I played hundreds of hours with my kid on minecraft. He was incessantly begging for more mods, new mods, different mod packs, etc. It got to the point where sometimes I couldn't load the same map twice, because the next tome we played he wanted more shit installed. I sat him down and asked him what exactly he was trying to achieve with all these mods. The condensed version of the conversation is that he just didnt enjoy the gameplay loop of mining and crafting and was, without realizing it, trying to mod the minecraft out of minecraft. He realized that the game probably wasn't for him, and that's fine, not every game is for everyone. I mean, obviously he's out of the will though.

Ahh, my woes with Minecraft. Whenever I play I'm stuck between the feeling of wanting something new and something that is of old. At some point I realised I was just chasing memories. Survival games don't hit the same now that I'm an adult, thinking logical makes them too easy. It was better when I spent hours trying to learn how to make a crafting table only to not know how to make anything else and result to making a new world and living hopelessly off the 4 torches that surrounded the bonus chest.

No joke if your looking for a more adult version of Minecraft check out vintage story.

It looks like Minecraft? How's it different? Not familiar with Minecraft but I love survival stuff.

Vintage story is a lot more granular. In Minecraft for example you'd just use stone and a stick to make a pickaxe. To make a pickaxe in vintage story you have to find the right type of stone (usually flint) and then actually break away blocks to to create the pickaxe head. They generally focus more on a realistic survival to the point that the layers of rocks/minerals actually follow real world principals and storms actually move across the world like they would irl.  This sounds like a lot but there's actually a really helpful in game guide that breaks all this down into much more manageable chunks. I never felt like I didn't know what to do next cause if I set a goal the guide would tell me how to get there. Thought certain things still take experimentation to get right. https://youtu.be/HbUKmXhDuZg?si=LkVKsrjtxb1jaL98 This is like a 5 min quick breakdown of the game to see some actual footage.

Thanks for the recommendation, Vintage Story really looks like a hidden gem, with emphasis on hidden. I'm a bit wary about them rolling their own platform (DRM? spying? malware? refunds?), but the game itself seems really interesting. Edit: seems the game is based off of a Minecraft mod "Vintagecraft", that's similar to another total conversion mod called "TerraFirmaCraft" (which is still in active development). If someone's uncertain about Vintage Story, these mods seem worth checking out too.

I thank you for your feedback kind redditor. I'll check it out.

>the feeling of wanting something new and something that is of old this is way too real. playing Minecraft for the first time 14 years ago was one of the highest points in my life so far. for a while I was chasing that high, fruitlessly of course. then I started playing on my cousins' server, enjoying the newer stuff for what it is, even if it's not the same. but the hardest part is accepting you'll never quite relive that specific feeling again.

LOL this makes so much sense being somebody who loves modding games. Sometimes you have to look at what's available & just admit this isn't the game you want.

I'm a bit of a nostalgic fool who likes to look at old worlds and save files for games. When I played Minecraft regularly, I tried to stick either to vanilla or only mods that enhanced things like the UI or performance. I'd avoid anything that would write additional data to the world file, lest I open the world years later and see holes everywhere, or I'd have to track down old versions of mods that have been out of support for years just to relive the nostalgia for five minutes.

IIRC, minecraft makes it easy to roll back your game version so you can always install the last version of an abandoned mod

Oh fuck this is good, I wasn't going to count roblox... but damn it, it's roblox lol I'll still keep playing with my kids tho XD

Roblox is different though. At this point, Roblox is a full blown game engine. A quirky one, but still a game engine nonetheless. So if the particular Roblox game isn't hitting right for you, you can play a different one.

Assassins Creed Valhalla. I put like 50-60 hours into that before realizing I hated it. I actually like Odyssey and would consider replaying it sometime, but that’s more because I like the Ancient Greek lore.

Same. The strength of the setting of Origins and Odyssey means I enjoyed them. As soon as it was a period and place I wasn't super interested in like Valhalla, I realised how boring these games have actually become. Mirage is in my backlog and back to an interesting time/place imo so I'm hoping it's better

Mirage is better than Valhalla in some ways where it's closer to AC2 era games. It's also 25 hours for full completion, so it's way more respectful of your time.

I put close to 120 hours into Valhalla then just had to put the game down as it never ended. I more than got my 60 bucks out of that game. Story could have been so much better and shorter. I don’t know why they can’t do an amazing 20 hour story. It’s fine if the map is Texas sized with stuff to explore and find but it’d be nice to finish a story in a weekend.

agreed. if they turned half of the main story into explorable side quests, populating the map, etc. that would be great. Main story is too long and the open world is too empty despite its size and frankly the effort and beauty the devs put into it

I feel the same. I have 150 hours in Odyssey and plan to come back to it eventually, I rushed the second half of Valhalla because I was sick of it. My biggest issues in comparison: 1. Valhalla replaced the entire loot variety with upgrade materials which made me not excited to explore and I spend the whole game in the same armor set. 2. Iirc they didn't have a transmog system which Odyssey already had. 3. Kassandra was way more fun as the protagonist than Eivor. 4. England just looked boring compared to Ancient Greece. Maybe because I live in northern Poland and can see these depressing rainy sights on a daily basis.

Are you me? I also spent the whole Valhalla in one very early armor set. And yes, compared to Kassandra, Eivor was rather boring :/

I gave Starfield a solid 30 hours before admitting I was trying to force myself to like it. Death by a thousand cuts for me, nothing was absolutely terrible but pretty much every element of the game had something that stopped me enjoying it 

For me it was when I took the 5th bounty mission in a row that took me to the exact same copy pasted mine.

how about those board missions that literally were: fast travel to location, fast travel back, get off your ship. and do that every time you get a new mission from those boards.

Yup, think I got to the second piece before I kept running out of ammo and just quit. Maybe 10-15hrs in? Didn’t even get to Neon and Atila, but from everything I’ve seen of the game Neon was just a half-assed Cyberpunk, so don’t feel like I missed much.

It was really disappointing and upsetting to admit to myself that Bethesda just hasn't modernized well. I was obsessed with Fallout 3 but they've simply stagnated in the meaningful ways other RPGs have been succeeding.

Levelheaded take. I've been struggling to word my own feelings about Bethesda since a Nuanced Opinion is actually a Death Threat Invitation; you stated it well.

I really enjoyed Starfield personally but I think you are 100% right. It's that Bethesda has not changed a damn thing about their formula, and it hasn't aged particularly well. IMO it's exactly Skyrim in space. How many of the caves you went into there had the same exact layout? But you need to be more flashy in today's climate. Open World games are so much more full now than they used to be. Elder Scrolls have sort of always been like this, but back in the day, the open world itself was insanely cool.

Idk if I'd even call it Skyrim in space. I've replayed Skyrim quite a bit and not sure if I'll ever replay Starfield. Skyrim at least had a lot more handcrafted quests and POIs.

Starfield was the first and only game where I pretty much made a 1:1 version of me in the character creator. That held me for like 20 hours, being able to really roleplay. Then I realized that I wasn't having fun. Crafting sucks, planets suck, cities felt less populated than games from a decade ago. The main planet where your crew hangs out absolutely sucked. Massive area by the train station that SHOULD have alot of people walking around, instead it's just a gigantic empty area.

With like one little train car always waiting at the station specifically for you. It’s so pathetic.

I spent most of my hours shipbuilding. I've tried to go back and do more quests but I just don't get that same thrill I had from previous Bethesda games (even without mods) b/c now you're just constantly fast travelling and hopping from POI to POI instead of discovering stuff naturally in one big map. I can replay TES 3-5 and Fallout 3/NV/4 constantly and not get bored of them but Starfield just doesn't seem like it'll hold the same grasp over me.

I loved playing at night and going into some of those underground bases and areas but the novelty wore off as there wasn’t really anything mind blowing down there. A game I thought I would play for years ended up being two weeks. The final straw was getting an enormous bounty on my head and getting shot at everywhere I went and not wanting to grind money to pay it off. Such a disappointment of a game.

