What is a game you really liked, but after awhile was desperate for it to end?

[ZedClampet]

You all are going to think this is ridiculous because it's a short game, but for me it was Shadowrun Returns. The reason the game had this effect on me was because at around 9 hours I thought the game was ending. I was sure of it. The story was basically wrapped up. I like my games to last awhile, but when I realize they are ending, I make my peace with it and look forward to getting to the end and moving on. Over the next 7 hours, I became increasingly annoyed and frustrated that it was just dragging on and on. I had fully intended to play the next game in the series, but by the time this ended i just couldn't stand the thought of it. This was years ago, and I still haven't played the next game.

I also tend to burn myself out on CRPG's by playing the first 80 hours as a completionist and then suddenly deciding I'm over it and want to finish as soon as possible.

 

[Sarafan]

I also tend to burn myself out on CRPG's by playing the first 80 hours as a completionist and then suddenly deciding I'm over it and want to finish as soon as possible.

I know the pain. For at least two years I have a similar problem. In the past I could play RPGs and open world games as a completionist from start to beginning. Now it's becoming harder and harder. That's why I started to drop some titles without finishing them. Sometimes I get so tired that it's almost impossible to continue. And the huge backlog doesn't help in this situation.

As for particular titles, one of the most recent ones is Horizon: Zero Dawn. What a cool game I thought in the beginning, but I dropped it only after over a dozen of hours. Basically I think that the game is overrated. It tries to be The Witcher 3 in a different setting, but I found myself very hard to believe in the created world. It's a very overrated game in my opinion.

 

[Zloth]

I almost quit at about a dozen hours, too, @Sarafan - the story dried up bad when you got into the big, wide world and didn't crank up again until you finally found out what "zero dawn" was really supposed to mean. THEN it got very good!

But back to the topic, yeah, I've mentioned on a bunch of occasions that Pathfinder: Kingmaker drove me batty at the end. The "final" dungeon (or mansion, whatever) was a pretty big adventure that even had a shopkeeper that had set up shop for your use just outside the door. I got through it, confronted the Big Bad at the end, and won. Then I was told there was a Bigger Badder pulling the strings all along. OK, not too disappointing, the Bigger Badder was spoken of many times earlier. Let's get the party refreshed and get into the real final battle!

Nope. Bigger Badder ran off or some such, to attack my precious home. You'll need to do this other quest to raise some armies (but mostly go through your old stomping grounds for a little nostalgia trip). I had been playing the game for something like 270 hours at this point, doing turn based the whole way through. I started in late September, and this was late February - I was very much ready for it to be done! There was no way I was about to quit after that long, though, so I gathered my armies and headed back to my home. I fought my way through the nasties with a little help from the "armies" (more like small squads) until I got to a resting place and... was given another quest!! AAARG!! OK OK, calm down, it's one you do on the path to Bigger Badder anyway, no worries.

I got to the end and found I was short on some vital component for one of my go-to spells. Sheesh. There's no going back. Do I re-load from an older save and repeat the last few hours? Hell no. It took a few tries, but I finished off Bigger Badder and won. Far from being happy, though, I was pretty livid.

I didn't stay that way. I got Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous in the Summer Sale.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

As for particular titles, one of the most recent ones is Horizon: Zero Dawn. What a cool game I thought in the beginning, but I dropped it only after over a dozen of hours. Basically I think that the game is overrated. It tries to be The Witcher 3 in a different setting, but I found myself very hard to believe in the created world. It's a very overrated game in my opinion.

 

[Colif]

Why play something you don't like.
Why do you have to finish it?
I don't see the point. I just stop playing games if they aren't fun.
I don't care if I don't see the end. Its not why I play games. If my avatar taught me anything, its about getting there, not reaching end. Only mmo start at end...
But then I don't want games to end... and often just restart instead of end them. that includes MMO.

Shadowrun was fun on the snes. I didn't take to the newer ones.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I also tend to burn myself out on CRPG's by playing the first 80 hours as a completionist and then suddenly deciding I'm over it and want to finish as soon as possible.

Dragon Age Inquisition was one for me, for exactly this reason. Got right to the final section, think there was a point of no return warning, and for some reason just never went back to it. Skyrim also, Ievelled up everything I wanted to level got the best armors and then bee-lined the mq until the end and never played it again.

It actually happens to me more often than not, once everything becomes familiar and I can see how the path to mastering everything goes I lose steam. Usually a half decent story will carry me through, as long as it doesnt take too much grinding to get there.

 

[Pifanjr]

I've mentioned it before, but by the end of Dragon Age: Origins, the gameplay had lost most of its appeal, I was mainly finishing it for the story. So when I got to the final boss and realized I was losing I cheated and gave myself invulnerability just to see the end.

Special mention to pretty much every Civilization game I ever started.

 

[Sarafan]

I almost quit at about a dozen hours, too, @Sarafan - the story dried up bad when you got into the big, wide world and didn't crank up again until you finally found out what "zero dawn" was really supposed to mean. THEN it got very good!

