Tanukitsune

Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

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It truly is a shame to have a quit a game, but sometimes you have to.

At the same time I see people slogging through a whole game they are clearly not enjoying, it's almost like they don't want to admit the game "defeated" them, or that that they made a bad choice and don't like the game.

I thought it would be a good idea to create this post to show there is no shame in quitting a game, as long you do it for the right reasons.

Think of this as the opposite of the "Completed games thread", the only rule is that you just can't quit and whine and say the game is terrible, you have to play enough to know why you don't like it and be a little more verbose. I think it's healthy to pinpoint the exact reason you don't like a game, that way you will know what to avoid the next time.

That's what I do, even when I start to have that feeling that I'm not enjoying the game, I don't stop until I'm sure why.

I'll start by giving a recent example:

Metro 2033: While I wasn't that invested in the characters, I did enjoy the world and the whole bullet economy. I actually enjoyed the parts when you have to wear a gas mask and pray your filter will last enough until you find the next one. What really got to me was the combat and the A.I., this is not the first game with "bipolar" enemies that either run straight at you like the mutants and the "tactical" ones like the thugs.

The thing is, it didn't feel right. You obviously can't conserve ammo easily on the mutants and they were more of annoyance than a threat unless the group was very large. As for the humans? They were the worst. There is nothing wrong with "tactical" enemies that will try to use cover and will move from cover to cover to make them harder to hit, but this is where the AI truly seems to be off. I've never seen a game where the enemies move this much, it didn't feel like they were trying to avoid my fire, they move so spastic-ally it's almost like they were dancing (or head-bopping to be more precise). Who thought it would be a good idea to have a game about conversing ammo where the enemies move too much to get a clear head shot? I know "tactical" enemies are slower to kill, but this is just ridiculous. Even when the enemy has no idea of where I am, they keep doing their silly "dance", until they spot me and then simply "dance" in my direction. I just couldn't get into the game anymore, the AI's behavior was just putting me off.

So, since it was clear I hated the fighting in the game, the thing was: did I hate enough to quit the game? Frankly, while I enjoyed the world, I've seen enough post-apocalyptic ones to know what I was in for and thought it was not worth it for me. So, I quit.

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I stop playing games all the time - I never got the determination to play till the end. I quit the Modern Warfare 3 campaign after about an hour when I realized it was the most staged and shallow experience possible. Im sorry but just shooting dudes in a game is not exciting enough to warrant playing. You need to have either a very interesting mechanic, like great bullet dynamics or AI, or a story or some sort of deeper interaction.

Metro 2033 is a game that I kinda wanted to quit, but I was glad I stuck with it. I found the mutant sections intolerable, they were just so awful. Even sneaking up on them and blasting two shots into them with a shotgun wouldnt kill them. It COMPLETELY went against the idea of being sneaky and accurate and I felt like every aspect of the game was designed poorly for those brute force interactions with the mutants. But I found the combat against the human AI so compelling that I couldnt stop playing. I would take take to scout the area, watch their paths and estimate their forces, then I would try to trip them up with their own traps and take advantage of dark spots and shooting out lights to ambush them and keep out of sight.

I dont remember experiencing this bobbing head thing. I found that the game did very well at enforcing a combat style that had you taking out enemies undetected from far away, or being forced to get closer and use SMGs/shotguns to kill them once you were detected. I cant wait for the next game, it just disappoints me that the mutant combat seems largely unchanged.

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Metro 2033 is a great example of a game that I have temporarily abandoned. There are games that I have quit from frustration or boredom, but more frequently I get distracted by something else (sometimes another game, maybe work, maybe I just don't get time to sit down and play a game for a week or two) and boom, it's done. I don't go back. It gets put on the backlog list.

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I usually don't have much trouble quitting a game I detest. I even have a Steam category for those which I own on Steam. It is titled "FUCCCKKKKK" and includes Bad Rats, Depths of Peril, Gish, RIP, RIP 2: Strike Back, RIP 3: The Last Hero, Speedball 2: Tournament, and Your Doodles Are Bugged!

