What is the thing that really makes you Quit on a Game-Rpg?
I just was playing an actionrpg called Dungeon Hunter Alliance for Ps3. The game was going well then the game turned into me dying 30 times in a row and healing and going back to the same thing, then going to healing the 13pots while fighting. So basically I was hitting and healing and all my skills were worth nothing ;(
I think it doesnt just happen in real time, but when the game just becomes too horrificly frustrating, I usually just cant stand the game anymore.
To explain there's a difference between being frustrating/infuriating in combat and there actually being a set way to take down an enemy. Take fallout 1 for example. That game has difficult combat on ocassion, but there is an easy way around each situation. So in a way, you can minimize the aggravating times by thinking outside the box.
I think that games that dont handle balance well turn the game into a frustrating slugfest bent on luck and aggravation.
How does the community feel about this? Would you say that the combat has to be based on luck/frustrating or it should have some skill? I havent played all the games out there but I want everyone's take on it?
I think it doesnt just happen in real time, but when the game just becomes too horrificly frustrating, I usually just cant stand the game anymore.
To explain there's a difference between being frustrating/infuriating in combat and there actually being a set way to take down an enemy. Take fallout 1 for example. That game has difficult combat on ocassion, but there is an easy way around each situation. So in a way, you can minimize the aggravating times by thinking outside the box.
I think that games that dont handle balance well turn the game into a frustrating slugfest bent on luck and aggravation.
How does the community feel about this? Would you say that the combat has to be based on luck/frustrating or it should have some skill? I havent played all the games out there but I want everyone's take on it?
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Combat only beat me out of a game once (that I can recall). That was in Drakenguard, where the final boss decided to ditch the hack-and-slash combat that was basically the game's only feature in favour of a weird pattern canceling thing. Spent a couple days bashing my head against it and gave up.
Other than that I've been fine with both skill and luck/stat based combat styles.
Often times this will mean a boss battle that is so very much tougher than the surrounding opponents that it just comes down to blind luck to get by.
Other times it is because they require some trick mechanic that you have to figure out (or more often google on the internet) just because they don't put enough clues in the game to solve it. The gimick itself is not so bad so much as it is usually clearly done just so you have to replay and replay and REPLAY thus adding to the "Average hours to complete" metric.
My personal view on Balance is that it has no real place in an RPG. Don't get me wrong, I think that appropriate ramp ups are important (see my previous comments), but when every single class has to be genericized to such a degree that they all play the same "All in the name of balance", I lose patience.
Doing the whole 'Rock - Paper - Scissors' balance thing is fine as at least there are three different approaches and they cancel each other out. But when swinging a sword and shooting a spell are simply a function of the graphics component and in all other respects are identical 'because of balance', I have a problem. Particularly when the developers miss something fundamental about their balance scheme that leaves one or more approaches significantly gimped. It's a problem. Classes should play differently otherwise what is the point in having a class (read: Class as profession or skill set or anything that should draw a distinction between one character and another other than looks).
Screw that, play it like a rlike, one chance is all you got
Lately, it's gotten to the point where if I notice that a game even has collectibles, if I think I'm going to be tempted by them at all, I'll stop playing immediately.
This may be tangential, but what makes me rage quit video game communities is if I encounter an over-abundance of juvenile behavior or just plain nastiness. I hung with the Dark Souls community for as long as I could until I found out that there were.....
How did Douglas Adams put it???
"A bunch of mindless jerks who would be the first against the wall when the revolution came".
Okay, not all of them were, but there were a few, and loud and notable ones.
I have had a few moments in my run in the Dark Souls series that have made me want to throw my controller through a window, but I know deep down that it's me, not the game. What mostly gets me about those is how going into a boss fog for the first time actually nearly makes me feel physically sick. A hell of an accomplishment for sure, but it also makes me long for turn-based or real-time pause, or something that doesn't make me feel like I'm going to have an stroke....
The achievements in the later games in the series were distinctly underwhelming, as they were much more along the lines of check-points along the main path of the story, and in fact gave away spoilers simply by existing.
Not having a console, I really don't have much experience with such tracked collection systems, although I am still something of an absolute completionist. I still have to extinguish as much black as possible from each BG map while completing every possible side quest - and Clairvoyance is an active hinderance as it takes away my ability to track which parts of the map still need to be visited!
Not being able to pause.
