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Games that have gaping plot holes in the story (if any) and patronize the gamer with cliché crap or bugs that crash the game constantly and happen to occur on a critical point in the game. Besides those two major points probably repetitive game mechanics with no real attempts to spice it up whether it's through an innovative gameplay option to engage the player more or a legitimate choices that impact the story (unlike Mass Effect 3....).

 Desubot wrote:
Inverted camera controls that cant be altered (ff12)

This ! So much this! I don't get inverted controls, If i want to look up i push up and down for down. This apparently weird taste of mine has got me in several arguments with people I've gamed with which end up with me saying " why do you want to use controls from 80's flight sims? "
WHY people WHY!?!!?!!11111

Bad controls, repetitive gameplay, a clear focus on graphics over substance. Any of those will make me drop a game like a bad habit. A near 100% rating on review sites generally puts me off picking it up in the first place.

Bullockist wrote:
" why do you want to use controls from 80's flight sims?" WHY people WHY!?!!?!!11111

While I'm with you on preferred camera controls, and that the inability to change inversion is practically criminal oversight, I can tell you why some people play this way. Far from being tied to just old games, it's all to do with how we perceive the "camera". If you're working from the perspective of the camera being a person's eyes, then the up=up approach that we favour makes more sense. You tilt your head up, your eyes go up to suit.

BUT if you treat the camera as a separate object that you can affect and control, much like you would an actual camera, this changes. When you hold a camera you have to move your thumbs up to make the lens go down, and vice versa. ...of course, this isn't the case if you move a camera with your wrists and not your thumbs but I'm sure you get the idea. Perhaps a better example is pushing down on one side of a switch to make the other side flip.

I may have been just burnt out of the game by the time I quit World of Warcraft and needed a little push to quit, but I remember a patch that drastically changed the style of play I preferred for my class and I lost all interest in the game and to this day I have no interest in returning, despite having a blast and making some good buds.

I also hate poor substitutes for difficulty in games. Like letting the computer controlled player cheat or just lazily increasing health bars to make the process of killing slower, but not really more challenging.

Bullockist wrote:
What things make you stop playing a game?

Bull gak. Bull gak stops me playing games. Stuff that comes out of no where with no warning or reason for being and makes you say "Bull gak!" out loud.

God of War: Ascension was the last game to do that. I walked around a corner looking for hidden chests, looked around for a few seconds, saw nothing, and then suddenly the platform I was on collapsed and I fell to my death. No warning. no indication that this was a platform that could collapse. No platform like it up until that point had collapsed. It was just a random death for no reason. Given the fact that I wasn't really enjoying the game that was the last straw for me. Put it down, haven't picked it up since, and I'm the kind of person who hates leaving things unfinished.

Food. Water. Sleep.

This is actually really bad but when a game is all about great Mechanics and Player creativity/agency i usually get bored of it. 'Pointless' games like Minecraft and Gary's Mod etc, Pure Puzzle games, Action RPGs/loot grinds, Roguelikes and Multiplayer Shooters usually only hold my interest for 8 or so hours of play time.

For some reason i also have an irrational hatred of side-scrollers, there's not a single game in that perspective that could tempt me.

Sometimes a shooter will hold my interest for longer but as soon as i stop playing for any length of time i find i have lost most of my proficiency. Having the patience to get 'good' again is often lacking.

I need a story to discover or somekind of way to experience that story from a new angle (like say mass effect or elder scrolls). As soon as i find the game is padded out with procedurally generated stuff i lose interest. I kill the baddies in a dungeon not to get the loot or get the exp but to find the journal entries.

Something that turns me off story driven games is when you go from one massive action set-piece to another without any down-time. In Deus Ex:HR for example you go from the infiltration of the Shang-hai Pangu thingy straight to the infiltration of the montreal thingy straight away with no Hub-based break. In MGS3 (one of the finest games ever made) You go straight from a punishing 1v1 boss fight with Volgin to an action-packed on rails segment. This means that as a rule i am not a fan of the old 'escape the collapsing building' endgame time-trail lol.

-Voice work that is bad, but not in the fun way.
-Horrible Camera + Controls
-Characters and/or Universe I can't enjoy.

Honestly though, I tend to be pretty good at not buying games blind. I either make sure what I'm buying has positive reviews from reviewers I trust, or is the kind of game I always enjoy or comes recommended by friends I trust. I don't find myself putting down/walking away from games very often at all.

A lack of enjoyment.

1.) Poor Controls

2.) Poor story

3.) Repetitve gameplay

4.) Constant QTE's

Poor, lackluster game design.

Call of Duty games (minus the zombie part, and the one level in Black Ops when you're riding around on the PBR to "Sympathy for the Devil")
Games that try to be like Call of Duty
The Flood (from Halo... seriously, I never quit a game midway through before. Space zombies, just can't do it...)

