What does it take to get you to quit a game?

[mightycasey]

Been thinking about this tonight since I purchased Shadow of the Colossus/Ico the other day. After about an hour and a half trying to locate and then defeat the third Colossus (shut up, I know I suck), I realized that somewhere along the line it'd morphed from a thrilling quest to a tedious slog and even though I was one stab away from beating him I didn't feel like going through the whole process of climb/fall/climb/fall/climb/climb/climb/fall/climb/climb/climb/stab again, so I said "yeah nope" and shut the system off. Maybe I'll give the game another chance, but as a guy with a wife, a job, and a bunch of unplayed Humble Bundle downloads...probably not.

And yet, I was more than happy to play Super Meat Boy for hours and hours, at least until I beat the main game, even though it was probably much more frustrating at times. So what's the difference? I think it came down to:

1: Mechanics: SMB was tight and consistent, while SoTC felt inconsistent and hostile
2: Instant turnaround: SMB is full of failure, but you're right back in the game within seconds after a failure, where in SoTC it's much more of a slog to recover when you mess up.
3. Walkawayability: A word I made up. With SMB you could walk away pretty much any time and return later at nearly the exact same spot. SoTC demands I take however many hours it takes to beat each Colossus with no saves in between. I think this is the biggest factor--I only game an hour or two at a time, so I need a game that can accommodate my schedule, not the other way around.

TLDR: I tend to quit games with bad mechanics that make me replay long sections when failing. What makes you quit or stick with certain games?

 

[tippy2k2]

It takes a lot to get me to quit a game because I'm stingy (quitting feels like a waste of money) and I'm a glutton for punishment. I can count on one hand how many games I've straight-up quit, which I'll bring up in my examples. There are two big no no's that will cause me to drop a game.

1. Bullshit challenge without being engaging

Bullshit difficulty to me is the game is difficult due to either bad/unresponsive controls or it throws challenges at you that I can not reasonably avoid. Generally, I will suffer through what I feel to be bullshit difficulty if the story grabs me (see Devil Survivor: Overclocked) but if I feel like the game is stupid in it's difficulty and I don't care for the story (see Witcher 2), then I will drop you out of my gaming life.

2. Technical Issues (see Dark Souls)

I liked DS. I really really liked DS. It was challenging without feeling like it was a bullshit challenge (see #1). However, the freaking frame rate chugged like a fat kid on a treadmill. Seriously, I'm still baffled how a console game can run so badly (you know exactly what you've got under the hood dev!) but I just got stuck at a point that I couldn't pass because the frame-rate died on me. It was a real shame since I feel like I could greatly enjoy this game but alas, it's just not meant to be.

 

[Zhukov]

- Monotony and/or repetition. If I feel like I've just done the exact same thing four times in a row then the game probably isn't going to last long. Bethesda games exemplify this. It's also probably what keeps killing Dark Souls for me. Oh, and it's also the reason I've never played a MMO longer than three hours.

- Bad controls. Few things are more frustrating in gaming than pressing the button you need to press and not having the thing you need to happen happen. Looking at you, Alpha Protocol.

- Bad checkpoint placement. This ties in with the repetition thing. Having a checkpoint, then some unskippable cutscenes, then some easy stuff, then a hard bit is about as bad as game design can reasonably get. It means that every time you fail on the hard bit you have to suffer through the cutscenes and blow through the easy stuff before taking another crack at the challenging bit. This is what took The Witcher 2 from "Meh, it's ok I guess" to "Fuck this game with a rusty gardening fork". Also shows up in Dark Souls.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

There are a lot of things.

The quickest thing is probably if I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing, especially at the beginning of a game. If I feel lost, or have no idea how to do even basic actions, I'm very unlikely to want to stick though a game.

Similarly, if I don't like how a game controls I'll be unlikely to stick with it. This has less to do with the actual tightness of the controls and more to do with how a game "feels". It's very difficult to describe, but if a game feels off to me, I'll probably not want to stick through it. This is especially prevalent for me when playing first person games using a gamepad, although those aren't the only ones.

One that perhaps applies to more games is getting stuck. I don't really get frustrated, I just usually put down the game and do something else. If I end up coming back, if I can't make noticeable progress I'll probably put it down again and not pick it back up again. This tends to be less of actively quitting a game and more of every time I think of playing it I think of having to do that section again. Interestingly, this is usually less of a section being difficult and more of me not figuring out how to do it or me trying to do something that I'm not supposed to do yet. This has become less of a problem since I've started realizing that I do it, because I'm way more likely to look at a guide to see what to do.

