Original screenshot by Berduu.
In light of recent talk about No Man’s Sky and people seeking refunds after 50+ hours of playtime, I’ve been wondering: have you ever spent way too long with a game that just wasn’t for you?
It’s definitely not an isolated phenomenon. I see it a lot on Steam, with people giving negative reviews to games they have played for hundreds of hours. Heck, a guy even made a Google Chrome extension that changes those people’s review text to “I do not know what I want.”
Of course, it’s not always so simple. This God-Damned, Mother-Definitely-Not-Approved year of 2016 is a tumultuous one, and games are no longer static creations. They change over time, not always for the better. There are sometimes very good reasons to suddenly despise the former object of your affection. And in video games, too!
I’ve been trying to think of games, though, that it took me time to realise I disliked. It wasn’t that they changed; I did. In terms of recent games, I’d say Fallout 4 fits the bill. I played for around 40 hours before realising it was never gonna morph into the Fallout: New Vegas-like game I wanted it to be. Haven’t really looked back since. I had a similar experience with Zeno Clash 2 relative to Zeno Clash 1, except I beat Zeno Clash 2 and then felt empty inside. I also got hooked on Clicker Heroes for a while, and now I despise all clicker games with a passion. In hindsight, it was all so tedious. I never need to have that experience again.
I’ve also spent way too much time with Pokemon Go, which I recognise is a very poorly designed game. I’m not sure if I hate it (yet), but I don’t think I really love it anymore either.
By and large, though, I don’t think I spend much time with games I’m likely to dislike these days. Thinking back on it, it’s something I did a little more as a kid, if only because my options were more limited, I had time on my hands, and my tastes weren’t exactly discerning. Like, I remember playing a Bubsy game on Super Nintendo, and I don’t think I liked it, but that didn’t stop me from keeping at it for days and days. And oh man, has anybody else played Radical Rex, also for the SNES? That game was a mountain of skateboarding dinosaur doo-doo, and you’d better believe I played it on and off for two years as a kid. Now I’m a lonely, emotionally-stunted adult, and I think the reason why is pretty clear.
But OK, enough about me. What games have you played for hours, days, weeks, months, years, or eons, only to realise that you kinda hated them?
Comments
101 responses to “Ever Play A Game For 100 Hours, Then Realise You Hate It?”
You were doing well, but you went a bridge to fur with that bubsy hate.
what could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
I do not know what I want
Hey, whatever blows your hair back.
Puns aside, it really was mediocre at best in comparison to some of the all time great 2d platformers on the snes.
I wanted to like it but I found the quirkiness just too off-putting.
Back when I was younger I would soldier through a game and enjoy it and beat it and find everything. They were a big investment.
I’ve just decided to walk away from Star Fox Zero. Totally stupid controls. Think I’m going to lose a bit of money on that too. EB offered a fifth of the price 🙁
Now that I’m a bit older, why continue with something I don’t enjoy?
Did you try flipping the controls around so the cockpit view was up on the TV instead? I found that made it far more playable.
same boat as you. why force yourself to finish something if it isnt fitting the need. it is sad that we have become a throw away society to some degree, but im the same as you. ive started to look at things as a cost to fun ratio. spelunky i picked up for $5, ive played maybe about 20 hours ish, id say that $1 for 4 hours of enjoyment is pretty worth it, considering the other things we pay for for enjoyment, like $15 to $20 for a 2 hour movie, or 50 to $100 for a 6 hour night out. or whatever it is.
GTA is a game i paid almost $80AUD for and i have about 450 hours in it. thats about 20c per hour if my terrible maths serves me. thats pretty good value.
Yeah. Metal Gear Solid V. I sunk in over 100hrs before I realised that I really wasn’t enjoying it and was just trapped in a grind for better weapons. Which felt almost exactly the same as the old ones.
So I sold it.
I’ve heard enough people complain about the length, story and end-game of MGS V that I find it really hard to persist with it.
The game itself is fun, but just knowing 10 hours in that it’ll keep going forever and not really get anywhere really puts me off even if there’s brilliant gameplay components and interesting slithers of story in there.
I get the feeling that if I didn’t know it would definitely end up being a game I’d pour 100+ hours into and then be resentful towards at the end when (like Fallout 4) it never built to a satisfying conclusion.
Ughh. Yeah MGSV was definitely that. I got 40 hours in and thought… this is a shit game.
Lol I watched someone else play it all on youtube + commentary (no grinding included). Great profit. Best $60 I ever saved.
I was really sad with MGS V i started playing it got about 20 hours or so in and then just left it, eventually traded it in.
I didn’t hate it i just wasn’t enjoying it as much as i did previous games in the series.
Same. I LOVED Guns of the Patriots. But it just didn’t have the same draw for me.
I think its a matter of depth most of the time.
Its not that game X sucks and it takes some people tens of hours to realize, its that they like what it presents initially and it takes a while to discover there really isnt anything more.
No
Are we really talking about hate here though? Or is this just the best word we have to express the concept of “I hate that I don’t want to play this game anymore and it’s giving me an existential crisis”.
