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What things make you stop playing a game?
For me it's jumping , I've always been slowed in the timing of jumping and growing up in the era of 80s platformers this was always a major drawback .

Quicktime events. I hate them with every fibre of my being.

I bought the new Tomb Raider on the steam sale, and every time one of those infernal quicktime events pops up, I have a hard time continuing to play. Especially when they pop out of nowhere and I end up having to repeat the cutscene.

That "attempted rape" scene lost all of its gravity after I accidentally failed the quick time event for the first time. It ended up becoming more of a joke than anything.

"PRESS X TO NOT GET RAPED!"

Of course, they didn't even have the balls to follow through with that. It's a great way to turn any attempt to make the player identify with the character into a complete joke.

Broken mechanics. Not just faulty, or pointless, or weak, or poorly done. Broken. Yeah, I'm looking at you. You know who you are!* Fortunately I don't find that that often, so most games I pick up I end up playing all the way through at least once. Even then though I still play it, if for no other reason than to find some twisted way to get my money out of it.

 Fafnir wrote:


"PRESS X TO NOT GET RAPED!"

Of course, they didn't even have the balls to follow through with that. It's a great way to turn any attempt to make the player identify with the character into a complete joke.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who thought that. If you're gonna play it at that angle, please devs, have the balls to just go through with it or don't start it at all.

*It was Too Human. Still played the gak out of it.

Pure laziness...... im still on the final battle of Dead Space 2 and after the trial in Chrono trigger (city lvl) theyre both great games.... i just havent played them (and others) since... i dont know why

Long spans of seemingly random combat between goals.
Elements of tactical choosing your battles would be nice.

Playing Eador and FF7, I find myself picking those up less and less. I love the ideas of the games, great stories but the grind is so irritating.

I can shut off my mind and kill the rampaging hordes but feel a bit unhappy of the use of my time and not getting much deeper into the meat of the game.

Dusted off Masters of Magic, playing the new Baulder's Gate, New Xcom, SW:KOTOR, not feeling that as bad. I guess it is "pacing" that makes all the difference.

Remember playing FF3 and going back and forth in the troll woods as the main way to make money and level up "going trolling" I do not like to feel like that again in any modern game.

Other than my wife desperately wanting my undivided attention not much. I'm pretty patient/ stubborn when I hit a difficulty spike in a game.

Blitz Ball

 LordofHats wrote:
Broken mechanics. Not just faulty, or pointless, or weak, or poorly done. Broken. Yeah, I'm looking at you. You know who you are!* Fortunately I don't find that that often, so most games I pick up I end up playing all the way through at least once. Even then though I still play it, if for no other reason than to find some twisted way to get my money out of it.

 Fafnir wrote:


"PRESS X TO NOT GET RAPED!"

Of course, they didn't even have the balls to follow through with that. It's a great way to turn any attempt to make the player identify with the character into a complete joke.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who thought that. If you're gonna play it at that angle, please devs, have the balls to just go through with it or don't start it at all.

*It was Too Human. Still played the gak out of it.

God I wanted Too Human to be good.


But there isn't really anything that makes me put down a game shy of my own short attention span. I remember playing games when I was a kid for weeks, months - like when I had a Sega and it was Robocop vs Terminator or Jurassic Park for like half a year. Now it's all "Meh, kinda bored playing Kingdoms of Amalur. Don't hate it, but I want to play some Skyrim. Or some Shogun. Or some Planetside. Or some Warband. Or some Dragon Age." Then it's been eight months and I forget the controls and don't want to play any more, or if I do I want to start a new character that plays different and I run out of steam at the same point. I've played the first 2 acts of Neverwinter Nights 2 probably twelve times. Never beat the game. It's terrible*.

* not the game, the situation.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was a game I never beat either. That game wasn't really broken, but oh my gosh was it sloooooow. If I was a DnD fan I'd probably have enjoyed it more, but unintiated as I was at the time I just couldn't get into it.

