Games you quickly gave up on, and why

I know some gamers are dedicated and plough through games they don't really enjoy as they understandably wanna get their money's worth. Personally I've got no patience for that. I give up a game I was previously interested in very quickly if I realise it's not connecting with me. To make this financially bearable I tend to only buy games that are already a few years old...

So it is with Final Fantasy XV which I got for my Xbox One S for €6 in a bargain bin. I love FFVII, and liked & completed VIII & IX and also have XII on my to-play list, so no stranger to this series. But all I needed was less than an hour to realise this game is garbage:

- the install size was 80GB, I had to wait 'til the next day just to check it out. No possibility to play while it installed in the background.

- once the game finally starts there's loads of system pop-ups suggesting I download add-ons, took me a bit out of the atmosphere of the title screen. One of them said something about first-person view. I thought great, let's try that. Oh, it costs €30 to upgrade to the edition that has that simple function which GTA V has in its standard edition...

- the story is introduced with two lines like: "there is darkness so we wait for a King of Light to save us". That's it. Hardly inspiring stuff.

- the opening scene with overly-dignified Dad and cliché moody teen son was just awful.

- the main character is a spoilt prince is another well-worn trope.

- weird graphical glitches like fuzzy black spots on faces, overly-sharpened hair, rough edges (no AA-filtering).

- the load times are appalling.

- the animations and collision detection while running/walking with your mates is cheap, but not as cheap as the animation for the first encounters with the local wildlife. We're talking PS1-era animation quality here.

- a painful version of Stand By Me while pushing a car on the road really didn't feel much like Final Fantasy...

- The mechanic girl with the open boobies...designed as a teen-boy's wet dream, but groans all round if you're a more mature gamer.

I ended up just running and exploring the 'open world'...some games are great to just explore their worlds (like GTA V or AC:Origins), but here I quickly came up to a locked checkpoint at the end of a road, and I realised "this game is garbage". Sure, that checkpoint will open up at some point and the game will open up with it, but it hadn't impressed me up to this point so I concluded it never will.

I turned it off, and it will never be turned on again. Life's too short and there's too many potentially fine games out there still to discover. First impressions are generally accurate in my experience so no regrets.

I'd add another hyped game to this list: Fallout: New Vegas...for similar reasons too.

What games have you felt no desire to 'give a chance' and quickly, unceremoniously, gave up on them?

Maybe. It was the Secon Lost Planet. Liked their first game. It was among the first games where you could fight with big monsters and taking into the consideration that you ahve to kept the attention to the weather conditions to avoid dying. I was expressed with that game really. But the second game was awful for me.

Almost every Grand Theft Auto game post III. I don't mind the walking talking gun shooting stuff, but when I get to the inevitable driving missions (usually they have at least one in what you would consider the prologue) I drop the game like it has suddenly become coated in Ebola-infused spiders. The driving in these games is just not my bag, and I always end up doing so poorly that I either don't/can't complete the mission, or I get through it and am so annoyed that I drop the game permanently. The only reason why I kept playing GTA III was the cheat codes. I got maybe a 3rd of the way through that game and I decided to just mess around with cheat codes for the rest of my time playing.

Another series I bounced off of (so far) was Dark Souls. I played on PC and managed to get to Sen's Fortress and I literally can't get past the first room. I could just sit there and try to "get good" by playing over and over again but life is short and I decided to try play other games instead. But I'm not mad at the game or anything, I just realized that I got to a point where my skill ceiling may be as high as it will go. And that's okay. I am better at other types of games so I will play those for the time being instead.

Thinking this over, I think I just have issues with some 3rd person games. I can play hard FPS games and have an okay time with other 3rd person games (Saints Row The Third, Gears of War) but some are just not my thing. And at 36 with a full time job, I kind of just want to play things that I enjoy and can get through at this point.

Any Rockstar game, Bloodborne, Dark Souls (all of them), most Platformers.

I'm at work, so that's the quickets list I could come up with.

I'll equivocate a little bit on the "quickly," since that is kind of a relative term in light of the length of the game you are playing:

Sekiro: Went into this game hyped given that I love From's other games and everyone and their brother was talking about how great it was.

I found it an utterly hateful experience. The combat was bad, the performance was bad, the locations and enemies lacked imagination, and the combat managed to be simultaneously painfully difficult while completely lacking depth. I fell off after about 8 hours and will never, ever re-install it. Probably the worst time I've had playing a game in the last 10 years.