For me it would be a matter of hatred. The game that this most applies to was WoW. I played from launch till about a month before Burning Crusade. One night I just had a realisation that I genuinely disliked to the point of hatred due to numerous aspects of the game design. Literally the only reason I logged on was so I could sit on my raptor, on top of orgrimmar bank and GChat with my friends while they played. And I was paying $15/month to do it. WHen you realise you trapped yourself in a cycle doing something you dislike due to force of habit or bizzare mental constraints, your dislike immediately upgrades to anger and hatred.
“Why the fuck did I just waste a year playing that shitty game?”
I just finished Arkham Knight and while I was loving the story and gameplay at release by the time i realized I wasn’t really having fun was around repetitive drone battle 100. Although came back to it recently and just got the platinum on ps4.
The drone battles are really horrible. Impressive game but huge mistakes made with the gameplay.
Having recently finished it too, I finally understand the Batmobile hate. The constant drone battles annoyed the hell out of me and then the Riddler racing challenges.
For some reason, Batman with all his resources can’t build a Batmobile that handles well. The amount of collateral damage I must have done in the city every time I drove that thing would even put Bruce Wayne into bankruptcy.
Loved the story elements and
Batman’s delusions with the Joker – some of the best Joker dialogue in all 3 games was in this gamebut my frustrations were all directed toward some of the Batmoble centric missions/battles.How good were those spoilery bits? I really looked forward to them while playing. There was some great writing and they integrated with the world so well. Definitely overshadowed by the vitriol about the game’s other missteps.
I loved when you’d be flying around the city randomly and get to the top of a tower and
Joker would jump out and “boo”. Other times when he’d just be sitting up there with a pithy comment. Loved it.I didn’t mind the batmobile stuff too much – I actually liked the drone battles. However, I also respect the hate for said gameplay.
Online games… they have the warning label that says something “players experience subject to other players interaction”…. but most of the time it is the developers interaction or lack there of.
Lack of updates or fixes or changes in policy or business models usually does it
Biggest offender, when a paid subscription game goes free2play. Star Trek Online, Star Wars Old Republic, Lotro. Firefall (MMOs are big offenders).
Usually it means they throw out or suspend content plans and spend 3 to 6 months restructuring the business and doing a free2play conversion… by which time a subscriber gets bored with lack of content or fixed schedule they will quit, and I do pretty much the second they announce a free2play conversion.
MMOs are awful for luring you into thinking that your satisfying reward is just around the corner and then you’ll start having ‘fun’. But the reality is that if you’re not having fun in the process of striving for the reward, the reward itself will feel hollow – because it’s always going to be superseded. MMOs are treadmills, pure and simple. Great if you enjoy running, but don’t ever believe you’re getting anywhere.
Took me YEARS to realise how hollow the raid-loot-raid gameloop was in WoW. I still play the game, but I almost gag at the thought of logging in at 7pm every night to do the same bosses over and over.
I bought Legion (haven’t played it yet), and will totally play through the quest lines… but the moment it starts getting to me repeat shit is the moment it starts losing me.
Yep! So far it’s looking great though, I have to say! Patch 7.1 announced already with new content, and although I’m not 110 yet I read that the world quests don’t really repeat either.
I did the same thing with EQ. Spent 7 years playing that game before I realised how repetitive the game was. Or, to be fairer, how repetitive it had become… So I got so much out of it that questioning whether it was worth it or not is ludicrous.
For me, its the same here. Games like Uncharted deliver 20-25 hours of entertainment, and are considered brilliant, while someone gets 50 hours and wants a refund? Theres something seriously wrong there…
I like MMOs and will admit to stopping and coming back to World of Warcraft depending on content… but other MMOs have an experation date in my book the second they say theycare cinverting to free to play. Its the fact they say everything is going to be exactly the same… but we just cut our work force in half and going to take the next 6 months switching the game to this model. Its like they just admitted their subscribers are worth nothing or shows lack of planning or faith in their brand.
Which is why I come back to wow repeatedly.. the devs dont lose faith even though they admit their content development even after a decade needs improvement.. which shiws growth.
I feel sorry for anyone playing a free2play that started as a paid subscription… it means the devs at one point gave up on their grand design for something mediocre.
I think games like SWTOR prove that F2P can be done pretty well.
It’s really about acknowledging that there are players who will happily pay much more than the sub price per month, and giving them something that they can spend it on. Outfits, and the like.
If you stay subscribed in SWTOR, even though it’s technically free, you get the full, base experience and the game doesn’t hassle you to spend any more money. You can play without the sub, but drop a few months’ sub worth of dollars and buy all the upgrades that let you ‘take the F2P wheel clamps off’. Y’know, full access to hotbars, equipment rarity, ship upgrades, etc.
Then there’s the BAD kind of F2P. Like the ‘Cryptic’ model – the one that has six billion types of currency, all linked to how much you’ve spent or how often you’ve logged in. The one that lets you spend those six billion types on various upgrades, none of which are really complete without the others. The cash-shop type is always the best. Doesn’t matter what you do in the game, it’s always reminding you to participate in shop-improved events, it’s always encouraging you to open gambling lockboxes, advising you when other players have done so and ‘got cool shit’ out of it, that has windows popping up telling you about ‘events’ (which always require some cash-shop investment to get the top tier reward), always has a bright, neon light pointing to the cash shop, always reminds you any time you get anything that you could get something BETTER or FASTER if you augmented your recent acquisition with the cash shop. They sell you anything and everything; cosmetics, companions, bag space, crafting, number of times you can run a dungeon, whatever… The ones which ‘rent’ powerful items to you.
