Games you stopped playing

[Callate]

I try, once I've started playing a game, to play it through to at least a basic conclusion. Occasionally I dabble in different games when I'm in a mood for a 4X strategy game and an FPS and an adventure game, but usually I hammer away at one until I can call it a wrap. I'm embarrassed to forget the intricacies of controls and mechanics from a long absence, and I tend to dislike feeling like I've wasted time having to re-learn or re-do things I've done before.

Partly as a result, I've played some fairly mediocre-to-wretched games to conclusion, including Duke Nukem Forever, Silent Hill: Homecoming, and Blue Harvest. (Your mileage may vary, and while I understand if you love one of those games with a passion, that's not really what I'm here to talk about.)

Occasionally, I just plain get fed up with a game.

I was making pretty good headway in Hotline Miami 2. Sure, I was dying a lot, but that was the nature of the beast. Yes, my more successful stages were in the C to C+ range; still, I was making progress.

Then I got to a level (some of you may be familiar) in which you're forced to play as a character who can only punch. And while his punch is lethal to most enemies, there are tougher characters who you can only temporarily knock out. And as always, one hit from anyone is pretty much enough to take you down, so those bad boys are going to keep getting up and coming after you over and over again until you miscue your timing slightly and start the whole level over one... more... time.

I just stopped. I said, "You know what? There's nothing fun about this in any way, shape, or form. This isn't 'challenging'; this is the developer trying my patience, seeing how much abuse I'll accept in the hope that something fun is around the corner. Congratulations, dev: I've reached my limit."

It isn't always a matter of difficulty. Sometimes it's being railroaded into repeatedly using a bad mechanic (a problem that plagued GTA IV, for all its other virtues.) Sometimes it's another annoyance- a character whose voice you can't stand, or "friendly" AI that wrenches defeat from the jaws of victory, or a trigger at the end of a long sequence that fails to trip the way it's supposed to one time in three.

Sometimes it isn't a "bad" game. I think there's a lot to be said for "Hotline Miami", even the second one. I'm a tiny bit bummed out that if I want to see it played through, I'll probably have to go to Youtube.

Anyway. TLDR: what are the games that you've played for a while and put some effort into, but decided you just had to stop playing? And why?

 

[Casual Shinji]

Recently, The Witcher 3.

I really did like this game a whole lot. As a matter of fact it was the entry that turned me around on this series. But after three weeks of playing it I was just spent. And I got to a point where the main storyline was taking over from the side quests, when it was the side quests that provided the most fun. It'll likely be quite a while before I ever return for another attempt.

I also never finished Bioshock Infinite because of the incessantly limp shooting and a story that really wasn't pulling me along much either.

 

[Lufia Erim]

Wait how is that not challenging? I mean you are now faced with enemies you can't kill so you have to develop a new plan or strategy to get around it. Isn't that meaning of challenge? It sounds to me like you are doing the same thing every time and being surprised when it continuously fails. Try something different. Now if you say you think it's cheap that may be a different story.

OT: i usually finish games i start. Outside of strategy games i usually don't have a problem finishing games. The last game i just stopped playing was bloodborn. I got to the final boss and just got kind of distracted.

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

I tend to often break off Adventures and RTS-campaigns. There's a number of reasons for that, but first and foremost I find it extremely annoying that in Adventures there is often just one right answer which enables you to progress and which requires you to have all parts of the answer. You just have to miss one random item lying on the ground somewhere to get stuck. Walkthroughs are helpful, but don't really help with enjoyment. A recent example is "Dark Fall: The Journal" where it was immediately obvious that I would not enjoy it. Atmosphere was not bad, but in the first 90 minutes or so of playing I had already stumbled on several puzzles where I could not even remotely guess the solution. I guess my problem with Adventure-games comes from the fact, that they can be very different in terms of how the puzzles work. Games like "Gemini Rue" and especially "The Cat Lady" were comparably straight up in terms of puzzles and I finished both of them. Same for "Sanitarium". "Machinarium" was somewhat difficult, but puzzles were often relatively self-contained and did not require me to fight the system or some badly implemented idea some designer had. And then there are games like "Dark Fall", which are meant to be very difficult and Adventures like "Anna", which suffer from bad design. Add the fact, that I'm terrible at puzzles and you have a bad combination ;-)

