Games that you've lost momentum with (stopped playing)

[Kingjackl]

I'm currently on my third attempt at getting into Witcher 2, which has never held my interest in the past. I just got to Flotsam, which is where I gave up on my last attempt. I think what annoys me apart from the fiddly controls is too many made up proper nouns. Characters talking about made up fantasy events as if I should know about them hasn't been winning me over.

Dude! That's where the game really starts, the stuff before that is pretty much just introduction. A lot of the events they reference are from the books, but you will gradually get filled in on the context for anything important.

I wish you could skip the prologue, to be honest. I thought that's what would happen if you picked the last option when Roche is interrogating you (when he asks you which stage of the story to begin with), but he makes you go through all four chapters anyway, so I just ended up with a very muddled, eclectic flashback sequence where Geralt infiltrates the temple, flashes back to the assault on the wall, has a brief interlude with a dragon before waking up in bed with Triss. As far as I know the only choice you get is whether or not to spare La Valette, which could probably be covered in dialogue.

What really annoyed me, and it sounds trivial I know, is the dialogue sequence where you meet up in the bar with Dandelion and the dwarf bloke after saving them from the execution. You're meant to be having this chat about the line of succession, what everyone's been up to, etc. but it just doesn't flow conversationally compared to say, later Bioware games (and oh isn't that a comparison that's going to get me tarred and feathered). So I couldn't get invested in the world because it feels less like listening to four mates having a chat and more like listening to a Youtube lore video on the backstory of Game of Thrones with different names.

 

[infohippie]

I'm currently on my third attempt at getting into Witcher 2, which has never held my interest in the past. I just got to Flotsam, which is where I gave up on my last attempt. I think what annoys me apart from the fiddly controls is too many made up proper nouns. Characters talking about made up fantasy events as if I should know about them hasn't been winning me over.

Dude! That's where the game really starts, the stuff before that is pretty much just introduction. A lot of the events they reference are from the books, but you will gradually get filled in on the context for anything important.

I wish you could skip the prologue, to be honest. I thought that's what would happen if you picked the last option when Roche is interrogating you (when he asks you which stage of the story to begin with), but he makes you go through all four chapters anyway, so I just ended up with a very muddled, eclectic flashback sequence where Geralt infiltrates the temple, flashes back to the assault on the wall, has a brief interlude with a dragon before waking up in bed with Triss. As far as I know the only choice you get is whether or not to spare La Valette, which could probably be covered in dialogue.

What really annoyed me, and it sounds trivial I know, is the dialogue sequence where you meet up in the bar with Dandelion and the dwarf bloke after saving them from the execution. You're meant to be having this chat about the line of succession, what everyone's been up to, etc. but it just doesn't flow conversationally compared to say, later Bioware games (and oh isn't that a comparison that's going to get me tarred and feathered). So I couldn't get invested in the world because it feels less like listening to four mates having a chat and more like listening to a Youtube lore video on the backstory of Game of Thrones with different names.

Yeah, it's not the best conversation sequence. If I remember rightly it kinda bored me too. Most of the rest of the game's conversations flow much better, though.
I do agree that it would be good to be able to skip the prologue, especially if you've already played it through a couple of times. I think there are more things in it that affect later events than just what happens with La Valette, though I don't recall for sure. I love all things Witcherish, but even I found the prologue dull. It's a real shame, given how much better the rest of the game is, IMO.

One thing TW2 does have over Bioware games (and I do enjoy most of Bioware's games, too) is that your choices really do make a difference in how the game plays out rather than just whether or not you get cameo appearances from past characters. One set of choices even gives you a completely different second chapter depending on what you chose, and some of the choices carry over substantially into the third game. One of the great things about the Witcher games is that fairly often the results of your choices aren't apparent until a chapter or two later when it's far too late to go back and change your mind.

If you can't find it in yourself to go back and give it another try then that's fair enough, but if you have nothing much to do one day it wouldn't be a bad idea to try again and see what you're missing once the game really starts to take off.

 

[Zhukov]

Oh Christ, so many.

I shall restrict this post to the games I have attempted multiple times or else I'd be here all day.

- Dark Souls. I've tried it three times. Each time I got to Anor Londo or whatever it was called, killed Ornstein and Smough and then just sputtered out. I can kinda see why people like this game, personally I like the combination of danger and exploration, but it's just too bloody repetitive. I can only circle strafe so many enemies to death with iffy controls before getting bored. Having those enemies continually respawn for a fresh round of clumsy circle strafing is the final nail in the coffin.