Dragon Quest Builders 2: I took a chance on this one given that I love both Minecraft and Dragon Quest, but I think I'm pretty close to being done. The entire game so far (to the end of the first "island") is basically a long, drawn out tutorial where non-voice acted characters you don't care about nanner on for five minutes before giving you a two-step checklist that takes all of thirty seconds to complete. It takes an interesting concept and makes it really, really, boring to go through.

Assassin's Creed 3: I will never forgive Ubisoft for f-ing up the Revolutionary Era. Twice. And while I understand that there is a lot of license given regarding the "history" component of the game, it really feels like Ubi couldn't be arsed to even glance at a history book because good lord there are some glaring errors in this one.

What kinds of errors are you talking about? I last played that game like 7 years ago when it first came out, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details. How bad did they mess up the history?

XCom 2 (~ 2hrs): every design change was designed to prevent me playing the way I wanted to. Fuck that.

Shadow of Mordor (~ 1hr): I don't remember exactly why other than that the movement and controls just felt terrible. This coming from someone who found launch-day Witcher 3 perfectly playable.

Watch Dogs 2 (~ 3-4hrs): the combat encounters are a disaster. The first area (the server room) took me half a dozen tries. The guards all react immediately to the smallest thing, are super aggressive and you have no tools to deal with them. But the breaking point was later on: there is a mission where you have to steal a lorry from a pier. There is me sneaking up all sneaky, and I get spotted. A guard hits me

- with a headshot

- from over 60 metres away

- with a pistol

- while he is running down some stairs.

Fuck. That.

Uninstalled.

I'm kinda right there with you. After completing the first island, I felt like I had gotten my fill. I'm going to at least give the second island a look, but I'm not sure I'll have the patience to see it through.

Shadow of Mordor (~ 1hr): I don't remember exactly why other than that the movement and controls just felt terrible.

Same for me. That game has the worst input lag I have ever seen.

For me it was Resident Evil, the original on Playstation.

1- It felt really bad to play, the tank controls and camera angle were just terrible

3 - The graphics even for then were so clunky

2 - The first jump scare scared the crap out of me.

Put it down, put me off horror games completely and I can't stand to play or watch them. As such I am so fed up with all the RE stuff on the GBE Playdate's at the moment but I wont get into that.

For AAA games: Watch Dogs and Shadow of Mordor.

Got both on sale on Steam and dropped both of them in under 2 hours. I just didn't enjoy how they looked or played at all.

For Indie games: Proteus

I played for 12 minutes on rec from Alex and just didn't get the point.

I bounced off of The Last of Us really quickly because I found a lot of the controls miserable and the stealth to be only loosely functional.

Watch Dogs 2 has a terrible Alcatraz escape mission near the halfway point that ranks among the most tedious and irritating things I've done in a game this generation.

Assassin's Creed 3 is the only game I was so disappointed with I ripped it out of my console and bent the disc in half to prevent me from ever trying to 'give it another chance'.

I guess you could call that a rage quit of a sort.

Assassins Creed III. I think i just finished Brotherhood when i started it and realized that i should step away from that series for a while.

This thread is gonna make me so mad...

Dropped out of The Witcher III pretty quick due to the terrible controls and combat, Dragon's Age: Inquisition due to its dated visuals, and Shadow of Wardor for being a general unengaging all around mess of a sequel to a game I was a pretty big fan of.

I've also been slowly trekking through Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask for several years despite blasting through the previous four in the series. The puzzle to story ratio isn't good, the shift to 3D models was jarring, and the extra work put into examining each area ultimately slowed things down.

I reinstalled Too Human recently (because it's free) and wondered why I never finished it, the concept is great, the game doesnt look or play that badly but then I died and had to sit through that damned valkyrie animation and it all came rushing back to me. Nope, not sitting through that again.

Maybe I'll give that game another chance someday since I absolutely loved Enemy Unknown/Within, but XCOM 2 feels so cluttered with systems and mechanics that are overwhelmingly distracting, especially with the expansion installed. My time with it on PS4 was also marred by an awful framerate and numerous bugs that guarantee that game can never be safely played without frequent save scumming. It's a bummer.

The most recent ones I can remember are:

The Division 2: didn't buy it, I was planning to, but I played the game during the free play days right after E3, and after 10 or so hours, I had played enough to assume that the rest of the game wouldn't be any different from what I played, so I kept from buying it and I'm grateful to Ubisoft from helping me avoid what would've been a horrible purchase.

Forza Horizon 3: I really wanted to finish this game, I even bought the $90 special edition at launch, which is something I rarely do when buying games (I usually wait for a sale, or if they are a sequel for some franchise, I play the first games in order to have a feel of the franchise and give the sequel some time to go on sale), but then FH4 released, and I started stacking up other new games I hadn't played yet, and the 60GB size of the game made me uninstall it to install other games.