With RTS-campaigns it's more a matter of mission design and length of the campaigns. Usually after a while missions just get so difficult or grindy to not be enjoyable anymore. And this has usually nothing to do with skill. In Dark Reign 2 it was just a matter of extremely bad path-finding and map-geography (valleys and streets :-(), slow moving vehicles and shots... I really liked the soundtrack and couldn't complain about sound or aesthetics, considering how old the game is, but it was simply not enjoyable to have so little control.
I started out liking "Warzone 2100" (Freeware by now!), but after 15-20 hours I realized that I was just about to finish the last mission of the first of THREE campaigns. I just didn't enjoy the game enough for that. A game being too long has been a problem more than just once.

I'm trying to play both newer games and older games and sometimes games just can't make up for having aged badly (Deus Ex for example, but I intend to give it another try sooner or later). I stopped playing "Deadlight" (even though I was almost finished) and "Mirror's Edge" because I thouroughly hate Trial and Error and context-sensitive bull*****.

"Dragon Age: Origins" is probably the only long game which I have ever broken off in spite of having played for something like 50 hours. I won't get into why that is, because I have already talked about it at length in another thread. If you are interested:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.867424-Trying-to-understand-my-disappointment-of-Dragon-Age-Origins

 

[Poetic Nova]

I also never finished Bioshock Infinite because of the incessantly limp shooting and a story that really wasn't pulling me along much either.

Stopped playing this one aswell, and I'm only 2 chapters away from the ending. Can't be bothered, which is funny since I was fully immersed into Infinite up untill that point.

First Bioshock is one that comes to mind aswell. I might be in the minority here but Bioshock is just a boring slog to go trough. To this day the only game that I actually threw away into the bin.

 

[Guffe]

I only have one game to date which I just stopped playing out of boredom and the fact that I had no frikkin' clue of what was going on!
The name of the game is Baroque. A dungeon crawler (I played it for the Wii, not sure if multiplatform or not) and I just found it Super repetative and boring and I never got anywhere. I thought I killed the last boss at two or three times, but the game just announced, "you failed" and had me start over. No clues what I was supposed to do or why, such a pain in the ass. I put around 15 hours into it before quitting.

 

[BeerTent]

Occasionally, I just plain get fed up with a game.

I was making pretty good headway in Hotline Miami 2. Sure, I was dying a lot, but that was the nature of the beast. Yes, my more successful stages were in the C to C+ range; still, I was making progress.

Then I got to a level (some of you may be familiar) in which you're forced to play as a character who can only punch. And while his punch is lethal to most enemies, there are tougher characters who you can only temporarily knock out. And as always, one hit from anyone is pretty much enough to take you down, so those bad boys are going to keep getting up and coming after you over and over again until you miscue your timing slightly and start the whole level over one... more... time.

I just stopped. I said, "You know what? There's nothing fun about this in any way, shape, or form. This isn't 'challenging'; this is the developer trying my patience, seeing how much abuse I'll accept in the hope that something fun is around the corner. Congratulations, dev: I've reached my limit.

I think I know where you were. You gotta hit space-bar on those bigger guys. Punch them to knock them out, and then finish them off. But, yeh, I agree, HM2 was a bit much. I feel like they made it difficult for difficulty's sake just to drive people away, and then the ending so people would not ask for a 3rd. The 1st one is miles better.

As for me? GTA5.

The story, is... Well, dumb. It doesn't hold me at all. Franklin's the only "good character" Trevor is lazly written as "This is the open world player as a character." and while the jokes are pretty funny, his antics get old around the 3rd time you see it. Michael's solution to all of his problems are "Crime! " and this is the guy trying to get out of it. He shouts, bitches, and moans about his problems without really realizing that his stupid anger issues got him in this situation.

And then there's GTAO. The Heists were the interesting thing because combat in GTA is lackluster at best. Sub-par in just about every aspect. 90% of the missions are racing, or killing, which are the two main things you can do in GTA, which leaves us with the Heists. Disappointingly put missions, and easily blown through in a week. Bad when the best part of them were the cinematics. There's a lot to do in GTA... If you like minigames. The Wii did those minigames better.

