What Makes You Give Up On Great Games?

[Chippy]

I've never completed any of the X space sim games. I've played them for hundreds of hours, but I just can't finish them. I recently stried to play X3: AP again with the BSG mod, and other mods that make it proabably one of the GOATS in my game library, but I've got gaming autism and have to play it in ironman mode. And everything takes so long (months. Actual months of realtime) that I made the mistake of leaving one of my ships unattended and it got blow up.

Now I can't bear the thought of starting again. But there's other little things; like my crack team of marines can board a ship against an equal number of marines and not lose a single life, but send them into an empty ship with no automated defences, hull protection, or hacking anti-measures and they get fucking wiped out.

In summary: the game has just that little too much 'German logic' in it. And that little bit just ruins the whole. Like the perfect woman from Sin City, but she farts too much.

 

[Just Locus]

Fatigue.

 

[VerSacrum]

Intrusive bad memories
Like I had a big X3 AP installation going back when a family member died of coof and now I can't play it anymore because of the bad feels (mostly guilt) associated with it

 

[Bohrain]

Is it a great game if you can't be arsed to finish it?
While I appreciate Owlcat's Pathfinder games for the 3.5 build autism they offer, I wasn't even close to finishing either of them. By the time most encounters become trivial after pre-casting haste they really struggled to keep me interested.

 

[Chuck Norris]

Overt complexity that is not paced very well. Some MMOs and grand strategy games suffer from this. Suddenly you are faced with too many mechanics and systems and you mentally check out.

 

[Gregz]

Whenever I learn that a game is a just a globohomo commercial, I uninstall.exe

 

[Just Locus]

Overt complexity that is not paced very well. Some MMOs and grand strategy games suffer from this. Suddenly you are faced with too many mechanics and systems and you mentally check out.

It's because so many games have this idea of "More mechanics = More fun" when in reality if you don't put in the effort to introduce those mechanics in a gradual, simple way, you're just gonna overwhelm a ton of players instead of drawing them in.

When introducing mechanics, it's best to wrap them in familiarity, I think the Portal franchise did this with immense success, They took the simple idea of a gun shooting portals but throughout their respective games, gradually introduced more puzzle mechanics that are easy to grasp but become challenging when all thrown into a single chamber, which gives it its complexity. They took a simple base and constantly gave it variety. While most new games throw all the complex elements in your face.

 

[soulburner]

- no way to increase FOV in a first/third person game;
- ugly or hard to read fonts;
- long loading times.

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

- Breaking my mods over and over with pointless changes (Paradox i'm looking at you)
- Losing saves and not having the will to do certain parts of the game again (Fallout New Vegas with the Lonesome Road after spending months doing everything on the main game besides the last mission and the other dlc's)
- Lack of patience to do certain annoying quests after already doing then over and over on previous plays (Abandoned Vaults on F3/NV and the Falmer/Dwemer Ruins on Skyrim)
- Development Hell for certain early access games.
- Stupid AI (Some tabletop style war games i play)
- Asian market specific gameplay gimmicks and weird/gay plot points (Giant swords, gacha mechanics, slow grind just for the sake of gameplay extension)
- Intrusive DRM with content locked being always online feature.
- Bad optimization

 

[beardalaxy]

There are actually a lot of examples of this that have happened to me, even as recently as a couple days ago. Generally speaking, a game has to actually HOOK me and it doesn't matter if it's good or not on paper as long as it does that. I'll give a few examples. Maybe these don't fit everyone's definition of "good game" but for what I played, they were solid and didn't really have much wrong with them.

1. FF7 Remake. I played for a good 6 hours and then just stopped. I think it was mainly that I knew how much longer the game was going to be, and I just didn't feel like putting that much time into it.
2. RE2 Remake. Again, played for a few hours and then just stopped. It didn't really hook me and I wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of being chased around by Mr. X for the rest of the game.
3. God of War PS4. The second I got to the upgrade screen I stopped playing. Way too much info to dump all at once and none of it looked particularly interesting. I can't remember exactly, but I think the UI was just not cooperating with me as well.
4. Snake Pass and My Friend Pedro both had the same problem. I got almost to the end of each game but the controls were pretty finnicky and I just felt like I was actively struggling against them. I stopped having fun, so I stopped playing.
5. BG3, I had just played through Tears of the Kingdom and I'd be damned if I was actually going to sit through another massive game. I knew this was going to happen but still wanted to at least check the game out anyway.
6. Most recent example is Lies of P. Still have a bit of Game Pass left after playing NFS Unbound, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I normally don't like Soulslike games, but this one is definitely the most refined I've played. Actually kind of enjoyed it, but ultimately I stopped playing because there are a lot of other games to play that I know I'll enjoy more.

A lot of it kind of boils down to that last point. There are a shit ton of games that exist, so if I'm not really into one game I'll skip it and move on to something else. The big difference with Snake Pass and My Friend Pedro was that I actually paid for them, so I felt like I had to struggle against them at least a little bit to try and get my money's worth. The other games were mostly borrowed from friends or played on something like Game Pass, so I didn't feel as bad putting them down.

Why would I continue playing Lies of P when I could play the System Shock remake or Metal Hellsinger, games I'm infinitely more interested in? Or even just playing Star Fox 64/Mario 64 for the hundredth time xD

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Overt complexity that is not paced very well. Some MMOs and grand strategy games suffer from this. Suddenly you are faced with too many mechanics and systems and you mentally check out.

This. At least for a recent example.

I gave Dave the Diver a go. Looks good, sounds fun, dove into the sea, found it enjoyable, though I felt the diving/harpooning-mechanics overly complexified, but nothing to worry about.

Then the game shifts into a full-on sushi restaurant management simulator, and my brain shut down. Too much, all at once.

Uninstall.exe

Out of curiosity I checked a video of the game. It pulls the same trick virtually non-stop for two weeks (in-game time). Always piling something new on top.

The cutscenes stand out in a league of their own, but the rest of the game waddles in a mud bank.

 

[Nutmeg]

Only my backlog.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Lack of barbarians

 

[HeatEXTEND]

If I like the game it's great and I'll finish it, if I don't it's not great and I drop, so never
For the record I don't think games like X are actually designed to be finished.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

With long games, sometimes you take a break for a short while, then when you get back, you realize it's been months and you've completely forgotten whatever it was you were doing it.

I mean if it's a great game, it really shouldn't have any annoying gameplay aspects that make me want to quit, no?

 

[Alter Sack]

Other great games.

 

[racofer]

• Terrible performance/optimization;
• Terrible controls;
• Terrible in-game systems;
• Riddled with bugs;

This sums up quite a lot of console ports.

Take the Dark Souls 1-3 as an example. Good games, I liked and finished all three, and I would like to play them again. However, I hate playing with a controller, and it's unforgivable how From refuses to make decent mouse+keyboard control schemes for their games.

There were other games I ended up dropping before getting even close to finishing them because of bad port jobs. I'm playing on a PC. Just make the damned game work like a PC game.

 

[Nutmeg]

Also back-log related, "saving the best for last" mentality. After I can tell I love a game, I move on. I guess I kind of feel its my priority to find out whats good first before diving in.

 

[Denim Destroyer]

If I abandon a game then it can hardly be great? With that said, here are some issues that lead me to abandon games I should be all means like with some examples included:

• Lack of inspiration (Parkitect and War for the Overworld) - Often these games are spiritual successors to yesterdays classics, but often lack some unspeakable quality which turn these seemingly good games into mediocre products.
• Difficult to install (Grimoire) - Games that require so many patches and mods to install for a basic experience where the act of installation requires hours of tinkering. Doesn't help to be a Linux gamer here like me.
• Unfinished (Any Early Access game) - I have many games on my Steam wishlist that have been in some state of development for multiple years with no release in sight. Neverlooted Dungeon, The Lost Wild, Ion Fury: Aftershock, and Art of the Rail are big offenders in this category.

 

[gabel]

The topic title is retarded, sorry.
Either a game is great, or it's not and I give up on it.
I don't give up on many games, because I know what I do and what I don't enjoy.
Which means I realise quite early that most games are shit nowadays.

 

[Eirinjas]

Boredom, fatigue, and regret about wasting time. The novelty in any game starts to drop off at the 30 hour mark. Great games can hold my attention longer, but any game that is 50+ hours long becomes harder to justify the time spent on to myself. For long ass RPGs, I feel pressure to hurry up to the end. When games are mission-based, like Thief, I find it easier to slot a happy hour in here or there and not feel pressure or guilt about playing it.

 

[911 Jumper]

Simply finding the motivation to turn on the console (my main machine is an Xbox 360 so it takes a while to start up), and actually sitting down to play has often prevented me from finishing great games. I think if I had a portable such as a Deck or a Switch, I'd def finish more games.

 

[octavius]

One of the few good games that I've played the last ten or so years that I have not finished is Terror From the Deep. I've played it on Super-Human Iron Man with alien weapons breaking, but it's the most fatiguing game I've played, with the levels being so huge, and with the sheer number of enemies on highest difficulty.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

I've played it on Super-Human Iron Man with alien weapons breaking, but it's the most fatiguing game I've played,

 

[Just Locus]

it's unforgivable how From refuses to make decent mouse+keyboard control schemes for their games.

When I playing DS3 on PC, It took me a solid 7 minutes to remap all the controls to where it was sorta comfortable to play on, and most of the controls were unfortunately mapped to the left side of my KB which resulted in me having to use my left hand (the hand I have arthritis on) a lot for a lot of buttons. It was not fun at all.