Missions that made you quit

[Cordeos]

This came up on the most recent Crate & Crowbar. Has there been a mission in a game that was so hard, so fiddly, so stupid, so poorly written, so offensive etc. That you simply couldn't continue.

 

Two games immediatly came to mind. Mad Max had a racing mission, before that 100% of the driving was out in the desert so you could drive like a crazy person swinging all over the place. Suddenly you are racing against a bunch of respawning cars in tight corridors full of traps. I found in insanely frustrating and since I was mostly done with the game I just abandoned it.

 

Similarly Starlancer had a mission where you had to defend you spacecraft carrier from long range torpedo ships. There were too many shooting too quickly and your AI buddies we're useless. I failed over and over and over again.

 

I am sure I will think of more games as I pull this over. How about y'all?

 

[jennegatron]

There's a stealth mission like 90% of the way through Bully that made me quit immediately upon it being told to me that I needed to try and stealth.

[Bjorn]

The final section of Cave Story+ suddenly jumps up in difficulty to a ridiculous degree, to the point that I tried it a couple of times, watched a youtube video to see if I was missing something obvious, and promptly quit and uninstalled. 

 

It's not quite the same in a roguelike, but chasing unlocks against Hush in Binding of Isaac RB/AB ended up being what broke me on playing that game.  Unlocking stuff through challenges is part of the fun of going back to that game, and there are a bunch of unlocks associated with beating each of the major bosses with specific characters.  But Hush requires a speedrun to reach (30 minutes to reach about two-thirds of the way through a full run), and is one of the biggest damage sponge bosses in the game.   Hush was the second boss with character specific unlocks that required a speedrun to reach, and beating my head against that with the more challenging characters just destroyed my desire to ever play it again.

[Professor Video Games]

I quit Goldeneye for a long time because of that level where you protect Natalya while she stands in the middle of a wide open room hacking some computer. But that was in the days when I owned like three games so a few months later I went back and got through it

 

3 minutes ago, Bjorn said:

The final section of Cave Story+ suddenly jumps up in difficulty to a ridiculous degree, to the point that I tried it a couple of times, watched a youtube video to see if I was missing something obvious, and promptly quit and uninstalled. 

 

You mean that Hell section? I got to the final boss in that area a few times but it was just too much. I just put it down at that point too.

[Bjorn]

7 minutes ago, Professor Video Games said:

You mean that Hell section? I got to the final boss in that area a few times but it was just too much. I just put it down at that point too.

 

Yeah, it's one of the most out of place difficulty spikes I can think of in a game.  Like, I've played lots of hard platformers where part way through I just decided it wasn't for me, but that specific jump just feels out of place in that game.

[Beasteh]

"All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!"

 

[Roderick]

Speaking of GTA, the hospital mission in GTA4 I strongly remember as an infuriating piece of mission design. Didn't quit, but I certainly wasn't happy and I absolutely threw my controller on a sofa seat in a semi-controlled fashion to vent my anger.

[twmac]

GTA Vice City had a mission with remote control planes attacking boats and that made me quit.

 

Mafia II, I got to the mission where there was an extreme spike in difficulty in about chapter 13/14 and as much as I was sort of enjoying the story, I could not be bothered with that so I binned it.

 

[Merus]

I feel like the post-game area being hard isn't really the same thing as a mission that made you quit; stuff like Hell in Cave Story is explicitly something after the point where the game is happy for you to quit, and to even unlock it, you have to do a fairly obscure series of actions that wouldn't occur to you unless you were intentionally trying to squeeze more playtime out of the game.

 

Hmm. There's a boss fight in Radiant Historia that I simply can't get past, and I definitely ran into a wall there.

[Patrick R]

The remote control helicopter mission in San Andreas was impossible on PS2, though I did manage it later with mouse and keyboard on PC by turning my hands into weird claws trying to manipulate 8 or so keys at once.

 

As someone who basically never beats games, I suppose almost every game I play has a moment like this (usually it's just "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing next"), but that was a big one.