 

[StreamerDarkly]

Wait how is that not challenging? I mean you are now faced with enemies you can't kill so you have to develop a new plan or strategy to get around it. Isn't that meaning of challenge? It sounds to me like you are doing the same thing every time and being surprised when it continuously fails. Try something different. Now if you say you think it's cheap that may be a different story.

OT: i usually finish games i start. Outside of strategy games i usually don't have a problem finishing games. The last game i just stopped playing was bloodborn. I got to the final boss and just got kind of distracted.

You accuse the original poster of failing to change tactics and eventually dodging the challenge, and then claim you just "got distracted" on the final boss and didn't bother returning to Bloodborne? This comes across as just a tad hypocritical.

I'll assume you're talking about Gehrman instead of Moon Presence as the final boss. I urge you not to lose heart - go farm 20 more vials and give it another go. He's not a pushover in the least, especially with that cheap AoE attack from the sky. If you've mostly avoided parrying the entire game, now would be a good time to learn.

On the topic of very-challenging-but-not-in-a-good-way parts of games, Frigid Outskirts in the Dark Souls 2 DLC is an area that a pissed a lot of people off and caused them not to finish. Getting to the boss fight is possibly harder than the fight itself.

 

[Thyunda]

Wait how is that not challenging? I mean you are now faced with enemies you can't kill so you have to develop a new plan or strategy to get around it. Isn't that meaning of challenge? It sounds to me like you are doing the same thing every time and being surprised when it continuously fails. Try something different. Now if you say you think it's cheap that may be a different story.

There's a difference between a challenging problem and a problem challenge. Dying in The Witcher 3, for example, made me rethink my strategy and the game opens itself up to that. Different decoctions, different oils, all lending itself to altering your game plan. Some games, like Hotline Miami, don't sit well with that. The music, the colours and the fast-paced action tend to throw too many things your way to think beyond a basic plan that you'd have to die a few times to be able to come up with, and at the end of it, if you're not having fun preparing your plan, you're no longer playing a game, you're doing the homework required for you to play the game in front of you.
I didn't enjoy Dark Souls, for this reason. I'm a little bit of a completionist (at least, I like to find as much equipment or experience as I can as I'm going, but I tend not to pick up a game I already finished for all the collectibles) and it bothered me that Dark Souls has so much shit hidden away that I actually had to hire a navigator. Sure, the next objective is probably on that path. Could be on the other path though, mate. Oh, and if you want a fighting chance against the black knights, make sure you buy that longbow and some arrows - you'd better buy sixty because I know you can't shoot worth shit - and find the dragon and shoot his tail thirty times to get the drake sword.
Sometimes a game becomes a headache...and that's why my contribution to this thread has to be Dark Souls. The combat didn't deter me a bit. Havel and his giant hammer? That battle was legendary. I had fun. I mean, I died a few times, but that's expected. What matters is that I knew what I was doing wrong and if I just got the timing right, Havel would be my *****. Five deaths later, and Havel was indeed my *****. I think I stopped playing a bit later...after you get the armour that the protagonist wears on the cover - after that dark forest place. I vaguely remember a sewer - I fell off one of the walkways onto a giant rat, whom I battered into submission and then asked my navigator where I was and what I was meant to be doing. Apparently it was a boss I filled in when I fell on his head - and then after a gauntlet of slimes, I think I was just too mentally exhausted to play the game anymore, and I just haven't had access to my navigator since, and I don't want to play the game without him because, first, I don't want to miss anything, second, I don't want to be wandering around the game world staring vacantly down random alleyways, and third, I don't want to be breaking my immersion every five minutes by staring at a walkthrough. Amazing how having a friend read directions to you can do wonders for immersion and fun.

Actually, I want to add the first Witcher to this, but for slightly different reasons. The combat means that if you're not a high enough level, you're not winning that fight. Necrophage oil is all well and good, but there's like six graveirs and only one of you, so you'd best go level up, bruv. Leveling up means doing quests. Doing quests means running around looking for random people and having conversations that just plain go nowhere. I wouldn't mind having to research the monsters so much if the books weren't so expensive, so Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, the Butcher of Blaviken and famed monster hunter spends a long bloody time rolling dice with fat bastards with trousers on their heads.

 

[IceStar100]

Mine was Ico so I get to play it at last and I realized I had to play music to entain myself. Just not a game for me it seems.

