When do YOU decide to give up on a 'boring/dull' game?

flashheart85

flashheart85

flashheart85

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Hey!

At the moment I am about to give up on The Outer Worlds. The gameplay is.. okay but the story is boring and for an RPG that isn't great. I'm on about the 3rd-4th main quest and It's REALLY just not gripping me. TBH i have zero idea who is who or what is going on due to not being into the story at all. I am in two minds whether to give up as this will be the third game in a row (Last two were Death Stranding and Suicide squad). I used to be a die hard "I HAVE STARTED SO I MUST FINISH" type. However, I am currently a carer for a family member and hardly have any time for gaming so my time is valuable. This has made me more willing to quit games when I don't see much point.

I've always been interested in this and would love to hear every ones point of view on this subject. As gamers we ALL come across these games where we think "I'm not into this." but when/what makes you decide "Enough is enough?"
Is there a certain criteria that you have to meet before you give up?
Do you have a time limit? (After two hours if i don't enjoy this im giving up)
A set amount of quests? Etc.
 
I used to be like you and force myself to finish a game. But it slowly eroded my passion for the hobby and I ended up playing/finishing fewer titles overall. My mindset changed around 2017, when I picked up a Switch and shortly thereafter a PS4, as I was envious of all the great Sony exclusives ( which weren't being released on Steam back then ). I now have a much better idea of which genres I enjoy ; between the late 90's and 2010 I played MMO's and competitive online games mostly but my tastes changed ( plus I was fed up with all the cheating ). It was during that period between 2010 and 2017 that I lost my way with forcing myself to complete games. Nowadays I will drop a game quick if I'm not enjoying it eg. latest 0.2 update of Path of Exile 2. Life is too short to be wasting my free time on stuff I don't enjoy. If a game doesn't captivate me within 2 hrs then that's it ... uninstalled, or refunded if purchased on Steam. But my methods aren't as ruthless as they sound ; as I said earlier, I'm pretty good at selecting games I have a good chance of enjoying. Completion rate is now very high.
 
I normally force myself through games that aren't doing it for me but that's really only because I've spent money on them and I can't refund. It only happens very rarely as I generally know what I like and don't like. Two examples are Guardians of the Galaxy and Starfield; both of which I loathe with a passion and the latter I spent significant money on which has since made me a lot more cautious about buying games.

Game Pass has been good for this though - I tried Avowed the other day and after 20 mins I just knew it wasn't for me. I could quite easily have been tricked into shelling out for that.
 
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This is one thats really hard to answer, I buy a lot of games, launchday , and very often never even launch them.

But sometimes the game is hyped enough, that I make the effort, then sometimes it Sucks , Death stranding is a good example, I was super hyped for it, then played it.

And , mabye its just me, but I couldn't get into it, so it will remain unfinished , and thats not a unique thing, I think as ive got old, my time has become more valuable to me, so if the game isn't grabbing my attention, and making me love it.

Well its on the trash heap
 
ne0 said:
Two examples are Guardians of the Galaxy and Starfield; both of which I loathe with a passion and the latter I spent significant money on
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Oh I couldn't agree more with Starfield.

And they hyped it so much. In hind sight, the real reason they hyped it so much is because they knew it was weak. They knew that the only way that game was going to make any real money was day 1 release sales, because as soon as people had had some time to properly play it, it would come out that all was not as it was supposed to be.

I got bitten as well although I got it "free?" with a graphics card, a graphics card I may not have purchased if it hadnt have been for the Starfield hype, to be fair the graphics card I do love today though. But it had everything going for it, RPG style game, the type they had a solid track record of making, the Fallout Series, Skyrim, even Fallout 76 was in a pretty good state by then.

But my god, how do you take something you are already good at and **** it up so much.

Instead of spending man hours making playable areas, just the few assets, and copy of and paste them here and there, copy and past a lot of stuff, proceedurally generate planets which are, basically all the same. REALLY borring quest lines, walk here, collect this, walk there, collect that, repeat........ I dunno, I could literally go on for pages and pages about how bad this game was, and I genuinly did give it a try I actually put nearly 100 hours in, because I was so convinced that some point something would click or the game would get better, but alas no........
 
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It's not something I consciously decide, I just drift elsewhere without thinking about it. Then 2 weeks later I catch myself thinking "huh, I haven't played X in a bit" and that's when I realise I had tired of it.

The exception is the 2 hour window on Steam. It has 2 hours to seems fun enough, and if not then it gets refunded.
 
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I’m really fussy about what games I even start these days, but lack of engaging story, boring/repetitive gameplay is usually enough to kill a game for me.

Recent bails are Star Trucker and Pacific Drive, mainly for the rinse and repeat gameplay, but having to totally rebuild my vehicle after every mission started to really annoy me.

I suspect that I just don’t like driving games.
 
I don't think I make an outright choice of "yeah, done with this game" I'll just have another game take my attention and off I go.

I do think Outer Worlds was a good time though. A bit samey in places but overall a fun game. Though my playthrough was charisma based
 
Whenever I get bored for a few hours in a batch I generally just leave it. Like others here that included Starfield pretty quickly. I really struggle with single players now, last one I enjoyed to completion was Cyberpunk.
 