And the worst part about those models is that they never stop. You can ‘subscribe’ or sign up for ‘premium’ or whatever, but the nagging, the reminders, the pointing to incentives never shuts up. There is no, “STFU” option, no item you can purchase which makes the cash shop functionally irrelevant or at least quiet. It takes whatever money you’re willing to give it, then it keeps heckling you for more. No matter how much you spend, it always wants more. It is insatiable.
That is the worst kind of F2P.
I spent a really, really long time ‘trying to find/recapture the fun’ in Destiny. The promise was there to start with… but it was never fulfilled.
Destiny. Picked it up for $10 at Target a few weeks ago. What a repetitive and boring game. Enter a ‘level’, horde mode. Repeat that for the rest of the game. It reminded me of the first Assassins Creed. I do not know how that franchise has stayed around for so long.
Maybe newcomers picking it up?
Jumped in with AC3, found it pretty enjoyable. AC4 was even better. That was it (Wii U owner).
Elite: Dangerous.
Thought it was amazing (and it was) when i first started playing it. After around 40 hours or so i got over the continual grind so stopped and havent looked back.
“its a mile wide, but an inch deep” is the biggest problem it probably has.
I play with other people, doing stuff. It can be grindy if you play it that way, but there’s vast depth.
Unfortunately, like Destiny, most of the cool lore is pretty well hidden and you only get it through snippets in game.
There’s an idea. Maybe I could play No Man’s Sky with other people too to break up the ohhhh wait, never mind…
Oddly, my first night playing NMS I was playing with another person. It was a lot of fun. Sure, we were both playing our own game, but we were sharing knowledge and I had a great time.
@os42 what do you think?
It was far more interesting than playing alone… and sharing knowledge that way kinda helps to bypass a couple of hours figuring out what resources are needed for what. Sharing discoveries verbally was pretty cool, but long-term… I honestly don’t think it’s enough to distract from the fact that there’s (currently) not all that much to the game. People are clamouring for proper multiplayer, but the only thing I can really see it impacting would be space combat, and speeding up resource gathering.
Which is a pity – NMS has some pretty interesting lore, from what I learned from the Atlas interfaces and anomalies… but it’s not enough to sustain it over the amount of time it takes to get anywhere near the centre of the galaxy.
I loved Alien Isolation right up until the ending. Soured the whole experience for me. But I want to replay the game some day.
Inside by the Limbo people, the final stuff in that game. What were they thinking?
When’s our Inside focused article coming anyway?
Games that pull off great stories are rare. Mass Effect 2’s ending can be gamed so you lose no crew-members, but then how much of it is the game’s ending and how much of it is ‘your’ ending?
There’s this drug-deal mini-game in the GTA Chinatown Wars game. I played that more than the main story, but when I finally finished the main story, I felt like I had wasted my time. But I still loved the drug-deal mini-game. I don’t know what that says about me.
Man that ending was just the worst! So so bad. It’s almost like they didn’t expect anyone to play up to that point so they just chucked in a filler ending and all went to the pub.
Sin.
I wanted to love it so much, but the constant bugs and crashes made it impossible. Put countless hours up until the underwater section where my machine would crash every single time.
Have never got to the stage where I “hate” a game after playing for many hours but there’s plenty that I just lose interest in.
Fallout 4 above was a good example I had fun to begin with but by mid game I was over it already because the story was on rails and the dialogue sucked, that would be fine if the combat changed…but it didn’t. The combat only got easier if anything. I ended up pushing through to beat the game but only because I wanted to tick it off the list.
Pokemon Go I could see was poorly designed from the start, that’s why I wasn’t interested in it from the beta testing. Then it came out and was more just addictive rather than fun, I played a fair bit more just because I wanted to capture them all. That’s petered out though, have given up on getting the rares that I’d have to wander around and be lucky to find. I never went over the top with dedicated trips anyway, the game has too many issues to hold my interest for long.
Of recent games The Division is my biggest regret though. Played it in the “beta” and it seemed fun, I liked the setting, the general story and the gameplay seemed fun. After release though at about 15-20 hours in the game was just boring, story wasn’t very engaging and it was just rinse and repeat the same thing over and over from one area to the next. That’s the point where I stopped and uninstalled. Would have loved a refund if I could get one, definitely my largest regrettable purchase in the last 5 years.
Fallout 4 and Fallout Shelter were my two first thoughts
Fallout 4 wasn’t a bad game, so “hate” isn’t the right word, but it’s a muddled mess with a terrible story, lame characters and a dated engine.
I did finish it though (main story), and even picked it up once again since (for about an hour), but the end of the main story is so weak that I had this sudden depression when it dawned on me that I spent way too much time playing with my inventory in a game that’s devoid of meaningful substance.
Fallout Shelter is a bit the same. I spent a LONG time building up my vault before it dawned on me that the whole thing was pointless. Again though, it was more my fault for being excited enough about the Fallout series to get really engulfed in the game without considering whether it was actually good.
Yeh I have to agree. Fallout 4 was… I don’t know how to describe it. The whole game just felt like I had been down that road before.