I was 60 hours in exploring a planet when I found a base. Running through the same layout for the 6 or 7th time made just quit and uninstall

Hard same. After getting kidnapped for the pirate missions, I followed that quest line until near the end of it. The quest line just wouldn't end, and when I got another mission for it after thinking I was done, I closed the game, uninstalled it, and will maybe try again in a couple years.

Same, except I actually ended up finishing the main quest and the major faction quests, which took around 50-ish hours. I was on the "Fallout in space" copium the whole time but finally realized it had nothing that made the previous Bethesda games great. Bland and soulless the whole way. Glad it was on Game pass on release and I didn't have to spend the absurd 70$ it was going for.

I really enjoyed starfield when it was fresh. But the glass shatter moment when you realise it doesn't have half of the depth of something like fallout 4s open world took me out of it completely. It only took 3 walks to a "dungeon" I'd seen exactly before for me to put it down.

I just don't understand why they don't have a system for limiting how often you encounter random dungeons you already completed. It feels like something so obvious it would have been in the requirements before they started prototyping that system.

I already own the game but I'm waiting for official mod support and maybe the DLC before I try it. But people say Bethesda lost their best factor: The seamless exploration. It's all loading screens now.

It's not the loading screens that bothered me, it was the emptiness. Same issue I had with New Vegas (which made up for the bland world in the narrative). Bethesda games were always about the "have something to do, get distracted by 3 other things on the way". They were always dense with things to discover. Starfield had none of that sense of exploration and discovery - in a fucking space game. Even if it was seamless and had no loading screens, it would still be bland as fuck - that was a symptom not the root cause. They simply spread too little content across too much "space" meaning you never just randomly found cool shit. Same issue I find in ALL procedural massive space sim games frankly. Freelancer did a better job in almost every aspect 21 years ago.

That sounds bad :( I really like to explore and discover things in Bethesda games. I really enjoyed to be derrailed by a great view or a cavern or a random quest in the Elder Scrolls games and Fallout 3. Let's hope the game becomes somewhat more dense with more content later on, but it's probably something about the way they designed it, that might be impossible to improve.

I somehow put 120 hours into Starfield. I cannot tell you what I did in all that time. Such a boring game.

Exploring in Skyrim and Fallout 4 was so captivating. Compared to those games, Starfield feels empty and lifeless.

Hell exploring in Skyrim and FO4 even today (especially in VR) is still WAY more fun and captivating, because every 5-10 mins you're stumbling across something cool. Played each for 100s of hours and I still constantly find new stuff, they're just that packed.

I gave it like 70, finished the main story, did some glitch shit to make my moon base more useful, went "wait, did I even have any more fun than anything else in my library?" Haven't touched it since

I was so excited, I love sci-fi. I took the day off work, made sure it was downloaded, everything. Bout 10 hours in it all crashed due to the carrying weight limit. In a game where I have to mine and loot, it felt like an artificial wall. Bethesda couldn’t remove a feature other games moved in from years ago

Destiny 2, fuck that game.

I had to scroll a long ways to find my answer. I really liked Destiny. Its my most played game ever. I was really hopeful that Destiny 2 would improve things. It didn't. And I hate it. Ive never seen so much squandered potential in a game.

Destiny has so much going for it (lore, art design, music, world building), and the core combat loop IS fun, it’s just that it’s surrounded by so many godawful systems, not to mention that the lore is squandered by the terrible writing of the actual story. I only really came to this conclusion after wasting 2 years of my life on it, and I still wish I could go back and tell myself to waste my time on better games.

The production value, smooth and fun base combat and stunning art design have had me convinced so many times. It's such a weird dichotomy. How they're so capable of creating something that looks, feels and sounds like a great game, but it is built on layers of incredibly boring, annoying and awkward game design. The illusion is enough to make me chase after a great game that doesn't seem to actively want to piss me off. That game never comes.

There's many of us former Destiny players that got burnt out by the grind, microtransactions, and general bullshit brought to the table every release.

Fuck that game. I quit the first one for years and then came back to it during its final expansion. Played the Destiny 2 beta and decided I wasn't willing to keep doing this and living like this. Said "never again". Finally I was convinced to give it a try by my best friend after they decided to buy all of the expansions for me. Figured it was something to do with them. I put 700 hours into that game last year and every new season it kept becoming more increasingly obvious that the devs had/have zero regard for the players' time, and that the game is held together by spaghetti code on an outdated engine, specifically designed to encourage you to spend money constantly. I deleted it after yet another season began and I had to completely regrind for everything again. Now the new expansion dropped this week and all of my friends want me to hop on and grind and carry through the raid and there's just zero percent chance. Honestly, part of this is me. It's a game that I would wake up thinking about, spend all day thinking about, and then go to bed thinking about it. I'm grown, I just can't live like that. I look back, and I honestly don't think I had fun for 90% of that time. That's a lot of time I won't get back So now I'm saying it once more, "never again."

I played 100+ hours of Dota 2 in uni before realizing I don't actually like MOBAs, so probably that. It's fun when you're winning, because you just snowball and get stronger and stronger, and getting kills/winning team fights feels good. But it's miserable when you're losing, boring the rest of the time (laning is just competitive grinding), and the community sucks. I feel like this is an easy hole to fall into with competitive games in general though. A lot of people spend tons of time chasing that dopamine rush from winning when they don't even necessarily enjoy the moment-to-moment play. The only competitive games I still regularly play are fighters (because I *do* enjoy the moment-to-moment play in those) and I see that in the online FGC all the time: people who are having a terrible time, but keep playing because they have some notion that it'll become fun if they win more.

My issue with MOBAs is that the highs are high and the lows are so low. You know instantly when it's going to be bad too, and when that happens its like, well I'm stuck in this shit for the next 20-40 minutes. That was in LoL, apparently DOTA has longer games, even. When things are bad its just miserable and you have to be really phenomenal to hard carry a dysfunctional team, and I never was. It wasn't strictly unfun, but I rarely ended a session feeling like it was time well spent.

You're lucky you got out around 100 hours! There are people with thousands and thousands of hours that seem absolutely miserable.

Overwatch lol. Regardless, one day I clicked that I, and everyone I saw playing the game, only had fun when they won. If they lost it was always "my team mates suck" or "the enemy used cheap tactics" - and people who were high rank with high win percentages didn't even seem happy when they won. If a game is only fun when you win, it's not a fun game and you're just doing a disservice to yourself by playing it. It's not healthy.

I feel seen, lol. My poison of choice was League of Legends. The first months were very magic and I have some fond memories of those early days. Lots of ARAM (All Random All Mid, a simpler mode with a single lane) and even struggling to beat the bots because we were that bad. But every victory felt glorious, every chat was fun. This was around the "What does the Fox say?" era and you could start typing "Dog goes woof" in the global chat and people would "sing" along instead of play, lol. I remember a guy that wrote stuff like a Star Trek's log: "Captain's Log 2311: They need to nerf Jinx". Silly stuff like that, I was having so much fun. Then, the game became routine, I noticed the "community" was terrible and the dopamine hits were happening less and less often. And it was always like we were this close to a perfect match (if only we could have spent 5 more minutes winning, if only we had all the players, if only we didn't have a flamer, etc, etc). Unlike you, I played LOL for thousands of hours. It's probably my most played single game ever. But the last months weren't much fun, at all. I was chasing ghosts and had a hard time letting it go.

Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen I gave it about 16hrs before I finally quit/uninstalled. I enjoyed the idea of being an adventurer on the road with my crew and exploring dungeons. But after traversing the same roads, fighting the same dudes and having to dump stuff off every trip I just started to get bored/exhausted of the tedium. The spell broke.

Dragon's Dogma is the most I've ever tried to like a game and failed, I made 3 separate attempts over the years to enjoy it, tried different classes thinking that was why I didn't like it, but in the end I just found the game incredibly boring.

"when does this get fun?"

Zelda Totk, 40 hours. The feeling of aimlessness makes everything feel pointless eventually. These types of games really should have some sort of interesting plot to get things going.

It’s the best game with the most obvious criticisms I’ve ever played. I adore it and sank weeks into it but it is FILLED with head scratching design decisions.

I agree…I spent 270 hrs on one playthrough last summer (easily a record for a single playthrough for me) but my overall memory of the game is not that positive.