Now, most of those are shit games that I got in a bundle randomly and was never actually looking to buy. Gish is something people love for some reason. I think it's completely awful. Your Doodles Are Bugged! has its fans, but I dunno. It's just so goddamn tedious.

I should note that I actually DIDN'T quit Bad Rats. I fucking destroyed that game. I hated it so much I refused to let its nondeterministic ass shut me down. FUCK YOU, BAD RATS. FUCK YOU.

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Ha ha, I should totally make a Steam category called like that for those game I quit and really hate. Every once in a while I go back to them only to remember why I hate them so much!

Also, kudos on beating Bad Rats, Twig, or maybe I should scold you for putting up with such a game? Either way, it's some sort of an achievement.

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Gish is something people love for some reason. I think it's completely awful.

UGH SAME! Its such a sloppy handling game. I have tried it 4 or 5 times and every time its worse then before. I wish I could permanently delete it from Steam.

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I'm not ashamed to quit a game. But I do think it's bad to quite a game because you might be missing out of something good. I rarely quit games, but I quite often stop playing a game. You could consider this quitting a game, but I might come back to playing it somewhere in the future. For example, I stopped playing Killzone 2 for something like 6 months before continuing it and finishing it.

Most games I stop playing are puzzle games that become tedious, or simply way to difficult for me. For example the BIT.TRIP games , I don't have the reflexes and timing to finish those. Or Cogs and Droplitz, seriously tedious and annoying challenges at some point. But I really don't consider it quitting because I moved on to something more interesting and the game simply started to gather dust.

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UGH SAME! Its such a sloppy handling game. I have tried it 4 or 5 times and every time its worse then before. I wish I could permanently delete it from Steam.

YEAH! I'm like, "Maybe this time?" BUT NO. IT STAYS TERRIBLE. Always. ):

Thankfully Edmund McMillen went on to make actual good games that I love a lot!

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YEAH! I'm like, "Maybe this time?" BUT NO. IT STAYS TERRIBLE. Always. ):

Thankfully Edmund McMillen went on to make actual good games that I love a lot!

Yeah, Edmund's older games tended to handle terribly specially compared to Super Meat Boy. Even Meat Boy is unplayable compared to the remake.

Elmuerte, you only quit tedious games if they are puzzle games? So other genres are OK to you even when they are tedious? That's odd.

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I've been playing Metro 2033 a level at time every six months or so. I love the gas mask and bullet currency dynamics enough to keep bringing me back, but then I play for a couple hours and realize the rest of the game is all strangely unkinetic gunplay and clumsy stealth scenes. Seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I put half a clip into a guy and still didn't know if he was dead, or for every time I shot a guy in the head with a silenced pistol and still managed to alert the whole camp, I could buy and build a computer to run Metro 2033 at max settings.

But I haven't officially quit that game, like with many others. One game I'm pretty sure I've quit for good though is Hegemony: Gold. I love it for being an amazing strategy game that fully captures the experience of command in the ancient Greek world, but that also means I was able to march a massive army through the northern Balkans, into a nightmare of starvation and rout, in pursuit of a campaign objective I wasn't aware was optional. Actually, through the same stupid determination, I was able to secure said objective, but it totally broke my game and left me unequipped to pursue any other objective. At that point, my options were to withdraw from Epirus and Illyria, which would take at least a dozen hours of game time to achieve, restart the campaign, which would take just as long, or tell the game to go fuck itself and play Total War: Shogun 2 like a baby. This is why sandbox games sometimes freak me out. I guess I am a baby.

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Elmuerte, you only quit tedious games if they are puzzle games? So other genres are OK to you even when they are tedious? That's odd.

I didn't say "quit", but stopped playing.

But yeah, because puzzles games pretty much never have something going for them except the puzzles. There is no story that comes to an end.

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Well, I guess I can understand that, since I stop playing RPGs pretty easily. Unless the story or world is excellent, I'll stop playing pretty soon, the longer the game, the stricter I am with it.

Come to think of it, I tend to stop playing puzzle games for the same reason you said. I play them so infrequently I forgot about it.

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I quit Dark Void because it's boring and didn't make much sense.