- Alien Isolation. I should love this game, it's right up my alley and very well made. Sadly, the pacing is garbage. Too slow for too long. I've attempted it three times now and never got past the bit where you get the flamethrower.

- Valkyria Chronicles. Tried it twice. Each time I got up to the first desert level where my tolerance reserves promptly ran dry. The childish anime stylings make my teeth hurt with every breathless "eh?" and the gameplay just makes me crave something better, like XCOM.

- Darkest Dungeon. Tried three times. Good game in many regards, but each dungeon crawl quickly starts to feel indistinguishable from the last.

- Assassin's Creed Black Flag. I was lured into this one by the cries of, "Best AC game ever made", and, "They've really refreshed the formula". A proper pirate games sounded great. Sadly this game is not that. AC:BF is still an AC game no matter how hard it pretends not to be. It still thinks anyone in their right mind would give a crispy fried shit about the future bollocks and it still makes you tail someone every ten minutes because apparently they were scared players would have too much fun on the high seas. It doesn't help that the combat and animation is aged and stale. Once the ship combat got old I was done.

 

[Fijiman]

Minecraft- I loved the game, but when all my friends stopped playing it and I had already spent way too much time putzing around by myself I couldn't bring myself to play it much more.

Farcry 4- I'm probably at like the last 10% or less of the main game, but I just lost interest at that point. It doesn't help that the two idiots you're supposed to be helping make me want to smack both of them upside the head with my knife every time they speak.

Fallout 4- I've been taking a break from this for like a month and a half now due to other things happening in mother games. I might try to pick it back up once Nuka World releases.

I'm sure there's one or two more I'm forgetting right now, but without looking through all the games I have I can't think of them at the moment.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Dragon Age: Inquisition. I got to the Winter Palace for the ball and completely lost interest. I already maxed out every character and completed every quest/DLC/secret that are available to that point. I may get a guide and go back again...maybe. I loved and completed the first 2 games multiple times, including Awakening.

The trick to get through Inquisition is to just do enough quests to earn the power you need to progress the main story. Don't bother with the side content, it's 90% shallow filler anyway (unless you are a DA lore junkie like me), so just ignore it unless you have a lot of time to waste.

 

[ThePurpleStuff]

Skyrim, somehow, unless I purposely handicap myself by wearing the crappiest gear possible, I just end up so powerful that I just lose interest in questing. I waste hours of my life downloading, installing the game, finding and then installing mods, but the game itself is so horribly balanced. I run around stealing everything I can and see how much I can grab with a person in the same room before they see me. I don't care about the story since the story is so hard to follow and stupid anyway. I stop playing and uninstall to free my hard drive space at the same point every time.

 

[Dalisclock]

-Arcanum. I've tried to go through this game a couple times and I've never made it farther then Turant. The first couple times I ran up against a wall with difficultly and now I got to the first big city and just kind of stopped caring. It's sad because I've heard it gets really good. It's just the first town is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with and if you don't build your character right then it feels like getting past those three jerks guarding the bridge is nearly impossible.

-Dragon Age: Origins. I want to like this game and again, I've restarted it a couple times. The problem is I've never made it farther then halfway through the game, had to put it down for nearly a year and now I feel like I need to restart if I play it again because I don't remember half of what happened.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

I usually finish/plat everything I touch just for the heck of it.

One game I just couldn't stand to see anymore or spend even one more second with was the last one from David Cage. The one with the girl and the... thing. And the Indians. And the dinner preparation. And the submarine. And all that other crazy shit.

I loved Heavy Rain. I still do. That other one... not so much. Dang, I almost remembered its title. I hear that if you say its name three times, David Cage will come and brutally end you with his Zweihaender of Confusion. Might have been a dream, though.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

Zelda Twilight Princess. There's was nothing I really disliked about it I just didn't feel like playing it for a few days. Then a few days turned into a few weeks and eventually it reached a point where I had no idea what was going on or what I was doing. If I do play it I'd have to go from the beginning and I'm not in the mood for doing that any time soon.

I've tried to get into Dragon's Dogma a few times but I always end up losing interest around the 6-7 hour mark. It feels like a game that I should like but something about it just isn't clicking with me.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3D I put a good 30 hours into but over time my enthusiasm for the things I liked about it waned and all I could see was the bad stuff. I won't be revisiting that one.

