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Why Don't We Finish More Games?
IGN has an opinion piece discussing why, as video games get shorter, we seem less likely to finish them than in the past. For example, BioWare said only 50% of Mass Effect 2 players finished the campaign. The article goes into several reasons gamers are likely to drop games without beating them, such as lowered expectations, show-stopping bugs, and the ease with which we can find another game if this one doesn't suit us. Quoting:
"... now that gamers have come to expect the annualized franchise, does that limit the impetus to jump on the train knowing another one will pull up to the station soon enough? ... In the past, once you bought a game, it was pretty much yours unless you gave it to somebody else or your family held a garage sale. The systemic rise of the used games market now offers you an escape route if a game just isn't your bag. Is the middle of a game testing your patience? Then why not sell it back to your local game shop, get money back in your pocket, or trade it in for a game that's better – or at least better suited for your tastes? After all, the sooner you ditch it either at a shop or on an online auction site, the more value you stand to get in return."
because we're not 15 years old anymore?
I know that in the past I finished all levels of a game, repeated it, downloaded custom levels, created custom levels, repeated it again, and so on... However now I'm indeed less likely to do that, but I think this has something to do with the fact that I grow older, so I'm not sure if it's really the fault of the games. I know I'm less attracted to them, because there's more difficulty in playing them (they're more locked in, DRM stuff, slow load times, no more LAN connection, etc...). I still play indie games and Flash games though, simply because they start up much faster, can be played in Linux and are enjoying.
It's been a while since I've played a long game that felt compelling after the first few hours (at least in single-player). If it's just a slog, why bother?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yeah, yeah, I know this is a /., and saying something like this is bound for karma burn - but anybody that collected ALL of those crack-cocaine-figurine-thingies in GTA has waaaaay too much time.
And please, yes - I know finishing campaign is not the same (I have done so), but what exactly is "game over"? With all those achievements, different difficulty levels and DLC where do you say that you finished the fscking thing?
Let me come back to this later...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to. Looking at the games in question, I'm starting to sense a common factor; repetition.
I think that as I get older, find work taking up more of my life and find my genuinely free time getting more and more constrained, I don't have the tolerance for repetition that I once did. This has had a pretty large impact on how likely I am to finish various types of game.
TFA begins by talking about Mass Effect 2, but to be honest, I had no problem playing through that to completion (and will likely do a second playthrough at some point in preparation for Mass Effect 3). Aside from the planet scanning (which you can ignore past the game's mid-way point quite safely), there's precious little repetition. Bioware did a great job of making all the side-missions feel pretty unique. Combined with a strong plot, I never came even close to giving up on Mass Effect 2 (nor on any other Bioware game I can remember).
I find myself strugging a lot more with Japanese RPGs these days, because that genre as a whole (and there are rare, welcome exceptions) has not yet grown out of the idea that levelling up is about running in circles for a couple of hours fighting identical monsters. I have twice tried to play through Star Ocean: The Last Hope and have run out of steam both times because of the sheer quantity of the grinding needed (the game has weird difficulty spikes - the bosses are much, much harder than anything else in the game). I struggled through the grinding in the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata because I was so deeply in love with the game's concept, plot and style, but I would have enjoyed it far more without the grinding (and I did come close to dropping it several times). Even Valkyria Chronicles, which I would rate as arguably the best game of the last 5 years, frustrated me because of the need to do multiple replays of the skirmish engagements for experience points.
I wasn't always this way. I remember playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII where I spent many hours levelling up in and around Midgar so I could beat the Midgar Zolom the first time I met him (nabbing the Beta enemy-skill far earlier in the game than you were supposed to be able to get it). But these days, the thought of doing that just makes me despair. I constantly find myself wishing that Japanese developers (and it is primarily Japanese developers at fault here) were confident enough to make a game as long as it needed to be, rather than trying to deliver the 40-60 hour playtime that they think the fanbase expects.
It's not just RPGs where I find myself increasingly intolerant of repetition. Even in action and platforming games, I hate (really, really hate) being made to replay sections I've already completed. Action games which have no quicksave function and which think it is funny to be sparing on checkpoints are likely to get dropped (Halo: Reach came close several times and had the campaign been slightly longer it probably would have). While I generally liked Mario Galaxy 2, I hated the fact that the lives system meant I found myself repeating sections of levels that I could do with my eyes closed just to get back to the section I was stuck at.
This isn't to say that repetition always means I will drop a game. Where there's a compelling enough reason, I can tolerate it. I've played through Persona 3, its FES "director's cut" and Persona 4 despite their grindy nature, just because the game's social mechanics are so unusual and compelling that I wanted to see them through. But I don't think that enforced repetition ever adds much to a game. Developers: please, work out how long your game needs to be to tell its story, deliver the gameplay experiences you want to get across etc. And then make it that long (or if you only had a 3 hour game left, you may need to go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept). Don't think that we're all sat ou
Maybe there's just too much choice. Who here hasn't invested hundreds, if not thousands of hours in games like Elite, just to achieve Dangerous or Deadly status? I can't imagine myself, or anyone, for that matter, investing that amount of time in a single game nowadays. Well, WoW and EVE seem to be capturing people's attention for a really long time, but single player games? If it gets even the tiniest bit boring or grinding, just drop it and play something else. But back in the '80s, there just wasn't all that much choice if you wanted a big game.
Once upon a time games actually had a replay value. That was back in the days when the game didn't repeat itself endlessly before you finished it.
I still enjoy playing through Monkey Island 1, Dune or Dune II once in a while.
Too bad I never managed to finish Frontier Elite II.
Maybe it's just a generation thing. Younger players might not be as patient or as skilled?
Yeah, yeah, I know...but what exactly is "game over"? With all those achievements...
Well, obviously you've never played Ninja Gaiden.
Those extra people who game now are - axiomatically - more casual gamers than the people who always gamed.
Casual gamers are less likely to finish games.
Wow, people get paid to analyse this sort of non-puzzle? I'm in the wrong job.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In my Spectrum days, a lot of games weren't completable anyway. Of those that were, I completed exactly one - Nonterraqueous - after myself, my brother and my dad dedicated several nights to mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. Typically, the next week someone published one in the computer games magazines. But that was it. I never completed Back to Skool which is three screens wide. I never completed any of the other 200+ games.
On consoles, the same thing happened. We completed Mario All-Stars on SNES by just sitting down and working through it hundreds of times as a family. I don't remember completing any other game on SNES.
In the arcades, the same thing happened. I only completed one game - Final Fight - by finding an old dusty machine in an old arcade with my elder brother while my parents were trying to get rid of us - we put about £5 in 10p coins into that machine but eventually we "won". We nearly won at Bad Dudes vs Dragonninja that night too.
On Gameboy, I completed the 2nd Mario game on my own but it wasn't exactly difficult. I also "completed" Tetris on any skill level you care to select. I may have completed TMNT too but it was a very simple game to complete.
On PC, a similar thing happened - most games that "could" be completed I just never bothered to. There are even some in that category that I love playing but have *never* managed to complete. I love Heroes of Might and Magic but have never bothered to "complete" it, I just like playing it. I love Age of Empires II but I've never bothered to complete the campaign, I just like playing it. I love Master of Magic but I've never completed it. I love Syndicate but I've never completed it (stupidly difficult last level doesn't help). I love Driver but I've never completed it (same thing). I have put hundreds of hours into games before now and never completed them. Some of them I don't even know *how* even if they are completable. However, I have completed Half-life 2 and all the episodes. I have completed some games to the point of "every achievement". I have completed some games with the help of tutorials and/or got to the point where, as far as I'm concerned, the game is complete. I have 200 games on my Steam list and completed about 3 or 4 at most.
And what classes as "complete"? Got to the end stage? On what difficulty? Just getting there or getting 100% completion? Does having co-op friends count? Do you have to do it all in one session? Are you allowed continues?
The reasons that people don't "complete" games any more are many, and still the same as always - They never really *did* complete lots of games. They don't need to in order to play for thousands of hours. Sometimes it's not possible to complete the game at all. Sometimes it's stupidly difficult even if they enjoy the game. They don't put the time into any one particular game. They don't like the game enough. The game has more content than can hold their interest. They have a life outside computer games.
To be honest, I've completed many more games in recent years than I ever did before (i.e. when I had lots of free time during the day), but I've also left many games on the very first level or demo thinking "this isn't worth my time". With modern games what puts me off is not being able to just play the damn game. I don't want cutscenes or intros or being forced to watch storyline, I just want to play because that's what I bought a game to do - allow me to play. And it's hard to "complete" a modern game because many of them are multiplayer and / or achievement based and it just means that completing consists of grinding away on silly achievements that you're unlikely to ever hit during the course of the game naturally (think Half-life 2's Gnome achievements).
I don't buy a game to complete it. In fact, I often wish that I never complete any game that I buy because then it gives me more to go back for. I buy a game to play it and have fun. Once I c
I think the combination of bad game mechanics and bugs can cause some games to just be too frustrating to play for some. But this coupled with the new trend in DLCs, I think most people probably feel the game was never really completed or they aren't getting their money's worth.
