Can't Bring Myself to Finish Games...

bushwhacker2k · Post by **bushwhacker2k** » Sat Apr 21, 2012 7:45 pm

I don't know what it is... I keep stressing myself to find a game that's actually worth playing that can keep my attention and then when I finally find one I lose interest half-way through...

It's really annoying because I want to experience a lot of unique and entertaining games but it's like I'm refusing to like them...

Anyone else have the problem of losing interest or just being unable to finish a game?

Nymie_the_Pooh · Post by **Nymie_the_Pooh** » Sat Apr 21, 2012 8:30 pm

I do this a lot myself. In my case I think it is that I like to explore not just settings, but systems as well. Once I get comfortable with how a game plays its days are generally numbered unless the story keeps me interested or the gameplay itself is truly exceptional.

If we don't count hitting level 99 three times in the same playthrough for Joust then my first game I beat was Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Follow that up with the first Myst and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands a few years later but about the same time as each other. These days I see the end of maybe three games each year, but I play more than ten times that amount with some of that being carryovers from previous years. Some of the games are older, but some are new games as well. I hadn't played a single game to the end so far this year with the last being Arkham City at the tail end of 2011. In Twilight Princess my save file is right before the final fight which I have a really bad habit of doing.

Most of my game time is spent in either MMOs or longer, open-ended games like the Elder Scrolls series so I can spend a hundred hours or more in any of those and never "beat" it. I was telling my roommate I wanted to buy Elder Scrolls V before it came out. She asked me if I beat four because she knows me. My response was, "Give me ten minutes." I never did finish the main quest in Oblivion. Maybe someday.

The one thing I can suggest is never pay full price for a game. Either wait for a sale, or don't buy something for more than ten dollars unless it is something that is likely to never go on sale or have the price reduced with a year's time. There are too many great games to get hung up on buying the newest ones at full price. If you own a console sign up for a subscription service like gamefly. If you enjoy a game a lot, or reach the end then buy it to send a message of dollars to the company that the game is capable of making a profit so maybe they should make more like it.

Another option is finding other activities to eat up your time. The less time you have for video games the less money you will spend on them and the more time you feel you are putting into each game.

I don't think this is really a problem in and of itself unless the individual feels it is. I finish some games, but I never see the end of the vast majority of them. You never see people feeling bad about not finishing out a television series or even a single season unless they missed it for some reason other than they just didn't feel like watching the rest. Most seasons take less time to watch than a video game with any real story content to it. Video games are seen in a different context by most people so there is a separate set of expectations for the consumer. I think part of it might be the investment levels that are typically involved between the two, but I am the furthest thing there is from any sort of expert on the way people's minds work.

LastDanceSaloon · Post by **LastDanceSaloon** » Sun Apr 22, 2012 1:49 pm

I almost always finish my games, glitches aside.

Every now and then I find a game to unbearable to proceed with or I lose a long-term save and can't be bothered to go back and replay what I lost, but 90% of the time I finish.

I suspect you are a very intense player, putting a huge amount of attention and effort into the first half so that, for the longer games, you find yourself burned out well before the big boss showdown.

If this is the case, try having more breaks, maybe put an alarm clock on your daily play patterns. Treat each quest/section as a complete game in itself, imagine each has it's own box and title.

bushwhacker2k · Post by **bushwhacker2k** » Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:57 pm

Nymie_the_Pooh wrote:Most of my game time is spent in either MMOs or longer, open-ended games like the Elder Scrolls series so I can spend a hundred hours or more in any of those and never "beat" it. I was telling my roommate I wanted to buy Elder Scrolls V before it came out. She asked me if I beat four because she knows me. My response was, "Give me ten minutes." I never did finish the main quest in Oblivion. Maybe someday.

Yeah, I'm unable to beat Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, I devote enough time to enjoying myself that when I realize there's really not much else to do I simply don't have the drive to beat the main story...

Nymie_the_Pooh wrote: The one thing I can suggest is never pay full price for a game. Either wait for a sale, or don't buy something for more than ten dollars unless it is something that is likely to never go on sale or have the price reduced with a year's time. There are too many great games to get hung up on buying the newest ones at full price. If you own a console sign up for a subscription service like gamefly. If you enjoy a game a lot, or reach the end then buy it to send a message of dollars to the company that the game is capable of making a profit so maybe they should make more like it.

I also have the sale issue, I think steam(and the other sites, like GoG) have been spoiling me... Well, not that I really ever approved of games relying on an initial 60$ purchase anyway, because that reinforces the strategy of creating shorter games more frequently and still charging the same amount...