I've played a couple of the gen 6 Pokemon games but I just lost steam somewhere along the way. With Pokemon I'll get into it for a while then get burnt out and have to take a couple of years off it. I think that's where I'm at now.

 

[Creator002]

For me, it was Dragon Age Inquisition. I only just recently completed it for the first time and I bought it in 2014.
To contrast, in that time, I've completed the Mass Effect trilogy 3 times.

 

[Jute88]

I'll join in and give my vote to Valkyrie Chronicles as well (frak the princess). Also, the characters and story were getting on my nerves.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I just never became comfortable with controls. I managed to beat the Ice Boss. After that I just couldn't force myself to go on.

Eternal Darkness. Nothing frustrating really happened during gameplay, I just lost interest during the modern day soldier's story. I do want to finish it someday though!

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam. The combat was just too tedious esp. when you got into some of the boss fights which featured sections of running away from the boss and either dodging it or throwing Paper Mario at it as a boomerang. Those wouldn't be so bad except that one fuck up and you're pretty much screwed.

 

[Soul of Cinder]

Assassins Creed: Black Flag because after it became Feels Creed I stopped caring.
Skyrim (Ps3) because after playing Witcher 3 and Dragon Age I couldnt bring myself to continue, mainly becauseof the AI and Ctrl+v characters plus the combat.
Diablo 3 because it?s boring.

I intent to go back to Mass Effect 2 and Salt and Sanctuary at some point, but for now they are just on hold until im done with witcher 3 and Hyper Light Drifter.

 

[Stewie Plisken]

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Gameplay's boring. More recently, Shadow of Mordor. I did eventually power through it, but it took me a long while to muster up the courage. Good game, don't get me wrong, but I got exhausted from the open-world stuff and the story was just kind of shit. The Elder Scrolls; all of them. They're fun to just mess around with some mods for a few hours and then just put them away.

Also, every single MMORPG in existence. I have played too many and I have never hit endgame in any of them (except the super-hero ones).

EDIT: Oh yeah, someone mentioned Inquisition; definitely. I mean, I finished the story, but I couldn't uninstall it fast enough once the credits rolled. About half the content went to waste.

Though I guess I did cover MMORPGs already.

 

[Beffudled Sheep_v1legacy]

I usually don't like putting down games. When I buy a game I try my hardest to finish it. There are still a few games that I just dropped for one reason or another though.
Lets see...

Far Cry 4: I loved the gameplay to death and I liked the story well enough. Unfortunately I got the endings spoiled for me and realized that both of your main quest givers were total fucking insane assholes that make the country shittier in their own ways. I was maybe 50% to 75% done with the main story and I had done almost all of the hunting and other little quests, so I put the game down because it had nothing fun left to offer me. I'd pick the game up again and shell out money for a "join Pagan Min and shoot some guns" DLC in a heartbeat though. I definitely liked him a lot more than that backwards dude and psycho chick that give you quests.

Destiny: I got it for free when I bought my ps4, but didn't actually start to play it until the first piece of story DLC was out. I forget the name but it had to deal with Crota (Krota?) or something. I played with a few buddies and had some fun, mostly because we ripped on the game and I was usually drunk or tipsy when I played. We all got evry annoyed at the lack of variety in the... They weren't flashpoints, I forget what they were called but in them you ran through a gauntlet of enemies and then fought a big boss at the end. Anyway, there were few of those but precious little else to do in the game, especially if you wanted to grind gear. One time we fought the Archon Priest (or something) 4, maybe 5 times in a fucking row. Me and my buddies eventually hit the point where EXP doesn't give you levels anymore, but we could never find any fucking gear to give us more "light levels" or whatever. We played for one more month after that and only one of us got the gear needed to level up, so we just quit playing. I went back to playing Halo and Borderlands and had much more fun than I ever did with Destiny.

Dragon Age Inquisition: I bought this game day one of release. And. I. Hated. It. I put it down before I even got to Skyhold, I think. I found it boring, the combat was not to my liking, and I was just not invested in the story or characters at all. I tried to play it again earlier this year and I actually made great progress. I wasn't exactly having fun but I wasn't hating the game either, it was a good time sink, which I needed at the time. So I grinded, did secondary quests, main quests here and there, and did lots of dragon hunting. The dragon battles, at least early on, were the best part of the game, buuut they got pretty boring too after like the fifth or sixth dragon battle. I got more into the characters, like Josephine, Solas (especially Solas), and Cullen. I didn't really get into the other characters though. Iron Bull was okay, pretty fun, but my PC already filled his role and did it better. Cassandra was an important part of my team, but I found her character to be kind of abrasive and needlessly antagonistic. Varric was just not as fun as he was in 2. I hated Sera (might not be her name, she was the lesbian elf rogue with the annoying voice and immature outlook on literally everything). I never used Cole, I didn't dislike him but I wasn't a fan of him either.