Mass Effect 2 for instance made me incredibly frustrated by the cover system employed (that I could avoid in ME1 using crouch), constantly getting stuck on things when trying to sprint around, and then crashed on me several times. Had I not been enjoying the story so much or been so enamored by the franchise because of the first game, I probably wouldn't have finished the game. In fact, each time I buy one of the DLCs Bioware produces I find myself getting re-frustrated by the same things after months had passed and I had forgotten about them.
Fallout 3 was also known for quite a lot of bugs, so much so that I have several friends that just stopped playing out of frustration as well. I had fond enough memories of the game that I decided to buy the DLCs and found myself getting annoyed at the same bugs and frustrating crashes all over again.
Because of these experiences, I have absolutely no plans on buying the new Fallout:Las Vegas after videos were reported of the same bugs and crashes. And depending on how they change the game-play in Mass Effect 3, I might be skipping that one as well until the "ultimate" edition with all the DLCs are on sale for less than $10.
I'm just not willing to buy a game for full price when I know it's going to make me just as frustrated at times than entertained. Not only because it feels like a waste of money that's really only getting myself annoyed, but also because these same companies are trying to subvert the game market with the DLCs. Most of the games packages that include the DLCs (like the "ultimate" edition I mentioned) also include DRM that won't let you sell it used. This drops the value of the game to me if I can't share it with a friend when I'm done or sell it if I hate it.
The more they devalue their own products by making bad decisions not only inside the game but also in business practices, the less likely they'll be successful with sales since it would be more likely drive someone will avoid buying it (either to avoid the product entirely or pirate it). While I've never pirated a game, the current trend has led me to investigate video game rentals in lieu of buying using services like OnLive or Gamefly.
Which from what I've heard, has already been eating away at game developer revenues. But as I'm trying to stress, they're doing it to themselves.
It might sound strange, but I've actually stopped playing a few good games (granted, I've beat them before) simply because I didn't want them to be over. Besides that, it's the usual reasons like the game being too tedious, boring, etcetera. But I've never really played a game that had so many bugs that it prevented me from wanting to finish it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
feeling one gets as the progress in many games. The "damn, if I haven't seen THAT ten bazillion times before. Far too many developers are blind to the repetitive nature of their games, somehow think they are unique among designers and came up with something we never saw elsewhere. Then you can also top it off with what I call dick moves. Essentially dick moves are mechanics whereby the player will do it the designers way or no way. Dick moves are things like gratuitous loss and such. Gimmick fights and over use of gimmicks also tends to dull one's willingness to follow a game to its end (I am looking at you HL2 : yeah I know you have a physics engine but damn if I am not tired of finding the one item I need to move from X to Y so I can cross a three foot chasm)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The main reason why I don't finish all my games is simply because they are big enough that I haven't finished them yet.
I don't go and do the final mission/quest/whatever before I have completely finished all side quests, unlocked all skills, crafted all items, leveled to the max, etc. Going to the final mission prevents you from going back and do all these things, and these things take a very long time to complete, so I rarely do the final mission which is what I suppose people mean by "finishing" the game.
Thankfully, a couple of games (most of them japanese) have understood the concept of "post-game" where you can still go everywhere you want in the game even after you've dispatched the final boss.
... buy fewer games. Then play them all the way through.
...only 50% of Mass Effect 2 players finished the campaign
The completion of most games is much less than 50%. Mass Effect 2 is special game here, and a big achievement (he) for his creators because managed to have this completion. A very high completion in a decent lenght game means a lot of people seems to like it enough to stick to it to finish. So ME2 is a very good game for a lot of people (?) is a objetive fact.
You can see the average completion of games in Steam, looking at general achievements, ...most games have achievements for finishing levels (or similar). Is a very depressing thing, since most gamers never finish the games, you have decent games where less than 10% of the people finish, it, and you have very bad games with smalligh completion ratio ( maybe 1% ).
That "only 50%" in the article is wrong because of that. Is like "I drive at only 180 Km/h in my car".
-Woof woof woof!
It seems like every time I stop playing a game in the middle, it's because I reach a boss or something that's simply too insanely difficult, with no obvious indication that anything except raw luck and endurance will get me past.
If there's any hint that I'm getting better with repetition, even if slowly, then I may stick it out, but few games really seem to have that finely tuned a difficulty curve -- they tend to either be fairly easy (boss takes 2-3 tries) or just insane beyond reason...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I find it quite easy to answer the question of why I'm not finishing a lot of games.
Perhaps a few isntances of games I did and did not finish:
Finished:
Infamous
Assassin's Creed 1 & 2 (playing Brotherhood now)
Anno 14 something campaign
Bioshock
Godfather 2
Call of Juarez 2
Star Wars: KotoR
God of War 1-3
Not finished
Brütal Legend
Civ5 (as far as you CAN finish this... Let's jsut say I stopped after two completed civilizations)
Star wars: Force unleashed
Mass Effect
Darksiders
Now, what made me play through the first bunch and not the second? Simple math:
(fun gameplay x entrancing story x cool characters) / (annoying bugs x repetitive gameplay x bad story x no connection to environment or characters)
I am not one of those 100% gamers. I play as long as I'm drawn back to the game, not to complete every single sidequest and get every last item. I will be drawn back by cool style (wild west, star wars, Infamous, Assassin's Creed) and/or if I like the gameplay as such (Infamous, Assassin's Creed). I love collecting stuff that helps you along... like building up the Villa Auditore in AC2 or cleaning out city parts in Infamous. I like to see my accomplishments and profit from them.
What I absolutely hate is repetitive gameplay that does nothing for you. That's the problem with Force Unleashed. You just walk through a predefined path, with bad controls, and slay your way through. The story might be cool, but I'm already fed up. Brütal Legends wasn't intuitive... at one point, I encountered a bug and since I didn't understand what the game wanted from me anyway, I've never gone back, even though I loved the setting of the game.
So it depends on how big the good parts are compared to the bad ones. Godfather 2 was repetitive too and a bit buggy, but the positive side was stronger.
Since this is all very subjective, MY question would be this: Was it any different ten years ago?
I remember completing Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden II. Killing Jaquio was quite an achievement.
I never finish games because I'm a shit gamer. There I said it.
Actually, that's not quite true. I finished Prince of Persia, Half-life and Half-life 2 but nothing else.
Why? Because I get stuck on one point to which I simply cannot progress. After playing it for what feels like the hundredth time I get bored and move on to something else.
This is why I like something like the helper in NSMB on the Wii. Sure it's cheating in a sense, but quite frankly, I don't care as I'd far rather be helped by a computer to get past one really difficult part than accept that I'm probably never going to be able to get past a stage and never play the game again.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
It seems to me that the game market has changed, if we go back to 20 years ago a lot more (popular) games were platform games, single player RPGs and the like. And as fun as those games were at the time I just can't be bothered playing them much anymore, it just seems like repetition to me.
My favorites these days are RTS games, Civilization-style "god games" and WoW but even with these I often find myself not finishing them anymore.
With the two former categories I tend to get fed up with cheating AIs and annoying scripted events (in the RTS games), I'd like an AI that's scales in "cleverness" rather than speed when I turn up the difficulty. Most RTS AIs are pretty much retarded at any difficulty setting, the only difference is that if you turn up the difficulty they do things faster and faster and the cheating becomes more obvious.
As for WoW, there isn't really an attainable "end" to it (I suppose technically there is an "end boss" and levels of completeness like "getting all achievements"), it's a lot more fun to just quest with your friends, play a dungeon or two, maybe do some world PvP but you're not really working towards "beating" the game (yes, there are those that look at it that way but most people I interact with don't seem to play it that way and it's really annoying when you get one of those guys in a PUG dungeon group).
So at least for me it's a combination of the changing game market, stale games and the fact that I'm just not putting that much value into "beating" games anymore (it was more important in 4th grade when you could brag to your friends). I suspect this is true for a lot of people.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
If by finish you mean they haven't got the achievement to run round the game world 200 times looking in every crevice possible for the last magical flashing blob that must be collected then the answer is because this is the most fucking awful game mechanic that has been put in modern games since, well, forever.
If it's that they're not finishing the main story line, then well, it's probably something else altogether, like, people simply being fickle.
Personally though I think I finish more games now than I used to. Here's a question though, sure they have stats now like only 50% of people completing Mass Effect, but how do they know more people used to finish games when those games were nearly always offline and hence they have no way of measuring completion rates of old games? Are they sure they're not just assuming people used to finish more games?
It's because the game gets boring. It gets boring because it becomes repetitive. You make it repetitive by continually handing players more of the same. I never even finished Zelda: A Link To the Past (which might conceivably be one of the games I've spent the most hours with) because it became so samey. There's only so many hours I can spend swinging a sword at enemies that move in annoying patterns. Didn't I spend whole years of my life doing that in the 8-bit era?