Elite Dangerous: was planning to play more of it, but the travelling process got boring and then I realized it was a never ending space travel simulator with very repetitive missions, so I just shuttled the game out of my orbit.

Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising: horrible horrible game, hated every second of it, put it away after an hour.

Ghost Recon AW 1: hated it as well because of its dated graphics and elements, although I have to admit that I picked up the game a decade after it's release.

I'm currently struggling to get through Vampyr. While I've enjoyed the setting and the concept of the game, those tedious dialogues and repetitive combat have already started to make the game a drag for me in each subsequent sitting, I hope I can find the will to finish it soon though.

I've played through a lot of games without giving up on them, some notoriously bad games even, just so I can get my money's worth.

The only game I've given up on is the original Sniper Elite on Xbox. It was good for a while, but then the game decided it wanted to be a stealth game set in tight, indoor environments and nothing about the game was built for that. It's like they built the game around a handful of the first levels and then just made the rest of the levels completely out of touch with how the game actually played.

I had the same issues getting into Shadow of Mordor and XCOM 2. Shadow of Mordor was an especially big bummer since it's been the first game by Monolith I didn't like at all, the camera and movement felt so incredibly uncomfortable, part because of the aforementioned lag, but also because it didn't seem the character movement was relative to the camera in the same way it usually is in third person games, I just could never get a good sense of where the character would go when I pushed the stick in any direction.

And yeah, XCOM 2. I didn't like XCOM 2012 as much as the original 90s games, but I still enjoyed my time with it. XCOM 2 kinda seemed to remove even more aspects of the original games, while also seeming to push you along a much more linear campaign. It never grabbed me, tried playing the daily missions for a few weeks but fell off it pretty quickly.

A few more games that come to mind are The Division, Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Destiny 2.

Just ... everything about both The Division and Destiny is pretty much antithetical to what I enjoy about both shooters and RPGs. I enjoy shooters for the level playing field, where everybody have the same movement rules and where you get a good arsenal to deal with a variety of situations, and I love RPGs for the character development and exploration, not grinding for loot with constantly inflating DPS numbers. I ended up playing the full "campaign" of the original Destiny and was incredibly underwhelmed when it was over. Gave Destiny 2 a shot when it was given away for free to battle.net users and couldn't stand it anymore after getting to the farm area after the tutorial section.

As for Assassin's Creed Syndicate ... I had heard a lot of glowing reviews about that thing, and I did love the original Assassin's Creed as well as having a decent time with Black Flag and Liberation, and I love the industrial revolution era London setting, but that world felt so static and stale. You'd cross the street and see the same three or four encounters repeat over and over, nothing you did had any meaningful impact on the world, and like all Ubisoft games, it hinted at a lot of themes, worker uprisings, child labor and all that, but it seemed to have no interest in actually exploring or properly addressing them, and like Destiny and Division above, it had incorporated a meaningless progression mechanic with incremental DPS upgrades which you could hint-hint-nudge-nudge pay some money to bypass.

Elite Dangerous. Five hours without a single enjoyable moment.

My Time At Portia. If Stardew Valley is Lego, My Time at Portia is Playmobil. It felt like a pale imitation of a better product, and after the nth instance of missing audio or some other relic of under-production I shelved it.

Niche. Maybe there's a good game in here, but presentation matters, and Niche looks like a mess. I dropped it after the tutorial.

The Banner Saga. This should have been a slam dunk for me, but clearly my tolerance for games that make Watership Down seem giddy is about two hours. I think I bounced off of this for the same reason I gave up on Dragon Age but stuck with Mass Effect; there needs to be a little levity somewhere. If your game's story, setting, and mechanics are all exhaustively dire then I don't think I'm going to finish your game.

I've dropped a ton of games from everything from poor performance, to a depressing moment (I made the mistake of trying Limbo right after a beloved pet passed and my first death had me burst into tears), to me trying and realizing for the n-thousandth time that I cannot do shooters at all (Titanfall 2, Destiny, Division 2, etc.).

How about one I almost dropped, but powered through a few hours and ended up loving? Yakuza Kiwami 1. Loved 0, but the first 3 (ish?) chapters of Kiwami 1 feature a never-ending and boring series battle with irritating standard opponents, a few meh cut scenes, and being locked out of all of the city exploration and side quests while being forced in a straight line. I almost quit (took a month or so break) but decided there had to be more. And of course there was, and I very much like that game (though others in the series are still better). Glad I made it through though, as having played 0 really made a few parts of 1 hit extra hard, and playing 1 made 6 hit extra hard. :]

I've got a laundry list of games I just straight-up can't play due to tiny or poorly contrasting fonts. I'll try to focus on the games that I quit for other reasons.