The biggest thing, however, is just distraction. I play the game for a while, have fun, start playing something else, and then don't go back to the first game. This is definitely where a vast majority of my backlog comes from, and I honestly can't think of any way to stop it aside from not starting completely over if I got halfway though a game. There are some games that it's taken me years to complete because of this.

 

[Random Argument Man]

I lose interest when I try to play more than two games at a time. Like you, I bought the SotC/Ico package. I like SotC. I never felt like a badass until I killed the flying colossus at the lake. Getting its attention, jumping on the wings, trying to find its spot while keeping my grip meter up. It felt good.

But, I also bought Metal Gear Solid 4 at the same time. I've played it and finished it. I have a satisfying conclusion to the questions the franchise brought me.

Problem is, I never finished SotC. I'm at the boss where you need to flip him with geysers. I need to shoot the hooves and try to find his weak spot. Flipping him takes a shit ton of time to do though. It's so boring and I know the other bosses will give me more of a challenge, but I don't have a particular need to continue the game.



Other examples would be Silent Hill, Fatal Frame 2, Batman Arkham City, Persona 3 and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. They're not bad games, but I either don't feel the needs to complete them yet. Although, in the case of Silent Hill and Fatal Frame 2, i'm pretty sure that its because I am scared shitless to continue...

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Mostly I seem to get bored with repetition or distracted with another game. Probably a combination thereof.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

Reading a map.
I really don't know why I hate maps so much, give me a pointer or the Dead Space line, I'm fine, make me read a map, I'm done.
The only game to get away with it is Metroid Prime because Metroid is my favorite series and because it has the best 3D map I've ever seen.

 

[dumbseizure]

Last game I just outright stopped playing and returned was Time and Eternity, and it was because while the combat was fun, it would have been more fun if it was responsive.

Press the dodge button and wait wait 2 seconds doesn't work in a game basses around fast paced battles.

Not to mention it froze on me twice in the first 40 minutes of playing it.

So for me, it has to be responsive, and it has to actually work consistently.

 

[Elfgore]

Well, I simple ask myself if I'm having fun. If I'm not, I'll usually give the game one or two more hours to make me change my mind before I quit.

If we're talking about controls or features that make me quit. They would have to be bad combat, fake difficulty, unnecessary features, and boring story.

 

[Lilani]

I quit playing Cave Story right after the part where you get the option to fly away and let everybody die, just because the next boss battle was such an exercise in the kind of controller-snapping difficulty I absolutely hate in platformer bosses. I HATE bosses that aren't forgiving, and I HATE that platformers tend to not have a leveling system so you can't just level up a whole bunch to squash a boss that's giving you trouble. I should be able to defeat it how I want, and if that means getting 10 levels on the sucker then that should be my choice. I don't mind challenges or having to try something again and again, but only if I feel the task is surmountable if I try enough. After a few tries in that fight, I was just done. I saw no light at the end of the tunnel so I just put it down, and haven't picked it up since. I don't care if that means I'm a quitter or a pussy. I was playing the game for the story, not the challenge.

Also, Ico. I just couldn't handle dragging that stupid girl around and having her get snatched up if I'm not holding onto her hand every ten seconds.

 

[WeepingAngels]

A few things:

Slow intros - I bought the game to play it, not watch long cutscenes about a half ass story that wouldn't survive 5 minutes with a respectable Hollywood director. I know video game stories suck and I am ok with that, unless you shove the damn thing down my throat. Sure a story is necessary but keep it short and sweet. Look, the beginning of a game is the worst time to do a huge exposition dump because I don't even know these characters yet and I don't care about them yet. Another example would be those tutorial levels at the beginning of a game where the try to hide the shitty tutorial. You know the kind I mean, the one where you have to do things exactly as the designers want or you will be stuck in the tutorial level forever. What a fucked up way to introduce a new player to your game.

Long Tutorials - This ties into the previous example. Most modern JRPG's spend way too much of my time treating me like an idiot. First of all, a JRPG doesn't need to be complicated enough to need a long tutorial. If your games needs a long tutorial, then maybe you should go back to the drawing board. While I am mashing X to get past the bullshit tutorials, I am thinking about a day when I could just play the game and consult the manual when I needed to. Has anyone noticed that modern manuals are printed on the fuckin sleeve? Indeed, if your tutorial makes me think too long about Breath of Fire 2, then I am likely to turn your game off and go play that.