I kill Bunnies said:
Whenever I get bored for a few hours in a batch I generally just leave it. Like others here that included Starfield pretty quickly. I really struggle with single players now, last one I enjoyed to completion was Cyberpunk.
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I ditched starfield pretty quickly too. Was really hyped for that game, but it was shockingly dull.

Really need to give cyberpunk another go as I hear it's much improved from when it launched.

If a game doesn't grab me in the first hour, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly these days.
 
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When I was a kid, I'd spend £40 on a game in a shop and even if it was awful I'd end up playing it to death in an attempt to get my money's worth. Plenty of games that in retrospect were pretty bad, I would find ways to enjoy them. Now, time is my biggest barrier, and actually I don't spend much on games.

I got Suicide Squad for free, and after a couple of hours realised I wasn't enjoying it was easy to ditch. Baldur's Gate 3 I just didn't get into. Might try again in a few months. I finished Witcher 1 on my second attempt, after bouncing off it. Witcher 2 I couldn't get through. Witcher 3 I did complete, although I wasn't sure how much I was enjoying it by the end. Starfield I completed, but haven't touched since then - very happy to wait until more patches / DLC / mods land and try again.

And right now I'm playing Anno 1800 again, when I've got a bunch of games that are fresher to me.

I try to be a lot more relaxed about games now - if I'm not enjoying them, I'll just stop playing them and I might pick them up again in a year or two and give it another crack. Or I might not. Is it weird that I've completed Dragon Age at least 4 times but haven't got into BG3? Yeah, for sure. But I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
 
BUDFORCE said:
Oh I couldn't agree more with Starfield.

And they hyped it so much. In hind sight, the real reason they hyped it so much is because they knew it was weak. They knew that the only way that game was going to make any real money was day 1 release sales, because as soon as people had had some time to properly play it, it would come out that all was not as it was supposed to be.

I got bitten as well although I got it "free?" with a graphics card, a graphics card I may not have purchased if it hadnt have been for the Starfield hype, to be fair the graphics card I do love today though. But it had everything going for it, RPG style game, the type they had a solid track record of making, the Fallout Series, Skyrim, even Fallout 76 was in a pretty good state by then.

But my god, how do you take something you are already good at and **** it up so much.

Instead of spending man hours making playable areas, just the few assets, and copy of and paste them here and there, copy and past a lot of stuff, proceedurally generate planets which are, basically all the same. REALLY borring quest lines, walk here, collect this, walk there, collect that, repeat........ I dunno, I could literally go on for pages and pages about how bad this game was, and I genuinly did give it a try I actually put nearly 100 hours in, because I was so convinced that some point something would click or the game would get better, but alas no........
Click to expand...

I hear you and so do many others. I kept playing and playing thinking there has to be more but when you're still finding copy and pasted outposts 20 hours in you know something is seriously wrong.

I think they realised it was a mistake part way through development but it was too late to back out so they just marketed and hyped the crap out of it and it worked. We all got fooled. My anticipation for ES6 went to zero and I no longer trust Todd Howard one little bit.
 
I'd say that I have a tendancy to shelf a game for long periods of time if I'm finding it dull, but I'll often come back to it multiple times to give it chances to win me over.
For most games, it often starts off fine with me being somewhat interested and enjoying the game, but then they all eventually seem to reach this point where the enthusiasm falls into some void. Because of that, I have a huge backlog of games that I've started but have yet to finish...

I'm not sure I can fully identify what it is that causes me to lose interest or at what point I should just call it a day and stop trying to return to the game.
Though, I do suspect that part of it might be down to my brain craving a handful of games that it has latched onto as my 'happy place', causing other games to not be able to draw my attention away from the favourites.

I'm quite stubborn though, so even if a game doesn't grab me, I'll usually complete it eventually. It'll just take me a ton of time and so much effort to make myself to push on through the bits that aren't interesting me as much to get to the end.

One game that many people seemed to enjoy that I really struggled with was the Witcher 3... I ended up stopping and starting it over the space of around 4-5 years before I eventually finished the main storyline. For the most part I kept finding that I lacked motivatation to engage with any of the plot, in the end, the only reason I finally completed it was that I got to a point of skipping all of the dialogue in the later parts of the game and treated it more like a hack & slash with no soul.
 
Like others on this thread, I just drift away from them rather than a conscious choice to give up. It also corresponds to life outside gaming though. Kids, work and other hobbies mean I don't have time for gaming sometimes so I don't play something for ages because it needs a proper go at it (not just a dip in for 20 mins) and I don't get that chance for a while. Elite Dangerous is like that - difficult to just drop in for a quick go, so didn't play it for a couple of months as it didn't have a nice long slot, and haven't been back to it in over a year, certainly since the end of the thargoid war
 
Almost immediately, unless I get a good sense from others that it will improve dramatically later.

Surely no one has time to spend hours on something that feels more like a chore than entertainment?
 
I've tried so many highly rated games that have just bored the pants off me. BG3 I just couldn't understand the appeal. Elden ring was just too damn difficult to actually enjoy. Starfield just empty and soulless.
 
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