...like any masochistic Souls-like, and the Souls games themselves. I've tried Demon's Souls, Dark Souls II, and Hollow Knight and had zero fun with any of them in the first few hours. Bounced hard off one of the last Tiger Woods game after being a fan of the series for a long time, but the monetization schemes and focus on realism bored the hell out of me. Guess that would be true of the last Madden game I played too. I'm also not a fan of games that feel like work thanks to purposefully bad controls, like Surgeon Simulator.

Owlboy - I liked the retro style, music, characters, and level design. But something felt very off with the way it controls. It was an inelegant control scheme from what I recall, like it was unnecessarily cumbersome.

Shadowrun Returns - In 2013 hot on the heels of Enemy Unknown I was expecting cyberpunk XCOM. Again, I liked it's retro look but I was not expecting the turn-based tactics to be this simple. Maybe I would've enjoyed the RPG elements but I didn't play long enough to see them.

The Witcher 2 - I played about half of Witcher 1, all of Witcher 3, and like 30 mins of Witcher 2. There must be a fundamental thing I'm missing with the combat because the beginning of this game was harder than anything in Ninja Gaiden (Xbox or NES).

The Far Cry games in general I've never got that far into the game. The second one in particular was very off-putting in the early game.

Blood Dragon I liked thought mainly for the astectic.

Oh man, I like to finish games, but my time for games is so limited that I’ve just quit before because the game kinda drags, or the opportunity cost of missing out on other games is too high.

Most recently, I started and gave up on the Battlefront 2 campaign (got the game for my kid for $5). Some levels were pretty cool. Others were pure filler. I don’t have time for that.

I’m enjoying Pillars of Eternity, but I’m an RPG completionist, and that game takes its time. I just bought a couple of Yakuza games, so I might just enjoy the time I had with Pillars.

In the past, Dead Space had a turret sequence that I failed on a few times and decided to play something else. I never went back to it.

Usually it’s a matter of if the game is fun and continues to be fun. I see the modern loot shooter as a genre I’ll no longer touch. Too much repetition and grinding. Destiny 1 was great (after a year of being pretty middling). Destiny 2 dropped the ball hard and kinda killed the genre for me.

I'm trying to grit my teeth at a few I don't like seeing on these lists. Forza Horizon 3 was great. AC3 was totally fine. I get why people bounce off the Souls games because that gameplay loop can be spirit-crushing, but they're still good. I still haven't completely finished DS2 for this reason (I'm close), but I've surely not quickly given up on it. I'm trying to think of other unfinished games. Destiny 2, I guess? I'd argue you can't really finish it given that the carrot is perpetually jerked out of your reach, but yeah. Shit, I never finished Sleepy Dawgs, but that's a great game. That one's on me.

I try to give games a fair shake and rarely just bounce off quickly. The only example I can think of that really fits in The Golf Club 2. Man, that game was not was I was wanting it to be, and I tried to like it as a fan of both real golf and video game golf, but never even actually finished a full round. EDIT: Also forgot about CoD: WWII. Boy, I regret buying that. Those games have gotten so ridiculously and unrealistically paced, and that definitely didn't work for me in the WWII setting. Thankfully, Battlefield I and V scratched that itch.

This one is going to upset a few people I know lol. Prey 2017. So I do like the game, I did not quit because of disliking it in anyway, and I will eventually go back to it I'm sure. But I just keep getting new games and end up playing those and forgetting about Prey. Oh yeah I also did the same with Alien Isolation, but that was due to it being so slow paced for me. I'm not sure if I will ever finish it.

Honestly: Sekiro.

Now, I'm not one of those assholes calling it the next Souls game, as if Tenchu was never a thing, that From Soft never touched the Tenchu IP, that From started in 2009 with Demon's Souls, or that Sekiro wasn't originally intended to be the next Tenchu game. So my anger towards that bit of ignorance aside, I just think that I don't like Sekiro's/Tenchu's gameplay all that much. Not that I want an easy mode, but perhaps the learning curve is a little too methodical for me and doesn't leave much of a margin for error compared to character action games like Devil May Cry V. So until I can find the time to really get into the minutia and "git gud", Sekiro is my Persona 3 in that I can respect those games despite the issues that I take with them.

Some of the most recent ones...

Ace Combat 7 - That early stealth level with no checkpoint made me nope out.

SOMA - Got bored with the puzzles.

Borderlands: The Handsome Collection - Didn’t feel good to control

Some recent ones that come to mind, though I've never been a stranger to giving up on game if it doesn't click with me in whatever way.