You can extrapolate this out to any other game these days. Most of them are just some stuff we've seen before. We're jaded and it's hard to impress us, as a group.
The game I've played most in life has to be Alpha Centauri. How old and buggy is that? It offers a new challenge in each game (if you're not a hero at these games, which I'm not... just adequate. would be nice if you didn't have to micromanage everything, that's the current limiting factor. people don't just sit with thumb in ass if you don't tell them what to do...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can't speak for anyone else, but the main reason why I rarely complete games these days is 'Real Life'; much as my disposable income has disappeared with the arrival of children, so has my disposable time. Years ago I could fritter away hours at a stretch playing Civilisation, but no more. It's very rare that a game comes along these days that I can muster the enthusiasm for to invest time and effort in to complete.
The last game that I played through from beginning to end was "Enslaved: Oddesey To The West", which was an almost perfect title for me; the overall length of the game was quite short (the whole thing was completed over a couple of evenings), the learning curve for the controls was slight and it had a character-led story that I actually wanted to see through to the end. Generally though the sequence goes something like:
GTA IV is sitting on my hard drive, barely touched - I liked what I played, but I just don't have the time to spend on it. Likewise Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 2, Arkham Asylum and so on. It took me at least three attempts to finish Bioshock (and I'm really glad that I did), but that's one of the few exceptions. Nowadays I'm finding myself playing more and more 'casual' games (Cut The Rope, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies mostly) rather than 'serious' titles - maybe after the kids leave home and before arthritis fuses my hands into impossible shapes I'll get time to play properly again.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
I don't think it's less. It's just because 10 years ago, we didn't had services like Live/PSN tracking every stat possible.
"Then why not sell it back to your local game shop, get money back in your pocket..."
Were you to try that, you would likely get less than a tenth of 'your money' back in your pocket.
It sounds a little counterintuitive, but games are better these days, so by the time you get halfway through a game, you want to play the next amazing thing on the market. Games rarely improve after the halfway point, and they almost never have new, interesting ideas at that point.
And the, of course, there are more of them. And they seem to all come out at once. For the first half of 2010, I badly felt the lack of good games. ('Good' meaning I liked them, and nothing else.) Now, I have about a dozen games that I want to play all at once. It's little wonder that I'm not completing most of them, and I probably won't, since other games will come out later and the excitement for these has died off.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
As the generations age, more and more adults are playing computer games. In my "adult life" I have played a lot of games and only completed two or three.
The reason for this are complicated controls and level of skills required to continue an interrupted game.
Let's take GTA IV. It's a nice game. The controls are kinda advanced and difficulty of the levels raises as the game progresses. An adult person with a job and a family can play a game like GTA few nights a week and complete some of the missions. Then something happens and there is a pause. Maybe your kid gets sick or you have a busy period at work.
After a while, I would like to pick up the game and continue the progress. But then I find out, that I have forgotten some of the controls and some skills have been lost and the game kicks my ass. After a few failed missions the frustrations takes over and I turn of the PS3 and never pick up GTA IV again.
As a busy adult with work and family, I do not need more frustrations from a computer game after a long day at work.
------- Look mum! I have posted another Slashdot comment! --------
Have they ever considered it's because games have become all about graphics whilst everything else has been neglected to the extent of devolution?
Seriously, if the industry ceased being a bunch of graphic whoring pansies, I would buy and play a LOT more games.
The problem here is that so few new games contain anything of substance. The games are literally just become tech demos for their respective engines.
If the storyline of the game is not interesting enough to make people WANT to see how things turn out, then people won't bother finishing it. In other cases, there are games that are generally good, but then come up with some stupid "action sequence" that just takes away from the fun of the game. Hit left, now jump, roll, right, left, and then you are through the stupid sequence and can get on with the game. This is the sort of thing you see that makes people either get frustrated and give up, or just disgusts people and makes them lose interest.
It is like these "boss encounters" as well, where the player needs to try things over and over and over again, not because of needed skill, but because luck plays into it a bit too often. If the story is not interesting in the first place, then people just stop playing.
Now, there are some ways to help, such as making multiple difficulties so you can make things much easier, but it really just comes down to game design, and some designs just being really poor. If I feel like the entire game is "doing the same thing over and over for no reason", then I just don't enjoy it(which is why I hate first person shooters, because shooting everything that moves bores me to tears). Other ways are to make it so you actually have some choice in playing and the order of events in the game, so if something is too difficult in the early stages of the game, give the player the option of doing that difficult part later, after you have better equipment/abilities.
Another thing that some people like and others hate is being lead by the nose, like playing through a movie and not being able to change ANYTHING. If a game is 100 percent linear, if I like the story I will play through ONCE, but that is it, but if you can change events a bit, then I will play through multiple times to see how my actions change things in later parts of the game. If anything though, people want CHOICES. If you play on the "good" path, you shouldn't end up with the same options as someone who played the "evil" path, and things SHOULD diverge based on the choices you make.
Yes, the problem is time to finish most games. And assuming you're a normal person you have to share this time with your work, family, maybe his wife and children, etc.. I have many interesting games on my computer that did not even installed yet, due to lack of time for them.
And another important factor was the difficulty in many games, most people do not have the skill of a ninja to win the "supervillain" a certain point of the game, nor the patience to keep trying for hours to win. The result therefore is that the player ends up getting tired and giving up the game.
Solution? I think an example is fallout3 (once you fix the bugs, of course). You have many options, you can scour every corner of the game if you're curious or just go straight for the "main story", and there are usually several ways to achieve a given objective, and it's hard to get "stuck" somewhere because of some action of too great difficulty.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I'll need more evidence than that half ME2 games got finished. I've never played it but gather it's a big, sprawling epic with many distracting side quests. 50% seems like quite a good figure for such a game. Give me the stats for a COD - not completing one of those is just laziness/boredom.
I finish a very low percentage of the games I buy, certainly less than 50%, probably less than 25%. The biggest reason is that I now have a great deal more money than I did when I was a preteen/teenager. Back then, I'd save up money for months to buy a game, so I'd like it to last me as long as possible. Gaming was also one of my only real interests back then, so I'd go through them faster. Now, a single paycheque can net me several hundred dollars in disposable income, a fair portion of which I still blow on video games. At the same time, I have less free time, with university, work, World of Warcraft, books, and other interests I've picked up along the way.
Not finishing a game doesn't mean I didn't enjoy my time with it, just that I went on to something different before the game ran out of gameplay. Some games I really enjoyed (like GTA4), I never ended up finishing for one reason or another. I also have a tendency to go back and finish games I started years ago, sometimes with a fresh start, other times picking up the old save file. I also prefer a variety of gaming experiences to spending a ton of time with one single game (WoW excepted, but that's more due to the social aspect of WoW.) I've never really done the whole 100% complete thing on a single player game. I suppose this makes me the ideal consumer, heh.
I know I really ought to look for games with a 10 hour single player campaign, which I actually beat consistently, but my instincts for long games from when I was 12 kick in, and I often buy long RPGs I rarely finish, for instance, I picked up FFXIII when it came out, but I don't think I've beat the tutorial yet, despite being around 20 hours into it. :-/
i used to write a long and complete answer to every slashdot article. But now I have less time so I
Personally, I've always been a fan of games that never really end.
- The Civilisation series.
- numerous Microprose simulations.
- The Football Manager series.
- MMOs (WoW & Eve in particular).
None of these ever finish and as such have more replayablility (if that is an actual word).
Of the games that I own that do 'end', very few have made me want to. Notable exceptions being Half Life 1, 2 & the episodes so far, Deus Ex, the first KOTOR game.
I think, what I'm trying to say in a very round about way, is that a lot of games are failing to create any kind of narrative that are making players *want* to finish them and the games that succeed despite this lack of narrative are ones in which the player creates it him/herself.
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jnr.
In Soviet Russia, game finishes you!
In the last 5 years I think the only games I have finished are the Halo 1 thru 3, ODST, Doom 3 and COD Modern Warfare. I have a stack of about 50 Xbox 360 games and a few computer games. The pc games are mostly RTS and sim style games. RTS games I normally play the first campaign level then jump into multiplayer, and SimCity, well thats never really done. The main reason I do not complete games anymore is AI. A good example is Halo 1 vs the new Halo Reach. Halo 1 was a very enjoyable game with a smarter than most AI. The Elite were hard to land plasma grenades on and the grunts played the perfect cannon fodder. The flood would overwhelm you and you found yourself running for your life. Since then if you played a Halo game on normal you could run through it in three hours on normal. Up it to Heroic and the game does not get smarter, it just increases the HPs for the enemies. Then it just becomes a grind and that really pisses me off. I want to be challenged by the "skill" of my opponent not the the health. This has lead me to play more of them online, with all them damn Xbox kids muted of course. That leads to complaints about lag though. Bungies matchmaking sucks. I don't know though, could just be me.
have been playing nethack for about 15 years and still didnt finish it... not even close!! :)
ok, i'm just play a few weeks then stop for some months/years, but those are fun and HARD games, finishing then is a real challenge and that is what make then still alive after all this years
Higuita
There have been a number of times lately I felt that to win the game I had to be able to read the game developer's mind. The fight with Loghain in Dragon Age was one such case. By the time I got there, my party was able to win most battles without difficulty. Sometimes there were battles which required more strategy but battles were not overwhelmingly difficult. With Loghain, I got my ass kicked in 2 seconds maybe 4 or 5 times before I wised up. Can you say difficulty spike? I decided that I was not going to put up with this shit. I went to the Internet and found that if you put Morrigan against him, it is a piece of cake. Then I moved on.
