What's the Quickest You've Ever Given Up on a Game?

[infohippie]

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth, when I discovered that "full controller support" really meant "You'd damn well better have a controller or forget any hopes for effective control or even movement". The main reason I don't play on consoles is that I hate controllers. Any game released on PC should have a well designed and tested keyboard and mouse control scheme even if the devs envisaged most people using controllers.

Fallout: New Vegas.

I like Bethesda games, and I heard that this one had an amazing story and that it was gonna knock my socks right off.

I played for about 3 hours before I just stopped. I mainly faffed about, like any normal game from them, but I got bored. It was the environment that did absolutely nothing for me. Mainly because I live in the desert and I don't find the desert all that interesting.

Kinda defeats the purpose in exploring a game's setting and seeing what goes on in the story when I don't care about it enough to wander around, really.

I had pretty much the same experience with New Vegas. I really enjoyed FO3, enough that I preordered NV. When I played it though, it was just... dull. I did not care for the crafting, somehow the weapons felt less satisfying, the game REALLY seemed to want to push me into ballistics when I'm an energy weapon kind of guy, and most of all the desert setting, ugh. Deserts are REALLY BORING.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth, when I discovered that "full controller support" really meant "You'd damn well better have a controller or forget any hopes for effective control or even movement". The main reason I don't play on consoles is that I hate controllers. Any game released on PC should have a well designed and tested keyboard and mouse control scheme even if the devs envisaged most people using controllers.

YES! This, so much this. Finally someone who doesn't take it lying down.
Apologies for my exuberance but whenever incompatible practices from consoles infect the PC market I can't help but rage.
It also doesn't help that whenever I enter a games steam forum I see "controller support plz" threads in almost everyone.
That said though, I won't deny those that want to use controllers (and not a console??) but KB/M must come first.

Addendum.
I don't use steam at all myself, but that is where most of the useful and concentrated info about a game is available..

 

[SweetShark]

Sadly right now I am seriously thinking to give up playing "Rain World" after playing only 90 minutes....
It is a so damn pretty game and the animation is outstanding, but the unfair difficulty and the freaking door system it have is very off putting for me...
I will trying playing once again, but I don't see playing for over 3 hours....

 

[maninahat]

I played Elite: Dangerous for about 15 minutes before I quit and got a refund for it.

I'm desperate for a good space sim, but the controls for Dangerous just felt strange in my hands. I flew around in the combat tutorial for a while before giving up.

Oh, well.

Yeah, I played E for like 2 hours. I like the idea and the gameplay seems fine. It's a good game I can't seem to get into. The problem is there doesn't seem to be enough to hook me into going on.

It's why I have been avoiding it. As much as I want to be a space smuggler in an exciting space game, in practise (like the X series) these feel like space trucker simulators, seemingly for people who think there aren't enough spreadsheets in games.

I think I'll give House of the Dying Sun a try, in that it sells itself as a modern take on X-Wing vs Tie Fighter.

 

[RedDeadFred]

Undertale

I put about 2 hours into this game, but I just got so bored of the random encounters combined with the simplistic combat. The combat would be fine if you only ever encountered an enemy one time since you'd be figuring out what to say to a new enemy each time. Once you've figured out how you're supposed to get to the point of sparing an enemy, the entire combat system becomes horribly tedious and boring if you fight them again. Some of the bullet hell stuff is funny and clever, but it didn't do enough to save the game for me.

The writing wasn't enough of an incentive for me to grind through the game. Too much of the humor boiled down to randomness for the sake of randomness. It's funny for a while, but I quickly began to feel like I was playing a meme.

The only thing I can truly say I really like about the game is the soundtrack. I've actually bought the soundtrack despite not finishing the game.

 

[infohippie]

Witcher
An original(?) rpg game praised to the heavens? Without DRM? Everything sounded amazing. Never heard a single complaint really. Odd.
I did not enjoy choosing between a clunky isometric view or a skewed third person (over-the-shoulder) view. New, exciting, original is not always good. Tried and true is so for a reason. I've always wondered if they changed it in the sequels..I don't dare try it and no review or gamer ever really touch upon such "trivial" things such as viewpoint and game-play/mechanics when describing a game. The combat wasn't all that either..

I put up with those horrendous controls right up until the first "sex scene", after which I just laughed a little, shook my head and uninstalled the game. I want to reward innovation in games, but it has to be innovation I enjoy.

The Witcher does not have sex scenes. It has those cards, which people seem to get weirdly bent out of shape about, even the tamer American versions, but you can turn those off in the menu. TW 2 and 3 do have sex scenes however, but they're honestly the most well-made sex scenes I have ever seen in a video game. They are tasteful, they have personality, and some have humour. Also, they are skippable and nearly all of them are optional in the first place.
Don't let them turn you off a truly great game series. You can skip the first one if you must, though I much prefer playing through all three, but try the other two. Certainly better writing and characterisation than Bioware, and the third is a better open world than anything Bethesda has put out.