I find this mostly in online (or online-enabled) games, like Destiny or Star Wars: The Old Republic. If I want to play one of these games, I'm committing to being locked into the game for however long it takes me to get through the current mission--or resigning myself to having to do it all over again next time if I have to leave in the middle.
As someone who plays these games primarily as single-player experiences, this No-Pause functionality is supremely frustrating. Being able to experience them in "offline mode" would be a great bonus--and would make me more likely to stick with a game, rather than stopping forever when the frustration gets to be too great.
Not only this, but "secrets." If a game likes to throw in secrets, or has secrets, I am usually running around a map, inch by inch looking for them instead of playing the game and enjoying the story. If I am not enjoying the story I may not load it up the next time I looking to be entertained.
Anything that takes away from the story and adds a grind session to a game, diminishes an RPG. When I first played Dragon Age: Inquisition, I noticed this a lot. It was a game that didn't know what it wanted to be and I got bored of all the running around, herb collecting, crafting, and what not, that I just wanted to finish the game. I stuck to the main story and finished it rather quickly, leaving out a whole lot of side missions that I really didn't care about.
Compare that to DA:O, all the side missions had meaning or repercussions, and the main story drove the game play.
Lastly, I like to have breaks in the story or game play. Mass Effect 2, I believe did this the best. Each mission was short and engaging and I could do a mission, then be able to put the game down realizing I furthered the story and accomplished something. If missions are too long where I have to commit a large chunk of time to it before I can save, or feel like I've done something I will lose interest in the game.
@deltago - I'd agree to an extent. In some cases, my role play experiences have been enhanced by the endless questing off the beaten path. I think that Baldur's gate 1 did that very well. You could follow the story line but it wasn't until you actually just broke out and started exploring the countryside that it became a true adventure. Baldur's Gate 2 had that to a limited degree, particularly in chapter 2, but it is a very different feel to the game as a result.
Even Oblivion and Skyrim where you can go out and farm plants and flowers to increase your alchemy added to the fun in my view. However, bobble-heads are insidious in my view. Where's the 'in game' reason for them? (personal and subjective).
Particularly so if they have generic fantasy designs..Dragon Quest, Namcos Tales of series and so on.
I really like the Suikoden series though.
For me this is becoming a major decision point in what games I like and play. I am a big Dark Souls fan, but after burning out on it (quite severely) I wanted to ween myself off of the franchise so I got Lords of the Fallen, a lesser quality clone. It is OK, but one of my biggest complaints is that you play one protagonist in an otherwise Dark Souls replica. You can't even select gender. Given what can be done today, why?
Well, the answer is in complaints that we often hear about lack of VO (voice over) in games. Gamers want a more interactive experience and to not have to read endless lines of text. Developers want to give a vocal experience for the player. But to do that, it that narrows the field of choices for the player character. They can't have 30 different actors voicing over the same stuff, particularly when the protagonist might have literally hundreds or thousands of lines of dialogue. Also, controlling or limiting the protagonist to a given circumstance/beginning allows for a more thorough and developed back story for the adventure. The writers can put in filler histories instead of hedging and being nebulous.
Even Fallout New Vegas suffered from this to some degree. And Fallout 4 suffer not from the having to control who the player is (well a little bit of this), but by keeping the dialogue so simple (4 choices only) that it often times didn't matter what you chose. They were telling a linear story with their back story. They needed to invest you in the search for
There has to be a happy medium in there somewhere. I like Voice over in my games. But I am also not averse to reading text if it gives me more freedom in my character choices. I suspect I am in the minority on that second point.
Comparing it to Inquisition, which has planting, cultivating, mining etc. You feel forced to do it to craft above average gear but it doesn't develop your character. It's a tedious task that you feel compelled to do even though it doesn't develop your character or the story.
I found a beautifull little game I had never heard of a year or so ago: Trine 2. It wasn't new, it wasn't high budget, but it was really, really interresting and well-made. I did what I so seldom do nowadays, I played it from start to end without any googling. But then came the final boss, and ofc I had to roll, duck and execute an exact series of movements in the right order etc. I tried 5 times, stopped. Picked it up a month later, tried a couple of times more, but failed and quit. Haven't tried since. Too bad, would have liked to see the ending.