Next on my list would be Black Desert. Graphically it is amazing, but after that… I had nothing else to look forward to. Played that for at least 200 or more hours becoming number 1 at trading(depending on the time of day) but to what end….?
Final Fantasy XIII comes to mind. I was told it takes twenty five to thirty hours to “get to the good part” and I tried grinding my way through… it was a game I wanted to enjoy but I just couldn’t. The game felt repetitive, linear and some boss fights were overly difficult that I just didn’t enjoy it at all.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain… fun for a while, but it sadly turned into a disappointing experience. A game I wanted to enjoy but again, just couldn’t. Repetition and grind is what happened here.
Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC. Maybe on PC it’ll be good, but it’s so poorly optimized on PS4. The frame rate is horrendous, it makes me dislike the DLC.
I didn’t sink -that- many hours into No Man’s Sky, but this is also a game that I wanted to enjoy but couldn’t. No Man’s Sky felt like a repetitious grind where all I was doing was travelling from one galaxy, then grinding away to gather hyper drive fuel, to travel to the next galaxy and do it all over again.
I still keep thinking that I want to try FF13 again. And again and again and again, despite hating damn near everything about it! I hated the corridor level design, I hated the personalities of nearly all the characters (exception of Fang and possibly Lightning), I hated the story, I hated the paradigm system, I hated that it took damn near 30 hours to unlock any kind of party/combo/levelling/gearing freedom… Just. So. Much. Hate.
But fuck if it isn’t pretty, and hints at interesting themes. I’ve started and quit the bloody thing at least a half-dozen times, each time forgetting why I hated it so much.
“Oh, that wasn’t so bad… did I really give it up over annoyance at that? I should try it again and just ‘suck it up’ and push through the parts I didn’t like much. Worked for Dark Souls!”
20 hours later…
“I can’t believe I thought this was a good idea, holy fuck everything and everyone shits me to tears, I want this all to be over.”
I’m one of those weird people that actually liked FF XIII. The linear/corridor design for the first half of the game didn’t bother me, plenty of RPGs are like that. My favorite FF game was VIII and that doesn’t really open up until you’re 75% of the way through.
I played all the way through 13 and enjoyed every bit. The only thing I didn’t really like was the end game challenge stuff that you have to grind for. I sunk around 20 hours of pure grind and still didn’t finish all of that stuff.
Played through the main game at some point again after that until I got to where it opened up, got bored and started on another game.
Final Fantasy XIII is probably my best example too. Wanted to keep going because I’ve always been a FF fan and as you said, people kept saying “it gets better!”
By the time I got to the ‘good part’ (the open plains or whatever it was) I was so sick of the game I think I managed to kill 1 or 2 things then said fuck it, I’m done.
GTA V for me
GTA IV really put me off GTA games. I really liked GTA:SA… until those remote control plane levels and I just could’t get it done. Then there was a motorcycle chase in IV I couldn’t do. I really wanted to try V, but I keep remembering those moments and I back right off. Maybe the controls suck, or maybe I’m just not good enough? Either way, it stopped being fun very, very quickly.
My thoughts on Fallout 4 are a bit mixed. I started off a charismatic, intelligent build and the game so badly punished me for it, more than any other Fallout game I’ve played. There just isnt anywhere near as much speech options, heck there isn’t even a respectable town outside of Diamond City. All other Fallout games had multiple little towns you could interact and barter with – what Fallout 4 went with was the settlement idea instead. Why build a living town ingame when you can make the player do that for you. Well, I wasn’t interested in any farmville facebook resource game, so I was stuck. Combined with early sidequests sending me into a den of super mutants or a radar array with 50 or so raiders to deal with…. which was followed up with an escort mission that saw me up against a handful of molerats. The pacing of the game was very much off.
That said, I enjoyed it thoroughly once I became a competent shooter and abandoned my silver tongue, though that was over 20 hours into the game before I started to enjoy it. The DLC is utterly shameful. Only two worthwhile packs, certainly not worth the price-hike the Season Pass got. I had expected about 4 decent-sized content packs just like Fallout 3 and NV got, instead for nearly double the asking price, you get two decent packs (Far Harbor, Nuka-World) and a handful of content thats nothing more than a paid mod.
A number of MMO for me. Hell I played a bunch of korean MMO back in the day and holy hell that took grind to another level. Some of them I have appreciated but I think 9 dragons was probably the biggest grind ever. Hell you even need to level skills by use so you just sit there doing nothing but buffing your shield to get it to a working level. But I did lead me down the path of making some really good friends so can’t complain too much about the time but wouldn’t recommend the game.
i played about 60 hours of xenoblade and from the walk through guide/basing off other peoples play through times decided i probably still had another 50 hours to go. So i decided at that point I was just playing to satisfy the completionist in me and I didn’t want to waste my life any further. Felt like the combat was a diluted knock off of WoW and exploration was pretty bland, the world was huge but incredibly barren. I only really kept playing because I did like the story and characters. In the end I just watched a cutscene movie on youtube to see how it ends
most recently thou I think I kindvé regretted deus ex; man kind divided. Game wasn’t bad just very average
People seem to confuse “I’ve played 100 hours, the whole thing was awful” with “I’ve played 95 hours and enjoyed the game, but the few hours have made me realise I’m bored of it now so I’ll write a negative review telling everyone how shit it is”
Destiny got boring after 100 hours, but I loved it up until that point.