I stopped playing LA Noire when one of the first murder cases bugged in me and I was going to have to start back from the beginning. I was never really sold on the game anyway, God bless steam sales

I dislike games that are too much on rails, pr at least too obvious about it. Also hate cutsceenes that come in every 5 minutes... you just start gettinh into the game agin from the last ome and then you are cut off in the middle of doing sometging to watch a video.

Also dislike "press x theb bash b then rotate the joystick" events for the most part.

Sorry for typos - on phonr and cant read the screen well dueto sun.

 wowsmash wrote:
Other than my wife desperately wanting my undivided attention not much. I'm pretty patient/ stubborn when I hit a difficulty spike in a game.

This, mostly. Though it won't stop me playing, there is another thing that bugs me...a relentless wave of enemies that makes it difficult to take a breather to, say, pick up some dropped loot orswig a potion or whatever. It's fine when that's the whole point of the game - left 4 dead, diablo, serious sam - but all too often it's used as a one off section in an otherwise slower paced game. Usually with some kind of countdown timer to survive through, to boot. These frustrate me to no end, since I just want to be done with the seemingly endless mob and move on to the next area.

Bad Cameras + Bad Combat - Silent Hill 4 so far is the only game I gave up because I couldn't stand the camera together with the combat controls. I know SH isn't a game that's played for the combat, but there's a limit...

Too many cutscenes - People may call Metal Gear Solid 4 a near perfect game with all it's 10 and perfect scores (including my friend who lent me the game) but I can't stand the damn game. It's play 5 minutes and watch a 30mns cutscene. That thing isn't a game. After skipping lots of them and beating 2 of the "Beasts" I gave up.

Too many random combats - People may dislike FFXIII because it was "on-rails", but did I love this game. I didn't have a ginormous world to explore so it was full steam ahead and the combats weren't random. Lightning is awesome too. I appreciate when JRPGs have a mechanic that controls the randomness. For example, Ar Tonelico has a limit of random encounters per area. After that is empty, no more combats.

Endless Mobs or Padding - Sometimes developers just seem to add random events or situations or a truckload of enemies out of nowhere just because. I swear, just because, all it does is slow you down and increase the "game time". No, this isn't fun, it's boring unless the game is designed for having lots of fun when fighting lots of enemies. (See Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden 2 for good examples of this)

Real life stuff. Friends, familiy, fiancee, newphews etc., work.

That's an easy question. Games are supposed to be fun\entertaining\interesting. If a game is boring it goes away.

Cutscenes that suddenly wrest away all control and force you to sit through a load of BS exposition. Even worse when you can't skip them or are triggered right after reloading a previous save state.

 BrookM wrote:
Cutscenes that suddenly wrest away all control and force you to sit through a load of BS exposition. Even worse when you can't skip them or are triggered right after reloading a previous save state.

Oh man, save points right before a hard situation where you are prone to fail several times and you have to watch a non-skippable cut-scene every time are truly "RAAAAAAAAAAAAGE" moments.

When it is necessary to put in hours of grinding just to have a fair chance of progressing, particularly if it feels like it's only real purpose is to put a '100+ hours of game play' claim on the back of the box; life's too short .
JRPGs are the usual culprits - kudos to team Andromeda for bucking the trend and releasing a four-CD RPG with a playthrough of around 12 hours.

 RossDas wrote:
When it is necessary to put in hours of grinding just to have a fair chance of progressing, particularly if it feels like it's only real purpose is to put a '100+ hours of game play' claim on the back of the box; life's too short .
JRPGs are the usual culprits - kudos to team Andromeda for bucking the trend and releasing a four-CD RPG with a playthrough of around 12 hours.

I assume you are talking about the master-piece that's Panzer Dragoon Saga?

Sewers, endless mobs of foes to gun/hack down. and the dreaded fecth quessts are all things that makes me put down games, and never pick them back up

 TheDraconicLord wrote:

 RossDas wrote:
When it is necessary to put in hours of grinding just to have a fair chance of progressing, particularly if it feels like it's only real purpose is to put a '100+ hours of game play' claim on the back of the box; life's too short .
JRPGs are the usual culprits - kudos to team Andromeda for bucking the trend and releasing a four-CD RPG with a playthrough of around 12 hours.