Mazes - I love my oldschool JRPG's but I don't miss the mazes. I used to work my way through them but I am older now and I just don't want to fuck with them. I usually look up a map but sometimes I just turn the game off. I am playing for the fun, not the frustration of getting lost.

Difficulty - When the difficulty is so high that I have to repeat sections over and over again, I'll usually turn it off. Nothing fun about repeating the same shit over and over again.

That's all for now but you know what, I am so burned out right now I could probably list many more.

 

[shrekfan246]

Being bored.

There's a lot I can handle as far as poor controls, interface, story, and sometimes even gameplay is concerned, so long as the game actually entertains me in some way.

I don't tend to finish most of the games I play in the first place, though. I'll go back to a few of them every now and then and finish them long after the fact, but I tend to only finish games which really grab me, and there's no definitive reason or explanation behind exactly what will grab me.

EDIT: As an addendum, being frustrated as well.

Pretty catch-all as far as answers go, I know, but there are so many different things I'm willing to try in the first place that there generally isn't one or two specific things that will turn me off of a game.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

If I get so stuck that I cannot proceed. That has only happened to me three times. Dark Souls, I rang both bells, and could go no further. The enemies in the new area were just stomping me too much, and I still hadn't really figured out how to play the game, so I just gave up. Pleased to say that, after playing Dark Souls II, I am back in Dark Souls and understand it a lot better.

Bayonetta. Got to the part where you have to fight some sort of train in sky, and I couldn't kill it, or even hit it because you had to use ranged attacks. Just utterly gave up and sold the game.

Finally, Street Fighter IV. Seth. Enough said.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Ya redoing sections over and over again... that shit is just not what I intend to spend my limited gaming time on, which is why I'll never beat a Souls game until someone puts in a save system.
I'll also quit a bad multiplayer run, had one last night, over 20 matches in WoT and either my team was so shit we got rolled over or my team was so good they rolled over the enemy before I got a shot in, which just made my presence completely useless.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Loading times, a game like The incredible Adventures of Van hellsing is notorious for this and since then hasn't made me ever want to play it again.

Required controls, whenever you have the option to play a game with either M+K or gamepad but the game still sticks you with one of either I will most likely put down the game, again Van hellsing is a likely example since it's a Diablo clone but had the requirement for a controller even though I just wanted to use my M+K and the game was pretty much PC only so I couldn't ever wrap my head around that.

Having to redo entire checkpoints instead of specific area saves, I;ve always hated games where I just want to play a certain level of the game but I;m only given the option to play through the entire chapter just to get to the certain level I wanted to play, then it;s over and if I want to do that I'd have to repeat the chapter all over again, this kills the game for me a lot in terms of re-playability.

 

[gorfias]

I just quit and deleted an amazing time sink: Candy Crush. I'm stuck on an annoying, boring, aggravating level. Something good was about to happen and get me through this and I'm pretty sure it glitched, killing what I was doing. I'm done. Deleted it.

As for regular console games, I have a butt ton back load, but I haven't sold or thrown out any. I haven't really quit. I just haven't finished. If I haven't finished timely enough and a whole new generation of games comes out, I'll often sell them to buy into the newer generation.

 

[Nomanslander]

If the game is boring, repetitive, bland, same old same old, and my favorite... straight up broken. I'd say Skyrim has to be the most broken game I've allowed myself to like. Plus every other Bethesda game.

 

[FPLOON]

Luck... Glob damn fucking LUCK!

No, I didn't not beat this section of the game because I had "the skills to pay the bills"... I beat it because that ONE enemy missed its que to kill me long enough for me to proceed further in this fucking game!

Also, when I'm either bored and/or feeling the repetitive nature of the game taking over...

Honorable mention goes towards difficulty, in general... since that's more difficult to pin down when I do put said game down in the long run...

 

[ThePurpleStuff]

I have a similar story of the OP regarding SotC, I was fighting the giant serpent eel, whatever, boss, he only needed one more hit before he flung me off and I had to swim allll the way back over to dry land since I was literally at the end of the water. No matter how much I tried to get his attention he wouldn't resurface or swim toward me. So I had to go all the way back till he saw me, then go back to dry land just to hit him one more time. Which also happened to be at the top of the body near his head. So I had to hold on and climb the whole way, hoping he wouldn't go under the water and fling me off. But I killed him, and it wasn't satisfying at all. Never picked up the game again.