Mass Effect 3 was a great game that I thoroughly enjoyed my time with apart from the last half an hour.
Anyone that puts in a 100+ hours in a game and then honestly complains they didn’t enjoy any of it, well, they’re idiots. Who honestly spends hours doing something they really don’t like?! (apart from having a job! 🙂 )
It depends on if we’re talking about enjoyment from the game, enjoyment in general or quality of the game though. Like The Division, I was getting annoyed at that after the first hour or two. Half the game doesn’t work and half of what does feels clunky as hell. But I played easily over 100 hours of it in total because (like most online games) the experience with friends made it 1000X better.
Mechanically it’s a bit shit but it offers an MMO experience with a much smaller time-investment requirement than most so it worked well for my group of friends for a while – haven’t gone back to it for around a month now. It’s not a game I would ever play by myself though because I just don’t really like it that much.
Yeah, try playing The Division on your own…doesn’t last long. Was too repetitive and boring for me to keep going. It was interesting to begin with which is why I got 15-20 hours in before quitting.
I agree with you. I played WoW for 4 years before I quit. Thoroughly enjoyed most of it, I just kind of got bored of playing the same game after that long. Since then I haven’t been able to stick with any game much past 100 hours played, and the ones I even get that far with are pretty rare.
I have no idea how many hours I put into Ingress. Played hard for a year, on and off a fair bit the next year and the 3rd year, rarely. Finally made a push to hit lvl 14 and then I was done.
Now Pokemon Go is out and it’s even more fun. Especially playing with a group of friends. Gyms aren’t really worth going after solo unless they are already weak.
Lol. Same, so much time wasted ingressing. Then Pokemon GO just tipped it on its head. I guess the advantage of playing Ingress for so long gives us a fairly good idea of points of interest for Pokemon.
Yeah, decent advantage. Although there is no real incentive to get to the that pokestop on the top of a mountain like there was in ingress. No special mons’ no keys or anything. I don’t think it even counts uniques. You can just hit the same one over and over and your counter goes up.
I generally have a mentality of if I paid money for it, I’m going to at least finish it. So that means I’ve finished a lot of games I didn’t particularly like. Having said that, some games turned out great even after hating it for the first 2 or 3 hours.
Knight Online was a Malaysian MMO from the early 00’s and my first, it was very grindy and I spent frigging AGES playing that game. You had to group up to kill high enough monsters to level, so you’d spend half your time trying to find a group – which you didn’t want to leave because it took so long to find in the first place!
WoW was similar to me, especially in Vanilla. I ended up selling my original account as I really just how much time I had spent on the game and how little I actually enjoyed it. I ended up with a new account when WotLK came out which I still play to this day, but generally I’ll level up one character through the new content and unsub until the next major thing is released.
Lastly for me would be Counter Strike when I was around 16-18. I made a number of friends on certain servers so would constantly play round after round to keep up appearances. I used to get so bored with the game that I’d just started playing in a stupid fashion, i.e. P90/Shotty rushing etc
Knight Online sounds a lot like Risk Your Life was back then. Best way to level in Risk Your Life was to group up, pull lots of mobs and aoe them down. Entire game was pretty much just grind levels.
RYL was still extremely fun for me though due to unrestricted pvp in all but the starting zones for the two factions. I was one of the highest level players, ran a custom build that was pretty OP. Often walked into a town solo, charged up a max level spell, decimated all the NPCs and Players in the area then backed off and took on the waves of players that came out to attack me. Sometimes my brother joined me on his high level rogue-type character, hid in stealth and took them out from behind.
Good times, was still enjoying that game when it got sold to another company and they ended the free open beta. That’s when I stopped – game was fun but not worth paying for.
For me – Far Cry 2
Initial impressions were amazing; I loved the big open world and freedom it offered. I loved ram-raiding checkpoints, picking up jobs and doing what i wanted, when i wanted.
Then after some 20+ hours it dawned on me that the first 2-3 hours of amazing gameplay was pretty much the whole game. I got tired of ram-raiding checkpoints and quickly came to realise the game WANTED me to fight them by giving the guys in them turbo-charged jeeps which would quickly run me off the road should i try to avoid them (which was strange because they never went as fast whenever i stole said turbo-charged jeeps). When I realised those checkpoints also respawned after you went maybe 50m down the road, it just pissed me off immensely.
Add to that the horrible map that was more like a maze of canyons than an open world (i guess to force me onto roads so I can fight more checkpoints?), dealing with the nagging malaria and the repetitive and hollow missions i can only describe as an FPS interpretation of fetch-quests, and also the garbage guns which start malfunctioning after firing more than 20 shots, you get a game I just cannot help but hate.
This is why it shits me when people with no sense of empathy and no life experience outright dismiss the opinions and evaluations of those who’ve spent a crazy amount of time with a game trying to ‘find the fun’.
It’s not like this is a mental defect unique to gamers.
How many people stick around in awful relationships with people who are no good for them or who they don’t even really like any more, because they want to ‘give it a chance’?
How many people stick with dead-end jobs, in hope of some kind of promotion or opportunity that never materializes?