Sekiro. Put about 8 hours into it and stopped. Just too frustrating for me.

X Com 2. Loved Enemy Unknown, but this one just annoyed the hell out of me.

RE1 Remaster. In the 90's I tolerated these constant doors and running back and forth, not anymore.

Night In The Woods. Just...not for me.

DOOM. Not my kind of fps. I like'm slow and atmospheric.

Well I could go on and on, luckily there's plenty of games out there that click immediately and love playing all the way through :)

Octopath Traveler was a game I was so looking forward to and is so targeted directly at me and it was such a total disappointment to me that I bailed out on it very quickly. It had all of the pieces of that nostalgia and no skill at putting them together.

RE6 half way though the second play though

I can second RE6, I bought it on sale a year ago for about $5 and I only got about two hours in before boredom set in. Everything about the pacing was slow and tedious and the combat felt clunky and uninspired.

Mass Effect Andromeda. Bought it 2 years ago, played it for maybe 30 minutes and then just gave up.

Fast forward to this month... Guess what I'm playing?

Can't really say why I'm hooked on it, although I've been following Alex's play through of Mass Effect 2. I guess that was the trigger to try Andromeda again.

I agree the puzzles weren't too interesting, but I played on because of the atmosphere, and then was gripped by the ending. Ended up being one of the strongest stories in sci-fi gaming.

GTAIV and Final Fantasy XII come to mine pretty puickly. I was looking for a game since I just bought a PS3 and GTA was a series I never played before and since it was well reviewed I got it but I got to the first mission that involved shooting and it...just didn't stick with me. gpot HOOKED on Saints Row the Third though, weird.

FFXII is easy for me to understand, I hate desert levels and that game just starts in a deserv and after 45 minutes and finding a tomato I stopped then and there. It's still my Final Fantasy White Whale and I hope to finish it one day.

Im quite done with Streets of Rogue, its a bit overrated IMO.

Man if you mean the second playthrough of the entire game, as in all the chapters for all the different characters.. then I wouldn't call that "quickly"

Red Dead Redemption 2 and AC3. RDR2 is very impressive but it is just too much of a time sink for me at the moment (maybe ever?) because I'm never playing just one game at a time and it feels like it takes hours to just do a couple missions.

As for AC3, I love II and Brotherhood and even liked Revelations quite a bit, but everything about playing 3 just feels so clunky. Walking around a wooded frontier also just isn't as fun as exploring an urban area like in the previous games. Maybe I'll go back to it at some point because I would really like to see how the Desmond "trilogy" wraps up, but I think I'm probably just going to read a wiki summary and move on to Black Flag.

I literally just stopped playing Guacamelee 2 because of the introduction of undodgeable attacks. The combat arenas get so hectic, throwing in random attacks that your invincible dodge roll can't go through is nearly impossible to keep track of. I also found that a lot of the combat arenas themselves were needlessly overdesigned and there's one in like every other screen. I don't remember them being such a hassle in the first game.

@humanity: oh no no. I mean the second “chapter” or second... character pick?

Not sure if it is truly "quick", but I lost almost all interest a few bosses after Genichiro in Sekiro (Big Monkey or whtaever the fuck)

I think that up to that first boss the game was flawed but a great experience. In a lot of ways it reminded me of what I wish Furi had been. After that boss (challenging, but not overly so) I did a few more and eventually said "fuck it" after realizing that any big enemy would be frustrating due to the weak dodge (worse than a fat roll) and that the bosses I liked are more about muscle memory and just remembering the timing of parries, rather than reacting. I get that is closer to how actual fighting works, but that just ain't fun to me.

@chamurai: ha your Final Fantasy White Whale is evocatively put...it conjures up an impression that despite its annoyances there's something about the game which you can't quite let go.

@juantopo89: Streets of Rage is clearly the superior game!

@tds418: yeah i also give up games that despite looking good just are too much of a timesink.

Shenmue 1 & 2...saving myself 60 hours of gametime (SPOILER: because i thankfully found out that the most interesting thing about it, the antagonist Lan Di, is barely in it. I'll only play Shenmue 3 if there's an epic fight with him).

Elite: Dangerous...impressive space simulation, but no real game. Still in another life i'd probably sink thousands of hours into it as it makes a childhood fantasy as realistic as possible...yet in this life 100 minutes were enough to respectfully say thanks but no thanks. I'll stick to doing the odd Egosoft X-campaign.

@heidegger:

Nothing that much lately that I can think of. I did started playing RDR 2 but I pretty much dumped it because I changed over to PS4.