[Gormongous]

There's a mission in the first Black & White where you threw everything you could through a portal to another world to escape an attack, and then you came out in a land where there was a constant rain of fireballs. They gave you a shield spell to protect your people, but it never seemed to work? I tried mightily for the better part of a week to beat it and just couldn't. I'm still not sure if it was bugged, or if the building and item placement was dependent on where it came through the portal and I just got screwed? Who cares, Black & White wasn't even that fun of a game anyway.

[Deadpan]

The Cradle mission in Thief 3 made me quit that game, I'm too much of a wuss when it comes to horror. The rest of the game was also a little spooky, but I was mostly doing okay as long as I could tell myself that the dark was my friend and nobody could see/hurt me. The whole conceit of that mission though is that a spooky ghost is aware of your presence no matter how well you hide yourself and that freaked me out way too much.

 

I didn't quit that game, but I noclipped through large sections of Ravenholm when I first played Half Life 2 for similar reasons.

[Jayel]

Been playing Mafia III recently and the Grecco mission made me damn nearly quit out of rage. It's maybe about 6 hours into the game, and it's supposed to be the "tutorial" mission for learning to drive and shoot - I didn't even know you could fire a gun while driving in this game until this mission, and I'd bet majority of players didn't either.

 

It's a car chase mission, where you're chasing the bad guy, but you have to use right bumper to fire, while holding the right trigger to accelerate. As an added twist, there are bad guys chasing you at the same time, so you have to aim backward using the right analog stick while driving at full speed, but it's humanly impossible to do both at the same time, so you have to hit the Y button at just the right moment to slow down time.  This is supposed to be the first mission where you're doing an entirely new form of action, but it asks you to juggle many things at once, all the while holding the controller like a weirdo!

[infamous space turtle]

There's some really hard flying minigames in GTA5 that I think I quit out of, although i then just went and played other parts of GTA. There's definitely more but I cant think of them. A lot of the games I play allow save scumming so I just incrementally make progress like the filthy cheat I am. 

^^ I get that in horror games too, though its more love hate. I'm constantly ready to alt F4 but I never actually do and usually retrospectively enjoy it, horrors weird. 

[elmuerte]

Max Payne 3, the airport. I think it's the second encounter in the baggage claim area where you have to climb up while being attacked. Enemies keep respawning until you push through enough. So you cannot take your time to kill off everybody with the short supply of ammo you have.

[Henke]

13 hours ago, Deadpan said:

I didn't quit that game, but I noclipped through large sections of Ravenholm when I first played Half Life 2 for similar reasons.

 

Oooooh yes. I had a hard time thinking of anything, but Ravenholm did put a stop to my first HL2 playthrough as well. I don't like creepy crawly things that wanna get close to my face, so when HL2 started introducing headcrabs and barnacles I had to get myself nicely liquoured up to have the courage to keep playing. Eventually I got used to them, but when I got to Ravenholm a long-legged thing came skittering around the corner and I NOPE'D out of there and didn't return for a year or two. Eventually worked up the courage to play through the game, and even went back and played HL1 later on, which I'd given a miss for the same reasons.

[sclpls]

On 4/3/2018 at 6:03 AM, twmac said:

GTA Vice City had a mission with remote control planes attacking boats and that made me quit.

 

Mafia II, I got to the mission where there was an extreme spike in difficulty in about chapter 13/14 and as much as I was sort of enjoying the story, I could not be bothered with that so I binned it.

 

 

That GTA Vice City mission is what came to my mind when I saw this thread.

[brendonsmall]

Most recently, I nearly quit playing zelda botw because of the "The Lost Pilgrimage" shrine quest.  It has all the tropes of my least favourite mission types in games: Stealth in a non-stealth game, escort/follow, hard fail/reset loop.

 

Thankfully zelda had enough good will in the bank that I just googled a walkthrough and finally beat it. But man is that mission punishing and terrible.