Basically don't waste my time with shitty AI/Programming and I'll replay your game over and over for years to come if its that good.

 

[MHR]

I have a very high threshold for "boring" gameplay. What gets my goat are straight-up bad mechanics or base imbalances.

Dark Cloud 2: I was playing just fine and enjoying the whole game, but got depressed when I found out the monster tranformation mechanic was underpowered garbage. Ruined the whole thing for me after a while since I wanted to kind of 100% the game.

I quit World of Warcraft a long time ago for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the PvP was junk. Despite all the classes being as balanced as stilts on a treadmill, there are a few specific things I hated. Graveyard zerging in the open world was an awful mechanic. Yeah, everyone hated having their corpse camped, but I'm talking about when you kill some suckers but they just don't stay dead. Their bodies are going to randomly rise and you can never get rid of them. If you wanted to be safe, you had to kill them and just leave the area. Hit and run was sometimes fun, but large engagements easily became huge cluster Fux. Other MMOs fixed this by making you simply respawn in a faction graveyard when you died.

Burning Crusade introduced flying mounts which made open-world PvP worse. There was no continuity to the battlefield. It was easy to avoid other players, zip around everywhere without consequence, and randomly inexplicably get ambushed by death from above you probably couldn't have seen coming since you were too busy killing things on the ground.

The biggest PvP factor for my quitting was that arenas were the only endgame PvP at the time in Burning Crusade. Having the reason you play the game amounting to a boxed-in arena with some pillars and ramps to mix it up wherein you deathmatch again and again and again against min/maxed broken bullshit class combos got boring and depressing. After I gladiator ranked season 1 of the arena, I was already through with it.

The absolute worst insult was when they ruined Alterac Valley. This big epic PvP battle zone turned into a PvE racetrack to kill the end NPC boss. Complete terrible garbage. You would actually get yelled at by the other team for being turtles if you ever tried to engage them directly in PvP combat... in a PvP battleground.

Guild Wars 2 I quit because the innovative MMO combat system thing just didn't work well enough to be really fun on its own. The two dodge rolls were the only truly unique thing about it, but they tried their hardest to milk that for all it was worth. No class roles meant that all the PvE was like a group of all DPS classes in another MMO trying to play a dungeon. Lots of kiting and trying to burn everything to the ground as fast as possible before problems could arise, which is really just silly. As a result, all the PvE content had to be really easy to facilitate this playstyle philosophy to the point that that you could almost solo most of it with the right class and build, which people often did. You didn't need to really think about your class role in relation to anyone else. It always involved 3 simple elements; Spam abilities, kite, and mash your heal cooldown. This was the same for every class. It made me want to play a traditional MMO often.

Crafting was also pointless. People only did it to say they did it and to craft specific grindy things for legendary weapons. You could buy everything right off the broker for less than the cost and hassle it took to make it.

The big World Vs World PvP mechanic was a very good idea, but had some draggy execution all-around. Poor matchmaking meant one world would often get stomped and just lose all morale for the rest of the match week. The worst part is it was often just whoever had the biggest zerg was the winners. If you had a small group vs their zerg you were probably screwed. Sure, some guild could rally people together and actually pull off tactics and shizz sometimes to turn things around spectacularly, but all the hours spent "Player VS Dooring" or being hopelessly outnumbered or just getting raided at night by different timezones didn't make those moments seem worth striving towards in my opinion. What it needed was incentives for small groups. There was no reason not to just bunch up into the biggest group possible and zerg individual objectives.

Also the "no enemy players in the PvE gameworld" and "everybody is your friend in sharing, questing, and life all the time without exception" design about the whole game just reeked of carebear communism. I was able to stomach it for quite a while, but it wasn't for me.

Honestly, there aren't too many things that make me quit a game I've decided that I wanted to play. Like I've said, I can handle a fair amount of boring, difficult, repetitive things. It's really when I get distracted by another game that I have to quit games I like.

TL;DR Dark Cloud 2 monster tranform mechanic sucked. Guild Wars 2 was meh. Everyone knows WoW sucked/sucks. I tend to like most other games that I decide I want to play.