LastDanceSaloon wrote:I suspect you are a very intense player, putting a huge amount of attention and effort into the first half so that, for the longer games, you find yourself burned out well before the big boss showdown.

If this is the case, try having more breaks, maybe put an alarm clock on your daily play patterns. Treat each quest/section as a complete game in itself, imagine each has it's own box and title.

Not actually sure what you mean when you say 'treat each quest/section' as a complete game in itself'.

I do agree that I end up putting a lot of attention into the early portions, that the latter portions often end up seeming kinda samey because the majority of the 'game' to me is figuring out the system and how to use it best, so once I've figured out the best way to do everything it's generally fairly uninteresting...

LastDanceSaloon · Post by **LastDanceSaloon** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 12:42 pm

The games you mention there are all The Elder Scrolls series. This series is predominantly an open world adventure. I've read many posts over the years from people who do not like doing the main quest and prefer just wandering about until they've had their fill of the game. Your reasons might be specific to you, but for those games it's not at all an uncommon state of mind.

I apologise if you've already tried them, but the Civilisation series might be of interest to you. It's a strategy game rather than an an RPG but it's turn based rather than real-time and operates on a grid system.

The mechanics of this game are pretty endless and you can play games which can last just 3 hours or games which last a whole week. The level of micro-management is entirely dependent on the player and the number of variations in style of play to get to the same or different conclusion are quite numerous.

There are people who have been playing it for 10 years who are still discovering and discussing new tid-bits of the mechanics of gameplay.

My personal favourite is Civ 2, but each Civ player has their own personal favourite in the series, often the first one they played due to the fact that each one has vastly differing mechanics.

A free version is available from the net and is entitled Freeciv and is a very close match to Civ 2 should you wish to try.

I apologise that it's not an RPG, but if you love figuring games out more than anything else in a game then the Civs will have you engrossed for quite some time, and there is no beginning or end really and a lot of players just play maps until they are bored of that map and simply load up another with completely different game requirements.

dragon wench · Post by **dragon wench** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 2:55 pm

I have a vaguely similar problem. I tend to suffer from chronic altitis, so as I experiment with different builds I'll get to know the first half of the game very well.. and then by the time I settle on a character I like I've had my fill of the game.
This is particularly a problem with the Elderscrolls. I have more or less, over the years, managed to finish Morrowind and its expansions, but I have yet to complete the Oblivion MQ or even finish SI. I've also only gotten halfway into Skyrim's MQ so far.

This is much less of a problem for me with more story-driven games, though. (Witcher series, Dragon Age:Origins, BG2m PS:T etc.)

bushwhacker2k · Post by **bushwhacker2k** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 6:32 pm

LastDanceSaloon wrote:The games you mention there are all The Elder Scrolls series. This series is predominantly an open world adventure. I've read many posts over the years from people who do not like doing the main quest and prefer just wandering about until they've had their fill of the game. Your reasons might be specific to you, but for those games it's not at all an uncommon state of mind.

I was responding to a comment about the Elder Scrolls series so it makes sense that every one I mentioned was from the series. I agree with what you've said, but the point I was focusing on was that I hit a wall where there was nothing left to do and it makes it effectively impossible to continue while having fun. My problem is that I want to do the main quest but I can't because it's so streamlined because I've already gotten to the top tier of power that the mechanics allow.

LastDanceSaloon wrote:I apologise if you've already tried them, but the Civilisation series might be of interest to you. It's a strategy game rather than an an RPG but it's turn based rather than real-time and operates on a grid system.

I've played a little Civilization in the past, it was an interesting game and definitely something that it's possible to lose myself in. I might check them out again at some point.

One aspect I really look for in games is the ability to customize my character and increase their power as I play, this isn't generally very present in strategy games so they've never appealed to me as much as they could.

dragon wench wrote:I have a vaguely similar problem. I tend to suffer from chronic altitis, so as I experiment with different builds I'll get to know the first half of the game very well.. and then by the time I settle on a character I like I've had my fill of the game.
This is particularly a problem with the Elderscrolls. I have more or less, over the years, managed to finish Morrowind and its expansions, but I have yet to complete the Oblivion MQ or even finish SI. I've also only gotten halfway into Skyrim's MQ so far.

This is much less of a problem for me with more story-driven games, though. (Witcher series, Dragon Age:Origins, BG2m PS:T etc.)

Yeah, it's not as problematic in the more linear games where I can cleanly say that I've done everything there is to do in an area and move on. I haven't actually played Planescape: Torment and is BG2m referring to Baldur's Gate 2?