I had a similar experience with the last battle in Bioshock. Got there, got my ass kicked several times. Again, the previous battles were difficult but not overwhelmingly so. I read up on some strategies but still got my ass kicked. Then I read that if you have selected this and that ability it is a piece of cake. In this case, I said screw this, uninstalled the game and watched the final cut scene on Youtube.
I doubt that developers read this but just in case. This shit is precisely why I decided to NOT buy Bioshock 2. I've also decided that I'm not going to buy any more Dragon Age.
Both Bioshock and Bioshock 2 have a big problem on 64-bit operating systems: some of their "auto-save" locations simply crash the game and can't be gotten past. Bug reports simply go to a knowledgebase message, from a player, not a Bioware engineer, about turning off sound drivers, which does not fix it. This happens with both the DVD and new Steam releases of both game.
So don't even *think* of laying blame for not completing those games at our feet as being due to our "short attention span". The "short attention span" is of the black hole they now use as a tech support department.
its the same old same old. i dropped mass effect 2 probably at 10%, and even forgot it was on the hard drive after a few days. it was just a more polished version of the older one, but, quite dumbed down to the extent that i feld playing an interactive movie like the games back in mid 1990s. (early cd era, remember). click a few things, watch a cutscene, shoot some, watch a cutscene. actually clicking was also even out of the picture.
its the result of extreme industrial corporatism in gaming. everything is for profit, no risks taken, whatever made money before is rehashed and pushed in front of people.
and people just drop them.
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It used to be you'd get a cool movie or a cut scene epilogue after completing a game and that was a satisfying way of wrapping things up. I finished Civ5 with a Space Race victory after 5 solid days of play, crashes, recovery, AI cheats, and gross over-simplification and what do I get? A dialog saying "Congratulations on your space race victory, do you want to continue playing?" Whoopee-doo... If I'd known that's what I'd get for my £30 and 5 days of struggle with that buggy POS, I'd never have hit the Purchase button. Why should I keep hitting the feeder bar if the food pellets are made of sawdust and ashes?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Maybe because back then I remember I did not have that much disposable income and so was stuck longer playing with the games I own forcing me through boredom to finish the game regardless if it's a quality game or not
... invaded gaming. Gaming used to be a hobby for those dedicated to it (would finish the games) they are the conniseurs of gaming, but the masses have infected gaming and the masses aren't really "that into games". So only those who are passionate about what games are about (challenge, systems, rules, rewards, etc) will go the extra mile because deep down they get games.
Average gamers who give up half-way through or are interrupted by life-stuff and just never get back to it just aren't all that interested in games.
This does not mean how-ever that the content is wasted. The problem with statistics and numbers is that it's used to justify cost and corner cutting an we're already seeing that in major franchises, this is only going to lead to the core abandoning gaming altogether because it's been infected by the masses who of flies who will eat shit in large numbers (Call of duty 5/6 I'm looking at you).
Too much repetition. Repetition is boring, thus a game with lots of repetition is boring. Sometimes it's called grinding. Sometimes it's called leveling up. Sometimes it's called unlocking. Sometimes it's called earing "money" to buy the item you need to continue.
Game makers seem to be convinced that what is important is how long it will take to finish a game. They will add these repetitive parts to make it take longer to finish. However, games are meant to be fun. Adding repetitive parts makes the game less fun, because you have to *work* (without even getting paid for it, unlike a real job) to get to the next fun part.
I own all four Gran Turismo games. Each of them I have played until somewhere around being able to buy a stock NSX, then the fun was lost. Ok, in GT4, I was able to get quite a bit more money, but only because one race gives loads of money (second one in special conditions, AFAIR). Yet, even that got boring, and I'm not sure I even got around to buying the NSX. Didn't play for half a year. Then I got an Action Replay disc, and was able to download a save game with all the cars. Suddenly, the game is fun again. Load the save game, go into arcade mode, pick a track (way more tracks then before), pick a car, anything from a Ford model T, to a Le Mans race car. Now there's alway something I haven't tried.
The point is: Downloading a completed save game should not be needed to make a game fun.
On my early days, mostly Amiga, games were so hard that I almost never finished a game. Games like shadow of the beast are hard to finish today with cheats and everything. Games like monkey island I finished but took almost a year per game. But what I most recall is the frustration that meant to play games, long load times, die in 30 seconds, another long time to see a game over screen... it was ridiculous. Even so I loved that era. If you think about arcades, it's basically the same, who finished arcade games?
I completed 60% of GTAIV before I got round to setting up multiplayer, now it's the only mode I play and I haven't returned to SP. That's one explanation.
Indeed, what counts as 'complete', is it 100% progress, because this is very hard to achieve in many games.
some people will remain 15 for ever
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I tend to always make an effort to finish a game that I start playing, even if I begin to dislike it (much like I do with books and films - I've never walked out of a movie, and only stop reading a book if it really, really is doing nothing for me). I rarely ever play games online (like many here, I'm unable to cope against exhaustively practiced 12-year-olds), so it's the single player experience for me that counts.
Generally, I also only ever have one game on a go at a time, which I guess helps things.
I even made it through to the end of Demon's Souls, a feat that I know many either gave up on or were simply unable to achieve.
I've been playing games since I was about 8, moving from a Commodore Plus 4, to C64, to Amiga, to PS1, to PS2, and now to PS3. I have noticed a sharp decline in the number of games that I play, through. Likely I'll become far more casual and start to only play games on my phone or something...
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even when i had too much time back when a teenager, i didnt invest in that much time to achieve any 'status' or 'title' that i couldnt do anything with.
its pointless. just acquiring a title does nothing, if it has no value in the game. ie, if it doesnt open new doors, or do new things, its just a text label that appears in a variable.
i feel the same for most 'achievement' style fish hooks in recent games. pointless.
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I've never understood the game console and the concept of game completion. Why does it have to have an end? To what point? Who actually cares you got there?
Personally I would like to L4D or Bioshock with a level-less mode. No bosses, no achievements, just play. There are days when it would be nice to just sit down and bash, shoot and stomp the shit out of zombies for 2 hrs and do nothing more.
I didn't finish Mass Effect 2 because of that TINY MINISCULE font they used on all of the conversation UI. The whole game is predicated on what choices you make in conversation, so it's really important that you read each of these options, some of which are pretty detailed.
Meanwhile my TV is not a high def plasma or something, it's a little LCD with poor resolution.
They should have warned me before I bought the game.
You don't want it to finish, even if it's beautiful at the ultimate moment. At least that's my point of view. However, maybe some people practice sex just to finish it... Ok I'm stopping there.
I don't need to finish a game to get my enjoyment out of it. I play games more for the ride than for the endings. Though I always finish Valve games. Also laziness. Also End Boss fights are almost always lame, and it's not the nature of boss fights that interests me in games.
I have no idea why you don't finish more games. Maybe you suck at games!
I agree that somewhere in time games went from an pleasurable escape to being on par with real life. I recall Mario Brothers, Need for Speed, Wolfenstein were games that required some focus and a degree of curiosity and persistence. Games like Halo and Call of Duty require focus and determination akin to a studying for an exam and thus I've tossed many a controller in disgust at times when my abilities come up short in completing the tasks. In fact, I have absolutely no interest playing the online variants of games like Halo - having 10-15 year olds out perform you and taunt you is a level of crap I don't need. I get enough of that in the real world, 9-5 M-F thank you very much.
I'd like to point out that the younger generations (today's teens and early 20's) are wired differently than the older generation. It's a fact that they are great at multitasking, however they have the attention span of a squirrel. That generation simply doesn't have the attention span required to play through a 20-30 hour game, they're easily distracted by the next shiny.
Anyone with a kid in that age range can tell you that they constantly see them chatting on Facebook while texting a friend while listening to music while chatting on MSN while watching videos on TV/Youtube. You can't do all that and properly concentrate on finishing a game.
~Syberz
"Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it."
Has anyone here ever completed Ghost and Goblins or its hellish kid brother Ghouls and Ghosts? Or even had the patience to make it through the second, or first stage?
It's because of bad controls. When your most dangerous enemy is your own inability to move as responsively as you would like, or the camera hiding critical information from your eyes, what incentive do you have to even keep going?
