What grabs your attention about a game and makes you want to play it?

I still remember how I almost didn’t even play World of Warcraft, and was on the verge of quitting. The Paladin I’d started off playing wasn’t anything like I expected. People kept expecting me to heal them, and I didn’t sign up for the class with a giant hammer and a whole spec called Retribution because I wanted, or even understood why I would, to go around healing anyone. I wanted to do the exact opposite, to go out and harm things.

So, in a bit of a final lap before I uninstalled the game, I went out and rolled an Orc Warrior and tooled around on that for a while. Levels 1 through 9 (remember, this was in 2004, before the game had gotten it’s first major balancing patch, much less the years and years of changes and updates we’ve seen since) were not exactly getting me hyped. I was about to call it a day when I killed yet another Scorpid, and got the level 10 swoosh, and saw that I’d learned a new ability. It was called Charge.

Charge back then was annoying. You couldn’t use it in combat, so it was only good as an opener — you’d get close to something without it aggroing you, and then you’d hit Charge.

So that’s what I did — and my friends? It was magical.

For all that I was annoyed by aspects of the skill, the ability to literally throw myself directly at an enemy — instead of the usual shoot-it-and-wait-for-it-to-attack-you I found so tedious for the previous nine levels — was a game changer for me. It cemented in my mind that I wanted to keep playing World of Warcraft. And here I am, many years later, still doing exactly that with a Charge ability that is, in my opinion, far superior than its original incarnation. Thank you, Charge, for making me a believer.

So now, I turn to you. What makes you stand up and pay attention to a game? What have you done, or seen, or noticed, that turned you from a “maybe” to a “yes” about your favorite games? What grabbed your attention and got you to really get into them — or, inversely, what turned you off of one, and made you stop a game you might well have enjoyed otherwise?