CNN: Why people don't finish games they play...

It largely depends on the game whether or not something is too long. Really some things just feel like they drag. Like most Final Fantasy main entries. It just gets to this point where I just cry out for it to fucking end.

And then other games feel far too short. Like Lufia Curse Of The Sinistrals. I love that game dearly but it's just too damn short feeling. It's around 20 hours worth of gameplay the first time around and it still feels too short. The newgameplus and other shit adds on more hours, but its woefully lacking in length.

And then you have things like Lunar 2 Eternal Blue which are just right. Everything is perfect.

edited 22nd Aug '11 1:53:38 AM by Aondeug

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

If they get tired of a game then just play another until you start game hoarding, which is the act of filling yourself with tons of games in a single drop.

The advantage I got: You now have a massive list of cool RPG games that you don't even know which to finish first....

The problem: You now have a massive list of cool RPG games that you don't even know which to finish first....

...a little brother should belong to his older sister, right? - Orimura Chifuyu

When I was about twenty I realized something:

The games I really like, I'll replay. Maybe not immediately, but sometime down the road. When I first bought Super Metroid (which I still have the box and manual for) it costed maybe $40-$50 and its a game that can be beaten in two hours if you're speedrunning. But I play that game again and again on almost a biyearly basis, so it's more than made up for its cost.

If the only way you'll replay a game is for carrots like unlockable content or branching paths, or upon the release of an expansion pack, then no offense but that speaks pretty low of the game itself.

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I started just buying the games I knew I would like also. I took a few risks, and got burned a few times, but I think risking to play Katamari was worth all those burns 100x.

I could very easily.

"It's so hard to be humble, knowing how great I am."

I could, but only because I'm awesome at the straight face thing.

Still have to finish the Apache game and Two Worlds II... Got discouraged from Apache after like the fourth mission where I failed CAS pretty hard. Then I got to the Japan-inspired section of TW 2, wandered around there some, and then got bored. Oh, and Crackdown 2 as well. That game just...eh. Only picked it up during a really, really dry spell where there was literally nothing else worth looking at.

Most of the games I play aren't really games that you can finish. Those that can, I tend to complete pretty thoroughly, although I don't usually get every obscure achievement and unlock. Still need to finish the campaign in The Battle for Middle Earth. So far I have never survived Helm's Deep. I also never played the last mission of Zoo Tycoon, although I got pretty close.

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I finish pretty much every game I play, unless I'm seriously getting bored or annoyed. This has certainly happened more in recent years than in my youth, but it's still the exception rather than the rule. The only difference is that whereas before I could finish a 40-hour RPG in two or three weeks, it now takes me closer to two months. I'm just about to turn 31, btw.

Part of the problem is that us older gamers grew up in an era where games were few and far between. We loved getting new games because there just weren't very many of them, and the goal of finishing every game we were interested in was actually attainable.

However, nowadays there are so many games and so little time that the goal simply can't be done. But we're still conditioned to pick up all the best and brightest because we don't want to miss out, even though there's no earthly way we'd be able to finish them all.

I've reconciled myself to the fact that I am not going to be finishing more than a handful of games each year. I try and find the best handful I can, but I don't get all upset because of the games I'm missing any more. I enjoy them the same way I did before, just slower, and don't feel the need to jump on new stuff all the time.

Yeah DV Ds are overpriced and I really have to stop buying them....I don't buy albums anymore though.

I've really gone a bit overboard in the last steam sale, between that and some books I bought (I'm doing English and History, I have books I need to read for study, what was I thinking....) and what else.....I'm trying to change myself now. I'll always finish big purchases though, but I'm often not much of a postgame player, Pokemon being a great example, I put a lot of time into Platinum but I've bought HG and White and while I completed the main story, I've lost interest in postgame stuff....Fallout would be an exception.

(I'm given too much student grant money for what I need....maybe I should return it/accept less grants...)

Dumbo

I tend to get distracted by other games before finishing the ones I'm working on. Either that, or I get stuck and don't feel like playing for a while. I usually get around to finishing games eventually, but sometimes it takes a really long time.

Short =/= Shallow

Length =/= Quality.

Seriously, those two statements are ridiculous.