 

[Dalisclock]

Don't let them turn you off a truly great game series. You can skip the first one if you must, though I much prefer playing through all three, but try the other two. Certainly better writing and characterisation than Bioware, and the third is a better open world than anything Bethesda has put out.

The first game nearly turned me off the series due to how clunky it was(I suspect I would have liked it better if I had played it on release and not last year) but the second one I liked a lot better so I'm glad I didn't give up on it.

I've told a number of people to just skip the first game if they aren't enjoying it. Especially since only a handful of story beats and player actions get any acknowledgement in later games anyway.

 

[darkrage6]

Takedown Red Sabre and Hatred were the quickest for me, tried playing each of them for a couple of hours for a few days, then I gave up on them, and I usually finish all my games, but those were just too damn awful for me to persist with.

 

[ghostrider9876]

Dreadhalls on my Gear VR. I can play most VR games on it with mild or no nausea, but Dreadhalls was NOT kind to my equilibrium. Plus it's immersive enough that I actually felt like I was stranded alone in a creepy dark dungeon with awful things scuttling somewhere in the dark...Nope.

The only other game that really stands out in my mind as "screw this, never playing again" is Little King's Story. I put a not-insignificant amount of time into it, getting increasingly annoyed at the Mandatory Stupidity in the plot ("I know you're the king and we're just your advisors, but we're going to overrule your decision because that's how the game was written"). However, I didn't quit on it until I got to the level where you have to walk up the mountain path with the boulders falling constantly...and I realized that, insidiously, the developers let you upgrade the health of your UNITS significantly, but your King (who had to be there) was always, ever, only going to have at 3 health. I tried and tried to get up the path without dying...and finally, I let out an enraged scream of "F***!" so loud that the whole house heard me, followed by immediately ejecting the disc, walking out to my car, and driving straight to Gamestop to rid myself of it forever.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I played Elite: Dangerous for about 15 minutes before I quit and got a refund for it.

I'm desperate for a good space sim, but the controls for Dangerous just felt strange in my hands. I flew around in the combat tutorial for a while before giving up.

Oh, well.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. I think I lasted about 20 minutes to half an hour before getting fed up with the controls.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

The original Fallout. I wasn't exactly familiar with the design of isometric 90's CRPGs to begin with, and the game (having come from the Fallout Collection I bought) having no instruction manual or tutorials didn't exactly help either. Played about 30 minutes and never came back. I didn't hate it, but trying to shift from action games to the downright archaic design and gameplay was too demanding.

Witcher
An original(?) rpg game praised to the heavens? Without DRM? Everything sounded amazing. Never heard a single complaint really. Odd.
I did not enjoy choosing between a clunky isometric view or a skewed third person (over-the-shoulder) view. New, exciting, original is not always good. Tried and true is so for a reason. I've always wondered if they changed it in the sequels..I don't dare try it and no review or gamer ever really touch upon such "trivial" things such as viewpoint and game-play/mechanics when describing a game. The combat wasn't all that either..

.

No complaints at all? Wow. I've finished and enjoyed all three of the games, but I expected even the fans to be aware of the numerous problems The Witcher has. It's a game you can appreciate and enjoy despite its faults at best.

Uh-oh... rant incoming!

I've been playing the Witcher since I finally got a good gaming rig, and want to see how the choices carry over from the games. But by fucking fucking fucking God is this game a slog to get through! Every single thing Yahtzee said about it is true, though not all of them insurmountable. The UI is maddeningly cluttered and unituitive, but you get used to it. The combat... well no excuses there. It's shit. I've played roughly 13 hours on normal difficulty and never has it been a challenge. Except when the game throws bullshit status effects at you that make Geralt pause for a 45-minute "woe is me" soliloquy while the enemies play jump the rope with his entrails.

It's no hyperbole when I say roughly 80% of my game time has been spent trudging between the same 3 FUCKING locations over and over and over and over again because having a fast travel system would be too brutish I guess. Oh, you wanna travel to the swamp? Well go talk to the ferryman. Oh, it's the evening and he just left? Well too bad, I guess you'll have to wait. Except we're too good to have just a simple FUCKING WAIT FUNCTION, so you'll have to go all back to Vizima again to find someone by whom you can meditate. It's the most merciless drawing out of gameplay I've ever seen, and I've played Far Cry 2.

Oh, maybe you need money for something. You wanna do those monster hunting jobs? Well you've gonna have to research them first. And I'm not going to show you what merchant has monster manuals so you could do those, figure it out for yourself, so you'll spend even more time aimlessly running around talking to every twat you pass on the street.

