Ever stopped playing a game because you just plain sucked at it?

Some games I stop playing because I find them boring, badly designed and so on, but recently I dropped Rocket League because I'm just bad at playing it. For some reason my brain has difficulty switching attention between the ball and my car. This leads to a lot of hitting the ball in the wrong direction, crashing into other players and incorrectly predicting the movement of the ball.

I know there's always a learning curve to any game, but I've been playing on and off ever since Rocket League came to PS Plus. Yet, I've never felt confident I'm my ability which makes me nervous, especially when you get that painfully awkward replay of you scoring an own goal. I get less anxious playing fighting games for God's sake!

Rocket League is a good game, I've had a lot of fun with it, but it's also a game that has left me so disheartened at my lack of skill that I don't want to play it anymore.

Anyone else ever had this experience?

Oh, more than a few, for sure. I mean I've stuck with stuff like Bloodborne and Spelunky where I was having a bad spot only to stick with it and find a lot of enjoyment in there, but some stuff I just know that I'm bad at and don't give much of a chance to. All recent Call of Duty multiplayer experiences come to mind; I'm just terrible at PVP and Warzone in those games so I just kind of don't play them. Rock Band was another one where I just couldn't deal with the lag after we all got HDTVs or the weird guitar up/down swiches, so I didn't stick with that very long.

Divinity 2 I also could just never figure out how to make a party that worked well together outside of the baby difficulty, which really put me off of it after a while.

Overwatch
PUBG
Apex

I have a problem where I get it in my head that I like competitive shooters but it turns out i'm crap.

This is basically every PvP-oriented game ever for me. The way those are set up makes it essentially impossible to do well or enjoy yourself unless you are willing to (a) play nothing but that game and (b) play it 10 hours per day so that they can learn the "meta" or whatever. If you aren't in on the ground floor, the experience pretty much amounts to getting killed in 2 seconds over and over and over (and over) again. All with some 13-year old shrieking in your ear.

I think Rocket League might have been the only exception because it largely didn't have a meta. If you played enough, you could get better without having to obsess over stats and camping spots and which gun has a .001% better reload speed.

Pretty much any fighting game. For as much as I enjoy everything about Mortal Kombat, it's not even worth me trying to pick one up anymore. I bought MKX on PS4 when it was like $5 a few years ago and tried playing the story on the easiest difficulty, and by the third or fourth fight I was just getting my ass handed to me and I decided I was done. I've never been good at any fighting game, and I'm never going to be. But I do enjoy watching them be played, for sure.

Also any battle royale game, beyond Blackout. I don't like playing them solo, and my only buddy who's in to them has pretty limited gaming time, and even less time where our schedules match up, so we never played any long enough for me to get a feel for them. We played a lot of Blackout when Black Ops 4 came out and loved that, but just kinda fell off once they made too many changes. Like, I would love to play Apex and did enjoy what little time I played it when it first launched, but at this point, I don't think I would have a good time trying to jump back in. The few battle royales I've played in the last couple years I just didn't played often enough to get good at which made for frustrating experiences.

Most people say PvP, but for me it's single player games that want you to play a very specific way mechanically. One example is the original Mirror's Edge. I can't do a simple sequence like jumping to a pipe, so I just end up dying 10 times in a row. That gets old fast.

I think a lot of games comes down to QoL features combined with difficulty. If a game is difficult, but you can restart easily and get right back into it, then that's ok for me. If a game is just average, but forces you to sit through a 20 second loading screen or "fast-travel" sequence just to get to the mission start again, then heeelll no.

Killer7 springs to mind... I heard a lot about it and was super excited to play it - but I didn’t get it at all and I was terrible at it.

I was that bad at it I don’t even think I could realistically form an opinion on it. Didn’t understand it.