Biggest one for me, both new Zelda open worlds. So blatantly pointless. Like Ubisoft games with less direction, mid graphics, poor combat, very few moments making the journey worth it. Some redeeming qualities but tiring overall

For me, BotW being so unlike anything else at the time really carried it for me. It was such a a breath of fresh air (pun intended) that even after beating it once, I was able to go through it again and enjoy it again. By the time TotK came out I'd played dozens of games that modify and improve upon the formula. It did have new stuff that kept it from being totally stale, but the difference in enjoyment was night and day. One day I just put it down and never picked it up again.

I beat Dragon Age Inquisition years ago, I liked origins a lot and the mass effect games. Inquisition had just enough to keep me playing but I don't think I ever had much fun. It was thoroughly mediocre. 

I ended up buying the $100+ collectors edition and while I like the physical items it came with, I then proceeded to never even finish the game lmao. I felt compelled to try and 100% every area and yet bored the entire time I was doing it

> I felt compelled to try and 100% every area DA:I is probably the worst game you could have tried to do this in. The game is at its best when you pop into an area, do a couple of quests that sound interesting, then leave for the next area / continue the main quest. Trying to finish the Hinterlands is probably the primary reason why people drop the game.

This is true, but coming from DAO and DA2, you were encouraged to do everything in an area because you would most likely not ever be coming back to it (or in DA2s case, those things might be gone when you came back again). Maybe it's not DAIs fault, but the shift to a semi open world you could keep exploring in after you left it was a jump from what DA fans were used to, myself included

> Maybe it's not DAIs fault It's Bioware fault, when they decided to use Dice as an engine they had to retool *everything*, the only team which didn't need to essentially recreate basic game element from quasi-scratch was the team in charge of building the maps. So they created a bajillion map because... well they were finished before most others team had started.

The newest Diablo. Played about 15 hours, started each class....it's a highly polished turd. (though I hope anyone else who is playing likes it!)

Same. I played Diablo 4 for a whole week - wife and kids went out of town for a week right after release. I blew off work and play for 12+ hours per day for 5 days. By day 3 I had that creeping suspicion that it was not going to get much more fun. By day 6 I was done and have not picked it up since.

I mean… you played 60 hrs in a week lol

Mass Effect Andromeda I’m a huge fan of the original trilogy and got Andromeda on preorder download (the one and only time I’ve ever done that) so I was there day one and even booked a couple of days off from work (owed a lot of time in lieu so didn’t lose out on that front) I fought through the bugs, blank faces, pop up textures, camera exposure issues and all the other pre patch well documented nonsense. And after *checks notes* 30ish hours of stomping around the arbitrarily locked off open world maps, some terrible writing, and a companion mission that made me want to kick one of my team out of the airlock, I got a mission where the NPC I needed to talk to spawned 100 miles under the map with a marker showing me that they were impossible to reach. I went on the EA support forums, and had a moment of clarity of what a shitshow the game was. And the fix for my mission breaking bug was to go back half a dozen hours with a very old auto save and replay everything again on the off chance that cleared the issue and if not to start the game from scratch. And that was it for me and that game. I never came back to it, never finished it, never bothered even looking anything up on the wiki in case of a sequel. I was flat out done with it.

I beat Andromeda, and after reflecting I came to the realisation that they wanted to mimic the original trilogy with an Andromeda trilogy that was so close that it wasn't even a goddamn joke. Now mind you, its been like 5 years since I last played so my knowledge is a bit spotty. Companions: We have, two human companions. One's a biotic, the other's a soldier. Both male and female. We have an aged Krogan warrior An Asari that has a great interest in ancient alien tech A turian who's works with station security who's willing to do whats needed even if its against the law. An alien not apart of the main races (humans, asari, turians, Krogan. (Original we had Tali with the Quarians, in this Jaal with the Angarans.) Now, plot similarities. The Angarans are facing an enemy (Kett) that means to wipe them out, just like the Quarians and the Geth. WHICH we didn't knew at the plot of Mass Effect 1, were just an branching group that worshipped the reapers. It wouldn't have surprised me, if that the main group of Kett wasn't warlike and that this was just an offbranch. Either that or they were but there was also another group that was gonna work with us and the Angarans to take down the evil Kett. The Kett convert their foes into themselves, similar to reapers with their indoctrination and assimiliation of the dead into the husks. And the making of reapers. The Tempest is very similar to the Normandy, a stealth ship meant to gathering intelligence and to be fast. Both ships are like this, but the only difference is that the Normandy still had military capabilities, whereas the Tempest doesn't. We have the Mako and the Nomad, both are offroad tanks that can climb sheer cliffs. the Nomad doesn't have a gun though, but still has the jump and boost abilities. The beginning mission in both MA1 and Andromeda starts off in a 'Paradise planet' turned to hell. We get immediately attacked, and our mentor dies in the process. The MC takes up the mantle and then heads to the main station. Which I don't even need to explain why its similar to the Citadel. Both ending missions have us in a race against time, rushing in our tank to reach destination to stop the big bad guy from doing something important that will alter the course of the galaxy.

that game was so forgettable I beat it and have literally forgotten what even happens.... at all

I actually really liked the combat. However, the story was lackluster and no where near as good as the original trilogy.

Something around 30 hours in Horizon: Forbidden West. I just kept on playing hoping it would eventually turn out like its predecessor... but it just never happened. Didn't even finish it. I just can't quite put my finger on it, objectively it has improved in so many areas compared to Zero Dawn, but it just didn't evoke the same levels of fun. Eventually I stopped and honestly, I don't even regret it one bit.

Some people say that losing the mystique of what happened made Forbidden West lose its fun factor. You are still playing for future stuff that's about to happen, but the big mystery was solved in the first game. I want to play Forbidden West eventually, though, but I'm still a bit tired of the original's gameplay.

That is certainly a key factor. The story in Forbidden West was extremely disappointing to me, although I have to admit I did not finish the game and also have no clue what happens in the end. Although from what I have seen so far I was just not convinced it was worth finishing. It also felt extremely formulaic, though the same applies to the first game. I guess the same routine gameplay in a successor tends to make it boring. I also remember that in the first game it was extremely rewarding to master your weapons and enemies. At first I scrambled a lot to even kill a Bellowback, but towards the end I completely obliterated two Thunderjaws with ease. This simply did not happen in Forbidden West, and it feels like the combat system definitely changed for the worse. Or maybe I just got older and my mechanical skills took a hard nosedive lol.

>It also felt extremely formulaic, though the same applies to the first game. I guess the same routine gameplay in a successor tends to make it boring. Yeah you play the first and it's like, "OK cool, yeah sure" but by the time you get to the sequel, you've also played the recent Assassin's Creeds, The Witcher 3, Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor, Sekiro, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, etc and you start noticing that there's only so much you can do to differentiate 3rd person open world with parry/dodge and stealth section in high grass with ranged side weapon and mounted traversal and detective vision and whatnot

I probably put about 100 hours into that game. Finished it. I feel lukewarm at best about my experience.

HFW was the first “next gen” game that I played. I turned on the option that limits the HUD and just explored and was really sold by how beautiful I thought the game was. The facial expressions also felt like the biggest leap in improvement in that category that I’ve seen in a long time. The story dragged at times but I loved the combat. And being a big fan of lore, I really just ate up the breadcrumbs the game scatters everywhere. All that said, I tried to play it again recently and after 10-15 hours had to admit to myself that I wasn’t enjoying it. All of the novelty was gone. And as someone who likes to replay their favorite games, I had to admit to myself that maybe it’s simply not a great game once you take away the bells and whistles.

