How long until you give up on a game?

[Silvanus]

If I'm going to give up on a game, it usually happens pretty quickly. Less than half an hour. If I'm over halfway, then I usually plough through.

Same with books and films. There are a few films I've left almost-completely-watched (because I've started them really tired and fallen asleep), and they irritate me until I rewatch them.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

The absolute MOST I'll give a game is 2 hours. If a game isnt at least somewhat enjoyable or show promise within the first 2 hours I'll put it down indefinitely. Though if I really feel like I've gotten an idea of what the game is going to be about and I really hate it I'll just sort of drop it on the spot.

Honestly if I put down a game it's usually before the halfway point. If I have the end in sight, I'll probably just finish it but chances are if Ive gotten that far I like the game to some extent.

 

[MrDumpkins]

So I got bored of LA Noire about 3/4s of the way through but felt I needed to finish it and plowed through without having much fun. Now I'm a little more than halfway through Prototype (I like buying older games on Steam for $2.50) and I've given up on the story and the gameplay is getting repetitive. I feel guilty just stopping without completing the main storyline but I also have about 140 titles in my Steam queue waiting for me.

What do you guys do?

If I get bored with a game I just quit it, maybe some time down the road I feel the need to come back to it. But I'm not going to be a slave to game if I'm not having fun.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Really depends for RPGs I usually give them a fair go. I dropped The Last Remnant after 40 ish hours in as it just wasnt getting any better and Baldurs gate 2 after about 8 hours because I disliked the combat intensely (but I keep meaning to go back to this game). Other games I drop pretty quick if its supposed to be action based and its not exciting me after an hour or two it gets dropped for story style games I am likely to give it much longer same with competitive type games as I find they tend to get much better later on but it all depends how much I am disliking it but then again my most hated game in existance Donkey Kong Country didnt get dropped until about 10 hours plus so I am fairly persistant.

Some games get dropped because they posses a near insurmountable obstacle to me such as the hoverbike level in Battletoads.

I do tend to finish most games I start though its just starting them in the first place. Oh also having my data wiped when im 40 hours into a game usually means I drop it.

I also have a self made rule where I stop playing a game if its really pissing me off but that has only happened twice this gen and neither games got dropped permanently they just got put on cooldown.

Just because I drop a game dosent mean I wont ever finish it though I dropped Mario the Lost levels when I was a kid because it was to hard later on for me 18 years later I picked it back up and finished it....and partied.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

It all depends on the game and series and genre for me. When it comes to JRPGs, you can't really stop before the X hour mark because of how slow a burn those are. I stopped playing Ni No Kuni after about 2 hours and I'm still whacking things with sticks for example. Then there was Final Fantasy XIII which "gets good at chapter 11". I got to Chapter 11 after many hours but once I got there, only to find it was the same old shit, gave up on the thing.

Most other games you can figure out within the first few minutes (I like to call these good games but it makes me sound like an asshole who hates RPGs). You can play these games for less than a quarter of an hour and know what 99% of the game will have you do. I don't dislike games like Wario World and Star Fox Assault but I easily figured out what they were and haven't gone back to them because...well other games.

 

[theseworlds]

There's a few games I haven't finished, for one reason or another, but the most recent, I'm quite ashamed to admit, is the Last of Us. It's won all these masses of awards and is said to be THE best game of the PS3 era, but I just can't finish it.

I know there's a wonderful game in there- the world is beautiful and vast, and the interaction between the characters is great. But I can only seem to play it for an hour or two at a time before I get bored and give up, due to one reason: the damn sneak set pieces.

There I am, walking around, searching and exploring through the wasteland, having a wonderful time. I get to a building, and climb through, still enjoying myself. And then I hear a scream. Or a click. Or people talking. And I think, "Oh god, I have to sneak past/kill all these bloody things again, which will work for a while, but will inevitably end in a fist fight of some kind and I'll die and have to do the whole damn thing again".

Like I said, there is a great game in there, no doubt. But I just can't pull myself to finish the damn thing. I'm not having fun.

 

[kickyourass]

I'll usually give the game a few hours before getting a feel for how good it is, a game has to hit pretty hard and fast with the horribleness for me not to muscle through at least an hour or two.

 

[T_ConX]

A few hours. Five maybe. If a game doesn't have me hooked after 4 hours of gameplay, it's done. I think Yahtzee said it best:

I won't bother quoting specific examples, suffice to say there were a lot of them. The main thrust of the argument was that Monster Hunter Tri totally gets good once you've gotten past the tutorial, which takes about ten hours of gameplay.

...

Besides, does the game really get better after ten hours, or is that just the point when you become numb to the pain? Unless at that magic ten hour mark the game goes "Ha ha, just kidding, here's a completely different game" and magically transmutes the disk into Shadow of the Colossus or something, I don't see how it could significantly improve.

Source

I tend to fall into a strange variant of 'Sunk Cost Fallacy'. If I've invested enough time in the game, I feel as though I owe it to myself to see it to the end. Part of this is what got me through Umineko last summer. Then, when I beat them, I vow never to play them again. There are games that, while I think very highly of them, I never want to play them again. The typical 70+ Hour JRPG (unless it has a NG+ mode that lets me cut out hours of grinding), like Xenogears or SMT:Nocturne.