Also I bought Saints Row 3 on OnLive and halfway through my monitor fucked itself in a way that it always starts the game offset a few hundred pixels to the left, and to the up... which is weird. So I can't play it. But it was pretty boring anyway, so I'm not that sad about it.

I'm playing DarkSiders right now and WHY DID THEY MAKE IT SO LONG!!!! The game is basically Devil May Cry, but with less focus on combat and more focus on puzzles, and I don't know what kind of evil person would set out to make that. There's so many... dungeons and back-tracking and levelling up your shit, and dragging huge crates around to line up with things- It is Devil May Cry with a load more fat added in between boss fights. That's exactly what it is.

Oh and I didn't finish Majora's Mask. I hate Majora's Mask.

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I quit Dark Void because it's boring and didn't make much sense.

Also I bought Saints Row 3 on OnLive and halfway through my monitor fucked itself in a way that it always starts the game offset a few hundred pixels to the left, and to the up... which is weird. So I can't play it. But it was pretty boring anyway, so I'm not that sad about it.

I'm playing DarkSiders right now and WHY DID THEY MAKE IT SO LONG!!!! The game is basically Devil May Cry, but with less focus on combat and more focus on puzzles, and I don't know what kind of evil person would set out to make that. There's so many... dungeons and back-tracking and levelling up your shit, and dragging huge crates around to line up with things- It is Devil May Cry with a load more fat added in between boss fights. That's exactly what it is.

Oh and I didn't finish Majora's Mask. I hate Majora's Mask.

Could you be a little more specific on Majora's Mask? I did specify on being more specific on why you hate Majora's Mask. Are you sick of Zelda games? Did you hate the time limit? I find it "unhealthy" to quit without a good reason.

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I never finished Half Life 1, and I have suh a baby game reason. It was too hard. I started it on normal and just got to a point where I was just throowing myself against a spikey wall of death and ould only progress through tedious quick saving and trial and error.

I picked it up after all the talk on the podcast having never really played it when it first came out and I just couldn't gel with the controls. I don't know what it was but, I felt unwieldy and out of control until I put the disk back in its case, I'm usually not too bad with PC FPS but it was just taking the mick.

The difficulty thing wasn't neccessarily that I couldn't beat things with the weapons I had or that the odds were unsurmountable, just that all it had to do with was luck and foreknowledge.

Not skill, I could never fight my way out of a sitch with my FPS skill, if I rolled the dice wrong I was screwed. I just felt like I never had a chance against what was about to surprise me arround the next corner, I just had to die a bunch of time until I figured out the kill sequence and where all the ammo and medkits were hidden.

I know HL is a bit of sacred cow but, I just quit and read a synopsis instead.

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There are a lot of games that I haven't finished or played recently (it's usually been a year +) but keep meaning to come back to at some point. It never seems to happen though. If I'm going to be realistic, I've probably essentially quit about half on this list.

Bioshock, Portal (that's right, the first one), EU 3, Half-Life 2 ep. 1, Mass Effect 2, Space Pirates and Zombies, Hegemony, Civ IV (yup never finished a game), Dominions 3 (I will never be remotely competitive in that game), Defense Grid

But there are a couple I've quit for good:

Terraria - it was interesting but I got impatient with it. I've never really enjoyed games with such an emphasis on memorizing crafting formulas. I don't particularly like tabbing out of a game to check the wiki every 10 minutes. This is what scares me about minecraft (probably unfair of me)

Risen - Got it cheap on steam. It was long enough ago I don't really remember why I quit, just uninstalling it and thinking "well, I'm never doing that again"

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I usually dont "quit" games, but the percentage of games that I actually end up finishing is very small. The last game I remember finishing was Bastion back in December, and it was only 8ish hours long. Usually I'll get into the zone for a game and play it a lot for a few days straight, but sometyhing comes up and I don't play the game for a day, and once that cycle is broken the game is basically dead to me. A lot of times I'll think about coming back, but won't remember where I was in the game or what was going on so I'll decide I should probably just start over again if I wan't to play it, and some times I end up finishing the game, some times the same thing happens. Also a lot of times I'll get to the very end of games and either decide I want to finish side quests and I'll never end up finishing them so I never finish the game. When I played Wind Waker I got to the very very end of the game and decided I wanted to get every figurine, and I got a ton of them, but there were a couple that at that point it was impossible for me to get, so I haven't done the last boss fight. Some games I'll like so much that I'll get to the end and not want to actually finish it so I'll just leave it. That happens a lot with books for me, I'll like the book and read it super fast, but then get to the end and leave the last chapter or two. I also haven't watched the last episode of Seinfeld.