No sense of achievement for me in "finishing a game." Been there done that. These days I only play for fun. It is in the playing of a game that there is the fun. The ending only gets in the way. Then too, most new games have nothing new for me. I often watch a few minutes of game play on YouTube and decide I would be equally bored with the game itself in a few minutes. So, I have my favorites. I play those very much and an awful lot! But none of my favorites are the sort of games that hold up an ending as a shining goal.
Does anyone remember Myst? Great story, superb graphics (navigating through stills to provide high res scenes), and great use of Quicktime mini-windows for animation in the days before full 3D rendering. I finished that game many times.
Then came Riven. Five CDs full of that immersing world, and a storyline better and more complex than the first. I finished that game quite a few times as well, even though it was much longer.
By the time Uru: Ages Beyond Myst came out, other companies had begun producing fully rendered 3D universes that were as good or better, but I bought it because it was a Myst sequel. I played through the first part, solving the challenges, then picked up the expansion packs.
When I got to the last part, there was a challenge I couldn't figure out. After spending hours going back and forth through the section, trying to find what I had missed, I gave up and went to a walkthrough site. There it was revealed that, in order to progress further, I had to stand in one place for exactly fifteen minutes and catch a pebble that was dropped from a mechanism. I couldn't just leave and come back in approximately 15 minutes though, or the pebble would time out and leave me stranded for another 15 minutes.
I don't know whether the game creators were trying to enforce some sort of RSI break to compensate for the carpal tunnel syndrome their games may have induced, but I felt cheated. Every other part of the series to that point I had solved myself, but how could anyone be expected to figure out that solving this last challenge required standing around doing nothing for as long as many games require you to complete an entire level?
I turned off the game, uninstalled it, and have not played anything from those game developers since.
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Mass Effect 2 - I had no problem finishing, but then I mostly play games for the same reason I read a book or watch a movie - I want to be gripped and immersed in the story - and in the case of a game, challenged by the difficulty. If that doesn't happen boredom creeps in fast. If it does I keep playing until I have to stop. I dusted off Jedi Knight 2 about a week ago. I'd been playing for a while when I realized that if it had been a modern game I'd be near the end by now... and I still didn't even have any Force Powers. I'm pretty sure I'll finish it again. It'll take me longer than I did back in the day because life's just fuller, but I'll do it. On the other hand 'The Force Unleashed' is about as gripping as a butter vice... I can bash legions of stormtroopers about with my amazing powers... but meh...
That's easy, many of today's games don't have linear gameplay or a proper ending. I bet lots of people finish games that have level 1-10 and then you win. How do you "win" world of warcraft? Sure, people finish the quests, etc. and in that way, they are finishing the game because the game doesnt have any other "you win" at some point.
stuff |
Speaking for myself, there are only three reasons I don't finish games (and most of the ones I play I finish):
Getting stuck a ridiculously difficult part: If the game is good, then I always finish it unless I get hopelessly stuck somewhere and try and try and try to get past it, but cantt. I then get tired of it and move on to something else, but this hardly ever happens anymore. Now what I usually do is set it aside and come back to it later, with fresh eyes, and that usually works.
Quality issues: If I quit early on, then the game just wasn't compelling or was too boring or had way too many bugs, etc.
Something new and much more interesting comes out and I start playing that; if the initial game I was playing was a quality, compeling game, then I'll return to it fresh....
I can't imagine anyone not finishing a Mass Effect game though, unless the reason is time - those games are so fun and they're quite easy.
Because there are many more games now. It used to be Quake or Diablo. You would finish the game 3 or 4 times. Now we have 3 or 4 new games coming at us each month.
I like traffic lights
I'm surprised that 50% finished ME2; I got bored of ME1's appalling unskippable cutscenes, on-the-rails unavoidable events and repetitive running around (go to talk to someone on one side of the zone, then go back to talk to someone else on the other side, then talk to someone on the side you started from) within a couple of hours and the ME2 demo only offered more of the same plus flashing boxes shown you exactly what to click on to get through the 'game'. I could watch a bad SF B-movie in ninety minutes and get the same effect without as much tedium.
Personally, two of the main reasons why I don't finish all my games are:
1. I have about 300 games of different types, several of them MMOGs, most bought in deep discount sales because they looked interesting. Where am I going to get the time to finish them all?
2. Many, if not most, game designers can't come up with anything more interesting to put at the end of their game than some tedious overpowered boss fight. At that point I usually just give up unless I really, really want to see the end... boss fights are just so 20th century.
For me, Mass Effect 2 was huge disappointment after first one.
ME2 was too straight-line battles which isn't what I expect from scifi-RPG, especially after first Mass Effect with more complex plot and choices.
I did eventually plow through it, just for the story, but did not enjoy ME2 as much as first ME.
period
I play through games to write about them now. No, I don't get paid to play games, I just do it for fun. I look forward to expressing my thoughts about a game, even if no one reads them.
My biggest problem the last few years is trying to take on too much. Now I limit myself to one game per system at a time, and if possible, one portable game and one console game at a time. It helps me stay focused and actually finish games.
My second biggest problem is knowing when to say I'm done. Too often I'll continue playing a crappy game just so I can beat it and write about how terrible it was. I've started to get out of that habit more, but I put way too much time into Persona 3 before I finally called it quits. And I still chose to tear it apart in writing. Satisfaction.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I had GTA 4 since it appeared in 2008; was at 55% of the story. Didn't play it for ~1 year. Uninstalled it yesterday.
I had Assassin's Creed 2, almost at the end of the story (I think). Uninstalled it yesterday.
The same happened for Mass Effect 2. Played about 40% of it and uninstalled it.
I played Star Wars Force Unleashed 2, uninstalled it and returned it after a few hours.
I used to love games and always told myself I'll be a gamer even when I grow up. Now that I have grown up, I don't have the patience anymore. Add the repetitiveness of games and glitches, bugs, boring stories, going to work 5 days a week... well, priorities change in time it seems.
Who judges how difficult a game is?
I mean good old GoldenEye, was pretty easy up untill you had to recure Natalia from the last room and also shoot the people at the back before the shutter closed. I lost count of how many times I played that train level and ended up having to do this for other people too.
I enjoyed Kane and Lynch untill the level where you have to save the girl from being run over... got really pissed with that and was glad I'd hired the game.
I remember a really old bruce lee game that was great untill you got to a certain point and it was sooooo difficult you lost all the additional lives you had accumulated over the last few hrs and died. I think the games that get completed more often have save points in the right places (before a difficult event). Games that you have to do it all again, are annoying. No matter how good they are to play.
After all, the sooner you ditch it either at a shop or on an online auction site, the more value you stand to get in return.
Persona: Revelations, US release. Fun game, and it sold for more than I paid for it. The advice is still mostly true; the value of Bioware probably wont go up anytime soon since it was so widespread upon release. But, I don't see the incentive to get rid of a game I might want to play again in a year, just to recoup my money now. It could also become a collectible someday.
The poster's advice reeks of, "Throw yours away so mine gets more valuable.".
When I was a kid a long time ago and played games (both console NES and computer games like old school ghostbusters, king's quest, etc) there were two things at play:
1. I had a lot more time to do things. Although time is an important aspect of it, I don't think it is the main difference today. Sure there were times I would sit for hours on end to play a game and I don't have that ability to do that today, but my marathon gaming sessions were not all that often, maybe 3 or 4 times a month until Everquest invaded my life.
2. I think that games have become complex for complexities sake. When I was a kid I completed all of the mario games, zelda games, dragon quest games, final fantasy games, kid icarus, on and on and on. The last game I managed to finish was the new super mario brothers on the wii. Before that it was Bioshock. I love fallout (played the original on PC and completed it), but I never completed it though I still intend to. What is the difference between these games?
Bioshock and Mario was me and the game. I didn't have to look anything up on the internet, didn't have to read a bunch of guides, etc to complete the games. I could explore and figure out what I needed to do. In the case of Bioshock it was also a very compelling game. Mario is Mario and was just plain fun (4 people at once was a laugh riot). Fallout required a much greater investment. If I didn't play for a week I would have to revisit what I did and spend most of my session tracking back where I was and what I was supposed to do. Fallout and games like Mass Effect have a requirement outside the game as well because they are so complex. In reality, I do not know why. I love RPG games and completed tons of them in the past, but I did it without ever having to spend time outside of the game unless I wanted to. Final Fantasy VII I could leave for a week or month and come back without much effort. You could juggle Zelda and Dragon Warrior with other games and not lose your place. For games like Fallout and Mass Effect, you basically have to play that game and forsake others, unless you have limitless time of course that you wish to game with.
All these comments and no one's come out directly and said it. People simply are becoming more conditioned to instant gratification. They want results NOW. We are becoming a less patient people, period.
These days there's a big difference between finishing a game's main storyline and getting 100% of all goals completed. I almost always finish the main storyline, but will only go back to get 100% of everything if it's fairly easy and rewarding, like the Tony Hawk games.