> I just can't quite put my finger on it, objectively it has improved in so many areas compared to Zero Dawn, but it just didn't evoke the same levels of fun. I had this same realization with this game, although I gave it way less than 30 hours. Something just doesn't click like with the first game

I hated ZD and enjoyed FW way more. The voice acting took me straight out of ZD every time.

yeah the voice acting in ZD was abysmal

I agree completely. On paper, Forbidden West sounds better than Zero Dawn. There are so many new things to do. So many new or improved mechanics, like swimming, gliding, climbing, melee combat. Even some of the story segments should have been good. So much more lore about the old world, that made Zero Dawn so intriguing. Beautiful moments, like the Las Vagas section. But somehow it didn't translate into a better game. I played through Zero Dawn at least three times, looking for every collectable. But I played Forbidden West once, beelined straight through the main quest. Have since uninstalled it, and have never thought of playing it again. So much of the game was weighed down by stuff that just wasn't great. Combat was frustrating, the mini games weren't fun, the story took too many turns into tedium and awkward strangeness.

Starfield. Spent almost 100 hours thinking it was going to click any minute. I just need a ship that's fun for me. I just need a power that fits my style. I'm gonna find that one really well-written quest with one super-cool character. I really wanted to like this one...

I got 60 hours into my first playthrough of Stardew Valley and I was asking myself “Am I having fun or am I addicted?” I ended up setting it down. Tried again and had more fun with it after I made the conscious decision to simply not engage with certain aspects of the game (crab pots and livestock) beyond what I needed for the community center. But after getting married and receiving the blessing of my grandfather, I felt like I had done enough with it and quit. It’s not a bad game, but I still prefer to “win” games and move on.

RPGs in general, because more often than not you have to invest quite a lot of hours to see if it gets better or not. If I were to say specific games, probably Luxaren Allure (spent like 15 hours till I gave up). Or Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne. Spent like 12+ hours on this one till i realized it wasn't for me

For me it was Assassin’s Creed Origins. The main reason being that the last act of the game is massively level gated, and because there’s no XP scaling with level you have to do absolute hoards of side quests in the late game. The side quests were always a bit meh for me, I found them quite fetch questy and repetitive for the most part, but were doable in small chunks, but then having to do like 10-15 back to back really signified how glaring a mechanical issue they were, and I mentally checked out. Same went for the armour upgrades, which required repetitive hunting of the same animals in the open world. Later upgrades required obscene amounts of materials so hours of hunting, and were required for late game progression on higher difficulties. So even here towards the end of the experience the degree of grind just massively spiked. Not to mention that as well as the above, the last third of the game was really badly paced with a lot of disjointed cutscenes due to lots of cut content, one of the worst main antagonist reveals I’ve seen in gaming, and a sudden (and hence not very well earned) change in character right at the end of the game to fit the narrative being an origins story for the creed. The earlier game’s story was a lot more compelling, the side stuff could be done in smaller chunks so was more bearable, and by this point I wasn’t acclimatised to the beauty of the open world. When I saw the mass of side quests that I needed to do to level up 4 times for the final mission on my second playthrough, I thought "nope", turned the difficulty straight down to Easy, and just mainlined it.

For me it was Odyssey. I was iffy on the game but I gave it a real good shot, occasionally even going back to it to see if I change my mind, but I'm always reminded of the large health pools, loot and meh combat and I can't do it. Personally I actually liked Origins. Some side quests weren't great but there were some I gravitated towards. It was just a more streamlined game but yeah, maybe I'm just stubborn on a franchise I was obsessed with that these new games don't gel with me no matter how much I try.

I'll get downvoted for this but I actually preferred Odyssey. Probably because I went into it with the mindset that it was an expansive action adventure RPG rather than an AC game. As an AC game Origins is definitely more in line with the franchise. Yes, Odyssey wasn't as relevant to the whole assassin brotherhood lore, but I thought the open world was a lot more engaging with more narratively and mechanically engaging side content, more stuff to do like the cultist system, naval battle, conquest battles, etc. The RPG mechanics were also a lot better imo with more build varieties and enemy types, as well as the fact that the game bypassed a lot of Origins' grind with XP scaled proportional to your level, being able to buy upgrade materials from Blacksmiths vs 10 hours of hunting hippos and crocodiles, and more varied content meaning you could choose how you levelled up rather than being forced to do specific side quests like in Origins. I also thought that while Origins' story in concept was far more compelling, it was let down by really awful pacing towards the end as well as a lot of retcons that didn't honour past lore. It was only after Valhalla where I really started to worry about the direction the franchise was taking, because that game didn't work as either an AC game or an RPG, it felt like such a baffling regression from Origins/Odyssey, they removed or replaced things that worked so well in those games in favour of changes that on paper and in practice, made little sense. As well as the fact that it's monetary success as the most revenue-generating game in the franchise will make Ubisoft think "let's do more of this".....

Fair. I see why it's appealing and it's a popular game for a reason but personally, the RPG stuff is what I liked the least as it wasn't very good for me. I was playing Odyssey yesterday and the skill trees were fine but I don't know, splitting up the skills made for a much more restrictive playing experience. Bayek could one shot assassinate, fight capably and use his bow efficiently while Odyssey locked you into one play style unless you spread out your skills evenly which ultimately gives you a more dry experience because you miss out on the best abilities until the late game. Never felt like I was playing a master of each combat form but more segmented into one play style. Like I was doing a quest yesterday and the bow was basically useless because unless I used a special ability, I couldn't kill anyone with it or I'd just risk alerting every guard. This is all with loot that is appropriately levelled but because I don't have enough 'Hunter' points, headshots don't kill enemies. I also honestly strongly disliked the level scaling. They allowed you to tone it back but it never stopped enemies from taking way too long to kill. At least the level scaling in Origins was optional and personally I never felt under levelled while in Odyssey, even after getting more skills and better loot, Mercenaries were still an absolute slog to kill and they hunted you down constantly. You'll stab one of them like 9 times on one combo and it takes away a quarter of its health and they are my level. Origins at least felt like a middle ground between the genres but personally, I think Odyssey leaned a little too hard on the RPG but in a bit of a directionless way. It has loot progression but you don't visibly get stronger because enemies scale with you and take similar damage. I think I just want an experience Odyssey doesn't offer and that's fine. I see its appeal and sometimes I do enjoy it (I think the spear you use is awesome) but I fall off too quickly when I am reminded of the fluff that pulls me out. Sorry I got a bit carried away lmao totally respect your opinion though

Re the combat, I didn't experience that too much with Odyssey, even playing on Nightmare mode. I invested a lot of points into critical assassinate but I was still borderline unstoppable in close quarters combat, and my bow did a good chunk of damage as well. You can easily circumvent the advantages lost by specialising in one skill tree through engravings and gear perks. I also focussed on a few key skills and upgraded them to max, like health regeneration, and a few combo attacks. The rest was just levelling up and engravings, and I still had a fairly balanced yet still quite tough and engaging experience. Origins I found more difficult to diversify mainly because of the lack of additional build options. I think the quirk with the levelling system was that it was exponential which is why they used the scaling system in Odyssey. They didn't want you being overlevelled because an enemy even 3 levels below you could theoretically just get one shot killed, in the same way that an enemy 5 levels above you can one shot you. It made for quests that were far lower level than yours to still be suitably challenging rather than just being a complete cakewalk of one shot kills, which meant you could go back to older quests you forgot to finish rather than doing everything when it was exactly your level, not higher, not lower. I do agree that the mandatory scaling can be a bit much but I understand why they did it because of how the levelling system is structured. Still upvoting your comment despite my playing of devil's advocate as I respect your opinion.

I agree. I played the hell out of origins when it launched, finished it then and attempted 3 more playthroughs since and haven't even made it to the arena storyline in Krokodilopolis. I've come to realise on my most recent attempt on pc that I prefer the game as a sort of Egyptian road trip simulator. I used mods to remove all weapons and went with the default robes, starting off in Siwa I try to go up those big cliffs to the end game city. All the wildlife and bandits are those 1 hit skull levels so it's terribly difficult but also terribly fun. It's what I did when I first played the ps4 on Christmas 2017. It brings back old memories of how hyped I was for the game. I love not looking at the map and just getting lost. Going land mark to land mark following the suns glimmer off metallic shields on the sides of far off garrisons. Hitching the ride on the side of a ship across the lake and infiltrating high level bases for supplies pretending I'm a hobo stealing some food. It's corny, but I love it.