I'm having trouble playing Bayonetta, Devil May Cry and similar skill-based games. It's not that I'm getting stuck in them, I make progress every time I play, but when the game is always grading my performance it really makes me feel like the worst player in the world, constantly putting words like "mediocre" or "D-rating" on screen. I get a bad rating if I don't find the collectibles, but then again I get a bad rating if I spend time looking for them. I get a bad rating for dying, but also I get a bad rating for using health potions. I get a bad rating for using the same combo too many times, but I can't buy new combos on account of my bad ratings. Or if I try a more challenging combo but don't nail the timing. Every time I complete a level, my first feeling is that of failure because I know that I could have done it better, but also I want to play a new level instead of replaying the one that I just beat. Bayonetta looks and feels amazing but I just can't over the the game constantly telling me that I suck.

Yep, Bloodborne. I received it as gift as I normally would not play any of these kinds of games but I wanted to give it a shot since I had it. Played it a decent bit, got passed the big wolf/beast and just kept dying at the Father guy. I just didn't care enough to "get good" at it and had a bunch of other games I wanted to play.

Bloodborne, also. I also got past the wolf beastie, moderately quick. But I kept hammering myself against the sad Deacon Lady. I could of hung in there, though it had already taken way too long. But I had another enemy in Bloodborne. The artistic environment itself. I Just Did Not like the looks of the city. That particular developer guy's vision that everyone likes to go on about, He realized his vision all too well for me.

I did enjoy reading about the lore, though.

Just to mention, I loved all the Dark Souls...

I tend to play such a variety of games that I'm fairly adaptable all things considered. So it disheartens to say Spelunky. I've gotten pretty into Rogue-esque games over the past several years but for whatever reason I just can't get good at Spelunky. I've even watched streams of successful runs before so I generally know what I'm suppose to do, but my hands just can't make it happen consistently. It's why I push back on the idea of it being a "perfect video game". How can it be when a seasoned gamer like myself can't get over the hump? I thought the sequel would be a bit more accessible, but I'm even worse at that! For the record I think everything about the design of Spelunky is super duper cool. I just suck at it! And that's a rarity for me.

Also fighting games. I play them and I love them in a styyyyyle sense but I've never been good at any aside from Power Stone and Psychic Force. Had a decent run with Super SF4 but nothing to write home about. I don't often hang out with anyone willing to play them with me therefore I see no need to practice on my own. I not only get no satisfaction from fighting CPU but I suck at fighting them anyway even as a means to practice combos.

Fighting games, with the exception of Mortal Kombat.

I definitely threw the towel in on X-Com very quickly.

I quit most competitive games once their community forms around the people who are too serious about it for me to keep up.

Man, I beat the previous demons souls, bloodbourne all 3 Dark souls. Love love LOVE the Demons Souls remake on PS5. I think it showcases the new hardware incredibly, but for some reason I am absolutely abysmal at it. I dont know what happened or what it is, but I was having such an impossible time progressing through it that I just stopped playing it. Havent deleted it off the console yet (though I should with the room issues I have on this system) because I really would like to play it and see it through. Been months now

I had Bloodborne back in it's case with the receipt laying on top so I could return it, but after many failed attempts at the earlier stages I stuck with it and eventually finished it, but WHOOO! I hated that game at first.

Rocket League I like it but I am terrible at it.

Overwatch I was so excited when that came out I love Blizzard stuff but boy I suck at it big time so I stopped playing after a week. I simply cannot follow what's going on half the time.

I’m about to stop playing Returnal because the third biome is destroying me. Each time I fail the fun drains out of the experience a little bit more.

Some RPGs are like this for me, especially western RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin. I'm just not at all interested in min-maxing my characters and so I get stuck at some battle and can't move on. Same thing happened with Final Fantasy Tactics even though I loved that game.

A lot of League of Legends spoke to me but I just couldn't get good at it. Partially due to only playing with friends and never "practising" on my own because of bad queue anxiety in MOBAs in particular compared to other games. For a long time I just kept up with the professional play and streamers and kind of lived the game through that but I haven't really paid attention to League in a while now.
I really hope their spin-off games end up being good because I like the characters and universe of League a lot at the time.

i dropped Sekiro because I suck at parrying. I beat all the Souls games and Bloodborne without parrying. That wasnt an option in this game haha :( I still think its a great game though, just wish i was better at it

Single player? Never.