Equally, I have not gotten very far in DA:I, so I don't know necessarily how bad it gets. If it is as you say and it is more of a chore than something fun, then I totally agree it is problematic and the type of thing I'd be against. I still say Bobble-heads (or those trophies that you could get in Mass effect for the captain's quarters) are the antithesis of RPG gaming in my view (not really as I am being overly dramatic, but you get the point).
And Inquistion isn't that bad of a game, only if you let it be. If you are a completionist, you are in for a grind. And I think that is my point, if the grinding takes away from the story and what you actually need to accomplish then the game suffers and I bore of it.
Also the story needs to hold me from the beginning. That is one thing Inquistion got right. Pillars is a game I shelved since I didn't care for the main story, nothing was there that compelled me to unravel its mystery and so it just became a party of misfits travelling the land.
I left my PoE run when I got distracted by the idea of a complete Might and Magic 6 run. Might and Magic 6 is an exponentially better game to me than PoE was.
I left my Divinity:Original Sin run because it just plain started to bore me to death. I was distracted by ideas for the umpteenth runs of whatever older games I like and enjoy so much more than anything newer.
So, why? I don't think this is a case of nostalgia for me.
One of the things that make me want to keep coming back to a game over and over is the tone of it. The tone of the music, the art design, the colors - the total game environment.
Is it colorful or is it shadowy and dark? Is the story optimistic and heroic, or is it pessimistic, gothic, and/or post-apocalyptic?
A game that's out of balance between "talky-talky, read-read" and engaging combat will also have a very limited shelf life and replayability in my library. For that reason, I've never been able to summon interest to even try Planescape:Torment, and I almost definitely won't be buying the new Tides of Numenara version of the same thing. I've also never been able to stay interested in Star Wars: KOTOR2 long enough to finish it. I tried recently, and I got so incredibly bored during the third planet I went to, running back and forth and talking, talking, talking, while combat was laughably easy even on the highest difficulty setting, that I started to dread trying to finish it, or even starting it up.
I think the answer to the OP's question is that personal taste determines what games we play and which ones we quit, especially with regards to how well a game meets our reasons and needs for playing and what we expect to get out of it. For me, I play to relax, to escape real life, and to immerse myself in a heroic, optimistic, colorful environment, with good imaginary friends, good music, good art, good architecture, lots of items and skills to work towards and covet, lots to explore, self-examination, pretending to have special powers, and an engaging story arc.
I want to concentrate and reach a meditative state, forgetting all my troubles, without any huge adrenaline rushes, but also no boredom. (Just enough danger to require concentration, not go to sleep.) I want to be stimulated by the visual, sound, and music environment, and I want to collect lore and items.
PoE and D:OS didn't meet any of those needs for me, and neither does almost any game published in the past 10 years or so.
Mostly, I don't find the time it takes to learn the ins and outs of a new rule set to be worth the joy I get from almost any game. This creates a natural bias toward other D&D and Infinity Engine games. However, even NWN that has the same rules but a different engine has proven too much for me to complete, despite having a competent understanding of the mechanics.
This actually prevented me from playing Knights of the Old Republic for many years (in addition to not having a computer good enough). However, I have finally, after all these years, started a game and I am committed to finishing it. Unfortunately time constraints prevent me from playing it in any way other than small increments, and even that proves difficult at times.
The absolute worst example was Pillar of Eternity, which I was actually very excited for. However, even that strayed too far from D&D and Infinity Engine principles for me to be inspired to continue. I do hope to eventually finish it, but the chances are slim.
So overall, overly complex rules tend to ruin RPGs for me more than anything else. I know, I must sound like a knuckle-dragging simpleton, but I am simply not keen on learning the minutiae of something new and will usually stick to the classics.