Metro 2033 I got maybe 10 minutes in and then I heard Steve Blum's voice and instantly quit because I hate it so much, and on top of that he has a terrible fake accent and it makes it even worse. I'll probably play it at some point, with the full Russian audio, so I can avoid his voice.

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Usually I'll get into the zone for a game and play it a lot for a few days straight, but sometyhing comes up and I don't play the game for a day, and once that cycle is broken the game is basically dead to me. A lot of times I'll think about coming back, but won't remember where I was in the game or what was going on so I'll decide I should probably just start over again if I wan't to play it, and some times I end up finishing the game, some times the same thing happens.

This happens to me too. I can lose momentum on a game pretty fast. Actually, Max Payne 3 is sitting installed on my PC right now just waiting for me to finish it. I estimate I was at least two thirds of the way through, probably more like three quarters. But I stopped playing it for a day, and then another day went by without me playing it and now every time I think about doing it I just sort of say "ugh" and either just play LoL/Dota 2 with my friends or log back in to Guild Wars 2 for a bit.

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I've never seen a game where the enemies move this much, it didn't feel like they were trying to avoid my fire, they move so spastic-ally it's almost like they were dancing (or head-bopping to be more precise). Who thought it would be a good idea to have a game about conversing ammo where the enemies move too much to get a clear head shot? I know "tactical" enemies are slower to kill, but this is just ridiculous. Even when the enemy has no idea of where I am, they keep doing their silly "dance", until they spot me and then simply "dance" in my direction. I just couldn't get into the game anymore, the AI's behavior was just putting me off.

This is the same reason I had to quit Bioshock, though I intend to revisit on an easier difficulty setting in the near future (and focusing more on using the wrench). The splicers were just too jumpy and the whole game totally activates my OCD tendencies on conserving bullets, so it's just constant feeling of "ugh I didn't do that last part correctly, I hope that doesn't screw up everything", etc. Oddly enough, the original Homeworld felt the same way too due to the persistent fleet between missions. Plus I don't feel quite as comfortable with the Unreal engine's controls as I do with the Source engine, so combat feels a lot worse to me.

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Could you be a little more specific on Majora's Mask? I did specify on being more specific on why you hate Majora's Mask. Are you sick of Zelda games? Did you hate the time limit? I find it "unhealthy" to quit without a good reason.

Majora's Mask is a game where you play the same 3 days over and over again, and it's the same every time- in the game's fiction.

A side-effect of this design is that there are more than a dozen different people to talk to, and quests to START that you aren't equipped to finish yet in Clock Town. You can start conversations and quests, and try to solve problems and puzzles for people for hours on end without realising each one of these branches is sealed off until later, and ONLY ONE, with a specific chain of events triggered at specific times, will advance you forwards.

By design, each quest opening has to seem as legitimate as the last, because at some point it will be.

I was stuck in Clock Town for a long time, half-solving quests that lead to dead ends. Every time I felt like THIS IS IT! THIS IS MY TICKET OUT OF CLOCK TOWN AS SOON AS I GET THIS LETTER TO THE MAYOR!! -it turned out that that wasn't the right quest either. Even when I left the first area: this kept happening in other towns.

Also there's so much sliding-on-ice rooms and pushing-blocks puzzles and walk-the-plank games and just corny, frustrating tests in all these dungeons that between that and the confusion with everything it was a nightmare to make the tiniest bit of progress in that game.

If someone told me Dark Void or Saints Row turned out to be really good games, I'd try em again, but I couldn't beat Majora's Mask for a thousand dollars.