How many people root for sporting teams that will never win, thus spend every single match wringing their hands and moaning because of loyalty? How many people hate their car/house/apartment/any other purchase but stick with it to ‘give it a chance’ to grow on them or get better or be worth the investment, even though you can always refund/move/apply for jobs elsewhere/break up?
It’s ‘sunk cost fallacy’, only people don’t just invest the eighty bucks the game costs, which they could refund… they invest emotionally in hope and hype. It’s just a universal human failing that anyone should be able to understand it.
Way too real for Kotaku comments thread.
Complain like the rest of us or move on.
Well looking at the comment thread here most people are agreeing with you and the article. Spend a decent chunk of time playing a game, start to not like it or never did to begin with but keep playing anyway just to finish it, or get their money’s worth or to play with friends who like it etc.
The ones I don’t understand is when a game is clearly bad from the first hour of playtime and you see someone sink 400 hours into it and then bad mouth the game and say it has no depth. I remember that from the Killing Floor article on here…they shared a Steam review from someone with that kind of playtime. Tried the game myself on a free weekend with a friend, we got through 1 match before quitting.
For me, it’s usually what a game becomes after updates. I sunk hundreds of hours and dollars into LoL only to see patch after patch change the game I loved into one I grew to despise.
I’m sure there are others but Pokemon Go comes to mind because it is recent.
I was addicted and played it non stop for the first week, then quickly realized how poorly designed and bug ridden the game was. The love for pokemon was overcome by the perpetual frustration of trying to play the game.
I would guess the majority of people still playing are kids who can’t distinguish poor apps from a great one.
Nah, majority are still adults. They’re just the people who want to catch em all badly enough to keep trying…or they happen to live in a decent spot and actually have a chance to catch the rares.
Niantic just released the game too early, it’s an alpha at best in its current state. I’m going to keep my ears open for updates and will jump back in for a bit when something decent gets introduced. The incoming buddy pokemon system is alright but not really much of a game changer. Means I could fill out another 10-15 pokemon through evolutions but I cbf walking enough for that.
No Man’s Sky is the only one I can think of. Put in a fair few hours but didn’t like it. It’s like a TV show that shows potential without living up to the potential. You keep playing thinking “Surely there is something spectacular coming up. If I quite now I won’t see it”, so you keep playing but eventually you realise that nothing is coming and what you see is what you get.
Watch_Dogs. I was at EB for the midnight launch, got the price match for somewhere, got it home and installed it… played it for a few hours the next day. Was appaled at the driving physics and bored by the story. Played less than 5 hours, probably traded it for less than $10 credit.
I done this. Except it was an hour and purely the driving physics, So unenjoyable!
You know what? Grand Turismo, any part. Yes, I only bought this twice for the ps3 because someone stole my first copy, and then I only had it because of how nice it always looked and I could show off nice photo mode screensavers on my tv. I don’t know why, but I absolutely hated the trials and the trying to get your licenses just to be able to get the better cars. I wasn’t into racing games to begin with so why the hell did I ever buy this? Probably peer pressure and hype.
I hated DotA2 from the beginning, but played around 200 hours over the course of a couple of years because I’d use it to catch up and chat with some friends.
It’s not something I’ll usually do with single-player games, though. I think Max Payne 3 is probably the only time I’ve played all the way through a game that was so bad it was making me angry.
I feel you on the DotA2 point. Did the same with LoL.
But Max Payne 3? I picked it up on a whim from ye ol’ bargain bin and loved it. Probably helped that it cost me under $10.
I was probably way too hyped for MP3 so it didn’t get a totally fair shake. MP2 is one of my favourite games of all time.
But MP3 just didn’t “feel” like Max Payne. The writing was mediocre, the story was cribbed from other sources, the shooting mechanics were OK but I thought Stranglehold had implemented cover and environmental interactions much better several years before.
It was the way the story and gameplay fought each other that really bugged me, though.
This gets pretty ranty 🙂 Feel free to ignore the grumpy old man in the corner.
How much of the game is spent trying to save that girl, insta-failing if she dies, and then she just gets shot in a cutscene anyway? The game could have continued on at any previous point without any narrative disconnect, it just forced you to run through x different environments.
And then the stupid ending. I tried so many times to run up the stairs and jump off, only to be insta-killed in a cutscene. The actual course of action? Randomly kill people until the game decides that you’re done and makes Max do his run up the stairs in a cutscene.
Understandable. I’m old enough to have experienced the original games but for one reason or another, I never did on a first-hand basis. I knew enough about them to give MP3 a punt.
I suppose coming into it having spent next to nothing on it, no emotional investment and without expectations beyond a fun shooty time probably helped me to enjoy it more than you. Perspective and all that.
Man, it’s crazy to me how many die-hard MP1-2 fans rag on MP3! I played the originals on launch and revisited them a few times for nostalgia’s sake before getting into 3, and I loved the SHIT out of 3. I didn’t really run into the insta-fails that you’re describing, so that might be a big point of difference, but 3 felt so thematically right to me.
It wasn’t a re-hash of the character, it was the next logical step in his evolution and growth as a character. I really related to Max in this. (I mean, they totally lifted the main plot from Man On Fire, but I also loved that, too. Max had his own take on it, and that was great.)