Don't get me wrong, everytime I boot up Origins I'm taken aback by how stunning their recreation of Ancient Egypt is. But as mentioned in my original comment, aesthetics only go so far for me, because after a few hours you get acclimatised to it, after which you actually need a good gameplay loop to keep you going. I didn't explore every nook and cranny of worlds like Witcher 3, RDR2, Skyrim etc. just because they were beautiful (and don't get me wrong, they all were), but because those games had a sense of mystery to their worlds; you never knew what you were going to find in seemingly innocent areas, whether that be interesting lore, or a random quest that ends up being really deep and complex. Origins' side content I just found to be too formulaic and samey, at which point I was no longer impressed by its beauty, more fatigued by having to grind hunting and fetch quests to level up to continue the story. And once you realise it doesn't diverge away from that formula for the entirety of the game, you stop wanting to explore as much.

> Egyptian road trip simulator They actually released a combat-free version of the game called Discovery Tour. You walk around and can listen to audio of the history of those places, like a virtual museum. They did one for Odyssey and Greece too. Ubi gave both away during the pandemic so if you are an obsessive free games collector, you might already have them.

I tried that before, it was built into my original ps4 copy. I have a vivid memory of playing as a roman soldier and finding a group of guys at a camp fire and following them around on their patrol for several in game days as they moved from location to location until they got taken out by bandits. Being invisible to enemies in that mode it was brutal not being able to defend them and watching as they got cut down. 10/10 gaming moment. The npc system was really well made.

I installed and uninstalled BOTW 6 times and just could not do it finally gave up after 46 hours of scattered restarts through a bunch of years

I have about 70 or so hours in Xenoblade 2, and have played about 50 hours or so of 1 and X combined. Man, these games are not for me. It's like playing an Asian MMO filled with every anime trope you could imagine, offline. But as a Nintendo fan I am always reading hype and praise for the series.

The Xenoblade series certainly is MMO-ish. That's part of the fun for me, it's addictive like an online game but they are finite and won't run forever. But if the anime tropes and the MMO-feel is not for you, then the series won't be a good time. One of my core gameplay memories of the first game was getting a quest super early, when you are like level 12, you have to go and find something in a cave. Thing is, the cave is guarded by a lv 40 giant frog. So, every time I progressed in the story I came back to the frog, to see if I could beat it. But you had to be like level 37 to even stand a chance and that took a while. It was so satisfying to finally beat the damn frog, lol. But I also loved to just explore and grind there. Bionis' leg was a fantastic level. Just drop it if you aren't feeling it. The series is always high on grind, doing a million small quests and walking everywhere in big-ass levels. On top of dozens of hours of cutscenes with tropes and anime things. It's super effective for me but it could be horrible for you.

I really thought I was going to love it, but - Elden Ring after “only“ about 12 hours. Dying too much and having to repeat the same sections over and over quickly made me realise I wasn’t enjoying it at all, was actually bored and could be spending the time having more fun playing something else instead. Traded it for what I paid for it, so my only loss was those 12 hours I’ll never get back!

I dropped elden ring after 40 hours, realized I’m tired of souls games

Interesting. I initially bounced off it. But I now have 55 hours in the game. I realized how free you were in the open world to just skip hard sections, level up elsewhere, and come back later.

I think they tried to teach you that with the first major boss, Margit. I was doing like 1% of his health with my attacks and he would kill me in one hit, so I thought "there's no way they'd make this the *first* boss" and left to explore other areas before rematching him. All future areas that had enemies take tiny bits of damage but deal one-shot kills made me do the same.

The Golden riding horse and Margit do appear as sort-of tutorial for that whole idea of "if you feel weak, run away and come back later".

To be fair, with Fromsoft’s reputation for difficulty, I can see why a lot of inexperienced players may think that making a beeline to Margit is the intended experience.

Not just inexperienced players, a lot of Souls vets also kept throwing themselves at that wall. A combination of stubbornness and trying to play Elden Ring like it's Dark Souls. And then there's players like me, who thought "Yay open world!", and end up in Caelid without even a horse.

I did the same thing in Dark Souls and Sekiro after hearing they were very difficult. I'd think "Well, this is just how it's supposed to be" when I had just gone to an area too early.

Yeah, I had the same experience as you. It's just not fun getting killed over and over. I did kill a massive troll or something by glitching it into a wall, but the reward I got for it seemed like pretty much nothing to me. I understood quickly that there are many, many things you need to skip in the beginning. I did that, found some easier bosses, and still got my ass kicked. I can see what's fun about it, but it's not for me. I also refused to grind and level up on small enemies, because that's a waste of my time...though I did do that in Starfield, so I guess it depends on my mood. I'm also not really a fan of consumable items in general. I'm one of those people who have like 30 megalixers by the end of a Final Fantasy.

About 8000 hours in League of Legends before I realized all I did was chase the next rank for a better experience with better people, only to find out it only gets worse, and worse, and worse. It ended me up on this subreddit and got me back in to single player gaming.

What a happy ending 🥲

It's less that I suddenly realize I'm not enjoying a game but more like it has been a complete slog from the beginning and whatever potential I saw still hasn't been realized. **Curse of the Dead Gods**, 30 hours. I liked the general feel of the combat but everything is just so basic and repetitive, not to mention the roguelite upgrade system is bland and introduces more randomness in the runs (though I think it was fixed later) which just encouraged to buy the good weapons you like. It could be a good game as a straight up 7-15 hour dungeon crawler but not for me in its current form. **Metro Exodus**, 13 hours. I loved 2033, hated Last Light and Exodus unfortunately follows LL more than 2033. I might finish it if the ranger mode let me save anywhere (or at all) or the autosave actually worked and didn't delete 60 minutes of gameplay due to a death after clearing multiple outposts but since I haven't really had any fun with the game anyway I'm not keen to pick it back up. **Crosscode**, 30 hours. The plot nor the characters never gripped me and the MMORPG structure just makes the game worse for me. Once the puzzles started going from tough to tedious I just never launched the game again.

Man those dungeons in Crosscode. I think it was the third one that just kept fucking going way after I got tired of the puzzle mechanic. I think there were 30+ variations of the same lasers and I just couldn’t take it anymore

I love all metro games, but they should have really had a better save system in exodus for ranger mode. The older games worked because they were linear. In Exodus, you will clear the whole volga level, then die in one hit and be sent straight back to the beginning of the level. Only metro game that I don't play ranger in anymore because of it.

I liked 2033 and Last Light, but adored Exodus. I often read that Ranger Mode is really difficult with enemies aiming a bit too well, so I would definitely recommend not playing that. The quicksaving made dying much more tolerable, I don't think I would have liked the game as much if I had to redo so many sections.

I second crossover, I think I played less than you when I realized the core game loop just wasn't fun for me.

100hrs on Starfield just desperate AF to find something good about it

I feel you, I think I sunk about 40 hours in before realizing that I didn't care about literally anything about the game. None of the systems felt deep enough to get invested in

This is a super interesting question. It was a while ago, but I definitely think this happened with Halo CE and BioShock. I think I just kept playing them because I should like them, but especially at that time in my life I just did not like FPS and I think I was afraid to admit it or something. BioShock really made me realize this and I didn't play an FPS again until I played Doom 2016 during the pandemic. That game reawakened my joy in FPS, although I'd still say I don't love the genre. Another, more recent example, is not quite realizing I didn't like it, but Elden Ring really solidified my dislike of open worlds when I got to the plateau at the end of Ranni's questline and was like fuck this is just the same bland open world as the rest of the game but it's blue now. I still had fun with the game and completed it, but I really wish it didn't have all the open world boringness to it

I felt the game map got extremely stale and rushed after you do Leyndell (the capital city) - I still absolutely love the game because of the combat, but those maps SUCKED

FF7 Rebirth. I put like 30-40 hours in then realized that nothing had occurred to actually progress the plot in like the past 10 hours and I was just doing a bunch of mini games and repeat ubisoft open world style content. It's a well made game but it felt like they built it around the mini games and side content. I get a lot of hate for this opinion, but the ff7 remakes definitely feel like they only made them 3 separate games so they can sell it 3 different times, cause both of them feel extremely stretched out and padded, especially rebirth.