Pretty much it.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Call of Duty games (minus the zombie part, and the one level in Black Ops when you're riding around on the PBR to "Sympathy for the Devil")
Games that try to be like Call of Duty
The Flood (from Halo... seriously, I never quit a game midway through before. Space zombies, just can't do it...)

Pretty much it.

I loved that scene in Black Ops, why did it make you put the game down?

I didn't put it down for that, thats the one part of the game I actually enjoyed (I just hate the arcade style Call of Duty gameplay... although supposedly COD: Ghost is going to be more tactical, we'll see...)

 Avatar 720 wrote:
A lack of enjoyment.

Pretty much..

It's really hard to pinpoint the exact things that drive me over the edge. The last game that hit all of my angry buttons was FFXIII.

I can take dumb story if the gameplay is awesome or the reverse, but if there's half as much bad in both gameplay and story I get annoyed.

For instance, if a game has tense and stressful combat, you have to give me a break from it. FFXIII did not give me any mental breaks. It was combat to combat with no "safe" places to mentally rest. The combat itself was stressful and repetitive with extremely limited reward and almost no money to buy new items with. Combined with a weak story and a lack of safe spaces, my stress level maxed out and I quit.

Badly timed diversions also. I'm fine with a game pushing you off the main story for a minute, like the Sander Cohen segment of Bioshock, but when it's done too artificially or when they do it JUST as the story is heating up, I lose a lot of interest.

Lack of fun/ bad teammates. I don't mind two or three games of mass effect 3 with bad teammates, but when the level 12 human vanguard host sets the game to platinum and gets angry when we don't win, I usually leave.

 Rented Tritium wrote:
It's really hard to pinpoint the exact things that drive me over the edge. The last game that hit all of my angry buttons was FFXIII.

I can never really get past the first city in that game... Out of 3 or so attempts I did it once, and never played it again. I've yet to play an enjoyable FF game since 10. I played the flying feth out of that game.

It didn't make me put the game down, it made me feel like it several times.

I've never given up on a game out of frustration, just boredom.

Any game with a picture on the front that looks remotely like a desert camo soldier with an ar15.

Bad story,.pay to win. boring voice acting and boring characters. linear world where you really cant make any choices of your own.

 Medium of Death wrote:



It didn't make me put the game down, it made me feel like it several times.

I've never given up on a game out of frustration, just boredom.

Having played and completed that on Professional I can safely say I know that entire speech off by heart thanks to the QTE after that speech being a total bitch.

Lazy writing and programing. If the game has a story that I don't care about (Fallout:New Vegas) then it becomes a chore to finish. I didn't care about anyone or anything in that game. Also if the programers can't program in AI that can't find its way out of a paper bag with out incredible amounts of cheating (Civilization 5) then I get bored there too.

 The Foot wrote:
Also if the programers can't program in AI that can't find its way out of a paper bag with out incredible amounts of cheating (Civilization 5) then I get bored there too.

off topic: What does the AI do in Civ 5? Because it does pretty well in civ 4, besides having no clue how to put armies in ships.

on topic: Games with a really crazy-cool story that i can't partake in or add to in any way. If there's a big cool plot, i want to make my own decisions that further it. I don't like playing games where i feel like an observer, or where i feel like what i do doesn't make a difference to the ending.

In tf2 it's that 1 guy who obviously spends to much time as sniper and repeatedly head shots me as scout.

The Civilization AI has pretty much always been horrible (at least in 3 and 4, haven't played 5). It's kind of an accepted fact in that game that as you advance the difficulty the ai doesn't actually get any better, the computer just gets more bonuses and you get more penalties.

I actually like quicktime events. I think they're pretty fun. The only problem is balancing the amount of button pressing so that you can actually watch the cutscene. The best games will actually have multiple paths and different consequence for success/failure rather than just "didn't hit x fast enough, you lose".

Of course...then there was Force Unleashed in Wii. Their quicktime events consisted of wiggling either the main controller or the little thumbstick controller. These events were configured for a right handed player, where the thumb stick was held in the right hand. when the right side of the screen flashed you wiggled the controller in your right hand.

Guess what...I'm left handed, and There's no way to reverse this in the game settings! Imagine trying to map your brain to wiggle your left hand whenever the right side of the screen lit up. That made me give up after the first level or two.

Spec ops the line- That one particular scene in particular. That makes you do a very bad thing.....

Too much repetition. Hacking away at endless hordes of identical mooks gets boring as do repeated fetch quests.

Poor save points. If I have to watch a cutscene and then play for ten minutes before getting back to the part I keep dying at I a not going to enjoy it.

Bad Mechanics or controls.

To similar to everything else. I dont play many first person shooters these days because to many seem to want to be COd clones.

Lack of direction: This is a weird one because there are some great games that just let you get on with it and do what you want that I really enjoy, but I find myself getting bored with them quicker than I do games with a story line.

Being boring, I can forgive all problems a game has as long as it entertains me.

I am not often entertained.