I would need to force myself to return to this game. I really prefer to launch The Witcher 3 for a third playthough than try to engage myself in Horizon once again. This is a sign of the times. If the game can't get you hooked in a few hours it's in a lost position.

But back to the topic, yeah, I've mentioned on a bunch of occasions that Pathfinder: Kingmaker drove me batty at the end.

Actually you've reminded me that I never finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I dropped the game after around 80 hours. The reason was quite similar as in Horizon. I didn't like the main story arc. Also the pace of the game was too slow for my liking. I think that even fully turn-based Solasta seems more dynamic. But I enjoyed the combat. Especially the option to switch from real time combat to turn-based combat in a fly that they added in one of the patches.

Why do you have to finish it?

Maybe the fact that we spent money (sometimes quite a lot) stops us from dropping games? But in general I try to avoid making myself to finish them for some time. Why waste your free time on things that don't bring you joy?

 

[Colif]

I guess it did take me a while to wake up to fact i wasn't enjoying wow any more, and to stop... but that was 12 or more years ago. I forget these things.
I don't buy many games but they all cost more than the average cost US people pay, even with the increase. I have never finished a game just because I paid an amount for it. Time spent finishing something I don't like could be spent playing something I do.

 

[Johnway]

Pretty much the feeling for every game i play. I generally play one game till i finish it and unlock and explore as much as possible so i don't have to play it again. depending on the game and genre, the time will vary as to how soon i feel desperate to see it end.

I think it boils down to gameplay loop and progression i think. Puzzle games usually sap me pretty quickly and multiplayer gaming (pvp especially) doesn't take long to lose interest. if it quickly becomes work with little return is demotivating. Sometimes gameplay flaws (percieved or otherwise) that leads to pissing me off is usually enough to want to see a game end.

Other factors include generic humdrum games that lean towards the boring side of mediocre usually not a good sign.

Time plays a strange factor to things. For example if i have an arbitrary schedule as to when a game will be completed. if i miss it, i kinda get impatient. This happens especially with indie games. Other times it might be i've played the game for so long (so maybe a month or more or coming up to the 100 hr mark) that i want it to end.

 

[mjs warlord]

i agree with all the comments about Horizon Zero Dawn , its the only game i completed and re visited the very next day , i usually wait a year or so before re visiting something.

The only down side to the game is this , you HAVE to listen to almost all the video diaries and cut scenes that are in the game or you will never figure out exactly what " zero dawn " is/was

 

[WoodenSaucer]

The only down side to the game is this , you HAVE to listen to almost all the video diaries and cut scenes that are in the game or you will never figure out exactly what " zero dawn " is/was

That's the only thing I wish they would have left out of HZD. I'm ok with the cutscenes, but those long diaries you had to listen to were a pain in the backside. It was the same in Halo Infinite with the audio logs. The things keep beeping until your driven insane, and then when you activate them, you have to listen to them talk for a couple of minutes. There were a few times when having that audio play was really bad timing.

 

[Zloth]

Zed's post and mine have a common was an expectation that the game would be ending soon, then it didn't. That got me thinking that game designers should never signal an ending then not end.

But another game I played semi-recently (which I'll leave nameless to avoid spoilers) had a well done false ending. You go through a big fight to save a childhood friend that can solve everything and, when you finally get to the end of the fight... darkness there, and nothing more. Maybe that childhood friend never existed at all? Anyway, your character falls into madness, roll the credits and play the music.

While you're trying to work out what you did wrong and/or where to look up a walk-through, you might notice that the credits aren't quite right. Some important names are just "Leave". Then odd extra bits start showing up. The credits get more and more corrupt, until eventually becoming just a smear on the screen. Finally, you're dropped into a weird alternate reality/dream sequence.

It works quite well, but why? Is it just because the false ending was a loss instead of a win? This needs some proper ponderin'....

 

[mainer]

I also tend to burn myself out on CRPG's by playing the first 80 hours as a completionist and then suddenly deciding I'm over it and want to finish as soon as possible.

That rarely happens in CRPGs for me, as I usually see those through to the end without burning out, though there are a couple of notable exceptions. The first being Divinity Original Sin EE. The first 95% or so of the game was fantastic, but in that roughly final 5% of the game it became so puzzle heavy involving the teleporter pyramids that I nearly stopped, but I'm not playing a game that far and not completing it.

A similar situation with DOS2, but it had to do with the combat in that final 5% of the game, and more specifically, the final battle (which I personally felt wasn't balanced very well and way over the top), and after several tries, I had to bump the difficulty down to "explorer difficulty". Not proud of that fact, but I had a need to finish it at that stage in the game. I love Larian Studios, I think they're one of the last independent developers with a true passion to the games they make, but the final moments of the DOS games made me just wishing for them to end.