I didn’t feel this way about **Remake**, but I definitely did with **Rebirth**. I think it’s because part 2 is orders of magnitude larger than the first game. I feel like **Rebirth** would be a 10/10 masterpiece if it had about 60% *less* side content.

And this is why I don't bother with extra bullshit during first playthough. I couldn't care less about the minigames or sidequests. Hell I lost the story card tournament on purpose to skip it. I enjoyed the game a lot more than Remake because the gameplay was better (although it still has flaws and I didn't like the ending much)

Probably 25 hours or so in the new Lords of the Fallen. Love fromsoftware games. Really tried to like lords of the fallen. But it just didn't feel right.  Gave up after a few bosses. I got to the fire guy on the bridge. 

I know this is a thread about games we didn't like But if we talk about a game no one liked but I loved, it's the original lords of the fallen. Went pure strength with a big weapon and tower shield. Alot of people had issues with certain enemies being able to block most attacks but the tower shield made it easy. I finished that game with zero regrets. With LOTF2 being released on gamespass recently I thought I'd give it a go. I thought it absolutely sucked and hated that some classes are only unlocked after the game is cleared.

Fallout 76, around the time that it started going from “disappointing unfinished game” to “decent online game, possible comeback story”. The kicker for me was that it was still buggy. I was enjoying the lore, the map, the game challenges. I managed to power through a difficult milestone ‘dungeon’ that usually takes several players, but all by myself. I finally got to the final cut scene, feeling quite accomplished and proud… and the game crashed. I’d have to do the whole long, difficult ‘dungeon’ over again bc you couldn’t save part way through. I put it down and never went back.

I started playing 76 about a month ago, i'm enjoying it but yeah the game still has too many bugs. Crashes, audio bugs that force you to restart the game, and the getting into power armor bug that literally everyone knows exists but somehow bethesda hasn't fixed it

Gotta be Overwatch for me. I played it for years off and on and while I'd have fun for the first couple of weeks getting back into it, seeing the new characters and maps, I'd quickly become frustrated and sweaty. I stopped playing it for good a few months ago and noticed an improvement in my mental health almost immediately. It pains me to think about how many hours of my life I sunk into something I wasn't even actually enjoying. It was like it turned into a job. "Well I should play today because I need to get my dailies done to grind for the battle pass". Not. Worth. It. I kept coming back because of the sunk cost fallacy, I kept thinking about how much money and time I'd spent on it, but then I'd see a skin I wanted or something in the battle pass I wanted so I'd spend more money and time, trapping me in this neverending loop of sunk cost. I'm glad I decided that it was time to get out of it. I don't want to get trapped in that cycle with a game again.

Overwatch is an easy trap to fall into once you've had a break from it. You'll boot it up, feel that magic again and just not care if you're winning or losing. And then suddenly, it's not fun and you're just fucking annoyed. I refuse to play anything blizzard now, as I feel like all of their games do this in the modern era

I’m like 15000 hours into wow and I am not sure I ever liked it.

120+ hours breath of the wild. I bought a switch for this game, exactly 1 year ago. Didn’t like the Zelda and open world combination from the start. Got 80 shrines, 4 beasts, champions ballad and waiting to just fight Ganon but I couldn’t care less to be honest. I enjoyed myself for a moment but… not for me. I like open world games, and I love the Zelda franchise (even got tattoo) but it didn’t click. Heck, I love “souls” games, so the learning curve and difficulty wasn’t even a hurdle. Played links awakening on the switch and loved it,I got skyward sword waiting for me next…. But first Elden ring!

Fallout 3. I think I reached the end but did not finish it. I found the story extremely uninteresting and I really don't know why, but it didn't grab me as I wished it would.

I got about halfway through FO3 I think before realizing it was just bland. Tried New Vegas immediately after and loved it though.

Off the top of my head and as of recently, Ace Combat Assault Horizon, Brutal Legend and Zelda BOTW. With Ace Combat AH's case the game was basically: babysitter the video game. Every mission you do and I mean EVERY mission you do involves protecting other NPCs and if their health goes down you get a game over. I got bored and I moved on. That and I had no idea what plane and weapons I should use for each mission since the game would never tell me, and it rips off CoD pretty hard with that AC-130 mission, it felt so one the nose that I almost laughed. I wanted to like this game since this was supposed to be Ace Combat for idiots but the game wasn't even fun as that. Brutal Legend annoys me in a different way in that the COULD'VE been solid, if it just focused on the God of War and car combat but instead the game just wants to be an RTS really, really, really badly. I don't really enjoy RTS games and I'm not sure playing with a controller helped, but I just got bored with the endless amounts of RTS missions late game, then apparently the final boss has the GoW style brawling combat return after no showing for so long, I just gave up. Zelda BOTW is a complicated one, I liked the game at first and I enjoy the open world but the Great Plateau was the high point of the game for me, and the game has really weak combat and not in a way I find interesting, but the biggest reason why I dropped is that the main missions where you have to fight Divine Beasts succccccks. I did the water one and you need to collect shock arrows in order to progress but during the section to the "dungeon" you need to destroy enemy ice crystals and activate multple pillars and I can miss or have a bow break, and I wasn't good enough to make sure every arrow counted so I would be stuck in an unwinnable state or have to die since no new shock arrows would spawn. On top of this, the game never checkpoints past the unskippable cutscene to start this section so I gave up. I know later on you have to manipulate the water walves to do actually do the dungeon and that pissed me off the first time. Rather funny how this part made me drop the game the first time and it did it yet again too.

Not that you are asking for help, but in BOTW you can use your ice pillar special move to block the projectiles - that doesn’t use any resources

I'm surprised he's complaining about the Zora divine beast. That one was pretty easy Now the Gerudo divine beast, FUCK that demon in particular

Brutal Legit could legit be an awesome hack'n'slash open world game with minigames spread all around. Idk what went through the devs heads when they decided making it a RTS focused was a good idea.

An RTS was what they really wanted to make. There's a [Tim Schafer interview](https://www.vg247.com/i-dont-know-if-a-duck-is-going-to-swallow-me-whole-the-tim-schafer-interview?page=3) where he says that the hack'n'slash and minigames were just intended to be tutorials for the Stage Battle portions. YMMV if it landed, but they were explicitly trying to capture *Herzog Zwei* vibes.

Outer Wilds for me, I loved unveiling the mysteries for the first few hours and the overwhelming feeling of being alone in space was incredible, but the ship and jetpack controls were constantly getting in the way of my enjoyment, missing a launch point, falling constantly from missing a jump and losing so much time to what I consider bs. I get that the movement and flight are more realistic and physics based, but when it’s so frustrating that it made me give up on the game, I don’t care for that argument.

Same. I really wanted to experience the story but the mechanics pissed me off.

I played a lot of Kerbal Space Program before picking up Outer Wilds and I think that helped me intuitively understand how to maneuver in space. (managed to land on the Sun Station without knowing that there was another way to get to it lol) I'm glad I did, having a hard time with the controls is a very common issue that people have with the game

This is so interesting to me. I often feel that I'm not "good" at games in general...like I usually play games on easy settings, and never really understand advanced controls or mechanics in more "hardcore" games. But weirdly, I never felt like the mechanics in OW were that bothersome. That isn't to say I never had incidents...I definitely crashed my ship a time or two when trying to lift off from a world, but overall I found it enjoyable. The autopilot feature for getting from one world to the next helped a lot, and I felt the game was fairly forgiving in terms of surviving through impacts. Anyway, it's just interesting to me because usually I would be the one who would make this complaint, but I actually really enjoyed the jetpack and ship in OW.

I just wanted to continue to explore at my pace instead I just had to do the same parts over and over again to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Stopped being fun at some point.

About 40 hours for Tokyo Xanadu. The writing, especially for anyone not in the main cast, was just too boring. The writers wanted to make a slice of life school anime, not a video game. And I say this as someone who loved reading everything the townspeople had to say in the Trails in the Sky games by the same dev. The world just isn’t interesting, and erasing memories of people MIB style keeps it from getting interesting for long.