Quality is never dependent on the length of the game. Cutscenes can be padding too, especially when there's no dialogue. Not to mention, video games aren't movies. I'll take any cutscene where you have the move the dialogue forward with a button. Atleast then you have some control. So yeah, they also add to the artificial length of the game, not to mention the cost of the game. Look at Sonic 06. Cutscenes galore(even if they're interesting).

I've played games that are short, and barely have anything there, like Super Mario Bros. But it's still fun for me. There's little to not branching paths for starters. Just a few shortcuts. There's two power-ups. All the boss battles are the same. But I still find it fun. It actually is pretty short and shallow, when you think about it. But it's still fun for me.

So, really, what's the problem with a short game now? There is none. Should players have to spend money on longgggggg games they don't have time for? Obviously not.

Last I checked, the point of playing Video Games was either to have fun, or to challenge yourself in general.

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I guess I just have a different opinion on what I "deserve" from a game. When I interviewed with Bungie, they asked me what my thoughts were on crunch time, because they basically said that in an effort to add more stuff Halo 2, any semblance of humanity was pretty much destroyed. Personal lives thrown out the window due to long days and longer crunches, each individual gained about 20lbs, a lot of the team got divorced etc.

Just something to think about for what goes into those "short" campaigns.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Fortunately, indie games operate by a different model. It's amazing how much more actual gameplay you can fit into a game in less development time when you're not worried about making the latest and greatest graphics/physics for your product generation.

The model that professional, on the store shelves big budget games are using right now is, plain and simple, not healthy for the developers, and hasn't been for some years now. But they keep on going to it because they love their jobs despite, and because jobs aren't things to take lightly in these days even when they're crappy ones.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

And you know what fuels this push on professional developers?

Consumer demand.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Nah. Don't equate publisher deadlines and demands with consumer demands. T'weren't consumers that asked for Kotor 2 to be released on Christmas, half-finished. It's the consumers who wait for Diablo 3 patiently because they know the end product won't be full of bugs and half-completed content. The publishers make the unreasonable deadlines... and they make those deadlines because it's bloody expensive to fuel development for top-generation graphics. So, ditch the top graphics and physics and whatnot, get back to the basics of gameplay, and suddenly your schedule lightens a lot.

Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.

Well no, it's not a direct 1:1 relationship, but the publishers are, for the most part, not responsible for a game's feature list.

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Speaking as an "old fart," I'll admit I don't finish about 50% of the games I play. Why? Two big reasons, first the game may absolutely suck. Be it grindy, boring, aggrivating, or just stupid if the game itself is no fun I'll drop it. The ever greater demands on my time imposed by "maturity," mean that I don't have entire weekends or afternoons to devote to a game to finish it, "just because." If I'm not enjoying myself I'll turn it off and do something else. The second is if it doesn't engage me. The game has to hook me in some way, be it a great story, great gameplay, intriguing concepts, or plain old T&A if something doesn't latch onto my mind and take hold the odds are good that I'll move on to another one, sometimes before I even finish the one I'm on.

Starcraft II is a good example of the later. I did finish it but on the whole the game just did not latch onto me in any way. It was a flat out one and done kind of thing for me. I finished it, ejected the disk and I've never put it back in. The only thing that saved it was that I hadn't downloaded some of the other games out there like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. If I had played even a little of one of those prior to finishing SC 2 I know I wouldn't have finished the game.

The reason games don't get finished isn't that people have short attention spans and can't finish them. It's that the games they don't finish suck. If the game doesn't get your attention and can't hold it till the finish I'd look closer at the game and not necessarily at the player. Sure some people aren't going to finish a game because not everything is universally engaging but if a large percentage of player isn't finishing your game 25%+ the first place I'd lay blame isn't on the consumers but the game.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

Of course then there's the third reason you might not ever beat it: because the game is Gradius III

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When I don't finish a particular game, I can often point to a specific issue. The most painful are an unskippable Unexpected Gameplay Change, or lack of a quicksave in a game that desperately needs one. I've also had a recurrent problem with getting into a Quicksand Box, only to realize that the sidequests I was going on weren't fun and didn't advance the story.

One of the problems here is that the study of game design is a relatively new discipline. Games can be critically acclaimed despite massive design flaws, and games that apply proper design draw criticism because "hardcore" gamers think that removing Fake Difficulty equates to "dumbing down." Gamers who aren't critics and aren't hardcore just care about having fun, and stop playing when the game starts being a tedious waste of time.

edited 24th Aug '11 2:44:45 AM by feotakahari

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