I assume you are talking about the master-piece that's Panzer Dragoon Saga?

Spot on! And I'm sure a few hours of game time were shaved off by the fact that you spend much of the game flying around on a big dragon, and don't always have to be right next to an item in order to collect it.
It's a shame it'll probably never be ported, but I haven't given up on seeing a re-boot one day.

 RossDas wrote:
Spot on! And I'm sure a few hours of game time were shaved off by the fact that you spend much of the game flying around on a big dragon, and don't always have to be right next to an item in order to collect it. It's a shame it'll probably never be ported, but I haven't given up on seeing a re-boot one day.

Here is a step in that direction:

Hating the character that I choose.

This has plagued me in Deus Ex Human Revolution, and the Borderlands games. I disliked the characters that I chose, and by the time I realized I hated them that I was already far enough into the game that to go back would have been more pain than it was worth.

At least with DX:HR you can mould the character a bit in your choices of action and dialogue. I do understand what you mean, though, especially with Borderlands - though the latter is just too damn funny for me to care much about being connected to the character anyway.

Inverted camera controls that cant be altered (ff12)

 Ahtman wrote:

 RossDas wrote:
Spot on! And I'm sure a few hours of game time were shaved off by the fact that you spend much of the game flying around on a big dragon, and don't always have to be right next to an item in order to collect it. It's a shame it'll probably never be ported, but I haven't given up on seeing a re-boot one day.

Here is a step in that direction:

Hasn't this kind of game been done and don't again on both the sea Saturn and in every starfox game? It's a genre that really can't go anywhere, it's very limited on rails.

BrotherVord wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

 RossDas wrote:
Spot on! And I'm sure a few hours of game time were shaved off by the fact that you spend much of the game flying around on a big dragon, and don't always have to be right next to an item in order to collect it. It's a shame it'll probably never be ported, but I haven't given up on seeing a re-boot one day.

Here is a step in that direction:

Hasn't this kind of game been done and don't again on both the sea Saturn and in every starfox game? It's a genre that really can't go anywhere, it's very limited on rails.

Yes, that's true, but since Crimson Dragon appears to be Panzer Dragoon in all but name and maybe setting, it kindles hope that we'll see Panzer Dragoon Saga re-booted - which was more of a traditional RPG, albeit one where you got to do most of it on a morphable dragon!

 RossDas wrote:

BrotherVord wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

 RossDas wrote:
Spot on! And I'm sure a few hours of game time were shaved off by the fact that you spend much of the game flying around on a big dragon, and don't always have to be right next to an item in order to collect it. It's a shame it'll probably never be ported, but I haven't given up on seeing a re-boot one day.

Here is a step in that direction:

*video*

Hasn't this kind of game been done and don't again on both the sea Saturn and in every starfox game? It's a genre that really can't go anywhere, it's very limited on rails.

Yes, that's true, but since Crimson Dragon appears to be Panzer Dragoon in all but name and maybe setting, it kindles hope that we'll see Panzer Dragoon Saga re-booted - which was more of a traditional RPG, albeit one where you got to do most of it on a morphable dragon!

We can only hope. I think a "re-release" will never happen since it seems they lost the source code. If it's true or not, it's with them. Only makes the english version of the game much rarer *hugs his own copy*
If someone manages to understand Panzer Dragoon Saga was one amazing game and everyone praised for it's quality both in gameplay, story and characters (not mentioning graphics for obvious reasons) maybe, just maybe one day they'll create another good RPG like it.
No, not even that, just create the game from scratch with updated graphics and call it something else

When the story just breaks.

I was playing True Crime LA on PS2, having a really cool street crime story with thugs, pimps and the whole thing throughout the game. Just enjoyable all around.

Of course, until it's time to kill the triad leader, and he's some crazed out Chinese wizard monk that shoots spirits at you, with naked ghost concubines.

I said "eh" and put the game away.

Pay to win.