I did everything I could up until the Winter Palace mission or whatever, including the Grey Warden story line, and then I just got way too bored. The main story was not gripping me, I didn't care about most of the characters, and the gameplay was just meh. Put it down for probably the last time at that point. I don't think I'll be picking it up again.


I think that might be it. I usually force myself to play through games I find boring or kinda bad just to make it worth the money I spent, but the games above just had one too many flaws for me to force myself to play to completion.

 

[Laughing Man]

Quite a few games but the most notable one this year would be Witcher 3, not sure why I stopped but by the time I thought about coming back to it I had lost the thread of the story I was following and decided that I would just replay through again at some point in the late future.

Two games that I constantly play the hell out of then give up towards the end game are

KSP and Factorio both have serious late game issues that make the last part of the game quite a chore. KSP suffers (or suffered I haven't tried the new update yet which is meant to improve the issue I am about to describe) anyway it suffers from horrendous slow down, the thing is by the late game you are launching larger more complex rockets to go to further planets and do more involved and complex tasks. An early game rocket with 30 or so parts will achieve orbit in around 2 minutes, a late game rocket with 3 maybe 400 parts will take 5 times as long and it turns the entire late game in to an utter chore.

Factorio on the other hand suffers from a failure in the late game design, essentially all the late game techs require that you kill the hives of the creatures that live on the planet you have landed on. So if you want to run a peaceful game you can't complete the game, you have no option but to kill the creatures, even if you do go for this option you have to have the creature spawn rate at the highest value if you want enough of their hives to be able to effectively harvest the resource needed to complete the tech tree. Early versions of the game harvesting these was a chore, a case of setting up a beach head, taking out the hives closest to it and then moving forward a bit at a time, again a chore, new versions of the game give the player better tech that allows you to take a stab at the hives without establishing a beach head so it's less of a chore but the developers have said that they do not intend to include a peaceful mode, i.e you WILL have to kill the locals if you want to complete the game.... thank god the modding community exists, if only they would actually update the mods.

 

[Luxion]

-Project CARS: I was a little too fired up for this game, and was severely disappointed. Next to other sims like DiRT: Rally and Assetto Corsa it just feels like garbage so I stopped playing after a few hours.

Yeah same here. The most fun I've gotten out of the game is seeing some money from the Kickstarter in my Paypal account every few months.

 

[Dalisclock]

Quite a few games but the most notable one this year would be Witcher 3, not sure why I stopped but by the time I thought about coming back to it I had lost the thread of the story I was following and decided that I would just replay through again at some point in the late future.

Two games that I constantly play the hell out of then give up towards the end game are

KSP and Factorio both have serious late game issues that make the last part of the game quite a chore.

Out of curioisity, how recently have you played KSP? Because I remember that some of the more recent patches(since 1.0 or 1.2) had reduced some of the loading times by quite a bit.

Also, interesting you should mention factorio because I've had my eye on it and the only reason I haven't picked it up yet is because it's still early access and I'm pretty wary about buying games in early access anymore. I still might pick it up but I'm waiting to see the verdict once it officially releases.

 

[Veylon]

FortressCraft. It's practically an anti-exploration game. Technically, it's a minecraft clone but you are tied to a central hub by several different strings and cannot escape for any length of time. You have to gain energy (or DIE!) from the hub. You have to smelt and craft at the hub. Monsters come to attack the hub and you have to beat them off.

It's like if you started Minecraft with a furnace and crafting table already set down, were impossible to pick up, and you could only make more with blaze rods and they were eternally the target of flying creepers. Oh, and you would slowly freeze to death in the absence of your cheery furnace.

I get that the setting is that of a survival scenario and it certainly feels like one: do these tedious, dangerous tasks in the hopes of one day escaping this terrible situation.

 

[Captain Chemosh]

Shadow of Mordor, got killed by one captain twice which gave him immunity to stealth and ranged attacks and then he started showing up everywhere I went to foil my attempts on the other captains.
Overlord 2, the vertical stone elevator climb, it's caused me to quit playing twice now.