They lost his soul, though. He had no poetry left. No hope, no optimism.
In a way that actually worked, and the comic series did a really nice job of transitioning to ‘new Max’, but it left the game with a very different protagonist. New Max wasn’t a guy I wanted to hang out with for 10 hours.
Extra Credits did a good job of taking about many of the issues I had with his characterisation. I will point out that I wasn’t against change itself. I think that, much like the movie, most of the reasons for the changes made total sense. I just wasn’t a fan of the final product, and that was extra disappointing given how much I loved the originals.
It’s my No Man’s Sky, and I’ll forever be unnecessarily petty about it 🙂
Awh, I felt like they gave him a tonne of extra depth thanks to credibility of his response to his life so far. I think he found his optimism when he decided to sort his shit out and fight back against the wallowing and self-destruction. Well. He was still cruising toward self-destruction, but he was going to face it with a clear head. And you can’t get much more optimistic than his very final decision at the airport. 😀
Oh well. I guess we’ll never agree, but I felt like 3 was the best characterization of Max so far… just all the complaints I’ve read to date seemed to be from folks who stopped paying attention to his character growth long before he actually decided to change himself, characterizing the entire game as one of wallowing when it was actually a redemption story. A redemption story of a naive optimist who persists in doing the right thing and putting his faith in people long past the point of sensibility.
That moment when he plays the piano… so haunting. Reflecting on the echoes of his journey and how beat the fuck down it’s left him… still the wounded poet, but beaten down well past the point of wailing about it like the young man he was in the first couple games. It’s an older man’s response to the pain.
You’ve convinced me to give it a second shot with a clearer frame of reference 🙂
Well, now I’ll be devastated if all I’ve done is convinced you to do something you end up not enjoying, so sorry in advance if that turns out to be the case. I just really love the growth of MP3 Max. Also, he rocks the hell out of the bald and bearded look. Going from rangy, slick young guy to barrel-chested, bearded bruiser kind of mirrors my own ageing process. 😉
Eh, I’d stop playing before I get to 100 hours if it was a crap game.
Mad Max comes close, as I played it maybe halfway before getting annoyed that it was a really shallow experience.
Natural Doctrine as well, except I love half the game, and it really can be a deep experience, I just think the developer was really dickish with stages entirely contrived to ruin you unless you follow more or less a prescribed set of steps, particularly towards the end.
Fallout New Vegas GOTY. There’s very few games that I hate that I’ve played for over a hundred hours but that is definitely the one.
No Man’s Sky is my most recent example of this. I loved it to begin with but the end game is such tedium that it soured me on the whole. After 40 hours I was ready to ‘beat’ the game but probably had another 50-100 ahead of me to achieve that and that wasn’t going to happen. I certainly can’t recommend NMS in its current state.
Another would be Fallout 4, over 200 hours in that games doing *everything* all the while hating the dialogue and quest systems. I love the exploration aspect of the game but the rest is such a let down to the point that the negatives outweighed the positives for me.
Fallout 4 was a big reason I was looking forward to No Man’s Sky as it was going to be an exploration game without that horrible story tagged on to it.
Maybe Obsidian can make a vastly superior NMS using the same engine and a lot more bugs :p
The Games genre of all entertainment medium ( except sport ) might be the 2nd worst where lots of gamers invest so much of their identity into a game that they have trouble letting go and acknowledging how wrong they were. That process might take five hours, 10 hours, or 100 hours.
Also applies to series as well. My favourite game of all is Ocarina of Time, but I hate Zelda nowadays.
I like sport myself but sport is the worst culprit imo. I still know people who have a bad whole week if their team loses. WTF x 1000.
I remember getting bart vs the juggernauts on gameboy back in the day and played it A LOT but could never get past this one stupid fight. It was back when I would have to wait until the next birthday or xmas for a new game and I loved the Simpsons so I played it constantly. until I realised I really didn’t like it and couldn’t bring myself to play it anymore. These days I’m a bit more picky with my games so while I don’t realise I hate them, I definitely get over some of the grindy games. or get distracted by something better and never feel like going back. Mad Max and the division fall into these catagories. I enjoyed my time with them but I just didn’t see a future together
LA Noire started good but it then became increasingly obvious that it was unpolished. The voice acting was all over the place and inconsistent for the situations the characters were in. It got very repetitive too and so the last half was a grind because I just wanted to finish it.
The idea was interesting, the tech was new and impressive (bit the faces seemed to be floating on the bodies at times) but it got tedious quite quickly.
Oh there’s ANOTHER suspect deciding to run away from me ffs…
Why is Phelps shouting at this person he is questioning for no reason?
I only played it last year after buying it for $5 on Steam a couple years ago.
Yeah, LA Noire is one I got a bit hyped for. Played the first bunch of missions but it got boring pretty fast. I was always repeating the interviews because the facial clues that were meant to be such a key mechanic were too damn vague and hard to read.
That game did end up tanking pretty hard in reviews though.
I generally get bored of them way before I ever start hating them for not being what I thought they were – when I start to notice I’m not feeling like I’m accomplishing anything, or the mechanics are really not as deep as I thought they’d be, or I feel like there’s nothing left to accomplish, I go play something else. I’ve done it quite a few times during my 1600-or-so hours of Destiny, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon (hell, I hope it won’t, because it means I get time to play other games :P) – the key is to notice when you’re not enjoying something, and realising that your time is more important.