[brendonsmall]

On 4/3/2018 at 11:59 AM, Patrick R said:

The remote control helicopter mission in San Andreas was impossible on PS2, though I did manage it later with mouse and keyboard on PC by turning my hands into weird claws trying to manipulate 8 or so keys at once.

 

As someone who basically never beats games, I suppose almost every game I play has a moment like this (usually it's just "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing next"), but that was a big one.

 

Oh man, this is a classic frustrating one for me too. I recall it being super long too, which added to the frustration of failing while nearly done several times in a row.

[Professor Video Games]

Oh I remembered one! In the first God of War, there's a segment where you have to climb some tower with rotating bits with various spikes and things on it. The controls for it were bad and the hit detection was shit and if you messed up you got knocked to the bottom. I was already getting frustrated with that sort of stuff in the game so I just quit.

[marginalgloss]

What a great idea for a thread. When I was a kid it was almost every game. The Command and Conquer games were always particularly galling in this regard because it was always so satisfying to see the next cutscene (and so depressing to see the 'fail' cutscenes).

 

Mafia, the original one, is a murderously hard game. A sadistic saved game system, fixed single-use medkits - no recharging health in those days! - and semi-realistic gunplay. I probably gave up on that game all the time back in the day. But I always used to find a certain satisfaction in squeezing my way through it. Even to this day the sounds of Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt give me flashbacks.

 

I don't abandon games very often anymore. If I do it's usually because I've lost interest, rather than because I hit a wall. I stopped Deadly Premonition for that reason, even though I really wanted to like it. There's a bunch of moments in Metro 2033 which are really rough, especially if you're playing on Ranger/Hard mode. And not even hard in a rewarding way: just wave upon wave of horrible relentless clawing monsters. But somehow I got through it even though I didn't really find it that rewarding.

 

The one which I really did abandon, and which I sometimes regret, is Dark Souls 3. It remains the only game in the Souls series which I haven't finished. I got quite far but I set it aside around the time I got to Irithyll of the Boreal Valley. I can't quite explain why. It is in many ways a very good game. The difficulty was part of it, I suppose; were it an easier game I would have blundered through for the sake of finishing it. I guess it was just a sense of exhaustion - a feeling that, in spite of all the wonder and mystery, I'd somehow seen and done all this before.

 

Or perhaps my real problem was that it wasn't Bloodborne, which is still (IMO by some distance) the best of those games.

[Nappi]

All three Mafia games mentioned at this point, and while I eventually got through all of those games, I have to say that especially the first two ones had some insane difficulty spikes.

 

The final mission of Mafia was really brutal, but at least that felt like a fitting climax for the game. Some of the earlier missions were almost as hard, as I recall, and got me really worried about the difficulty of the remaining missions. Mafia II didn't have nearly as many difficulty spikes as the original, but thinking about the game still makes me angry about a certain shootout at the docks. In Mafia III the difficulty was mostly connected with driving missions, whether killing gangsters or escaping the police. I think I lucked out and didn't have to repeat any of those missions that many times, but they could very well have turned into one of those super frustrating  grinds.

[twmac]

3 hours ago, Nappi said:

 Mafia II didn't have nearly as many difficulty spikes as the original, but thinking about the game still makes me angry about a certain shootout at the docks.

 

That is the one I quit about 2 weeks ago.

[smoke]

Maybe the vehicle level in BattleToads? Can't remember if it's one or two.

 

But I remember that it involved jumping at exactly the right time and if you messed up, you're going ALL the way back to the start. Was insane and made me hate games for a while.

[Patrick R]

 

If you mean this level yes, absolutely. On the other hand I feel like in that era almost every game had some level (usually 3 or 4) that felt utterly unfair and insurmountable that you never saw past. Or maybe that was just because I was 6 and terrible at games.

 

EDIT: Watching this video, though, I am totally blown away by how it simulates amazing speeds. It looks like at the top and bottom of the screen sprites are just rapid swapping places while the pink membrane background in the middle scrolls by slightly slower. No wonder that game no one could get past the third level of was so popular, it looks great.