 

[Ryzengang]

I drop games early with regularity, so I rarely get to the "please god let it end" phase. If I stop having fun I usually move on unless I have a strong incentive to push through (e.g., to see how the story resolves). One game that did come to mind for this question, though, is Tales of Berseria. I enjoyed the game and the characters, but I really felt like that game was padded for really no good reason. It just dragged too much at the latter part of the story and I just dropped it*. But part of this is that I despise the JRPG "final dungeon" thing, where the final dungeon takes 17 years off of your life and accounts for a preposterous percentage of the overall run time.

 

[Zloth]

Huh? I don't remember the last dungeon being particularly huge in Tales of Berseria. (checks the screenshots) Oh. Yeah it was.

 

[Barukanen]

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, it started off okay but the grind to the end was absolutely horrific and I only carried it on because I was playing the whole thing start to finish with friends.

 

[Brian Boru]

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon

Do you mean all of them—must be ~10 such games—or a particular one?

 

[DonDigidonPRO]

I used to play Biomutant, everything was cool, but when I finished it I got bad ending, but the game gives you a possibility to play it again but make different choises, so you get a different ending, and I wanted to see the good one so bad, I spent like 10 more hours of this game and wasn't even enjoying it, I just wanted to see the damn good ending, and well, I did it, and I'm proud of myself)

 

[WoodenSaucer]

When I finally made it through to the end of Tetris, I was happy it was over.

 

[McStabStab]

I'm trying to play through Horizon Zero Dawn now but I just finished AC: Odyssey and honestly I found that more enjoyable than HZD. I've shelved it (have 18 hours so far) until I finish my last Tropico 6 mission. Then I'll probably jump back in.

Cyberpunk I finished feeling pretty lukewarm about the whole experience. The entire time I was playing it felt like a game filled with quests that would have ended up on the cutting floor of any other RPG. I ground it out and got the Path of Glory ending but honestly I wasn't trying for it and didn't care much about it.

Prey the combat was so un-fun that it was difficult to finish the game... and all for an ending that was kind of *meh*.

 

[Krud]

I've mentioned it before, but by the end of Dragon Age: Origins, the gameplay had lost most of its appeal, I was mainly finishing it for the story. So when I got to the final boss and realized I was losing I cheated and gave myself invulnerability just to see the end.

Yeah, I didn't "cheat" at the end of DA:O, but I did dial down the difficulty just because I didn't feel like going through yet another lengthy tactical fight. (And it was still lengthy even with the difficulty lowered.)

 

[Krud]

Why play something you don't like.

I think he means games we DO like, they just take a long, long time. It's like when your best friend hangs out way too long after a party and everyone else is gone. You're happy to see them, you enjoy their company, but it's late and you're tired and you have to work in the morning. You just keep hoping that any second they'll get the hint and call it a day.

Why do you have to finish it?

Possibly a completionist. Or in some cases maybe we're just hoping for a complete/solid story arc with a beginning, middle and end, even though a lot of games don't do great on that front. But also there is a mindset within the gaming community that affects a lot of us, some more subtly than others, where the logic is that if you didn't FINISH a game, then you haven't fully PLAYED said game. (Obviously this doesn't apply to utterly open-ended games like No Man's Sky or Minecraft, though even those have story arcs you can complete.)

I don't care if I don't see the end. ...(snip) But then I don't want games to end...

I think those are definitely related. I grew up with games that ended, or at least had an "end level". Nothing used to aggravate me quite like games where I reached the end and it just plopped me back to the first level but with harder enemies. There was a degree of satisfaction in "beating" the game, which usually meant seeing the end.

This was a lot easier with, say, adventure games, which were ALL about the story, which were finite. To a lesser extent RPG's, which I think is where the fatigue often sets in for some of us. I still haven't seen the end of the first Divinity: Original Sin, and I have refused to let myself play the sequel until I do, which is foolish because I *paid* for the damn thing, and it's supposed to be better than the first, so I should just suck it up and complete the first one, but I've put SO many hours into it and I've no idea how much further there is until the end.

And sure, I could just go watch a Let's Play on YouTube or something, but as you said, the journey is a significant part of it, so watching someone else do it just isn't the same.

I think sometimes it just feels like the game has filler so it can boast more gameplay hours. The game "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" had a great first act that drew me in, but then it devolved into wave after wave of enemies, and my interest started to plummet significantly. Was there a decent story to be found beyond that seemingly endless gauntlet? Maybe, I'll never know. And it's a shame, because I LOVED the beginning of that game and wanted to love the rest of it as well, but... I just got bored.

 

[Shodan_]

Definitely Xenonauts.

Loved it, best love letter to classic X-coms but at 3/4 of my run I was ready for it to be over.

 

[Colif]

I think those are definitely related. I grew up with games that ended, or at least had an "end level".

I grew up on arcade games. In many of them the only end is the screen 266 bug where the entire screen gets messed up. Refer Pacman, Galaga.

Some of the games had "ends" but they would just keep playing - Gyruss comes to mind, you could complete story, get to Earth and it would just start again - I had a friend who could complete entire story on 1 ship, not fun to play 2 player against. I saw the story a lot, though "story" is a stretch since its a space shootem up