About 30 hours into Baldur’s Gate 3 right now. I feel like I’m just playing it because everyone keeps going on about how great of a game it is and I wanna see that for myself. I’m towards the end of Act I right now and apart from a sidequest I haven’t really “enjoyed” the game so far.

No game is gonna please everyone, but it can definitely be frustrating when you don't click with something that it seems like almost everyone else is really into. If you're not enjoying it by the end of Act 1 I doubt the rest of the game is going to change your mind. I'm in Act 3 now and I love it, but I already liked it after the first few hours.

Hate to say it but IDK if you'll enjoy the rest then, cause Act 1 is by far the most polished portion of the game due to it being in early access for years before release.

Yeah I loved that game but man act 3 got tiring

I'm in the same boat as you friend. Keep feeling like I'm playing a different game than the one everyone else is talking about. At least I had fun with the co-op and some friends 

Completely agree, for me it was the gameplay, especially the combat. Everything felt super clunky and as someone who's never been into dnd the combat just straight up wasn't fun. After talking to my friend who adored it I realized it just wasn't for me. He loved it because of the incredibly in depth rpg elements but to me that just isn't that fun after a while, especially when I would dread any combat encounter.

I haven't seen anyone say it yet so kingdom hearts when I was 13 or so? Probably put a good 30 some hours into it, but I really didn't like the combat at all, I just played it because I didn't have anything else at the moment. I tried it again probably 4 times but just hated the combat, and even more so hated wandering around in circles trying to figure out what tf to do.

Biomutant. But I powered through it to get my money's worth.

Bought this game full price, played it for all of an hour, and knew I made a big mistake. What a great premise but mediocre output.

I remember it being so hyped but then after a week it just kinda disappeared

Twenty hours or so spent on Assassin's Creed III. The sea combat was great, the Colonial America setting was cool (and rare!), but the game just never felt FUN for some reason. Loved AC2. After two attempts with AC3, just quit because I didn't want to keep playing. Later played Brotherhood and loved it.

I really enjoyed AC 3 and I never tried the sea combat, lol. I might need to replay it. I only did the story missions, though. So, either I'm forgetting a single sea combat mission that didn't impress me or it was optional and I missed it. Have you tried AC4? It's all about the sea combat.

Played Breath Of The Wild for about 40h. Dropped it. Went back again from scratch. Dropped it around the 50h mark. I like a lot of things about the game but having to craft a lot of shit and simply finding myself without a weapon because all of them break on the same mini shrine boss pissed me off. Played a bunch of Hollow Knight on ps4 and switch and dropped it more or less at the same point. More recently Armored Core VI. I love a lot of things about the game and I am a big From Software Church follower but the game was not for me. The combat didn’t click with me. Must have played about 8h.

Prey 2017 20 hours. The way it was hyped up online, I was super excited to finally play it. About 20 hours in I realized I was not actually having fun. Story was meh, some of the mechanics were ok, graphics were good though.

70 hours, Starfield. The worst 70 hours ive spent in a game ever. I stayed for that long because i wanted to love the game and wanted it to be good . The witcher 3 is another one.. clocked in about 18 hours.. i was so hyped to try it due to many people praising it, but i just found the story, gameplay and setting kinda boring. Granted im not into fantasy medieval games. Had it had a great combat system, maybe i would've given it a proper chance.. the Red kit is out, so hopefully they manage to idk, make the game play like Sekiro🤷🏾. But yeah, both these games i had to force myself to like them until i realised fuck it, im bored as hell. On the other hand, Ghost Recon Wildlands is another one i spent like 20 hours and just hated it, but i tried it again 2 years later after developing a love for tactical shooters and WOW!! Incredibly underrated game no doubt, currently sitting at like 700+ hours... so maybe if i somehow somehow by god's grace return to the witcher 3 in the future, ill finally enjoy it. But good lord, i dont think Starfield will redeem itself for me, mainly because the one thing that bored me to death simply cant be changed ever, the dialogue... I felt like my intelligence was being insulted to a massive degree.

Somehow I spent 180 hours on Divinity Original Sin 2. I kept going because there aren't many local coop rpgs out there but at some point I just couldn't do it anymore.     It's just not for me. I don't think it's a bad game and I'm happy for all the people who love it but I did not enjoy playing it. There were many reasons that just piled on top of each other until I gave up. Overall I was left with the feeling the game had contempt for me as a player. Like you're playing a tabletop game with a mean DM.

I liked playing with all the magic and skills and combining them in combat, but I got frustrated that every encounter started with the enemy leeching my essence (I think that is what it was called), so I could hardly use those special skills. Never finished it. Installed loads of mods for it though after quitting 😅.

I still can't get over just how many people in that world were willing to fight to the death over trivial things. I had talked to my Scoundrel vendor one too many times while going to buy skill books and he got annoyed that I kept clicking on him so naturally he wanted to kill me. I had to tell my friends to buy books from him from then on and couldn't go near that entrance to the sewers without some stealth.

My problem with it is it's one of those games where I feel like I have to have about 20 tabs open and full build guides to not feel completely incompetent. The combat system punishes you for not following fairly railroaded party compositions. It doesn't so much encourage individual skills and combinations, as enforce spamming either magic or physical alone. Unless you focus down each enemies shield with a full party of magic users, your skills don't do anything. Same for melee. It's fun in a way but so rigid and if you don't spent hours theory crafting or remembering what the fuck build you were trying to do you end up with an incapable party that instantly dies to everything. It has so much going for it, and I will finish it one day, but it's hard work for such a charming and beloved game.

Love that last line. So many games I've played where I felt like the game hated me.

Hogwarts Legacy...80 hours, mostly because I'm anal when it comes to completing fetch quest and at the time I couldn't think of anything else to play. It's not a terrible or even bad game, it's just that for everything it does right it in turn does five things wrong. It also runs like shit on PC.

80hrs. Monster Hunter World. I tried so hard to like it.

Probably Final Fantasy VIII. Took me three times to realize it wasn't my thing (and I completed the story, anyway). I had to drop it the first time because my o.s. went belly up and lost my emulated saves, so I thought it was a horrible coincidence. I was just starting, I played like two hours tops. Then, a second time I almost played until the end of the first disc, had to move places and it was a good excuse to forget about the game, also didn't keep my saves. But, since my completionist spirit was stronger, when I was playing all the Final Fantasy games and reached VIII, I bought it on Steam and finally played it all the way through. I was in the second or third flashback to>!Laguna's time!!the bad witch from the early hours turned out to be the matron of ALL the protagonists when they were little, in an orphanage, but they forgot because using espers/GF gives you convenient amnesia. And they discovered that the Gardens where they trained were managed by aliens, basically. And it just kept going on and on until the "Time Compression" plan of the real big bad witch!<. That was strike two. And my dislike just became official when I was watching the final cutscene and >!Zell was stuffing himself with food!<. Strike three, you are out! I finally noticed I didn't feel a thing for those characters and wasn't happy with their "journey" and final destination. I played FF VIII for some cool 70 hours, at that point in time.

There's a fan theory that the main character actually died halfway the game and the rest is his dying fever dream. This is officially denied by the creators but it would be a lot better of an explanation than the actual story.

Ac Valhalla. Put 120 hours in it. I don't think I like it but I still go back to it occasionally. Odyssey and Origins were luv.

Loved the raiding parts but all the actual Assassin’s Creed parts were a snooze. I also hated Sigurd which didn’t help.

Yeahh, it’s hard to love valhalla sometimes. Even raiding gets boring after a while. Amazing environment but that too feels bland when compared to greece and egypt.

Red Dead Redemption 2. The gameplay/story moved like molasses and none of the characters came across particularly likable. I had around 25-30 hours put into it before I finally gave up.

All the way through Mass Effect 1. Surely such a lauded game is going to get better, right? Nope. Good story, would have made a great adventure game or RPG, but the action sucks the life out of it.

When I played that game the year it came out I got to a point where I was bored with them game and quit playing. A year later I didn’t have anything to play and booted the game up and after two minutes I was at the end of the game. I had quit playing literally right before the end. After 10 minutes of playing I finished the game lol.

Anything that isn't combat or the actual dialogue/RPG elements is the fucking worst (read: lightly jogging through the empty, lifeless Citadel; and the planet "exploration").