The story, or the hazy, hackneyed imitation of one the game has. Fuck me is it poorly delivered. I read the entire fucking Witcher book series, and I still do not give a flying rat's fucking ass about any of this. The game starts and immediately expects you to care for a bunch of bland characters without any introduction or reason to give a fucking shit. Then after the tutorial level this literally repeats all over fucking again. I'm over 10 hours in and I still have no fucking clue what the central plot is supposed to be. The game just throws you into these situations without any explanation and assumes you'll give a shit. At one point Dandelion, one of the most fun and engaging characters from the books shows up out of fucking swamp ass nowhere, and not only does Geralt instantly remember him despite having amnesia and thus having not recognized Triss or Zoltan earlier, we literally get no introduction to his character whatsofuckingever. And let's not forget the sex stuff and how practically every woman you come across will shag you within 5 minutes of meeting them, be it a witch, a tavern wench or a goddamn princess. It smacks of the worst kind of self insert fan fiction.

That Golem boss fight. FFFuuuuuuuccck youuuuuu CD Projekt Red. Giving literally no clue whatsoever about how you're supposed to defeat it is not good, smart or demanding design. If you want to give some hint to the player, make it at least more than JUST A SOUND EFFECT!

The game looks quite nice for 2007... until you get to the conversations. Not only does the game's recycling of the same around 7 character models get silly after a while, the expressions are unforgivably nonexistent for a game from the same year as Mass Effect. Thankfully you can at least speed through all the uninteresting conversations. Oh, and let's not forget how when you go to a different district in Vizima the weather changes from sunny June afternoon to dreary March drizzle over the course of a single loading screen.

I have no idea how this game got as much praise as it did back in the day. One particular critic in a gaming magazine I used to have a subscription of sucked this game's dick so hard he must have peeled the foreskin off. And that only confirmed to me for him to be the absolute worst fucking neckbeard.

 

[Maphysto]

Elite: Dangerous.

I was sold on EVE Online with twitch flight. Instead I got EVE Offline: All the Spreadsheets, None of the Fun(tm).

Oh, and you have to pay another 30 bucks every few months if you want the rest of the game.

 

[deadish]

Let's see ...

ESO: Connection problem during first log in. Refund.

GTAV: Can't race for crap to clear the first mission. Refund. (I suppose I will try it again someday. LOL)

 

[CatsNeverDie]

Dark Souls 1 because it was so slow and dark & dingy. I quit like 30 minutes after Firelink Shrine. But, I came back years later and now its one of my favorite series.

A metal gear game on PS2. Half hour of chit chat, not even cut scene but briefing chit chat. Never went back.

 

[sageoftruth]

The original Fallout. I wasn't exactly familiar with the design of isometric 90's CRPGs to begin with, and the game (having come from the Fallout Collection I bought) having no instruction manual or tutorials didn't exactly help either. Played about 30 minutes and never came back. I didn't hate it, but trying to shift from action games to the downright archaic design and gameplay was too demanding.

No complaints at all? Wow. I've finished and enjoyed all three of the games, but I expected even the fans to be aware of the numerous problems The Witcher has. It's a game you can appreciate and enjoy despite its faults at best.

Snip

Yeah,I've got no, or at least few disagreements there. The first one was definitely a game that made me think twice before deciding to replay it, even though I ended up powering through it twice (and both times ended up committing genocide. Oops).

If anything, the game definitely handled the whole "Your choices have consequences" thing pretty well. It wasn't the only game to do it, but it was rare enough at the time to be a novel experience. That, paired with emphasis on preparation before battle led to an experience that made you think more about what you were doing rather than going through the motions.

Of course, as you pointed out, this was all bogged down by a ton of BS that could take you out of the immersive experience just as effectively as the game's strong points could lure you into it. So, in the end, I think it really came down to how well one could tolerate the BS. For me, I went back and forth between being heavily invested in what was going on and being exasperated at the game design as I went through the motions. One moment, I was ticking off a list of menial tasks and grumbling about the character's voices and appearances, the extremely cumbersome way of getting around, and the appalling fetch quest extravaganza that is act 2, and then the game would hit me with a choice and I'd go "Holy crap! I need a moment to think about this!"

That was pretty much my experience in a nutshell.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I tried mirrors edge shortly after release. It was so shit, I got it refunded the next day for the reason of being shit.

Several games I tried, but since they had horrendous FoV on the PC and there was no way to change it, I uninstalled them and never played it.

Mafia 3, I got as far as rescuing Vito, then the game opened up to reveal....that I had to keep repeating the same thing I'd been doing already. Looking online, it turned out that was the entire game. Uninstalled.

 

[ShoobieDoobie]

Star Fox Zero. Controls sucked apex donkey balls, couldn't even come up with a new story, absolutely NONE of the charm of SF64 with Falco being kind of a dickhead, the goofy writing and the even goofier delivery. Yahtzee's review was spot on that game completely scraped the bowels of suckitude!!

 

[Solkard]

EVE Online. I spent 2 days downloading and installing it. Stared at the character creation menus for 30 mins and then uninstalled the game 5 mins after I started the ship control tutorial.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

God Hand. I came back to it much, much later on but the first time around I quite because it was too hard and I wasn't in the mood for J-nonsense anyway.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I can't remember exactly what it was about the controls that irked me so, but I lasted all of an hour before I packed it in. I just found the way the game controlled incredibly off-putting.