Multiplayer? Yes, in practically every single competitive game.

I must've played the epilogue in Nier Automata at-least 3 times and lost every time. Which is really annoying because the prologue is like 20 minutes where you can't save at all. I tried firing it up last week on easy and still lost at the boss. It makes it more annoying that when I played the demo i actually cleared that area.

I really wana play this game but I don't think I can go through the intro yet again.

pretty much any pvp or honestly general multiplayer thing but i've never really cared for competitive stuff anyway so that doesn't help too. outside of that puzzle games i usually suck at and just put them down n never look back on them. sometimes platformers i get that way with also.

Once they removed Tjorborn's turret from Overwatch, I stopped playing because without that I sucked. Most any multiplayer shooter I dip my toes into I'll quit, as with anything with co-op where I'm just not hanging with whoever I'm playing with. Dark Souls and anything designed to gleefully punish with difficulty is straight-up out the window for me. I played just enough of that game to realize I'd just be miserable with it.

Hollow Knight

I played all 3 Dark Souls and Bloodborne and never had to look up strategy ideas on YouTube, but Sekiro was a different story. Almost every boss I encountered required me to look up how on Earth I should kill it. I'm pretty sure that would qualify me for sucking at Sekiro, but of course, I never stopped playing and finished the game.

It was Dead Cells for me. Once I hit 3 boss cells, the game spiked up in difficulty. I saw what I needed to do to get better at the game so I could progress, but I also saw that it would be a hugely time-consuming process to get there. So I simply decided it wasn't for me and quit.

Other than that mostly just competitive multiplayer games. I got to the top of my natural abilities in Starcraft 2 and saw that if I wanted to raise my MMR anymore I'd have to actually start trying harder and commit more time to practicing. Attempting to do so sucked the fun out of the game and caused me to quit.

Initially the Souls games until I figured things out. Sekiro is still my white whale, though.

XCOM shouldn't count because the game are two-thirds RNG. 80% chances to hit feel like they miss 60% of the time.

Celeste, oddly enough.

I was so terrible at it I couldn't progress at all without turning on all the assists. But then it was literally effortless, basically just straight-up flying through the levels.

So the problem became there wasn't any real point in playing it because it was so mindless.

Fromsoft games, remnant fron ashes. Mostly souls like games. I am too lazy to "get good" or have the time.

I'm happy to admit that to clear my backlogs I've begun playing games on Easy or Story difficulty. The weird part? I'm having more fun than I used to.

That's the funny thing about PvP games in general, isn't it? If you can get in at the beginning, there's a larger pool of casual players checking out the hot new thing (i.e., more people who probably suck at the game), and no one has yet memorized the maps or knows the best strats. And then the longer the game is out, the more the casual folk drop out and you're just left with the most dedicated, most skilled players. I usually wait these days for games to go on sale, but for something like that I make an exception. Early on is the best time to play them. Though I don't think I've bought any online PvP shooters, period, since Overwatch and Battlefield 1, both of which I did fine at (and continue to do fine in the case of Overwatch... there continues to be enough people playing that thing that I can still find mostly-balanced matches).

Speaking of those types of games, and going back to the original question, I did briefly get into Spellbreak at release, but dropped it after about a week because... yeah, I kinda sucked at it. I likewise bought but then relatively quickly stopped playing Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Tekken 7, and Mortal Kombat X. I like fighting games in theory, but I'm really bad at them, I can enjoy fighting the AI for a bit, but usually with online fights against actual people I hit a wall pretty fast where it stops matching me against other helpless newbies and I end up losing ten in a row.

I suppose Tony Hawk also comes to mind, in a way. I liked 1 and 2, but when they added reverts for 3, I was never coordinated enough to be able to do reverts into multiple big air combos. I could string manuals and grinds together fine in 2, but the loop of air trick into revert into manual into another air trick was just too much for me. My brother was far better at it than I was. So I basically stopped playing the series while he kept up with it.

There may be others, but I can't immediately recall another single-player game that I quit because it was too hard. It's mostly the online PvP stuff that discourages me into dropping a game.