Now if almost nobody gets 100% of everything in a game like Just Cause 1-2 or a Pokemon game, that's totally understandable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Perhaps because we no longer need to complete a game to feel a sense of accomplishment. When I played Super Mario Brothers, there was only one real goal; rescue the princess. The same game today would have a "100 Mystery Blocks" achievement, which means that I wouldn't necessarily have to make it to Bowser to feel like I've beat some aspect of the game.
Just because some people don't finish games that doesn't mean the games should be made shorter. If you didn't finish the game (for reasons other than bugs) does that somehow diminish your enjoyment of it? There are lots of people who enjoy long games and will play through them. The people who like long and complex games shouldn't end up paying the same price for a shorted game just so that someone with little patience can get the "Completed the Game" achievement.
There's a lot of insightful analysis here about why people don't play games to completion, but the simple answer for me is MMOs and online play.
Back in the day, when the games were finite, it was common to play them to completion, whether it was Leisure Suit Larry or Doom.
Now, as much as I enjoyed Dragon Age or other AAAA titles, without the frisson of excitement, unpredictability, sense of "life" and (some will strongly disagree) inherent realism of MMOs*, non-online games are just fairly boring. If I want a story, I'll read a book. If I want to be involved, I'll play online.
*I don't mean realism in a system sense, but in a environmental sense. With a single-player game, nearly every situation you face is a) designed carefully, b) winnable if you do/have the right thing. In an online/MMO game, the unpredictability and spontaneity of people impacts the game in a very tangible way.
-Styopa
I think a large part of the problem is that gaming simply hasn't yet fully grown up, it is still to much stuck in mechanics that forces the player to overcome challenges before he gets access to later content. Adjustable difficulty settings lower the harm a bit, but they don't really remove it, as the last boss on easy might still be to hard for some people and even on easy you are still forced to play stuff you don't care about.
This is one of the reasons why I like simulations on the PC, they are generally free of any kind of forced challenge or unlockables. All the vehicles are available right from the start and when the game is to hard you can switch on unlimited ammunition, invincibility and other tricks, not by some obscure cheat, but by simply going to the option menu. Those games still provide enormous amounts of depths to the player, but they don't force it on the player via a fixed structure, everybody can enjoy them how he likes. Access to in-game developer console can often do similar things in regular games.
On consoles on the other side you don't have that, you might find some obscure cheats, but in general you have to play through all the challenges yourself to unlock the content. There are a few games that tried something new, I think Alone in the Dark allows you to select all chapters of the game right from the start without unlocking and Nintendo has its Super Guide that can take over control when the game gets to difficult, so hopefully more games will follow that trend and give the player the freedom to enjoy the game like he wants, not like the developer would like it.
I used to finish games some years back when there was an actual story that you were completing. Fallout 1 and 2 actually had a story that you were going through as part of the game, so finishing it was important. One of the earliest games I ever played was called Starflight, and you literally had to play through to the end to understand why the universe was collapsing upon itself. Knights of the Old Republic had a great story that was worth completing. However, right about the second one came out (Kotor 2), story started to really suffer. The end of that story was atrocious, and I was so disappointed. I've discovered there aren't a whole lot of games these days that actually have enough of a story invested that I want to find out what happens after. Many games are repetetive, and you just keep killing things over and over again for no reason whatsoever. That gets boring after awhile, so you just stop playing. The first Mass Effect was like that to me. While I enjoyed the story when it started out, I remember coming almost to the very end and deciding it just wasn't worth completing because I was getting tired of doing the same cookie cutter missions over and over again, in the exact same building but with different nuances to the building's architecture. And Mass Effect was a good game. I got through about 2/3s of Dragon Age before giving up because the adventure just got too stereotypical, and when I kept finding myself in situations where they wanted me to buy downloadable content to play out adventures, I was too annoyed to continue playing.
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Honestly, I blame the rapidly-growing casual game market for this. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that, with all of these casual games coming out, a LOT more people are getting into gaming. I'm betting that a lot of them are starting to buy other, less-casual games, and they're finding such games harder to beat than they thought.
Or maybe this isn't such a huge change after all. I mean, how many games older than five or ten years actually had ways of tracking who beat them and who didn't? I bet that for every person proclaiming their success online, there were a few people who were unable to beat the game.
I'd bet that Bioware is including all of the people who bought the game and didn't like it, and the people who bought the game and haven't had time to beat it in that statistic of theirs. If they only included the people who intended to beat it but didn't, the number would be much smaller, I would guess.
The problem for me is usually time. I do usually finish story-based games, but it takes a while and I have a huge backlog of games still waiting to be played. Basically, I have more money to buy games than time to play them. This is exactly the opposite situation from when I was a kid.
I don't mind games being short for this reason. I'd rather play a short but sweet game rather than one that takes 100 hours but has lots of "filler" to artificially extend playtime. When I say "finish" I generally mean finishing a playthrough of the story, not getting all the achievements or unlocks or seeing every ending. I think those are a good way to extend playtime for those who want to get every cent's worth of gameplay without making the story too long.
For reference, I play mostly (J)RPGs, survival horror, turn-based strategy/sim games, etc. Mainstream AAA games have really not held much interest for me lately, but that's another discussion for another time.
I thought it was because I sucked. Apparently it's not actually my fault. Phew!
I suggest you try Fahnreheit (aka Indigo Prophecy), if you haven't played it yet.
It's rather old, but great.
Got through it in two days, controls are trivial, and a great character-led story is there.
Is the middle of a game testing your patience? Then why not sell it back to your local game shop, get money back in your pocket, or trade it in for a game that's better – or at least better suited for your tastes?
Anybody want a slightly used middle of a game? Willing to trade for a new ending.
But the games I tolerate repetition from tend to be those which you don't play through and complete. If a game is about firing up a session and aiming for a high score, then fine. What bothers me is when a game has a beginning, a middle and an end, but pads itself out needlessly by adding tedious repetition.
Then would Tetris the Grand Master 3: Terror-Instinct bother you? It's still Tetris, but it has a beginning (pieces fall slowly and need to be manually dropped), middle (pieces land as soon as they spawn and need to be slid into place), and end (pieces turn invisible as soon as they lock into place, relying on memory). See video on YouTube.
I finish every game that I buy. Since my time is so limited these days (kids, work, etc.), I'm very particular about the games that I purchase. I know what genres I like, I know the style that suits me, so I only buy those games. Now, that being said, gone are the days when I could power through a game in a weekend, stopping only to eat and evacuate. Nowadays, it may take me a solid month to complete that same game, but I will finish it.
This comment wont apply to almost all of the games out there, but in the particular case of Mass Effect 2. I stopped right before the last mission because I enjoyed the level of immersion and how the characters interacted with me; in essence I didn't want it to end. Of course I eventually finished it, but not before waiting a few days and wanting to see if maybe there was a bit more dialogue or character development left. All of the characters in that game were wonderful to interact with and very well thought out. They all had very good voice acting and the authors genuinely took the time to look at things from the perspective of their characters shoes.
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely critical of games, especially since they've been so shitty for so many years, but that was the particular reason why I didn't finish ME2 right away. I'm not sure if it works the same way for other people, but it might. Others games on the other hand... I could write pages upon pages of pages of what is wrong with them all the way down to how game developers are being raised and the mindset the industry is setting forth for the gamers and the developers both.
I also "completed" Tetris on any skill level you care to select.
Select this level (or, if you live outside Japan, the "Sudden Ti" level in Texmaster) and see if you can complete it.
the generation that gave us the acronym TL,DR has a short attention span, and quickly moves on to someth
Because if we don't finish it in the first rental period, we aren't very likely to pay for another week.
Resident Freakonomist: the median age of gamers has risen over time. Everyone agreed?
As you move from your teenage years into early adulthood, not merely the amount of time that can be devoted to gaming changes, but the distribution of it, i.e., it will come in shorter periods. That means that a marathon gaming session to beat a boss or solve a puzzle is less likely to happen.
So why haven't games adjusted to this new median? For the same reason that average serving size has risen. Nobody DOESN'T buy a game because it's too long, just as nobody doesn't go to a restaurant because the serving sizes are too large. Making either one smaller threatens to alienate a segment of the market, for no gain. Furthermore, increasing the size of either one tends to be relatively cheap compared to, for example, upgrading a graphics engine (or upgrading your chef, on the other hand).
I'm exactly this demographic - Gamer-Dad, and I was pretty ticked when the single-player campaign for Modern Warfare 1 took me six hours to complete.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Yeah... primarily, I found myself agreeing with the very first post after this article, where the guy said, "Because we're not 15 anymore?" I'm 39 and some people seem surprised I even PLAY computer games at my age, but why wouldn't I? I've been into computers and I.T. since I was 10 or 11, and all I've seen over the years is gaming come more and more into the entertainment mainstream, to where they compete pretty evenly with Hollywood movie releases and such. Still, you get older and your priorities change. You have so many more responsibilities, you can't justify spending 20-30 hours on completing some video game when you had so many more important things you could/should have been doing with that "free time".
