I think if you’ve finished the main quest then you’ve “finished” the game. Anything else is extra. Akin to replaying a game so you can see alternate endings or explore different areas.
There’s a lot of games on my halfway-completed list. I have a tendency to burn out right at the 30 hour mark. I need to be particularly interested in the story or particularly focused in order to finish a game over 30 hours all in one go. Since I’m into RPGs, Strategy RPGs, and Action games this tends to happen a lot.
The longest I’ve gone is 8 years between dropping a game and picking it back up again. In that case it was an RPG where I was particularly invested in one of the characters, and I watched someone else beat it. The ending included that character’s death. I was quite close to that point myself, so I dropped it so I could get over the fact I’d have to do the death scene too. 8 years will definitely take the edge off the inevitable. It also helped that when I had the itch for that particular style of gameplay I could pick up any other game in the series, so I happily beat three other games in the series before getting back around to that one.
There’s only one game I consider myself to have dropped permanently after giving it a good go, and it’s Dragon Age: Origins. Then again, I’ve tried Morrowind about 5 times and given up every time, so I guess that belongs on the list too. And Myst. Yeah, I didn’t like Myst much. But I still intend to beat Full Throttle even though it’s been 5 years since I started. And maybe one day those Regenerators in Resident Evil 4 won’t freak me out and I can beat that game.
But most RPGs I’ve played have been dropped for some length of time after the 30 hour mark, and then picked up again a while later to finish. Strategy RPGs usually have a better time keeping me. It never is a conscious decision. It’s just one day I save and turn it off, and the next day something keeps me from booting it up - life stuff or I felt like reading instead or whatever. And my attention is broken, and I move on to other stuff. 6 months later I’m thinking “Wow, I need to get back to Lost Odyssey. What happened?” I’m getting better about it now, though, and making a point to go back to old games rather than start new ones.
I gave up on Civilization 3 because, when you quit, there was a timer showing how much time you played. I got to about 1800ad on my first game (over multiple sessions), retired/quit, and the game told me that I’ve been playing that game for 36 hours. I was like “What? That’s a freakin’ work week! Surely there’s something better I could be doing with my time!”
So I never picked it up again.
Borderlands 2, Rage, Duke Nukem Forever. I like FPS games but I’m apparently not that good at them. Dying a lot even when playing in easy mode is frustrating. If I can’t easily turn on God Mode I’ll give up.
I wasn’t enjoying the game much at all but then when stupid Anders made a return, I knew I was quitting soon. I couldn’t stand him in Awakenings and was thrilled when my game ended with Anders having perished from a sudden arrow-performed tracheotomy. Retconning his dumb whiny ass back into the game was a bridge too far.
And, no, Justice didn’t save him in my game since Justice was with me the whole time.
I stopped maybe halfway through The Last of Us. I never got into it. I heard it was the BEST GAME EVER, so I bought it about a week after it came out. I haven’t touched it since I quit.
I loved Vice City and San Andreas, so I bought GTA IV the day it came out. I played it for 30 minutes and sold it. Hated it. Loved GTAV though…
This was my first thought as well. So much wasted potential.
Skyrim and Mirror’s edge also just failed to hold my interest.
I rarely finish any CRPG. For instance, I started playing all the elder scrolls games, but never finished any. I always end up being fed up with the game. Even though I started many, many games. I have to come to the conclusion that I like experimenting with various character types, but rarely find the story compelling enough to really need to know the conclusion.
Currently, I’ve been trying to finish Dragon Age origins, that I started more than a dozen times about one year ago, I came quite close to the end, but now the character development phase is mostly coming to an end and I guess I’ll have difficult fights to finish it, and I don’t care for that. For instance, with Oblivion, I just didn’t want to have to go through yet another of these laborious gates to hell, so, I never could bring myself to finish it (something else I’m an outlier for regarding CRPG is that I hate long dungeon crawls).
I mostly like leveling up, picking equipment, visiting places,experimenting new character builds, reading a story, and killing bugs easily. I absolutely hate having to reload ten times because I’m fighting the big boss and it has to be very hard. In the past, I would tend to be extra cautious, to visit places that were too easy for my level, and try to beat the game without ever dying. Currents RPG typically don’t allow that, scaling up opponents to your level, not being very forgiving with weird character builds, and making the assumption players will save and reload a lot (I hate doing that, but no amount of caution will get you to stay alive for long in most recent CRPGs).
It’s not just that I’m unsatisfied with the way these games are made, however. It’s also that I tend to switch suddenly from very enthusiastic (spending all my time playing the game, wanting to try plenty of things) to completely fed up with it from one day to the next.
