Discuss Time! Issue 152

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

What makes you give up on a game?

Best answers will appear in the magazine

[dste]

Boredom and bad controls.

I don't care how nice a game looks or what the gameplay is like if either of these are present the game goes.

[joefish]

A pointlessly protracted quest near the end. Everyone knows the sort. It sounds easy, then gets progressively, pointlessly, and ludicrously drawn out. "Go to the bad guy's house and kill him". "HINT: Enter the bad guy's house through the basement garage". "You need a £2 parking ticket to enter". "HINT: You can sometimes find 1p coins down the back of a sofa". "HINT:Go back and search the city for 200 sofas". Oh FFS.

A 'protect the feeble idiot with no armour who happily sprints into obvious gunfire' mission.

Invisible barriers. At least in old games with simple 2D graphics you could easily see where you can and can't go. Even if it was something pathetic like a small shrub obstructing you until you found the axe, at least the game was consistent. The biggest curse of modern first-person games is something like Rage, where you can't climb over a simple crash barrier beside the road, but the game will happily let you walk off a cliff when it feels like it.

Random battles.

[Bluce_Ree]

As a bit of a completionist, I generally try to see out my games to the end no matter what. Even after losing hours of progress to dodgy save systems or missing a trophy/achievement because of a glitch. These days only extreme boredom can stop me. Usually something by Ubisoft.

[Mire Mare]

When the sheer scale of the game is so enormous and soooo much time is needed to finish the main story that there's not much chance I'll ever get to finish it? I'm out.

[The Laird]

Has to be cheap/unfair deaths. If you keep getting killed repeatedly by enemies that hit you out of nowhere, refuse to die, respawn in your way or the collision detection is totally off then that makes me really angry.

[Nemesis]

For me it would be;

Insane difficulty towards the end of a game.
Poor sign posting, losing the breadcrumb trail leaving me wandering around the same area over and over again with no clue.
Laborious tutorials that try to teach you the game leaving me uninterested by the time I've finished them.
Too expansive and meaning significant time investment which I don't want to give.
Excessive grinding to increase your level. Particularly bad regarding free to play games that demand that you remove the paywall if you don't want to grind forever and a day.
Deja vu, often with sequels repeating the same tropes as before making me feel like I'm playing the same game but with a different skin.

[The Beans]

As far as I'm concerned, when the enjoyment goes ... the game goes.

The ways a game can kill my interest are far too numerous to list here but they all boil down to the same thing: there are hundreds of other games I could be playing and enjoying instead of wasting my finite gaming time on unenjoyable chores merely for the sake of completion or a score on a leaderboard.
I'm finding that as I get older my patience with games is decreasing and my boredom levels are becoming easier and easier to trigger. Three attempts at a boss and I'm already yawning. I've got to really want to see what's on the other side of that boss to make more than five attempts. It just feels like the developers are wasting my time with that stuff now.

[The Hardest of All Freds]

Ice levels, underwater levels and autoscrolling levels..... or a combination of them.

Or the wife barking orders.

[themightymartin]

Sudden difficulty spikes, such as the turbo tunnel in Battletoads. Stuff like that really annoys me and can ruin an otherwise enjoyable game.

[Hiro]

Difficulty spikes, uninteresting characters, bland battle system. And I loathe rubber-band AI in driving games.

[ArchaicKoala]

I know it's always part of the "experience" but I can't stand excessive grinding in RPGs, it just makes things incredibly dull.

Other than that, what I refer to as "Zelda Syndrome" stops me playing a game. If a title is a large game (Zelda in this example) and I take a break from it for a week or so, I more often than not don't have a clue where I am or what I'm doing so I just give up on it

[RetroBob]

The next thing coming along! I used to be terrible at starting and never finishing games but have got better at it these days.

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

I know it's always part of the "experience" but I can't stand excessive grinding in RPGs, it just makes things incredibly dull.

I despise this too, it's one of the few things irritating me about Secret Of Mana at the moment.

[Bluce_Ree]

I know it's always part of the "experience" but I can't stand excessive grinding in RPGs, it just makes things incredibly dull.

Other than that, what I refer to as "Zelda Syndrome" stops me playing a game. If a title is a large game (Zelda in this example) and I take a break from it for a week or so, I more often than not don't have a clue where I am or what I'm doing so I just give up on it

It's a bit like this with the EDF games. I love 2017 and 2025 but the devs seem to think people want 100+ hours of grinding through it. Make the game ten hours long and it'd be much better and more focused.