for me, I have a very VERY hard time playing new games, I feel that the formulate they make for new games doesn't follow the same as they did back in the good ol' gaming days where ideas were fresh and things still felt awe inspiring
the 2 newest games that I have played are duke nukem forever and starcraft 2, and that is even laughable because by todays standards they are already old, but the only new games I play are ones that they took from the old days and revamped it with todays technologies ( hence the reason why I played those 2 games)
and even with that said I didn't even finish starcraft's original campaign, I got to a level that was on fire that was slowly coming over to you, and I said F this noise im out ( although I did finish duke nukem and I was pretty proud of myself) so I think I know why I cant play todays games:
1- There seems to be a lot of "forceful annoyance" and that is what killed me for SC2, I hate games that put you into a pressure situation that you CAN'T get out of, and not only that, it makes it feel like doing social studies homework to complete, ugh, that's another reason why I couldn't finish mask of the betrayer, the new whack mechanic that you had to swallow up souls and do it with regularity was annoying as hell, and when I first played it years ago, I said F that noise this is dumb, and then I tried again last year, and I made it further, but then it became compounded with annoying dungeons, the one dungeon I got stuck on was ( inside a ship or something in the shadow realm?) and it was just too big and too mazy, and the action slowed down, and spirit bar started going down, and interest wore off and bleh, that was it for me, my opinion would be, if you are going to shove nonsense like that down a players throat, maybe make it so its not necessary to deal with and if a player does, reward them for it, so for example, we will take mask of the betrayer again; instead of slowly dieing from not having enough spirit energy, why not just make it so if you don't soak up energy nothing happens, but if you do soak up energy, give the players some bonuses, in my brain that makes sense, this load of jargon of -> well we want to make the player feel desperate and give some dynamic of suspense to push them forward, and all I have to say to that is lulz, if you're feeding me that rubbish the only thing I'm pushing forward is the exit game button, and then SC2 as well, the whack level that is burning on fire, how about instead of making the whole map burn on fire make it so your base is fine, but if you don't go to an expansion long enough, its gone, and as long as you got the expansion, your good to go, so if you get one behind you, it will still be there, especially in games where long term rational thinking needs to be involved it really sours the mood if you are forced to make fast decisions
2- the "fun factor" I will call it, see when I think of the word game, im anticipating fun, the idea and job of a game is; is there fun here? or is this just mainstream filth clogging your eyeballs with mediocrity, see back in the days, of lets say 1997-2001, ( the era I enjoy most) 3d graphics weren't that great, so they had to be very creative in the work by making up for it by the fun factor, I remember the fateful day when N64 first came out and everyone was getting proverbial stiffies on how sweet the graphics were ( unfortunately for me back in those days I was poor as hell and only owned a NES and a sega genesis, so no N64 for me) and then I remember watching gameplay thinking to myself; wow this actually looks kind of bad, why is everyone so blocky? but the idea of a 3D environment was cool, and N64 delivered quite well on the fun factor in my opinion, and then that brings us to todays games; are they fun? perhaps, but I feel fun is kind of taking a back seat and its all about "the appearance" now adays, but there is a big problem with this in my opinion, realistically from a casual gamers perspective graphics haven't really changed much since 2011 or so, OH BUT WAIT you say, they added in things like rain, and the water looks a little cooler, and they placed 4 more folds into the dudes shirt, and that's about it, I sometimes watch my brother play destiny, and every time he plays it I always think; what makes this game so hardware demanding that it can't be played on PS3? infact it almost could be played on PS2 if they had the right engine with HD graphics, even back in the PS2 days, some games really did shine well on their graphics like nightfire and even the dreaded BG series that were on that system, now granted they didn't have crazy things like killer cool rain and shiny realistic shadowy water, but to be honest if that is the thing going for a game, then chances are gameplay is going to be meh, because they have to please the graphic fans and the old school fans like me are slowly going away... maybe that's the reason why I like duke nukem forever, it delivered on the fun, I had a good time, I beat the whole thing on hard, then I tried insane, got half way, realized there isn't much for replay value tried some MP for a little bit, that got boring fast, and then never played it again, and its kind of sad, I've even tried to play it from time to time but apparently the games says; nope lol, we're not going to work, even though you bought the hard copy from future shop lol lol lol lol, such a pity