I feel bad about it but I gave up on Divinity: Original Sin. Its a pretty difficult RPG that gives the player plenty of rope to hang himself with and will happily let you go and get stomped by a zombie troll thats got 5 levels on you. I was enjoying the Baldur’s Gatesque experience until I got into the mines with the invulnerable Death Knights. One of my party contacted the rot(he didn’t have the bag to carry the dark ember mace he picked up) and only one of my party had any points in sneak. Having to try and get 4 characters to sneak through miles of Death Knight infested tunnels and getting killed on the very first turn if spotted proved too frustrating. I went back and tried to get through it a couple of times, but eventually just gave up. Truly sucks how such a promising game is ruined for me by an unskippable stealth section.
You got farther than me. I had so looked forward to DAII, but now I’m going to really wait and see on DA III before I buy it.
AITD is , of course, a classic. I’ve played it many times.
I’ve never been able to find a bug free copy of AITD2. But, what I have been able to play has been fun.
AITD3, has every kind of pulp adventure but the kitchen sink. Parts of it are goofy. But, overall it’s a good game.
New Nightmare stinks! I don’t play Resident Evil ( I tried once and didn’t like it). They seem to have thrown away everything that was good about AITD in an attempt to copy Resident Evil.
Instead of being a 40 something classic hard boiled private dick who wishes the supernatural would just leave him alone, Carnby is a troubled gen x on a crusade against monsters.
Instead of puzzles, everything is fighting. Dead monsters respawn when you re enter a room. You have to keep careful track of ammo.
An unkillable boss keeps popping up. Carnby has grenades. Why he can’t and doesn’t stick one in the boss’ mouth the second time he seems dead and refuses to move, I don’t know.
There’s an antique wooden door surrounded by glass panels. No weapon you have will get you through it. You must use the key. There is no indication as to how the door got so tough. Minor spoiler for AITD3- There’s a door in that game you have to shoot to open. I found this out when I got really frustrated and shot it.
Instead of being able to save whenever the hell you wanted, you now need an Amulet Of Saving.
I’m sure there’s more, but I refuse to remember it.
Yep.
Gave up on the main storyline of X[sup]3[/sup]. Anyone who’s played can probably guess where.
Ragequitted about 90% through Metro 2033.
Most traditional RPGs (Elder Scrolls, Fable, Dragon Age, etc.) I just lose interest in but will eventually return … for a while until losing interest again. Diablo, Torchlight, Fallout 3 & NV, I will finish at least once and will return to when in the mood.
You only need one character with Invisibility to run through it, really. And one of the companions knows air spells already. There’s also invisibility scrolls and potions but the duration is a bit short.
I hate to say I don’t start more games than I quit and I quit more games than I finish. Some because the game is a stinker but most just because I get bored.
Let’s see…
I’ve played a lot of games that were abandoned because they just weren’t that good. I don’t want to list those.
Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - I remember that this game had serious problems that prevented me from playing it, possibly with the combat system or collision detection but don’t remember exactly what they were. The game was as clunky as all hell and wasn’t that much fun so I gave up on it.
There was a FPS dungeon crawler that I played a while back. I think roughly around the time of Anachronox, but I can’t remember what it was called. It was set entirely underground, with tunnels leading off from the city to different areas. You’d use a key or object to unlock the areas. I remember there was a bit where you had to get something from a goblin king, and there were different solutions, including poisoning his food. Towards the end of the game these insane creatures attacked the city, and they were just too tough to defeat. I managed to kill one or two by putting haste and tons of other high level spells on myself, but it nearly wiped me out and took a ton of reloading. All the other bad guys were in groups. So I just gave up.
I also abandoned Lionheart for the same reason. Because the game auto leveled monsters, and I didn’t put points into whatever spell you needed, I couldn’t pass the end game monsters. I couldn’t go back very far in my save, so I was stuck and had to abandon game.
Going waaaaay backto the 80’s, there was an arcade game called Super Cobra. It was a side scroller through a maze filled with enemies. There was one narrow part where you had to go down to the bottom of the screen, then up to the top, then back down, in less than one screen length. Maybe I was just uncoordinated at 14, but I must have put over $40 in quarters into this game (over a few months) and just couldn’t pass that tricky part. For the record, I could beat at least 20 other games on one quarter, including Black Tiger, Sky Shark, Punch-out! and Super Punch-out!, Arkanoid, and many more. Super Cobra is one of my few marks of shame.
I’m about to abandon Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, I think. Even on the easiest setting, it is frustratingly hard. Too bad…as I have been enjoying the plot and atmosphere.
Answer: darn near all of them. I can’t seem to finish a game.
I did beat one version of NetHack. I think it was the first version. That’s been it. I get so bored of games so fast.
The only RPG I can think of that I’ve never finished is Wizardry 8. I reinstall and play it from time to time - the character development is fun, the story is cool, but I wind up getting fed up with the insipid combat system. If you want to move during combat, you have to sacrifice your turn in order to do so, but of course the monsters you’re fighting are under no such restriction.
Heh. I got out of the tutorial dungeon and that was it.
Did you set the difficulty to “Proud” maybe?
But seriously, set aside 20-30 minutes to build yourself an Ars Arcana deck. The game isn’t even fair anymore after you do. You almost literally never have to actually move the analog stick to win.