Nymie_the_Pooh · Post by **Nymie_the_Pooh** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:03 pm

With Oblivion specifically I had one playthrough where I counted up my stash and had eighteen of those sigil stones you get from closing gates. I closed a few more since counting them, but no longer have that character. I never closed a gate then went straight to another. It was always close one, go see what the Dark Brotherhood wants. Then I go closed another and followed it up with a trip to the Shivering Isles. I know I put in the time to "beat" Oblivion, but I was too interested in everything else to do so. The gates was what I was doing in place of a game like WoW at the time. Listening to audio books and podcasts while I played helped.

In fact, audio books are one of the reasons I spend so much time playing MMOs. I love to listen to audio dramas (a big thank you to Big Finish and BBC 4e for streaming to the USA) and game at the same time. Most single player games require a bunch of alt+tabbing to constantly pause whatever I am listening to so games like the Elder Scrolls and the newer Fallout games along with MMOs support this better.

Civilization is something I never considered beating. Sure, I have played it to it's natural conclusion, but it never felt like I beat it the way other games do. Branching out to other RTS games I finished the campaigns for every Dawn of War game (including the second game and expansions) aside from Soulstorm. I probably didn't finish the campaign in Soulstorm because it was very similar to Dark Crusade which I did finish that map campaign with three different races. By contrast, I bought Starcraft II at release and have only played about four missions into the campaign. I like the game, but for some reason it isn't one that jumps to mind when I am thinking about what I want to play at any given moment. It's sort of like Magicka in that it only occurs to me to play Magicka when I am drunk, and I only drink a handful of times in a given year. I actually beat more games each year than the amount I drink in that same year.

I get what Dragon Wench is saying on both counts. For instance, in WoW I discovered for myself years ago that there is a character limit of fifty characters per account. I have a max level character in one MMO (CoX), and that took me about three years. The only MMO I had one character level with any sort of speed was limited to two characters per server with an overall limit of eight to an account. I still used all eight slots, but that limit helped me personally focus on one of those eight. I have no clue how many characters I have made for campaign play with either Neverwinter Nights games. I never beat either of them, but my roommate got to the final fight with the first one and teases me about it. She has just the one character. I've played some of the longer mods to the end however.

Even with Vampire: Bloodlines I had more characters than I can remember. Games like Arcanum scream for different characters to play as there are so many things about character builds that change the experience. Now that I think more about it, most games I never reach the end of I have a dozen or more characters I have built for them.

On some of the linear based story games I beat Dragon Age: Origins within a week of its release. Well, it's not as linear as some. It's hub based. It's fairly linear when considered next to open world games as there is a definitive beginning and end with a middle that can be shuffled around. The problem I had there was that my character was a Dwarf commoner. The game felt like Orzammar was the real end of the game for my character aside from the bit at the actual end so it was a bit like grinding story content from that point on. I still had all of Denerim and the Elf lands after that to grind through and almost took one of my long breaks a couple of times. The first Mass Effect was much the same as in both cases I didn't look at another game or do anything else with my spare time where usually I play multiple games in a given week and have hobbies outside of video games that further split my free time.

Both of the recent Batman games were similar experiences for me as once I started I didn't stop until I not only finished the story portion of the game but I also solved the Riddler puzzles that I could. I never did get them all in the second one and pretty much ignored the extra challenge maps. I played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic before Oblivion. I'm not sure if I would have played it to the end if I had played Oblivion first. I liked the game, but it has an overall feel that is very similar even though it actually plays quite differently. I didn't beat Half-Life 2 until I beat the followup episodes which encouraged me to go back and see it through. I'm not very good at shooters however and there were a couple of spots in the base game where I had to cheat to advance so I actually feel like the game beat me.

I normally don't feel that a game I didn't finish beat me as it's usually not something like the example with Half-Life 2 but apathy or a different game or any number of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the game itself. My breaks from a game tend to be longer than a day or two and can sometimes be months which leads to more starting over as I want to play the early part of a game again to re familiarize myself with the controls. This happens all the time with the Gothic series as I simply can't pick it up again after not playing for a while due to the control scheme.

bushwhacker2k · Post by **bushwhacker2k** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:21 pm

I've actually beaten Neverwinter Nights 1 OC, Shadows of Undrentide, Hordes of the Underdark and NWN2 OC... no idea how, I'm also a big character creation junkie.

I've played a nice bit of Dark Messiah, but I've never beaten it for some reason.

Games like Arcanum make things a little difficult for me because I seriously feel like I SHOULD make a new character because I'm doing something wrong...