Oh I guess I have another I could say, Baldur's Gate 3. I got halfway through act 3. I quit because I don't really enjoy DnD5e as a crpg. Its not crunchy enough for how slow it is. Same problem I had with Solasta (though larian did make good changes to make it more flowy and fun). and I honestly didn't vibe with many of the companions, Lae'zel and Karlach were the only 2 I liked and the rest really annoyed me. and the glitches and bugs at the time were awful.

I think I put about 40 or 50 hours into FF7 Rebirth before just deciding to walk away from it. I already wasn’t a huge fan of combat or restrictive “on the rails” style of Remake, but I decided to give Rebirth a try since it was a more open part of the original game. I realized around Costa Del Sol the game’s story segments were going to have tons of padding and all going to be on the rails like Remake interspiced with the open world portion of that game. Yuffie joined my party, I left Costs Del Sol and she and two other party members ran off for no real reason for another forced story segment and I just said this game design is not for me and uninstalled it.

I put 120 hours into and finished Ghost Recon Wildlands, I didn't hate it but when I was done I was like hmm, I can't say I liked that game as a whole either. I'd played Breakpoint before it and the sequel is a far better experience even if the setting and story are Ubisoft basic junk. I found getting detected in the game to be incredibly frustrating and illogical. Take a shot from hundreds of meters away and someone finds the body? The AI knows EXACTLY where you are. Drone gets spotted? Every AI knows your location despite never seeing you. Not to mention getting sniped from nowhere by coked up cartel members with SMGs isn't just not fun, it feels completely unfair. And don't even get me started on the Unidad faction. Literally brings nothing but headaches to the game. I also did not like that late-game levelling requires the player to play on the hardest difficulty with 'Tier One mode'. For my tastes, I could never figure out which difficulty was the best and then getting pushed into Extreme made certain sections of the game feel like a slog.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The world was so big and empty, just wayyy too big. I was overhyped going in, spent like 3hrs customising my character to play idk, 4 missions? I kept playing the open world for maybe 3 more years after. The purple faction guys pissed me off too. It was just icky to play, animations felt janky, combat wasn't particularly engaging. I tried the sequel on game pass and thought the survival elements made it a heap better. The world design was more compact but somehow less inspired. This is why I gave up on ubisoft games, the maps are just too samey, you can have massive regions but all the towns in those regions are always got the same assets. MGSV was a much better military game. I felt like the world was designed with the gameplay in mind.

I played many many years of FIFA before realizing that the amount of time it made me angry, versus the amount of time I was having fun, was very skewed in favor of the former

Assassin’s Creed 3. I played for maybe 20 hours before realizing I was still in the tutorial.

About 30 hours into any Bethesda game studios game. Fallouts, Elder Scrolls, Starfield. There is a lot of copy paste content, and the main storylines are so underwhelming. The games don't do any gameplay aspect well.

Almost everything from Bethesda from Oblivion onward. My aim in those games is rarely to finish the milquetoast main storyline or the completely inorganic and nonreactive guild quests. I just find both too unimmersive as I'm playing, so I'm usually aiming to build a certain 'type' of character. Usually once I accomplish that and start \*actually playing the game\* I'm bored to death.

Elden ring. Something is horrendously wrong with the balancing in that game. Ignoring all the recycled content, I should not be getting one shot at 50 vitality. The bosses seemingly never stop attacking, with these ridiculous 12 hit combos, delays, and AOEs - each of which will probably oneshot you. Even regular enemies suffer from this shit. Some of them have combo strings that last for fucking ages, and you have to fight like 7 at once. Most of that game isn't even hard. It's straight-up bullshit. Sekiro was hard. Bloodborne was hard. Dark Souls 1 was clunky but still challenging. Elden ring is bullshit. It's the worst game Fromsoft has made by far.

Completed Elden Ring. Hated every minute of it. Only completed it so my brother couldn't lord it over me as he had completed it. Hated the combat, lack of clear story, aimless open world, aesthetic. Almost destroyed my interest in gaming.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I was a huge fan of the series around 2014 ,but stopped playing after syndicate,because I wanted to try out different stuff. Then around 2020 my brother gifted me a copy of Odyssey so I gave it a go. At first I felt really nostalgic doing some parkour and stuff,I liked the world ,but after a decent amount of playtime the game became too grindy,the characters were unremarkable to say the least and in general it felt like an Assassin's Creed-like rather than Assassin's Creed. I finished it ,but I don't like most of its aspects. After this one I played Origins and I liked it ,it felt more true to the series

So I've been playing a lot of Dreamcast games lately and finally realized, after years of trying and failing to get into it, that I don't like Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that much. Whoa, hey, put down the pitchforks! I *respect* the game, I can look at it and say that it's well made. But I am a casual fighting game fan at BEST and MvC2 is just way too technical and hard for me to fully wrap my brain around. Even on the easiest difficulty I barely manage to scrape by, and it's not like I'm a complete newb. I played a lot of MvC3 back in the day, so I at least understand the basic mechanics. I've just realized I'm maybe better off watching other people play this game and appreciating it from a distance.

Final Fantasy XII. After well over 70 hours, I realized I just wasn’t invested in any of these characters and didn’t care for the mechanics, and so even though I was at the final dungeon, I dropped the game entirely. Usually, my stubbornness would’ve kicked in at so late a stage and I’d have forced myself to finish, but FF12 made me feel especially apathetic.

I tried three or so times over the years since its release. I think two years ago I tried again and hit the "I don't care about these characters" point. There's a scene where everyone stops and talks in a desert (narrows it down real good, huh?) fairly far along in the game and I don't even remember the dialog but I know I turned it off for the last time then and there. It felt too much like it was just a handful of unrelated characters tossed together and subsequently had their lore smudged and blurred until they fit in the same setting but there was nothing interesting about any of them whatsoever. Had it been a real DnD campaign, the players could have made them interesting. The writers for the game just gave us the background story and had them walk in a straight line.

Breath Of The Wild. All I seemed to do was get 90% of the way up a cliff and then hang there for two days until it stopped raining and I could climb the rest.

I finished Final Fantasy X pretty much out of obligation. At least my last big level grind sesh was made easier by the beautiful Calm Lands theme. 

Half-Life, the franchise. played 1, 2 and 2.1 until around half of it, studently I entered a new section, stopped a few seconds looking at the screen, thought to my self "I'm tired...", closed the game and never opened it again. Not a bad game, had some amazing scenes, but in retrospection I guess I just got tired of the linearity and repetition.

Doom Eternal.  I loved Doom 2016, and my son assured me that Eternal was the superior game. But despite shoveling ... (checks Steam) 12.5 hours of my limited precious time on this earth into it, I'm still waiting for it to be fun. I keep forgetting which weapon goes with which demon, then having to switch and oh darn I'm out of ammo for that, what do I ... At least in 2016, there were many ways to skin these cats. Eternal really needs you to put the square peg into the square hole and the round one into the round hole. But that makes me the square peg trying to fit my style into Eternal'sc round hole. And I think I've abused that metaphor enough. Only 12.5 hours, but it sure feels like a lot longer.

I liked Doom 2016 (and even 3) but I'm not good at rhythm games so I just never got too far into Eternal. Also wasn't a fan of the new writing style, at all. It was like someone wanted to write some "this is my super important OC in his universe" fiction, was handed the Doom franchise and said "I'm going to just mix these and pretend it was always this way."

I put 27.1 hours into Morrowind. I'm guessing you had to be there at the time it came out. It's just too clunky today, and even mods don't really save the experience for me.

When it came out, there was nothing like it. My favorite game of all time, but I can see how it's pretty dated.

Personally I did my first playthrough of Morrowind about a year ago and loved it.

Morrowind still has the juice. But it’s a reading game. A lot of people who have played Skyrim have those kinds of expectations for Morrowind.

Cyberpunk, it's just not it. The game feels like as if it was built high on excitement and then the excitement died down the road. There are still noticeable bugs, combat is weak, story is just fine but the narration or how the story plays out is nice. The world feels highly static, not much to do in free roam. God, what a disappointing game.