Talking with a co-worker yesterday, and I asked if he was going to get Destiny. He’d told me that he’d thought about it, but he was currently in the middle of Borderlands 2. He was considering dropping the game because he was at a point where it was very difficult to continue.
Later that night, I fired up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Remix, and continued my game from Re: Chain of Memories. After about 5 attempts of fighting Riku for what feels like the billionth time, I got frustrated and seriously considered shelving the game.
I’ve done the same to Skyrim, and GTAV. Skyrim because it is so expansive, I feel like I’ll never fully “beat” it, and I just got tired of GTAV. It’s not a difficulty curve, as much as I just got somewhat burned out.
Are you a completionist, or are there games that make you want to walk away for good? If so, what are they, and what moments?
After trying and failing at the last level of Portal twice, I looked over at my friend at whose house I was playing it, and said, “Just tell me how it ends.”
But that was an hour and a half invested. I don’t know that I’ve ever dumped a big RPG 50+ hours in or anything like that.
For most games, I’m all about enjoying the story. It’s like a choose your own adventure, really. So many RPGs end with some really hard levels even when they’ve already made the end clear. You know that you find the evil lieutenant and kill him, then you find the evil boss and kill him. Then everything is happiness and you marry the princess. Once I know that, actually beating the boss is kind of irrelevant. So many games end with a boss fight that isn’t so much difficult as just plain tedious, too. (This is why I never finished either Avadon game. I don’t really want to spend an hour on a single fight. I’ll go on the web to read the spoilers and find out how it ends.)
I still intend to return to Fallout 2. My save files got lost/overwritten while upgrading a computer, when I was this close to finishing the game. Some day I’ll find the time to revisit that.
Quite a few. Most recently Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, an otherwise serviceable open-world RPG in the Elder Scrolls vein, which became completely untenable midway through due to the utter lack of places to store your stuff.
I’ll never quit a game because it’s too hard – only if it becomes boring or frustrating.
My big issue w/ CoM right now is that it doesn’t appear that I can grind my way to have an advantage. If I’m at level 5 and I fight this boss, he’ll be at level 6. If I go and fight a lot of trash to hit level 15, he’ll be level 16. That type of thing frustrates me.
**Kya: Dark Lineage **- Totally uncontrollable battle system and at one point, they take all your good stuff away. Drove me nuts.
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Giana Sisters **- Twisted Dreams - Fun, but impossible at times.
Thanks to Steam’s ridiculously cheap games, I probably abandon more games than I finish. I have limited spare time–an hour of game time in a day is a real luxury at this point–so for me to finish a game, it has to have wonderful gameplay.
I’ve recently abandoned The Swapper, Fallen Enchantress, Bioshock Infinite, Fable, Path of Exile, Wizardry 8, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Anno 2070, and others, and I’m pretty likely to abandon Divinity: Original Sin soon.
I never beat the final boss in Dante’s Inferno because it was WAY too hard for me
I never finished either Kingdom Hearts games, mostly because I didn’t have constant access to a PS2 at the time and my 3 wasn’t compatiable
CLoser to what you were saying, I gave up on Dead Space. The camera was just too weird, and the controls were too confusing for me and I got to a hard part and I lost more than I cared to try and win…so I took it back
I’ve numerous games that I just sort of faded away from without feeling actively hostile to the title. But the most recent game I remember saying “Eff this noise” to was Remember Me. Under better circumstances, the story might have been enough to keep me going but the mechanics, linear hand holding and abysmally bad boss fights were terrible enough to kill it for me. I first dropped the difficulty to easy thinking that I’d just breeze through for the story but, another chapter later, I realized that I just didn’t care enough to deal with the game any longer and really wanted to play just about anything else.
Mirror’s Edge on the PC. Granted, I was using mouse and keyboard and it’s apparently a horrible mouse port. I got to the point where the character is climbing scaffoldings and kept failing at the same part of that climb. After an hour and a half of futility, I gave up and watched the rest of the cutscenes online.
You’re not abusing sleights enough. If you set aside maybe 30 minutes to build a sleight deck for your level the game becomes an utter joke.
The only cards you should actively be using are 0 cards (to break supers) and items.
See, people joke about KH2 being “press triangle to win.” That’s secretly COM’s deal.
Make “cascading” sleights, since using a sleight will use up the first card used in the sleight. For instance, Blitz will work on any three attack cards whose numbers add up to be between 10 and 15. The “ideal” deck for this is all 5’s, but since you probably don’t have that, structure your deck so you can just mash triangle, when you run out of attack cards reload, proceed to mash triangle again. E.G. For Blitz a truncated example might be 5 5 3 5 2 4 6 2 -> 5 3 2 4 6 2 -> 3 2 6 2 -> 2 6 2
Early game (after level 17) build your deck around Blitz, then later Sonic Blade (or tornado, but Sonic Blade is better for certain bosses), and finally Ars Arcana. Throw in a couple potions for recovery and 0’s for breaking boss attacks and laugh as bosses and enemies melt.