 

[maninahat]

I broke off the first Witcher game because it was a broken mess of a thing that was a slog to play. A typical hour of game play would see me attempting to find 10 bear asses for questionably dressed females. Combat revolves around entering a building and getting wacked by swords the literal second I come through door, causing my character to stagger backwards through a solid wall and into oblivion. On top of that, the constant grim darkness and prurient displays just felt immature and tedious. The thing I liked best was the bloody dice game, and even that is broken. I'm only an hour into the sequel, and that has somehow managed to break the dice game even more. As hilarious as it is that a game might make it possible for me to cast a handful of dice, only to miss the board completely and send them into orbit, it does disrupt the actual game.

I also stopped playing Dead Island. That is an excruciatingly boring game.

 

[d00mMarinEBG]

Risen pissed me the f**k off afther two hours so i stopped playing, didn't even bother with the sequels.
Fallout Brotherhood of Stell was a diapointing mess, ejected the disk from my ps2 afther 10 min.
Far Cry 2 afther playing for 5-6 hours i just stopped caring, same goes for Hellgate London.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've stopped playing GTA: San Andreas, Dead Island, Demon's Souls, Red Dead Redemption... sorta floated away from them.

The name of the game is Baroque. A dungeon crawler (I played it for the Wii, not sure if multiplatform or not) and I just found it Super repetative and boring and I never got anywhere.

Yep it's on the PS2 as well. Nearly got it myself, looked intriguing.

 

[lacktheknack]

Probably Skyrim.

I just keep getting too distracted and eventually get overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. It's happened five times now.

 

[Guffe]

The name of the game is Baroque. A dungeon crawler (I played it for the Wii, not sure if multiplatform or not) and I just found it Super repetative and boring and I never got anywhere.

Yep it's on the PS2 as well. Nearly got it myself, looked intriguing.

I also looked up some Youtube vids and such before getting it.
It did only cost me 15? on Ebay so it wasn't a full risk, so to say.
Just wasn't my cup of tea, a few Escapist members have quoted me in the past when I mention this game and said they really enjoyed it.

 

[Teoes]

Most recently I just stopped playing Pillars of Eternity. I started it with a view to Let's Playing, but didn't like the feel of LPing it. Too much reading/narration, I felt it'd be a boring watch. I wasn't feeling it in editing so abandoned after three episodes.

I kept playing off-camera and was really enjoying it, getting to partway through Act 2. Had to stop playing for a while to concentrate on other things (mostly starting other games to Let's Play those) and just haven't felt the urge to pick it back up again. At this point I'm not sure if I'll get that urge. Shame.

 

[McElroy]

I never finished Far Cry 2, got halfway through, but I enjoyed the mp much more. Also I used to play a lot of Miniclip 8 Ball Pool until, on top of a losing streak, I was greeted by a hacker. Nowadays the game is total crock anyway, pay-to-win cue stats and so on.

 

[Pyrian]

If a game doesn't hold my interest, I quit. No sense in wasting my time.

Recent(ish) games I've started but haven't finished:

Bioshock:Infinite (finished 1&2, although 1 is mostly slog after Ryan)
Dead Island
Fallout: New Vegas (maxed out my level and quit)
Frozen Synapse (this game invites me to spend forever just making one move)
Magicka (I hate the way the faerie makes you lose your equipment)
Receiver
XCom: Enemy Unknown (later levels get more and more boring)

 

[LeQuack_Is_Back]

Oh god, where do I start?!

GTAIV, after my car flew off the road when I was trying to take the first date home.
GTAV, because I felt like I wasn't making the most of the whole stock market system
X3 (and all it's variants) because holy **** is this micro-manage heavy! I spent 3 hours trying to get a captured fighter back to civilized space so I can repair and rearm it and some stupid transport ship blundered into it.
Assassin's Creed in general, because I'm just worn out on the premise.
Red Dead Redemption because... it just wasn't doing it for me.
Dark Souls after my first character won, because the novelty of my other characters (pure tank, pure mage, etc.) wore thin.
Bloodborne because it came during a really difficult time in my life and I really didn't have the patience to die repeatedly on what little downtime I had from work.
Xenonauts once I saw that gas grenade spam stopped working and I was behind on the rest of my technology.
Evil Genius, because I had no idea what I was doing.
Darkstar One, I left for a while to do other things and forgot all the controls.

... I need to get back to a lot of these.