3- "forced grind/ forced gameplay hours" I think this is the number one killer here, games that are forced grind become boring very quickly, one example I can think of is destiny, now I never played it, and I have only seen my brother play it and I ask him? so whats the point of the game, and he says; oh you go on raids trying to get better gear, and is say; okay and do you use that for the last boss? do you use it to get ahead? and he goes; oh nah, its so you can do harder raids for even better stuff, friggin' looooooooools, and I see that some of these mainstream games are going in that direction, for their "replay value" and "gameplay hours" uh, that is just crap, so when I play a game now adays, im just looking for the one playthrough, the only way I will play it again is if you can make a different character and completely do it in a different way, the BG series for PC is a good example of replay value, because one game you can have a character be a big sword wielding fighter, and then next game you can be a mage spell slinging enchanter, and even the team composition can change, one game you can have 3 melee guys and 3 bow guys, maybe another game you have 2 melee guys and 4 ranage guys, but in a game like destiny its; find guns shoot baddies, OH BUT WAIT AGAIN MR SAREVOK 57 WE HAVE DIFFERENT CLASSES! as yes "different ways" to find "different guns" and "differently kill" baddies, nope to me that is still the same crap same pile
3.5- "forced gameplay hours" an example of this for me was hordes of the underdark which I just finished recently, and there is some noticeable forced gameplay hours in the games, for example, there is one puzzle where you have to teleport to different switches but you have to wait for the arrows to point in the direction you want to go, this to me is nonsense and it goes into the category of slowing down gameplay mixed in with the "forced annoyance" and this is something I found with the whole NWN game, combat is slow paced as piss, first bad culprit is this nonsense -5 cumulative penalty on your attacks must be the STUPIEST thing they interpreted in 3rd edition rules, I can kind of see where they are getting at that in theory every time you would make an attack on someone they would get progressively weaker, but obviously they haven't seen martial artists fight, because every attack comes out strong, but this isn't the point, we already have a d20 die, so whats up with this penalty crap, lets put this into perspective; enemy has: 35 AC you have: +30/25/20/15 so this means, that on your first attack you will more than likely hit, so far so good, next attack, you have a 50/50 chance on hitting, which isn't to bad I guess, 3rd attack, you need very high to hit so chances are you will not, and last attack is completely lol tastic you aint hitting unless its a critical and whats worse is when enemies are hard to hit on the first attack, every other attack becomes a crap fest, and this makes battles loooooong and boring and just plain dumb, I feel NWN 2 did a better job on it, but it still bugs me, so back to forced gameplay, it seems to me that games now adays will be like this: OH WE HAVE AN AWESOME PUZZLE IT REQUIRES YOU TO PULL 2 SWITCHES FROM OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE MAP AND WE WILL PUT A BUNCH OF BADDIES IN THE WAY, AND AFTER YOU PULL THE 2 SWITCHES THE DOOR WILL OPEN, I have a better idea, how about no, and the reason being some games will copy paste this technique over and over, and then it becomes a boring grind, see I remember a game called Mario 64, and in this game there was no grind, granted you would have to go to the same world a few times, but it was a different way of approaching it each time, in my opinion it was done very well, it always felt fresh and it didn't feel like a cheap "lots of gameplay hours guaranteed" sort of deal by making you grind the same crap over again, see a game that has grind is fine, as long as that grind is never necessary, then its good
4- my "solution" to all this, I don't buy or play new games, what I will actually do is watch someone else do it for me, for example I watch a 3 hour? video of someone playing one of the batman games, and I actually had fun watching it, I think it was the arkym asylum one, and I had more enjoyment watching this guy play this game in one run without dieing than I would have if I actually played it myself, so I think what I will do these days, is if a new game comes out that looks cool, I will just watch someone play it instead, they are doing all the tedious work, and the graphics now a days help make it tolerable to watch all the way to the end ( so I guess putting all that effort into graphics does come in handy eh?) kind of like a computer animated movie sort of deal, although the only new game that I will play when it comes out is doom which is supposed to be sometime this year, so hopefully that goes over well
well I think that is probably one of the longest posts on this forum and if you read all the way through I thank you for taking the time, and if you are an old fashion gamer like me, you probably agree on most of my points, happy gaming
And I feel you here, I really do.
Baldur's Gate seem to have both colorful and dark sides. You can't say if the story is only optimistic, only heroic, only dark. The tone of the music, the art design, the colors - it just all clicks.
M&M games are more colorful, plus they have a Sci-Fi element in them. And again the music, the art and the general environment click together.
It shows that the later, more modern graphics can't give all.
To me, the thing that makes me quit RPGs is exactly the circumstances @BelgarathMTH mentioned: not one reason, but the complex of them.
And I have to admit that the @sarevok57 's "replay value, because one game you can have a character be a big sword wielding fighter, and then next game you can be a mage spell slinging enchanter, and even the team composition can change, one game you can have 3 melee guys and 3 bow guys, maybe another game you have 2 melee guys and 4 ranage guys" is very true as well.
PoE, for example, doesn't give the same replay value Baldur's Gate and M&M games offer.
So, for me, in the end, it's a complex of factors: how exactly the game touches my desires about the in-game environment, how much replay value does it offer.