 

[Stg]

I don't sell games, ever. For me, I stop playing a game when it stops being fun. I know some games have slow points or lulls between action when story-telling is necessary (I love a great story so that never kills the fun for me), but when a game just gets down-right boring is when I put it down. I never finished Prototype, but I finished Prototype 2. I finished inFamous but I couldn't push past the halfway mark for inFamous 2. There are countless games that I loved at the start, but the fun trailed off somewhere in the middle and I just couldn't see myself wasting my time on it any longer.

So, when I find myself struggling to even play a game is when I find something else to play. The only game I ever tried to get rid of was that PS2 abomination of my beloved Spyro series. With the introduction of a "combat system", the removal of collecting everything in a level, the linear aspect, and the absolutely retarded aspect of adding VAs (famous VAs no less), made me want to get rid of that game quicker than I could put the disk back in the case. Sadly, I paid $40 for that game and all I could get in return was $5 credit at Gamestop and that felt like a bigger slap in the face than actually keeping the game.

 

[blackrave]

GTA4
I got to the point when cousin's (can't remember or bother looking up his name) car shop/wash/thing (what was that again?) gets burned down and they flee.
After that I just stopped.
Also- whoever made GfWL should suck one kilodick

 

[Yopaz]

I have a complex formula:
a^3+3b-12c+3xt>y

a is a matter of my expectations for the game, b is the amount of time I have been waiting, c is the critic's general appreciation for it xt is the logarithm of the time spent and if that adds up to being more than y, which is the time spent being bored, stuck, confused, annoyed or angry with the game then I will continue.

No seriously, it depends on the game. If I play a game and I don't have fun. I stop playing. I don't have time to play games I love, I don't waste it on playing games that bore me. If I have gotten into a game and I get bored at some point I put it down. Maybe come back to it later unless it was fun enough while I liked it for me to see it to completion. It's NOT science.

 

[Keiichi Morisato]

i usually give a game 5 hours of my time to generate a proper opinion on the gameplay. if i get bored with either the gameplay or the story, i don't finish the game.

 

[Artina89]

I try and complete games whenever possible before buying another one to avoid backlog, as if I don't finish the game I feel that I have wasted my money, but recently I have been so busy with work that if a game hasn't grabbed my attention after roughly 2 hours of play, then I will give it to my brother or my housemates. As a result, I have become quite discerning when it comes to purchasing video games. The only games I am interested in purchasing is Watch dogs and South Park: The stick of truth so far this year.

 

[L. Declis]

Well, my thought is basically this: I have over 100 unplayed (not even opened) games on Steam; if I play a game that is just un-fun after I've gotten the hang of the controls, and I have no investment, I just stop. There are literally better games to move on to, and I've still got too many.

Sometimes, a game will just boring; but if I've enjoyed it, I'll tend to keep it as I'll get the bug later. These tends to be the strategy games (Civ 5, Dawn of War, Total War) or building games (Minecraft, Simcity).

Is it a story game? Do I like the story? Have I finished the story? Then I stop. I don't replay games. I don't have the time, and I am constantly trying to keep ahead of letting them pile onto me.

Is it a game in a series I like? I'm currently struggling through FFXIII-3 for it's terrible controls, but it IS a Final Fantasy and I've finished the rest of them and I'm not going to let this one beat me, although it's pretty damn close. Assassin's Creed 3 got about 3 hours from me before I was utterly bored. As I've finished the rest, I shall return at some point, just to get the story.

 

[otakon17]

A few hours usually. I gave the shitacular Final Fantasy XIII eight hours. However after NO plot progression in that time in any noticeable amount and seeing what they did to the Bomb monster design I said "NOPE! NO MORE!" and returned it. However with the absolute KING of shit games, Two Worlds I couldn't play past an hour. It was maddeningly bad and the absolute worst game I have ever bought.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

It really depends really, since I don't usually give up on games.

I can't say I gave up per se on Baldur's Gate 2, but I always seem to say that I'm going to go back to it (have it on my desktop), but I have so many games/tv shows/books to play/watch/read in my backlog that I don't think I will ever get the time to get back to it and finish it (I'm around half way there).

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I don't really have a set standard for that. It's generally the point where the game feels more like a chore than a game. Either that or a reach a point where I know I'll never be able to win no matter how hard I try. Or the prospect of persevering just feels so arduous, which I guess goes back to it feeling like a chore.

 

[Skeleon]

I've stopped a lot of games somewhere in the middle... but I tend to keep the savegames around, so sometimes I revisit them later.
If I've invested a lot of time already, I may sneak a peek at a walkthrough to see how much more is ahead of me and decide to power through or give up depending on that.

 

[EHKOS]

I have a consistent 3-hour limit on Final Fantasy games according to my memory cards.
I have a 20 minute rule for movies, where I have to watch at least the first 20 minutes.

For video games it's in the ballpark of 40 minutes to two hours usually.

 

[Panorama]

i played 40 hours of kingdoms of amalur then hit a game breaking glitch which didn't let e get any further in the main story line, and got very angry and sad as i really liked that game.