with “TTV” or “YT” in their names, trying desperately to “cut a clip” as they dogwalk us.

Look, I’m not saying that people aren’t allowed to be better than me, but there’s definitely been a huge, palpable shift where it feels like one out of every ten players you run into is trying to “make it” as a professional. I love and cherish how mainstream gaming has become in pop culture and how it’s become a multi-billion-dollar industry, but it also translates to everyone trying too hard in online lobbies, so much so that I’ve genuinely begun preferring private servers with just friends.

As my time playing online with friends dissipates, I’d rather not have it be marred by “sweats.”

In fact, it’s why I spent over two months creating a huge custom map in *Fortnite *— so that my friends and I could play in peace, knowing that we now play not to win anything, but just for the act of engaging in a game together as we talk at the end of the day. Growing up has also meant growing physically apart, and gaming, at the end of a day or a week, is what ensures that the distance is strictly physical. Those moments are fewer and farther in between, and I’d rather not have them be marred by “sweats” who just want to “exploit the meta” and keep trying to one-up everyone in the lobby. All the power to them, but that just isn’t for me anymore.

Online gaming’s very structure is becoming TikTok-esque

Every screen is unsubtle about its hooks

I use the TikTok analogy because nothing else fits better. It’s about constant dopamine rushes, going straight into your brain, before you mindlessly move your thumb to scroll over to the next TikTok. Similarly, you’re just pressing that ‘Play Again’ button to queue back up, no matter what game it is. The modern online game is engineered pretty much like a lot machine would be. It’s a to-do list now, with daily challenges, weekly challenges, Battle Pass grinds, seasonal unlocks, and all the customization that comes with them.

Play long enough, and the game will shower you with rewards. Every time you get out of a match, some screen or the other will tell you about what you unlocked or earned, just because you showed up. So, just like that, fun becomes progression, playtime becomes productivity, and games? Those turn into jobs. I’ve seen this happen to me first-hand — I’d have friends ring me up to ask if I’m getting on the game because there are just a few days left to finish up the Battle Pass rewards in Fortnite. Longevity is earned not through community now, but through this manufactured fear of missing out, and a lot of us follow, because we’re afraid of falling behind.

No new online game comes out without these features anymore.

It’s unmissable at this point — no new online game will come out without these features. Without a list of challenges, trials, and feats for you to complete, to unlock one out of two or three different currencies in the game so that you may trade it for some other currency or item. That holds true for* Arc Raiders*, too. It’s the most engaging extraction shooter I’ve ever had the fortune of playing in my lifetime, and even that isn’t free of the burden a game must carry with it in today’s day and age. If it hadn’t been there, then we’d have had countless voices talking about how there just isn’t “enough” in the game to keep players hooked or playing, because apparently, the core gameplay loop is just not enough anymore to make a game stand on its two legs.

So... have I just outgrown online gaming?

What if online gaming hasn’t changed, and only I have?

Maybe the bigger truth here is that I’ve simply grown up. I don’t chase the adrenaline of competition the way I used to, and I no longer care about skill gaps or ranked ladders or proving myself to strangers I’ll never see again. These days, if I’m loading into an online game, it’s because I want to unwind with friends, and definitely not because I’m looking to get styled on by someone grinding a meta build they learned from a ten-minute YouTube video. And yet, I keep feeling that push to “keep up” and play the “right way”, because that’s simply what online gaming demands now. The joy of being new at something, of wandering, exploring, discovering, and wondering — it’s all been systemically shown the door, it seems.

I do miss the version of online gaming that brought people together instead of just pitting us against the internet’s loudest algorithm soldiers. Sure, I am significantly older, but the magic has shifted too, undoubtedly.

This cultural shift is calling me back to single-player games

It’s sad to see online gaming become an unrecognizable, running on daily grinds and battle passes.

I’m well aware that this is a rant, and there’s no sugarcoating around it. The skill gap is widening with younger players leading the charge, and yet, as someone who grew up on online gaming being a magical feature that let me enjoy the game I loved with people from across the country and the world, it’s sad to see it becoming this unrecognizable machine that runs and thrives on daily grinds, battle passes, and metas.