Hello Neighbor: The game was too unpolished and broken for me care about this so called deep story a player can uncover.

Red Faction Guerrilla Remaster: After hearing how this was a great open world action game, I was disappointed. Yeah there are big explosions and destruction that look nice, but the game has many bugs that weren't fixed from the original game, and it became annoying over time.

Divinity 2: Despite its rave reviews, the game was just too overwhelming with stuff for me to get into long term.

Cyberpunk 2077: This one is easy for most people to understand. I was enjoying it, but the constant bugs, even though they were minor ones, became too annoying to ignore and after hearing they were making huge patches to fix it during 2021, I decided to stop playing and wait.

And finally

Battleground games: I just can't get into them, even though I know some of them like Apex Legends are very well done. I did have the most fun with Apex out of them all, but I quickly got put off and gave up on it. There is a new 3v3 mode on Apex that is getting a lot of praise. Maybe I'll try it out someday.

I guess League of Legends, but that was more about people being mean to me for my lack of skill than strictly because I was bad.

I suck at RTS so I dropped Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings after an hour or so even though I would have wanted to see where it is going. It's also the reason why I quit Dota 2 after putting at least 3000 hours into it. I only ever ranked 3rd out of the 8th in their MMR system with less than 50% win rate by the time I quit. Wish I could take back all those hours, frankly.

I'm not good at certain games but these in particular encapsulate why I'd ever quit them.

Smash Bros. I played it for several years with friends casually like a party game; none of us ever got too good but I'd unlock everything and we'd have fun a few times a year. People who play regularly or even have mains aren't fun to play with or be around. There are 80 characters! Use them!

League of Legends. I played this because a friend I liked played it but I never got good enough and the community honestly intimidated me away from it. Even my own team would just say 'hide in the back and pop out when we need healing' which isn't fun at all.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. I wanted it to be my first soulsborne game because I liked the aesthetics of dark fantasy feudal Japan but I could never get used to it. It didn't help that NPCs get sick when you die too much so I just wound up feeling guilty about it.

I was extremely close to dropping Sekiro for this reason. I am not one to go for the parry in any game that I play, no matter how core the mechanic is, as I hate just-frames. After dying to the big drunken samurai man like three dozen times, I was strongly considering the notion that Sekiro was just plain too difficult for me. I decided to keep at it, adjusted my playstyle (stop playing it like a Souls game, mostly), and wound up finishing the game, which felt no less than triumphant. There were a few more fights along the way that rocked my world and made me feel like I was out of my league again, though.

Sekiro: If this had any kind of leveling mechanic, it might've been my favorite FromSoft game. Because it did not, it is my least favorite. I guess I like being able to say Bloodborne is my favorite, but it might've been nice to say Sekiro instead. I'll never know.

Dead Cells: I guess I don't really consider this dropping the game due to difficulty, but since the user above mentioned it I'll say that I never had a good time in the castle once I was doing a boss cell run, and the newer biomes were real pains in the ass as well, so I just decided I'd beaten the game "on normal" or whatever and set it aside.

DOOM Eternal: I wanted to play it like 2016, it wanted me to play it like it was the only game in the world. There were other games.

XCOM 2: As a PS+ game I can always go back, but the opening game seemed so much more difficult than the first game. I was almost always one or two soldiers down per mission and just couldn't seem to get my feet under me. I stopped playing the first XCOM multiple times because I felt like I'd gotten what I wanted out of it (similar to how I'll often start games of Civilization but rarely finish them) but XCOM 2 left me feeling like an idiot.

Invisible Inc.: Same. Felt like such a dumb ass playing this game.

Outer Wilds: The final physics puzzles were just far too much for me to wrap my head around, and the angler fish far too scary for me to get over. I happily went to Youtube.

Resident Evil 2: I'm not sure this fits under the strict definition of "too hard", but I couldn't spend more than a minute with Mr. X chasing me around without feeling like I was about to have a panic attack. I knew it was coming, but man. What a bad feeling.

Celeste: I know I could've turned assists on, but it just wouldn't have felt right. I got about 3/4 of the way through the game and hit such a wall.