Make not mistake, this is just MY opinion, I’m not trying to troll. It’s more of a case of going against what is commonly accepted as a great game by the majority of the gaming community. For me, one size does not fit all…..
Red Dead redemption….I had seriously looked forward to playing this game finally and it was one of the most boring games I had ever played, aside from the story and half decent gunplay. There was nothing to do, a huge open world which captured the feeling of what the wild west must have been like. It just got boring quickly.
Far Cry 2. Another over-rated game for me. I think by about the time this game arrived, I was suffering from open world exhaustion. How many times can you do the same thing in a different way?
Sacred 2. Tons to do, awesome ARPG up to about the 50 hour mark, then you realize you’ve still got another 50 hours till you’ve actually finished the game. Another 50 hours using the same 3-4 attacks you’ve been using for the past 20-50 hours.
Final fantasy 10. Yep, I said it……Every time I hear the main characters voice, I want to punch something in the face! “But it’s a JRPG, they’re supposed to sound like that!” I hated the characters, the game play, going nowhere story, mini quests with that stupid underwater soccer game. Would you hate it if I said I actually think FF8 or even 12 were far superior games?
Any multiplayer shooter, cause I suck at MP shooters!
Feel free to shoot me down in flames but this is just my opinion.
I finished Bioshock, perhaps expecting that the supposedly brilliant ending would make up for the dull combat, ham-fisted dialogue and predictable set pieces that I trudged through to get there. Nope. Not for me.
Maybe I shouldn’t have played it expecting it to reach the heights people describe it as reaching knowing how fond the internet is of hyperbole, but I thought that the opening 2 hours were fantastic, and then repeated again and again in slightly different locales with slightly more enemies.
Battlefront 2016.
What utter fucking shit.
I can’t think of a time I pushed on in a game I didn’t want to play.
Oh wait, actually FFX-2 I forced myself through a lot of of that, thankfully my gf took over while I helped.
(Wanted the Tidus ending, figured I owed Yuna that much)
As a somewhat new Dad myself, I find that my time available to spend on games is pretty small. So was never going to even attempt No Mans Sky!!
Generally, I will now avoid SP games that have a story of 20+ hours unless there is actual sense of achievement along the way (thinking GTA 5, Mass Effect to a degree) . Otherwise, it’s short-but-sweet MP games like battlefield and other round based games that will keep me entertained. I don’t look at the hours spent on those.
This whole thing with Ark’s DLC has boggled my mind. People who are negatively reviewing a game they have hundreds or thousands of hours in because they don’t… what… want the dev to be successful? It’s like every forum for every free to play game ever made where there’s pages upon pages of people sharing tips of how to enjoy that game without ever paying a cent.
If you like the game, support the dev. If you have a hundred hours in a F2P, pony up some dough even on the smallest thing.
If the game has changed for you in that you no longer enjoy it… giving it a negative review is like breaking up a happy marriage because your wife farted in bed (which mine does, all the goddamned time!)
What you’ve done here, is nutted out 1 of my biggest pet hates! People complaining about a free game asking you to spend some money. Now I’m not talking about the f2p games that constantly spam you with requests of real money and ruin your enjoyment , I mean all the other ones. People expect too much for nothing. the biggest complaints I always seem to read is when f2p games put a heap of content behind a pay wall a few hours into the game, or force you to grind for hours if you don’t want to throw a few dollars to make your life easier.
Games cost money to make, ongoing support and sequels also cost money to make, they gave you a free sample (sometimes a huge sample), by now you should have decided if you like the game or not, if not then Alt F4 and uninstall, but if you do, well it’s time to pony up some dollars and pay your dues. Most triple A titles don’t give you ANY content for free and hide it ALL behind a paywall.
Every time I read a steam review saying a game is shit and sucks because so much grinding or inaccessible content unless your willing to pay money, and see that they have 100-300h of played time, I automatically just think “ignore this tight arse”
For me the two biggest examples of this are Everquest and Eve Online. For EQ, I spent over a year in-game – admittedly including a bunch of ingame time in the market selling stuff. I briefly explored going back, then found that in making it F2P they had stripped the 1000+ AA points I had accumulated and which are required for a high-level cleric to be playable. Logged out, uninstalled.
For Eve Online I was spending most of my time mining and doing faction missions and gave up when I realised I wasn’t having any fun. Then a few months ago I renewed my sub for three months… then let it lapse after not logging in again. I just had no interest in playing again.
I’m a bit tempted to go back to LOTRO for a while, since that game at least had some semblance of progression. I’m interested to see where they go when they run out of content from the books. (The logical path would be to set up some sort of gateway to the First or Second Age, where everybody was overpowered already so a high-level 3A/4A character would fit in nicely.)
I notice with MMOs especially that people love to talk shit about the game after quitting despite having put hundreds/thousands of hours into it, and that they also tend to act as if they’re above anyone else who still plays said game.
Reminds me of Ex-WoW players who call it the “worst game ever”, ignoring the fact they had played for thousands of hours and on many occasions were clearly enjoying themselves.
Just because something ends badly, does not mean it always was. People really need to stop confusing the two.