These days, I find I prefer games that have no "ending", other than your team winning a quick battle before going on to the next one (which you can exit at any time you like). I don't even care for playing many "single player" games anymore, because I'd rather feel I'm at least playing against other live human beings.
That said? I *also* know the feeling about some of these "boss battles" being insanely difficult and making me just quit playing a game completely. Seems like I run into that on my PS3 a lot more than I do the computer games, though. There seems to be a large group of console gamers out there who are *really* skilled at figuring out the exact way to move, shoot and press buttons in just the right sequences to get past these challenges, so to them, "the harder, the better!". (My ex-wife is re-married to a guy who is like that... He's *really* into console gaming and has beat every title someone threw at him, usually in the first day or two. At this point, he's looking for a title with a boss battle that's SO insane, it might actually keep him busy for a few days trying to get past it.) It just makes me go "Screw it!" and eject the disc! I remember feeling that way about "Conan" on the PS3, as well as a scene in "Heavenly Sword". Both good games I liked playing until I got to some part that just seemed to repetitious AND difficult compared to everything before it -- and I lost interest.
When you were 15, games were 3-5 hours max, and about 12 games worth playing were released a year. It got to the point so you were even renting crappy games because the good ones weren't released often enough. You probably just remember finishing more of the games out of the total that existed. Today, 12 games worth playing are released every season, and they range from 15 to 50+ hours, have online components, and the popular ones have expansion packs.
Back in the day the only games that boasted about being 40 hours long were a few RPGs, and the good ones were few and far between. Today almost every game is open world and filled with side quests and collectibles, and has a list of extra accomplishments that can be earned for meta scores. Back in the day games didn't have difficulty settings, so they had a more average difficulty, and games had cheats as well so you could burn through them faster, today they remove those so they can sell you enhanced equipment and other crap.
Twinstiq, game news
When I'm done doing it the programmer's way, and I'm not going to invest any more time getting "better", I should have a control to just dumb the whole thing down. The idea that the content has to be honestly earned is ridiculous. I paid for it.
Bring back the cheat codes, but put them right in the menus. You can even insult me by making the menu option say, "I suck. Pander to me."
Just because some of us are older and don't have time to finish games, what about the kids out there that don't have full-time jobs and families? There are way more gamers under 18 than when I was a kid. The answer isn't simply that we have jobs and families now, the answer is probably that kids today have tons of things that demand their attention and so finishing games is low on the priority list.
Facebook profiles, "farming", city-building, etc. all are time sucks that prevent even the kids from dedicating the necessary time to finish a game.
The primary reason I give up on games and stop playing them is poor AI being augmented by outright cheating.
I'm sure someone has a much longer list, but the usual things like unlimited numbers of enemies, enemies that never run out of ammo while I'm required to scrounge every round, enemies that start rounds fully supplied when you start empty handed, enemies that always know exactly where you are, never miss, etc...and the just plain "haha, I'm a developer and I don't want you to finish the game so the last level is literally impossible without cheatcodes" bullshit.
Many games I've given up because I wasn't having fun, i was just pissed off that the game was cheating so badly.
I have two reasons why my gaming in general has dropped dramatically.
One is increased distractions from other devices and entertainment sources vying for my attention. Between my smart phone and iPad, NetFlix and then the constant interaction that comes with social media sites, my attention is constantly pulled away from console gaming. I use my PS3 to watch NetFlix movies 90% of the time and gaming the other 10%.
My other issue is games have become boring in the PS3/XBOX 360 generation of gaming. My guess is all the creativity and man-hours are going into making the games look and sound good, so nothing is left over to go towards intriguing game-play. If game play sucks, I'm not going to waste my time. I think Portal also ruined a lot of games because of the pressure for developers to stick puzzles in everything. Blech! I'm having a great old time blasting aliens, and then all the fun stops because I have to figure out a dumb puzzle. Also, there's too much instructions in games now -- thanks to Mario Bros games. Blech! Instructions, puzzles in non-puzzle games and run-on-rails gameplay have killed gaming for me.
A lot of the old console games were really, really hard. They couldn't have a lot of unique content, so they had to make up for it by padding out the gameplay. This meant steep difficulty curves, death knocking you back a major amount, maybe even to the beginning (remember Contra?), no saves, and so on. It was damn hard to finish many games. I'd reach points that I just could not get good enough to beat.
This is much less of a problem now. Companies have a better understanding of a difficulty curve so the game doesn't get so insanely hard. Also, because space is cheap, you can have more unique experiences. You can actually have 20-40 hours of content, not a couple hours of content, padded out by making people do it over and over because tiny failures require complete redos.
I spend a fair amount of time reading. I'd guess that half the books I start, I don't finish, for one reason or another. A few of the books I finish, I reread. It's much the same with games.
When I've had more free time, I've spent more time playing computer games. I don't think the proportions of finished and unfinished changed.
This topic seems like an excuse for people to recite their complaints about how [ [ kids | games ] aren't what they used to be | life is more hectic than it used to be ], but I really don't think there's a story here.
Games are cheaper. You may notice that games have been $50 for a very long time. You may also notice that the value of $50 has changed. I understand why my parents were stingy with videogames when I was a kid: The damn things were expensive. Say you bought a $50 NES game back in 1987. In today's dollars that is about $93. Games were just much more expensive. So not only do you have more income, but the games cost less of it, even the $60 ones. For that matter on the PC at least we are also seeing games that are less in nominal terms too. More $40 games are cropping up, titles that are still high quality but maybe not AAA from a big studio, and so sell for a little less. Indy titles are cheaper still.
I think a lot of game designers don't take into consideration how important certain 'pet peeves' are for some finicky gamers (i.e. me).
I have two major qualifications to be able to enjoy a game. I feel the need for them viscerally, and react in a strongly negative manner if sufficient effort isn't put toward accomplishing them.
1) Graphical immersion-- I prefer first-person view above all else. [I will play some non-first-person games, such as Diablo or Torchlight, but I quit Diablo 2 because I couldn't zoom in like I could in the original. You can complain about how crappy the zoom was and ridicule me for liking it all you want, but it increased my sense of immersion significantly and was therefore invaluable to me. Why would they remove a feature like that?! It really made me mad and was a deal-breaker.] So, lack of first-person is why I won't be finishing Mass Effect (really, I can't get a view which doesn't involve looking at the back of a cartoon head the whole time? really??) Also, I like to be able to turn off all HUD/UI elements. I want to feel like I am 'there'. If the UI is minimal, I can get over it, but it should be hideable (I doubt this option is ever a technical challenge, there is no good reason not to offer it).
2) Choices! From gameplay style (i.e. equipment & methods) to multiple & significantly different paths through the game world, so the game can be 'completed' in different ways (although my ideal game would have some sophisticated randomly-generated elements so there was at least the illusion of infinite possibilities). Despite all its flaws, this is why Oblivion is still probably my favorite game of all time. Well, that and the excellent graphical immersion.
If you as a game designer don't at least show some token of effort toward these two very important things, I probably won't finish your game. The only exceptions I can think of are games I would consider 'casual', such as Super Mario Galaxy, but I think of those differently.
1. Don't make me sick.
2. Don't bore/irritate me.
Games I have played. ... still playing) ...
All Duke Nukem
All Wolfenstein
Unreal
HalfLife
All Resident Evil
Ratchet & Clank (first three were best, and replayed), the last one was boring/irritating unfinished
Demon Soul (completed many times
Assassin Creed II boring/irritating unfinished
PoP was droped
Many... more over 20years including some ASCII-D&D
Realism I do not like (SOCOM, Vietnam, WWII...). Escape to fantasy FPS and Adventure are fun.
The graphic texture and detail clean 1080p and delay free web-play would be appreciated.
Ratchet & Clank started irritating me with to many or eventually any retro-game and pattern-section/level locks.
Demon Souls needs a better random action generator for action-surprises. Invadors need to be better matched to invadees, but always fun getting whacked and whacking as invader or helper. In the next version they should just open some more hidden passages, gates or doors and keep the familiar turf with improved play/gaming. A special flying dragon killing tool would be nice 100+ arrows is boring. The muck-swamp needs something or just drop it as too dang easy. Every on appears to like the 1st and 5th worlds (good danger/balance).
Anyway, most games I stop playing on the first day or within the first week. Games I like I run through (on average) in one week some times two.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Like the last level of Psychonauts. (which never got playtested)
Fuck the glitchy cheese graters
Sometimes there are reasons beyond the player's control.
A few games like Fallout 3 have game-breaking bugs that won't let you continue (even happened to me once when I played through it a second time and the script after finding the G.E.C.K. wouldn't trigger).
I usually quit because I find the game I'm playing lacking something I found before in an older game.
Bioshock, I didn't finish this in fact I quit playing it quite early. I felt like I was being ripped off.. System Shock 1 & 2 were a far superior games .. gameplay, story etc..
It's just my opinion.
I think some of the reason I cannot stand most new games:
I feel that they're being created by people that are just working jobs, NOT by people that are TRULY passionate about said game.