Also, when you level up, never take health. You don’t need it if you abuse sleights.
I don’t finish 90% of the games I play. Most just don’t hold my attention, or I might get to a hard bit and get sick of doing it over and over again, or I get a new shiny game and leave the old game for the new.
Dark Souls 1 and 2 - I got over playing the same stuff over and over.
Some of the more recent CoD games - First Person Shooters have become so mundane and same same, I’m completely over them, especially the ones that are mainly cut scenes with little bits where your hand is held while you essentially “play” through a cut scene. Civilization (all versions) I don’t think I’ve ever played a Civ scenario to the end, I get sick of it after a while despite loving the premise. Halo 2+ - I loved the first Halo but no Halo since has held my attention for long enough. Morrowind - A great game but I got bogged down in the detail. Oblivion - I made the mistake of finding out too much about how to get really powerful and then once I got really powerful it got boring.
Notable games I’ve finished:
Call of Duty 1 through to 4 - That’s how long I lasted before I got FPS fatigue. Fallout 3 - Tried once and failed, then went back after a year or two and had a blast. Skyrim - Same as with Fallout. I have to get the right character build for me to enjoy these games, it seems I get bored with anything other than a sneaky, rogue, ranged type dude. Mass Effect 1 - A great game. Xcom - See above.
For me to finish a game, the gameplay itself has to keep sucking me in. I can play some motor racing games such as MotoGP and SBK over and over, I can come back after weeks away and still enjoy it. The reason why is that I enjoy the physical experience of controlling a simulated vehicle. There are many other games where the physical act of playing doesn’t really grab me and the only thing that holds my attention is the sense of achievement after reaching certain goals. Normally that alone is not enough to keep my attention and so I put it down once the goals become harder to achieve.
Most games that I Give up on I rarely play more than half an hour.
I gave up on Radiata Stories, Shining Force EXE and Valkyrie Profile after the first chapter, too boring.
I gave up on Super Mario Bros U about halfway through, it’s just too hard.
Epic Mickey. I was having fun and enjoying the story when I got stalled on a difficult bit. I ended up ragequitting that day and never went back to it.
I didn’t get very far into Dragon Age II at all. I loved Dragon Age, but II was like a sequel to a completely different game. They cut out everything that made the original great.
And no one finishes Skyrim, you just get to the point where you figure your character is retired in a tower somewhere waiting for the bat signal.
Woo! I’m not the only one listing this! It wasn’t even really a conscious “Welp, I’m done with this game”; I just saved, shut down for the night and…never felt motivated to go back and play it. Maybe someday I’ll watch the plot on Youtube.
I don’t know that I’ve EVER abandoned a game because of the difficulty, though there are games I’ve never finished as a result of the difficulty, but we’re talking about stuff like Ikaruga, where you’re kinda not EXPECTED to finish unless you sink a lot of time getting better at the game. I DID finish Hard Corps: Uprising, which was pretty difficult.
Games are generally abandoned because the combination of story and gameplay isn’t compelling enough to stick with, or, occasionally, because something more interesting comes along and I just never get back to the old one. Though there are a couple in my Steam library that fall into the “Got for super cheap, played once, didn’t like, never went back.” category too.
I gave up on Skyrim, or maybe it gave up on me. On XBox, when you accumulate too much loot and build too many manor houses, the game starts getting buggy. Crashes and graphical glitches become annoyingly common. So do problems like items you have stored in known safe containers vanishing from the game. I had completed the main quest and the DLC, so I just kind of drifted away from the game without ever really deciding I was finished. My daughter plays it on PC where, apparently, these things aren’t an issue.
Oblivion: The power-escalation curve as I leveled up eventually reached out and smacked me in the face; I found myself running from city to city, being chased by a trail of trolls, wolves, bears, and all manner of cranky & inhospitable beasts who would just never stop chasing me. I read up online about how I should be leveling my characters so they’d be able to handle things and found that I had to fanatically mini-max my skill development so as to maximize stat & skill increase, and by the way, I wasn’t even halfway to the level where the game was supposed to be playable, and I said “ok, screw this.”
WoW Cataclysm & Mysts of Pandaria. Completed the main quest chains in Cataclysm leading up to rawr raid time, and my guild went completely buns-up and stopped raiding, so I never got to the endiest of end game material. Dropped out for a year or so and bought a 3-month card when MoP came out, then played through the Panda quest line until I found out there really wasn’t one, and dropped out. FWIW, my main was a Kingslayer prior to the release of Cataclysm, so there’s that.
Please don’t laugh at me, but I’m at level 45 (did a bit of grinding last night) and on the 8th floor of Sora’s side of the story, where Riku is stonewalling me. I have, probably 5 “0” cards and don’t really utilize slights, so that’s probably where my issue is (and I’ve been stockpiling health, hoping to wear him down).
It wouldn’t be so frustrating if I hadn’t beaten the game when it initially came out. I’m wondering if they tweaked the difficulty when they did the re-release, because all the guides I’ve seen state that Riku should only have 2 health bars, and when I encounter him, he has twice as many.