This War of Mine: I might've been able to get good at this, but I didn't have the patience to. I'd always get a couple of weeks in and then everything would fall apart, which I think is kind of intentional but I wasn't interested in fighting through.

The Witness: Another game that just made me feel like an absolute bozo. The girl I was dating at the time was trying to get into video games and loved puzzles (like, puzzle puzzles, not puzzle boards) but neither of us could crack this one past an hour or so in. I'm so dumb.

Hotline Miami: Those first three levels are so damn good. A real shame I'm so damn bad at this game.

the thps remakes.

I still hold they didn't age particularly well. But I'm sure there's a fair amount of. 'hey i just suck at his now'. In there.

Chess. I've never won a single game, ever.

@corvak: The thing about Overwatch is that you'd think playing someone like Mercy would be a less demanding experience, but then you get everyone yelling at you that they need healing, along with enemy Reapers and Tracers chasing you down.

@development said:

Yep!

Rhythm games. Last time I played them in any meaningful way was during the PS1 era. Fast forward to the release of the bright and colorful Hatsune Miku Future Tone which was actually two or three separate releases all coming out at once. Credit card in hand I was ready to buy them all based on the ton of content and the positive reviews. But something told me to just try the demo first and found that I was absolute garbage and could not deal with the the lowest star levels at the easiest difficulty. Then I realized that I was probably bad at Parappa the Rappa and never really finished it. I put my credit card away and uninstalled the demo.

At least Patapon is manageable and let's me think I'm decent... until the little Patapon characters stop chanting and I lose the rhythm.

For both single player and pvp:

Bloodborne: It's funny seeing other people mention this and quitting after the Cleric Beast when I never even got past that. I probably could've beaten my head against it more, but I just didn't find the loop to get better any fun.

Dragonball FighterZ: Had a good time in the beta, but then I played with some friends when it came out and realized how terrible I was at. I thought I was going to be able to manage, but I'm just really terrible at/ don't like tag games. Never really liked MvC either.

I stopped playing Apex after my best ever run. I thought I was going really well, had multiple revives and a couple of kills. I was feeling really good about it, and on the death screen noticed that my teammates had twitch gear on.

I realised they must have been streaming and thought "oh it'll be interesting to see my good run from another perspective". Turns out I was "Everything that was wrong with the game". I uninstalled the game after that not because they were dicks, but because I realised the way I liked to play wasn't the way that was the current meta, and the game would get tuned more towards that.

Hollow Knight. Got to the hornet boss and was just dying over and over again and having a completely miserable time. My partner then breezed through it in two tries. Lost all desire to play after that. I’ve stopped playing a lot of Soulslikes but that’s the only one where I fundamentally did not get it, whereas with Dark Souls and Bloodborne I was progressing just fine but I wasn’t having much fun.

Also I never finished an XCOM or XCOM 2 campaign, but I don’t know if I stopped because I sucked per se so much as I just got stupidly unlucky with RNG and my blood pressure was at risk.

It's funny, waaaay back when when the beta was out, and when the full game was first released, I played a fair bit of Mercy and enjoyed her, even though my mentality is really tank main. After a while (I think it was a year or two?) they did a Mercy rework and I tried her again after a long time not playing her, and man, it was brutal. I was terrible with her. And I really think the difference was that early on there were simply fewer people who made a concerted effort to attack the healer whenever possible. But a few years in, and Mercy just had a giant target painted on her back. I did a lot of dying in the few games I tried with her before going back to my normal tank role, which is a role I understand and can do pretty well. I've got nothing but respect for people who can play a healer well in that game, 'cause I sure can't.

Any modern baseball game. Too many sets of controls = too confusing. Why do I have to preload a throw from the outfield to the second baseman? Why do I need to make zig-zag motions to throw a pitch?

There is so much to remember that I always mess it up when it counts. This leads to bad play, annoyance and then never playing the game again.

I need a simple arcade baseball game.

i find with anything if you enjoy something you usually get good at it naturally.

I honestly think I've dropped more games in my life than I've beaten. I have a super short attention span and also I'm super bad at video games.