I still finish almost all the games I play. That is, I finish the main story of all the games I play; I don't necessarily do any side-quests, and tend not to care about how many trophies or other meaningless objects I collect.
There are three games I haven't finished this year.
The first was Whiplash, an old PS2 game. I gave up on it part way through because of a particularly frustrating section that was made almost impossible by horrible camera angle problems. I suspect that the game got the good reviews it did because none of the reviewers had played it through more than half way.
The second was Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. I finished everything except the final battle, which is a stupid boss fight in (at least) three different stages, where if you fail stage 3 you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the battle. It's way more difficult than any other part of the game.
The third was Oblivion, which I stopped playing because it was crap. Horrible leveling system that utterly broke my suspension of disbelief. (The wolves have been practicing and leveled up into timberwolves? Yeahright) Laughable plot. (Let's go through the giant flaming vagina to the land of blood everywhere and battle the evil demon Menses... or whatever it was called.)
But I finished GTA: TLaD, Prince of Persia, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Uncharted 2, Katamari Forever, Folklore, and a bunch of other games.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
When was a game "yours unless your family had a garage sale"? There have been used game markets since pretty much the instant games were sold. The majority of games have never been finished. The only difference now is the fact that publishers can track it.
I for one welcome this kind of tracking. I've found that games are becoming much more "the right length", and I'm more likely to finish them.
In my case the answer is twofold: Time and Money. 'Back in the day' (TM) I had nothing but time on my hands so I could easily drop 4-5 hours a day on a game. I didn't have a job, family, or other adult responsibilities to get in the way. Of course I also didn't have money, so I only bought one or two games at a time and played the crap out of them. As I got older I had less and less time to spend on games, but I also had more money to blow on them. The result is I bought tons of games, but only finished a small percentage of them. I just didn't have the time to spend playing the same game over and over again until I got good enough to beat it (or grinded enough to beat it in the case of RPGs).
Now that I'm married I find I have even less time then I did before. If I get 4-5 hours a week to play a game I'm lucky, so my list of unbeaten games continues to grow. Unfortunately I have a thing for 60 hour + RPGs which doesn't help matters. :)
There are too many games to play, and too many that require 80+ hrs to fully complete.
Then, there are several that fall into the 8 hr range (I'm looking at you Dantes Inferno and Gears of War 2)
Now if you think about it, those 80 hrs put into Fallout New Vegas could have been put into ten 8hr games.
So the blame squarely rests on games like Fallout 3, New Vegas, etc. :-)
Having played and beaten Demon's Souls a few times, I have to say that every time I died, it was my own damn fault. My mistakes were usually one of the following:
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Besides, I've been playing that Linux game for 15 years now, but some guys went all-American while still trying to Finnish it.
I mean seriously - when I was a kid I had time to finish video games. It was competing with reading a book, playing outside, or watching TV - I was a kid.
As an adult, I got stuff to do and my playtime is at a premium - I finished two out of three Morrowind game endings, I finished No One Lives Forever and NOLF II, and when it cools down and I have time I'm finishing Baldur's Gate II all the way through. Come to think on it I finished Neverwinter Nights too, and I got a guy at work I'm going to mug and steal his copy of Planescape. Oh, and I ascended once in Nethack.
That what has kept my attention in the last decade or so. I might play Dwarf Fortress but I haven't got the time for the PhD required to figure it out, I play various 4X games, and the rest is casual games, mostly Wii.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Many games nowadays are nowhere as engaging as old ones.
Sounds like an old guy's rant, but it's simply true. I find myself revisiting classics like Gunstar Heroes and Super Mario World really often.
Since the 32-bit era I find myself playing mostly roguelike games, pokemon (say what you want about the cute critters but the game has substance, ideal for a portable title), and indie stuff like Spelunky, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, or "japanese-indie"(doujin) games such as Touhou (ignore the animu fanboys and you get solid arcade gameplay). Oh and Doom, still fun after all this time. I'd take it over yet another "real war" game anytime.
Most games you find today are pretty much graphics. That's it. Some are only fun for a few hours and they might stop being fun before the climax, which is pretty sad, as the game ends up unfinished or becoming a "pending task". Not to mention the "cash-in" games with bad graphics and bad gameplay that resemble Flash games and are the "casual" crap people dislikes so much, yet have solid sales.
It's not that we became old or our tastes became more refined. It's just that now top-class games are as engaging as mediocre games of the past. I don't blame bad developers or anything, though. I blame "people in suits" (corporate drones, such as marketing or sales people) dictating what is done (and . I find the old games, often made by a dozen or less people, have more "free will" than games of now, as well. Perhaps bigger teams make the experience less engaging as the idea is "diluted" from so many hands working on it?
It's not that I am a grumpy old gamer either. While I enjoy and even love 2D aesthetics, I can still appreciate games from the previous generation, but this one (marked by DRM, draconian usage laws, overly expensive consoles for their worth, flash games becoming a common marketable title, consoles with download-only stuff (PSPgo)) is...bland. Feels like instead of games we are getting test programs for cloud distribution and DRM systems. And crap like deprecating "playing with friends" (In the same room, with some beers, having fun) in favor of "playing with 'friends'" (random online people who might or might not be a 13yo). Example? Starcraft 2. The game might kick ass but you remember LAN partying the original? Yeah, welcome to the future.
Indie is the future for me. (Although I can criticize indie games for sharing the same damn "Alien Hominid" type of designs. Didn't you cringe when Eversion HD got some of that, and it looked completely out of place? Yeah, that. Now notice how many indie games share the very same style.)
Why play a game, when you can Live in it?
All health complications come from lack of activity, and everyone is expected to sit-down for hours at a time to do something interactive on a screen?
Sure some of you are saying most Lives people live today are riddled with harm to your health, but that's not one of the many more diseases that lack of activity causes: some people get shot, others stabbed or scraped, many scolded and torn apart, but nothing is more harmful that sitting somewhere like in a jail or prison cell to watch something or do nothing active for what ammounts to tens or more thousands of hours of acidosis.
I still play Europa Universalis 2 and FTG in my spare time since 2002, but more modding this game nowadays. Strategy games rulez!
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Many of the comments in here reflect my sentiments; other life commitments, bugs, terrible controls (especially for those games that feel ported/made for consoles then hacked into pc).
But mainly there is a lack of epic feel to games these days; take Fallout 3 vs 1 or 2. I got F3 goty with the dlc, and only found out that I had finished the main storyline when my flatmate (who played on a ps3 with not dlc) got all excited when he hit the final scene and was kicked to the menu - I was still playing after that, looking for the second half of the story (in both F1 there was a distinct second half to the story & I think there was one in F2 as well).
F1 & F2 you got the kick-arse voice-over cutscene that took you through all the towns you had an impact on in your wanderings - you actually felt like you had an impact on the world. I loved F1 with the time limits that actually felt like they meant something, and gave a sense of responsibility (I remember getting pretty frantic when time was running out for my vault & I still had no idea where to go :-D then after sorting out the water chip no damn supermutes were going to screw with my vault after all that effort!). F3 was a huge let down after that - which I thought it would be & is why I held off buying till the cheapo version was on sale. Well that and the transition to FPS didn't help (*sigh* if only Van Bruan had survived).
Similar with the Baldur's Gate series, epic story but non-linear massive scope for replay. Similar with Planescape:Torment (yes, I'm an bioware/black ilse infinity engine fanboy). What makes me finish those games? I'm emotionally invested in the outcome; I feel responsible for the characters. As opposed to say, Neverwinter Nights, where I just couldn't give a rats arse about my toons & the interface just made playing it painful.
Or take Elite (and Eve Online) for example; literally the universe to explore, you set your own priorities and there are clear ways to achieve what you want. Never finished Elite, actually - was there actually a storyline? Pirates (the original, not Sid Mier's remake/retread of his game) had that same epicness of being able to live on gameplay alone regardless of storyline.
Last game I'll mention is Heroes of Might & Magic. Truly one of my most fondly remembered game series; no benefit to being able to click faster than the pc or your friends, just a fun well-thought-out concept, excellent campaigns - ruined somewhat in number 5 by the 3d-ish interface.
Meh vaguely-connected & disjointed ranting over.
It seems simple to me. I do not finish games because -
1. The original game depends upon graphics rather than plot.
2. The sequels are not as good as the original, relying upon repetitive fights or the hope that a poor story line will not be noticed because we remember (fantasize) the original game
3. The game relies upon the participation of on-line gamers. The developers have a poor or undeveloped story line and hope that just providing a base and putting it online will allow the Players to create their own world. Sorry, I don't buy that.
I quite ME2 as soon as I learned that squad ammo powers didn't stack, which was the basis upon which I was designing my entire team.
Players shouldn't have to 'google ahead' to 'future proof' their game, the powers description should have clearly spelled out what you can and can't do with them.
Their interface screw-up ruined 15+ hours of game time I had invested over two weeks, so I quit and haven't looked back...or forward to another Bioware game for that matter.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky