I'll just kill Alduin n-

[Prosis]

Star Ocean 3

...tedious hours of forging Tears of Aphrodite to get the ending I want.

I never really cared about the affinity values or tears. But yeah, the forging system in general drove me to quit that game. When you need a guide to make decent weapons for your character, you know there's something wrong with the game.

Let's see... Usually for me I quit a game when I forget to save, or lose essentially hours of work through some means. Or if I lose enthusiasm for the game. IMO, RPGs in particular are hard to pick up after they've sat for a month.

Also, I'm not sure if Alduin was a glitch. What was your bow enchanted with? Iron arrows generally suck.

 

[Arakasi]

Lucky, I took Alduin down in about 2 minutes with iron arrows.

I was sorely disappointed.

 

[Atlas13]

Oh! I got a good one!

Ok, so there's this part in Battlefield 3 single-player where you're climbing along the outside of a subway. The whole thing is pretty much on rails so all you can do is move back and forth and do quick-time events, but there is this one part where you have to jump from one car to the next. You hit the quick-time event as prompted, but every time you try you just go off the rail, miss, and die.

Err, maybe that's the part where you have to mash the button? Cause there's a part where you have to mash the button.

 

[Trivun]

I was playing the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim about five minutes ago. Seeing as I do not have the expansion I decided to finish the main quest that I progressed on and then took a month or two break from the game (See GameInformer's "Every RPG Ever" flowchart for the process). I was just about to fight Alduin for the first time, so I went back to doing that. Alduin flew around, I spammed dragonrend and put about 300 (not joking) iron arrows into him. I looked up at his health bar and saw it was not even scratched. Not a single hit.

So for discussion:
-What has stopped you from finishing a game? was it a bad cutscene? Maybe a terribly hard level?
-What are some of the biggest glitches you've encountered, such as the one I described?

Lol, I wouldn't call that a glitch, I'd call it being poorly equipped. Iron arrows aren't going to do shit to Alduin. Get yourself some Eleven or Ebony arrows, and make sure your bow is the best and the highest quality you can make it. And as someone else pointed out, dragonrend just makes him land, it doesn't actually do damage. Arrows are rarely the best weapons against dragons, especially if you have dragonrend. Just make him land then slash or magic away at him.

Anyway, I started replaying Final Fantasy X-2 for shiggles a few weeks ago, but I got stuck and I haven't been able to get myself out of there since. I'm stuck right before a boss battle with The Magus Sisters (one of Yuna's previous aeons, but gone bad). I went up like 10 levels, got the best abilities on Yuna and Rikku's best dresspheres, and they still get me. It's their stupid rage attack--it brings you to one health, and then even without Haste they always attack like 2 times for every one time you get to attack. Oh, and there are three of them, so by the time you get to act again you've been attacked six times and you are definitely dead. Once I find some time I might just grind another 10 levels to the point where I can blast the motherfuckers out of the water before they even get a chance to do it.

Go to the Via Infinito in Bevelle, and just work your way through the levels. You get a pretty decent amount of grinding there anyway, but at something like level 40 (out of 100), you get a boss where if you win you get the Catnip item. That makes all damage done by the wielder equal to 9999. Just give it to Yuna, make sure she has the Trigger Happy Lv 3 ability (easily gained from the previous grinding) as a Gunner, and the rest of the stor is piss easy. Kind of a cheap way of doing it, but ah well. And the side plot of the dungeon is pretty interesting too, fitting in nicely with the main plot, but you don't really have to go further than the Catnip reward dude if you don't want to. I made it to like level 80 or something before the bosses were too hard and I gave up. On the plus side, with that amount of grinding it took me about ten seconds to beat the final boss - for each of his forms - which has to be a record for me, given how tough I found Braska's Final Aeon in X. I've only beaten that time when I fought Orphan in FF13, and that was again because of silly grinding times...

CAPTCHA: fezes are cool. Yes, yes they are. River was out of order, shooting it...

 

[Waaghpowa]

I played the PC version, so I didn't get that kind of problem. I hear that some of the bugs are really bad on consoles.

I beat Alduin as a 2 hand melee/heavy armour character. Do you understand how hard it is to fight dragons as a melee class without dragon rend? I spend triple the amount of time required to kill one because I have to use bows given my low skill by comparison.

I also have yet to finish a Call of Duty game because I find them incredibly tedious. I'm also surprised I managed to finish Gears of War 3, it was so horribly predictable and formulaic I had to push myself to finish.

So basically the only reason I don't finish games is due to boredom attributed to being crap or unfun<--apparently not a word.

 

[Patathatapon]

Quantum Conundrum.

The game was just too shit, and when a stupidly hard puzzle came along, I just gave up. didn't bother looking up the answer, I just gave up. I looked up the ending on youtube, which was even worse than the game.

I'm glad I didn't finish it for that.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Final Fantasy 13: I realized how stupid I was getting for playing it for so long.

Yeah I pretty much stopped playing when I realised it wasn't going to get any better. Which was about a quarter from the end -.-.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

If the story is lame (in the cases where it has a story), it really makes it difficult to muscle through to the end. I started Just Cause 2 recently and didn't get anywhere because the story was just so meh. Same with Saints Row 2. I'm playing Pikmin 2 now and I'm within $1000 of clearing the debt and I just don't care at all. What, is the gameplay going to amazingly grow and develop into something new? Is it going to be revealed that the manager is a mob boss and the whole thing was a massive crime ring?

I guess the key idea here is lack of variety. I was able to muscle through Skyrim because I liked the storylines, but now that I've exhausted everything that I want to see and I've almost maxed out archery, I can't play it anymore. I don't care about the Stormcloaks or the daedric artifacts.

 

[Davey Woo]

I think I beat the crap out of Alduin with a Skyforge Steel Greatsword.
It really helped that the 3 hero people with me were absorbing all the damage he was dealing, he went down in about 20 seconds.

I still haven't finished Lost Planet, I got about 5 levels in, the story wasn't engaging, I hated all the characters, and the boss fights were either too difficult or too boring. So I think that's definitely the worst game I ever bought.

 

[Rawne1980]

I really dislike driving in games, timed missions and quick time events.

If I come across anything like those and I don't do what needs to be done within a few tries I give up.

 

[SciMal]

So for discussion:
-What has stopped you from finishing a game? was it a bad cutscene? Maybe a terribly hard level?

Shitty controls that require some level of inhuman prescience (no, I'm not going to memorize enemy location after 30 reloads - that's so 90s) to progress.

Also, very shallow stories layered on non-platformers. Haven't finished Assassin's Creed because of this. I just can't get into the story, and being able to wrist-stab people doesn't cut it for me.

-What are some of the biggest glitches you've encountered, such as the one I described?

I don't remember any particularly notorious glitches. I don't buy a lot of games in the first place (see: shallow stories), and those I do are usually from studios that put out reasonably operable games (Valve, BioWare, Stardock, indie studios).

 

[StraightToHeck]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

I dunno, arrows didn't seem to make a difference to damage output after a while. An higher level bow with some decent enchantments, some fortify archery buffs and a high skill level will do stupid amounts of damage even out of sneak, I guess to compensate for Oblivion's lackluster marksman skill. Not meaning to brag but, my level 50 has a bow that does over 300 BASE damage without a sneak bonus and I still used iron arrows, and if you're finishing the story at an earlier point in the game than that, then I'm interested to see how you went through the game as a whole.

Back on topic: clipping straight through a solid stone block in Sonic Generations. I literally just said "No, Sega, just no."

 

[kuyo]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

Also, you might want to let dragons fly around since it lets your voice and majicka recharge since their dps is much lower when they're doing flyby's.
Normally, I look into games enough to know what I'm getting into, so the only time I don't finish a game is when it wasn't that much of an investment, like Darksector, Vampire Rain and GTA4. Games I got for five dollars. Total. (yeah, it took a lot for me to go against my instinct on GTA4, and I regret doing so.)

 

[Ravinoff]

Metroid Prime came pretty close with the Omega Pirate fight, took me months to get past him. Still haven't finished Dragon Age II because of the horrible ganking I get during the fight with the Desire Demon, a Blood Mage and about half a million darkspawn in at the Docks. You know the one, right at the end of the game when you're fighting through the city. My party isn't even slightly built for swarms that big.

 

[Jolly Co-operator]

An unreasonable spike in difficulty will usually make me stop playing, at least for awhile. For a recent example, the "Mean Juggernauts" mission during Dollface's campaign in the Twisted Metal reboot. Holy shit is this mission unreasonably hard. I don't mind a reasonable spike in difficulty, but there's generally a line you shouldn't cross (Especially since I was only playing on Normal difficulty). To put it mildly, they jumped over the line with a damn jetpack.

 

[A Weary Exile]

I ran into this same bug. Reloading saves sometimes fixes it.

The penultimate and ultimate battles with Alduin are really disappointing IMO. Overall I felt most of the big "Set pieces" in Skyrim were really underwhelming. Should have just kept derping around the wilderness, that I enjoyed immensely.

 

[ecoho]

Eh, for some reason I can never seem to get around to finishing Dragon Age: Origins. I don't know whether it's the requisite micromanaging in battle, the fact that I played as a rogue, the general atmosphere, or the fact that the game didn't really give us a chance to connect to the world before hell opened up under our feet[footnote]Thereby making it harder to get a feel for exactly what was at stake. What are we fighting for? A return to better days we never saw?[/footnote]

You're fighting Alduin and the best thing you brought to the field is -iron arrows-? Did you consider that maybe you're just not doing any appreciable amount of damage? Also, Dragonrend doesn't actually do damage, it just forces the Dragon to land and I think might mess up their shouting.

While granted, he probably should have been using stronger arrows, Alduin's hp is not so high that the damage would be unnoticeable. What's described seems more like another instance of a well known bug, which renders Alduin incapable of taking damage during that encounter. That in turn renders the quest impossible to complete, as Alduin retreats when his hp hits a certain point. The typical workaround for this is reloading a save prior to using the elder scroll.

i can make dragon age fun for you if you want but it does invove the use of a glich to reach max lvl and the game scales with you so fights will be a bit harder if your interested let me know

OT: oh lets see so many "you got to be kidding me" moments.
ok ninja gaiden's kitty cats of doom which will pull you into an infinite fucking combo till you die.
star ocean the last hope, just went on waaaay too long.
the ending of fable 2 pretty much made me hate that game.

 

[-Drifter-]

My room-mate's buddy gave us his copies of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. I didn't play much of the former, but wound up putting a respectable amount of time into the latter. For the most part I didn't have that much trouble with the game - I was surprised to find that so many people had a hard time with the Taurus Demon in particular, 'cause I took him down on my second try. Then I got to Blighttown.

God, I fucking hated Blighttown.

Narrow walkways, confusing level design and nearly invisible snipers shooting poison tipped darts... it just sucks all around (keeping in mind that being poisoned in Dark Souls is a major pain in the ass.) After trying to get through it about twenty times, I realized that what little fun there was to be had with this dreary slog of a game had officially dried up. Honestly, I couldn't tell you why I played it for as long as I did.

As for the biggest glitch... Once, while trying to climb up a big rock in Red Dead Redemption, John went right through the ledge he was grabbing and fell screaming into an endless void where every frame of animation was frozen in place, sort of like when your computer crashes. It only lasted a few seconds though, after which he just landed on his ass back where he started, unharmed.

 

[Veldt Falsetto]

I stopped playing FFXIII after that brilliantly moving moment with Sazh, because I realized that there was nothing the game could do to make itself better and that I had just hit its high point.

Palumpolum and Nautilus are EASILY the best points in the game...easily but they are genuinely fantastic chapters too

 

[Ghonzor]

I stopped Dragon Age 2 because it was a massive slap in the face after Origins.
I stopped the Witcher 2 because holy fuck it's a long game.
Other than that I'm at least in the process of finishing every other game I own.