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i hate to say it but i never finished farcry2...

i really loved the game and played the shit out of it on my friend's laptop (because mine was too weak) right up until it corrupted my save just past halfway (i think). i started again and loved it just as much and then it corrupted my save just past halfway (i think). i am a bit of a completionist so i had every diamond from the first map when it wiped it all away the second time.

there is no reason why i don't go back on my new computer and replay it again but i just can't. something about doing the same thing three times really drives home the pointlessness of games - that feeling you put to the back of your mind after playing for an entire day...

also because of my completionist nature i never finished just cause 2. i started early on clearing every town and just got sooo bored by the rinse and repeat nature of it. that game needs lots more mechanical variety, and more incentives. you can do basically everything at the start and so there is no progression (apart from the tank and chopper)

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I try as hard as i can to finish most of the games i play, and only quit if i'm bored to tears or the game is fundamentally broken. I end up giving friends a lot of shit for absolutely never finishing games. (I will endeavor not to do that here.)

I'm playing DarkSiders right now and WHY DID THEY MAKE IT SO LONG!!!! The game is basically Devil May Cry, but with less focus on combat and more focus on puzzles, and I don't know what kind of evil person would set out to make that. There's so many... dungeons and back-tracking and levelling up your shit, and dragging huge crates around to line up with things- It is Devil May Cry with a load more fat added in between boss fights. That's exactly what it is.

Oh and I didn't finish Majora's Mask. I hate Majora's Mask.

I just have to say, your description of DarkSiders is bewildering to me when you go on to mention that you have familiarity with the Zelda series on the very next line. (Besides, the combat system is more God of War than DMC.)

(Also, i happen to think that Majora's Mask is the best and most interesting game in that entire series, but i won't begrudge you your opinion.)

Anyways...

I'd have to dig deep to find games i rage quit on or literally could not finish because of technical issues. (I never finished Dark Messiah because of technical issues.) Mostly, it's just that i get bored with it, put it aside intending to get back to it, and never do. I put Dragon Age: Origins aside a while ago fully intending to get back to it, but after ruminating on it for a while, I decided that it just wasn't a very good game. (I think it was a pretty boring and lifeless successor to the whole infinity engine legacy.) I also have a bunch of DS RPG's i mean to jump back into and finish, particularly the ludicrously intricate Infinite Space, but that game is intimidating as hell. (I'd really have to bail on my save and start over.)

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i hate to say it but i never finished farcry2...

i really loved the game and played the shit out of it on my friend's laptop (because mine was too weak) right up until it corrupted my save just past halfway (i think). i started again and loved it just as much and then it corrupted my save just past halfway (i think). i am a bit of a completionist so i had every diamond from the first map when it wiped it all away the second time.

Finishing the game wouldn't make you like it more. The ending really doesn't make much sense and has a pointless decision you can make. Also something happens that is quite unpleasant and forces you to do something really awful.

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I'd have to dig deep to find games i rage quit on or literally could not finish because of technical issues. (I never finished Dark Messiah because of technical issues.) Mostly, it's just that i get bored with it, put it aside intending to get back to it, and never do. I put Dragon Age: Origins aside a while ago fully intending to get back to it, but after ruminating on it for a while, I decided that it just wasn't a very good game. (I think it was a pretty boring and lifeless successor to the whole infinity engine legacy.)

I've come around to this way of thinking with the first Dragon Age. It's a collection of mostly uninspired ideas in the service of a story that plays it totally safe, as opposed to the sequel, which at least had some higher pretensions. I have a second playthrough that's been waiting over two years for me to finish, once I discovered that almost all the thrills in Dragon Age come from experiencing it for the first time.

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This is the same reason I had to quit Bioshock, though I intend to revisit on an easier difficulty setting in the near future (and focusing more on using the wrench).

My friend got Bioshock when it came out and just got around to beating it last Winter. He went 100% wrench build, witht he life steal and freeze on hit, and it ended up being incredibly strong. It also made the final boss even more absurd and disjointed in relation to the rest of the game. He literally walked up to the boss and held down the trigger and since he had freeze on hit, it just froze the boss and as soon as he became unfrozen he would get frozen again. It took a long time, but he didn't get hit once and he probably could have just taped his trigger down and not touched the controller.

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